Wes Anderson, 42, is known for
his eccentric and quirky style, influencing many of America’s new auteur (and
non-auteur) filmmakers emerging in the 2000s. Anderson, like many auteurs,
writes, directs and produces his films, and has an almost overzealous attention
to detail – crafting the mise en scene of every frame to look exactly right.
This month he has a new film that he is directing, producing and co-wrote with Roman Coppola called Moonrise Kingdom. While it
stars newcomers Jared Gilman
and Kara Hayward, the
supporting cast is brilliant featuring Bob Balaban, Frances McDormand, Harvey Keitel, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, and frequent collaborators
Bill
Murray and Jason Schwartzman.
It is about two young people that run away from a small New England town,
causing the grownups to form a search party to look for them (here
is the trailer).
Early Career:
Anderson got his start while
attending the University of Texas at Austin. While in school, he made friends
with the Wilson brothers (Owen,
Luke and Andrew), and made a short with
them called Bottle Rocket.
They took the short to Sundance, where it was screened and noticed by producers
James L. Brooks and Polly Platt. Brooks and Platt
brought Anderson and Owen Wilson to Hollywood and commissioned them to write a
feature based on the short, giving birth to Anderson’s feature directorial
debut (also called) Bottle
Rocket. It was a box office failure, but critics began to take notice of
Anderson’s talent and unique cinematic style. Most notable among these positive
critics is Martin
Scorsese who named the film among his ten favorite from the 1990s. Thus,
despite the commercial shortcomings of Bottle Rocket, Anderson had carved a
niche for himself as an indie art-film director, with cult/pop culture appeal.
Style and Influences:
Wes Anderson films are easily
recognizable due to the director’s individual style. Anderson has listed animator
Bill Melendez (who worked on Charles Shultz’s Charlie Brown),
Shultz, Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut (and really a
lot of the French New Wave filmmakers), and Hal Ashby as his major
influences – and a lot of their works shows up in his (many times in direct
reference). He is a director who explicitly cares about every facet of his
films, from the overall aesthetic and thematic look all the way down to the
minute detail of which font print material should be presented in (typically
Futura). He has a very theatrical style, often breaking the fourth wall
visually by drawing attention to how the camera is moving, the significant and
highly stylized action blocking, and/or to the artistic touch of a shot or
scene – he likes to use wide-angel anamorphic lens, take/double take shots,
slow-motion tracking shots, lots of background action, and logistically
astounding ‘virtuoso’ shots. The theatre itself plays a role in his films, with
stage productions occurring within the films and the use of curtains to signify
the beginning or end of chapters in the narrative. Anderson continues to use the
same players and filmmaking collaborators on his films (for example, of his
seven films including Moonrise Kingdom, Bill Murray has appeared in six,
director of photography Robert
Yeoman has shot six, and Owen Wilson has co-written and/or appeared in six,
and there are many others who have appeared in or worked on two or more). He
also constantly plays with the same themes: a broken family circle, someone who
was once great but is now in decline, adults who act like children, and more.
Anderson often uses a color pallet with subdued washed out colors (especially
lots of yellows). And, he infuses his films with brilliant soundtracks,
generally made up of British rock from the 1960s and 1970s, but some French pop
has started to find its way into his work (probably due to his living in
Paris). All these aesthetic and thematic trends across his work make them feel
familiar, to an extent that fans know exactly what to expect when they see ‘A
Wes Anderson Film’. His films are funny (with wonderfully dry wit) and sad (as
many of his characters are quite melancholy), and while they fall under
criticism for the role of director being highlighted over the narrative and
characters this is more an attack on Anderson not fitting into the general
narrative filmmaking style than a comment on the quality of his films (as they
are all very good). He is an extraordinarily ambitious filmmaker, in which
every element is specifically done to fit both the style and overall narrative
of each film. He is truly one of America’s great auteurs.
Rushmore to Fantastic
Mr. Fox, the Films of Wes Anderson:
After finishing Bottle Rocket,
Anderson decided that he wanted to have complete control over every creative
aspect of his films, thus he needed to not only write and direct them he also
needed to produce them. He set up American Empirical Pictures as his production
company. The new company’s first film was 1998’s Rushmore.
Originally set up to be distributed by New Line Cinema, co-writers Anderson and
Owen Wilson put the film up for auction, having not come to an agreement over
budget. Joe Roth the chair at
Walt Disney made them an offer they agreed too and the film went into
production. Wilson and Anderson wanted to create a feeling to the story of a Roald Dahl children’s book, but
still have a slight edge to it. Max Fisher, the film’s protagonist, was modeled
on an amalgamation of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and he attends a prep school
similar to the ones that both the Wilsons and Anderson had attended in Texas.
Starring Jason Schwartzman (launching his career), Bill Murray (serving as an
indie resurgence for his) and Olivia
Williams, the film opened to critical acclaim. Anderson won Best Director
at the 1999 Independent Spirit Awards, while Murray took home Best Supporting
Actor. For their next project, Anderson and Wilson co-wrote The
Royal Tenebaums, influenced in part by the novel From
the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The film stars Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Luke Wilson
(with Owen Wilson and Bill Murray in support), and was another critical hit of
Anderson, as well as a surprise box office hit. Wilson and Anderson were
nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for the film. To date, it is the
last film that Anderson wrote with Wilson – some saying that without Wilson
Anderson’s work is less grounded. The Royal Tenenbaums is often considered his
best film (but, my favorite is Rushmore). With the box office success of his
last film, Anderson amassed a much bigger budget than usual a set out to make
(an epic of sorts in) The
Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which he co-wrote with Noah Baumbach. The film stars
Bill Murray as a formally great oceanographer and adventurer who goes on one
last expedition to find a mythical shark that ate his best friend and kill it.
The film is brilliant (at least I think so) – wildly ambitious and strange.
Anderson makes what amounts to an action adventure in which characters are
melancholy, deadpan and seemingly totally disconnected from the reality in
which they exist. Of course, the film was met with mixed reviews and poor box
office receipts. However, I contend that the film will long be remembered and
held in acclaim (above many other films from 2004, which was a good year,
especially for genre films) – plus, Murray is fantastic in it. For his next
project, Anderson decided to make a short film in Paris. Hotel Chevalier stars
Schwartzman and Natalie
Portman (who Anderson recruited through his business side producing partner
Scott Rudin, who is probably
the best indie film producer in Hollywood). It took two days to shoot in the
Hotel Raphael. While editing the film, Anderson realized that Schwartzman’s
character closely resembled a character in a new script he was writing and
decided to combine both projects (as sort of a part 1 and part 2). Hotel
Chevalier was met with much acclaim both for the film (and Anderson’s
directing) and for Portman’s performance. Part two became The
Darjeeling Limited, which Anderson co-wrote with Roman Coppola and
Schwartzman. It stars Owen Wilson, Schwartzman and Adrien Brody, as three brothers
who reconnect on a spiritual journey through India. Anderson wanted to make a
film in India to pay tribute to his love of the films of Satyajit Ray, and has also
stated that Jean Renoir’s The River and Louis Malle’s documentaries on
India were major influences on the film. The film opened to mostly critical
praise and is called his most mature film as a writer (it is my favorite film
of 2007). Anderson’s 2009 film, Fantastic
Mr. Fox, began in 2004 as a stop-motion collaboration between himself and Henry Selick (who had worked on
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), but the studio the picture was set up at
folded and Selick left to direct Coraline.
Co-written by Noah Baumbach, based on the Roald Dahl story
and starring George Clooney
and Meryl Streep, the film
marked Anderson’s first non-live-action film. However, to give it a
naturalistic sound to the voice performances, Anderson recorded the dialogue
outside with the actors playing their characters. The film is one of Anderson’s
best reviewed films, universally loved by the industries top critics. It was
nominated for Best Animated film at the 2010 Oscars. What I like about
Anderson’s films is that he expects viewers to have a strong knowledge of
cinema (its history, filmmakers and how films are made, the process and
aesthetic choices), as if he were making them for people who love and live
cinema.
Commercials and
Producing:
Anderson has produced all but one
of his own films, and he also produced 2005’s The Squid
and the Whale, written and directed by his co-writer of The Life Aquatic
with Steve Zissou (and subsequently Fantastic Mr. Fox) Noah Baumbach. The film
was met with critical acclaim and a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination
(it, along with The Darjeeling Limited, is among my
favorite 25 films from the past decade). He also helped friend Sofia Coppola cast Bill Murray
in her film Lost in
Translation (credited with a ‘thanks’). While Anderson is best known for
directing features, he also has a successful commercial reel. In 2007 directed
a few commercials for AT&T as part of their ‘Your Seamless World’ campaign
(Reporter; Actor). Next, he starred
and directed an American Express ‘My Life, My Card’ commercial with Jason
Schwartzman (here). It
is a great commercial for fans of Anderson, as it feels like a spoof both of
his films and his perceived personality. In 2008, he directed a SoftBank (a
Japanese cell phone) commercial with Brad
Pitt, inspired by Jacques
Tati’s Les Vacances de
Monsieur Hulot (here).
Recently, he directed a few commercials for the Hyundai Azera (Modern Life, which I
particularly like, and Talk
to My Car).
Wes Anderson Career
Highlights:
6)
Hotel Chevalier/The Darjeeling Limited (2007)* –
director, writer, producer (Blu-ray,
DVD,
Streaming)
*Editor’s picks
