Contents: Donna Kornhaber, “Wes Anderson, Austin Auteur”; Tom Hertweck, “The Great Frame-Up: Wes Anderson and Twee Narrative Contrivance”; Kim Wilkins, “Assembled Worlds: Intertextuality and Sincerity in the Films of Wes Anderson”; Kevin Henderson, “Failed Comportment and Fits of Discomposure in the Films of Wes Anderson”; Rachel McLennan, “‘That’s not enough’: Aging in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and Rushmore"; Rachel Joseph, “Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums: Writing and Forgiveness”; Alissa Burger, “Beyond the Sea: Echoes of Jules Verne in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”; Peter Sloane, “Kinetic Iconography: Wes Anderson, Sergei Parajanov, and the Illusion of Motion”
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| Set from the film Isle of Dogs. Source: Isle of Dogs. Author: Paul Hudson |
This is very hard, but here’s an attempt:
- The Grand Budapest Hotel
- Moonrise Kingdom
- Fantastic Mr. Fox
- The Royal Tenenbaums
- Rushmore
- The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
- The Darjeeling Limited
- Bottle Rocket
What aspects of The Grand Budapest Hotel lead you to place it at the top of this list?
I think it’s the film where Anderson’s stylistics and thematics finally reach scale, so to speak—where he is able to build what is arguably his most complete and complex universe (his own country, quite literally) and tell one of his most narratively complicated stories, all without losing the thread of stylistic idiosyncrasy or repeated thematic concerns that mark all of his works. It is an epic Wes Anderson film, which for years seemed like an obvious contradiction in terms; though still invested in the fate of individuals, it operates on a world-historical plane. It is also the first film, I would argue, where Anderson gets serious about politics (something he continues in Isle of Dogs), which likewise seemed an impossibility from a certain view of his earlier works. Grand Budapest shows him taking his manner of filmmaking in directions that previously seemed unfeasible.
Bottle Rocket seemed extraordinary when it debuted in 1996. What are your thoughts when re-watching it today?
Bottle Rocket was very much of its moment—there is no Bottle Rocket without either Reservoir Dogs or Clerks, whereas neither Quentin Tarantino nor Kevin Smith are directors you tend to think of in connection to Anderson today. If it were the only Anderson film you had seen, you might think he would develop in a very different direction than the filmmaker we’ve come to know. (It was largely on the basis of Bottle Rocket that Martin Scorsese dubbed Anderson “the next Martin Scorsese” back in the 90s—a title that seems more than a little misplaced today.) But rewatching the film in light of Anderson’s later works is revealing. The basic thematic concern around familial disintegration and found communities is all there, and certain Anderson character types are already in formation: Dignan (Owen Wilson) is basically a prototype for Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) in Rushmore and, to a lesser extent, Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) in Moonrise Kingdom, while James Caan as Mr. Henry starts to prefigure Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) and even Steve Zissou (Bill Murray). Even the basics of Anderson’s frontalist, symmetrical style can be seen in the film, although here’s he’s really letting the mise-en-scène do most of that work for him rather than generating it through his camera, with that great set-piece of the Hillsboro Days Inn (just a couple of hours up the road from us here in Austin) holding this fantastic geometrical weight over his composition for certain portions of the film.
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| Pola Negri and Ernst Lubitsch on the set of the American drama film Forbidden Paradise (1924). |
It’s almost impossible to say in any concise way; the list is just too long. Film scholars like to talk about the rise of cinephilia, or the love of film, among a certain crop of directors in the later twentieth century, directors who came to view part of the task of their art as responding to the century of cinema that came before them. But Anderson is really in a category all to himself when it comes to cinephilia. His knowledge of film is absolutely encyclopedic, and his willingness to mix and match his influences is boundless. Take almost any scene from an Anderson film and you’ll find traces of the French New Wave, classical Hollywood cinema, a few silent film elements (including techniques dating back to the era of early cinema), and then maybe something from a marquee name like Stanley Kubrick. And then there are Anderson’s short films and commercials which serve more or less as adaptations of earlier cinematic works—François Truffaut’s Day for Night in that famous American Express commercial of his, Jacques Tati’s Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot in a SoftBank commercial with Brad Pitt, all the Fellini connections in his short film Castello Cavalcanti for Prada. You could probably teach a course on the history of cinema just based on unpacking all of the references in Anderson’s body of work.
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| Paint chips. Source: Joyful spherical creature. |
There is a long tradition of film scholarship on the subject of color, whether from a historical perspective around the rise of Technicolor and other competing formats or from a theoretical and formal perspective. For Anderson, color is supremely important—but not just as an element of what would be called production design. What is fascinating to me is the degree to which Anderson thinks through issues of color even on the level of film stock. One of the tragedies in the loss of celluloid film in today’s filmmaking is the degree to which issues of tone and coloration become more standardized; sensitive directors who shoot on digital, often for economic reasons, will these days frequently go back and digitally recolor their films to try to undo this effect. For Anderson, who has the luxury of shooting on celluloid, the question of film stock is really a question of color. For The Life Aquatic, for example, he made a point of using Ektachrome reversal stock because it was the favored film stock of the old National Geographic films. In Moonrise Kingdom, he tried to approximate the look of 1960s-era Kodachrome using Super 16mm film. So for Anderson, color is not just an element of design but an aspect of setting the time and place of a film and of connecting it to film history—almost everything for Anderson goes back to film history.
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| Pathé-Baby hand movie camera, 9.5 mm film, 1923. Source: Annick Monnier |
In film studies, we sometimes talk about certain films acting as frames, setting off a world apart, and others acting as mirrors, reflecting our current world back to us. Anderson’s filmmaking is absolutely an example of the former. So if I were looking for his opposite, I would want to find a filmmaker as interested in the mirroring potential of film as Anderson is in its framing abilities. Among contemporary film directors, I would probably choose someone like Sean Baker, the indy director who is most well known for his recent film The Florida Project, about a quasi-homeless mother and daughter living in the shadow of Disney World. Baker, like Anderson, is incredibly literate as a filmmaker and regularly includes visual citations to previous masters; and his sense of composition can be quite beautiful. But his fundamental artistic drive is sociological, almost to the point of being documentarian. In The Florida Project, he works primarily with amateur actors and shoots entirely on location—even using surreptitious iPhone footage to get around Disney’s restrictions on filming in the park. He’s a Neorealist, really, and like the Italian Neorealists before him he sees the work of cinema as being ultimately an artistic encounter with the real.
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| Hollywood sign. Source: Minkelhof. |
Similarly, if you could watch any film from history with Anderson, talking with him about it as the film unfolded, what would you want to hear his thoughts on, and why?
While it would be hard to pass up the opportunity to do a binge viewing session starting with The Grand Budapest Hotel and then moving through various Enrst Lubitsch films that influenced it or Isle of Dogs followed by some Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirō Ozu, and Hayao Miyazaki screenings, what I would most love to do in that scenario is watch some recent films that handle their cinephilia in very different ways than Anderson—films like La La Land or Hail, Caesar! I have mixed feelings about both, in part because of the ways in which they handle the history of film and questions of film genre. I have no doubt that a committed cinephile like Anderson would catch just about every reference and shout-out in those films, and I would love to get his take as a filmmaker on how he thinks those pictures handle the delicate balancing act of homage and original storytelling.
Anderson belongs to an interesting generation of American men. It’s said that at one moment in 1989 a person could open a classroom door in the University of Texas English Department and see a young Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson as students, then walk across campus and see Jon Hamm and Matthew McConaughey in a Psychology lecture hall. Could you talk about this coincidence and Anderson’s place in the generational mix—particularly in light of the crisis of masculinity unfolding in our culture?
I would also add Richard Linklater to that mix, who was in Austin at the time (though not at UT) and whose first film came out the year before, in 1988, and whose breakthrough film Slacker came out a year later, in 1990. There’s a generational component to this linkage (Linklater being admittedly a few years older than the others) but also a geographical component. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of these figures were in Austin during such a pivotal period of their maturation. It would be another decade before we got the “Keep Austin Weird” slogan, but the ethos was there—the idea of staying true to your own idiosyncrasies. If you think of where mainstream American film culture was in the 1980s, it’s remarkable that any of these figures thought they might try to make it in Hollywood. The fact that they succeeded and did so mostly on their own terms is really a testament to their belief in their own unique visions and personalities, to their own weirdness.
While it would be hard to pass up the opportunity to do a binge viewing session starting with The Grand Budapest Hotel and then moving through various Enrst Lubitsch films that influenced it or Isle of Dogs followed by some Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirō Ozu, and Hayao Miyazaki screenings, what I would most love to do in that scenario is watch some recent films that handle their cinephilia in very different ways than Anderson—films like La La Land or Hail, Caesar! I have mixed feelings about both, in part because of the ways in which they handle the history of film and questions of film genre. I have no doubt that a committed cinephile like Anderson would catch just about every reference and shout-out in those films, and I would love to get his take as a filmmaker on how he thinks those pictures handle the delicate balancing act of homage and original storytelling.
Anderson belongs to an interesting generation of American men. It’s said that at one moment in 1989 a person could open a classroom door in the University of Texas English Department and see a young Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson as students, then walk across campus and see Jon Hamm and Matthew McConaughey in a Psychology lecture hall. Could you talk about this coincidence and Anderson’s place in the generational mix—particularly in light of the crisis of masculinity unfolding in our culture?
I would also add Richard Linklater to that mix, who was in Austin at the time (though not at UT) and whose first film came out the year before, in 1988, and whose breakthrough film Slacker came out a year later, in 1990. There’s a generational component to this linkage (Linklater being admittedly a few years older than the others) but also a geographical component. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of these figures were in Austin during such a pivotal period of their maturation. It would be another decade before we got the “Keep Austin Weird” slogan, but the ethos was there—the idea of staying true to your own idiosyncrasies. If you think of where mainstream American film culture was in the 1980s, it’s remarkable that any of these figures thought they might try to make it in Hollywood. The fact that they succeeded and did so mostly on their own terms is really a testament to their belief in their own unique visions and personalities, to their own weirdness.
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| Isle of Dogs press conference at Berlinale 2018. Wes Anderson, Koyu Rankin, Liev Schreiber, Jeff Goldblum, Kunichi Nomura. Source: Diana Ringo |
Is there, in his films’ presentation of characters that aren’t conventionally masculine, something to learn about gender?
Absolutely. Masculinity is a very fluid concept in Anderson’s films, many of which actively stage a confrontation between an older conception of masculine power and prowess (think Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum or Harvey Keitel’s Khaki Scout Commander in Moonrise Kingdom) and a younger generation more at home with vulnerability and sensitivity (Luke Wilson’s openly wounded Richie Tenenbaum or Edward Norton’s more nurturing Scout Master Ward). Perhaps the most important example comes in the relationship of Monsieur Gustave (Ray Finnes) and his protégé Zero (Tony Revolori), which is a deep and powerful relationship that proves hard to describe in any conventional terms. It’s a professional relationship between master and protégé, a transformational friendship between two men of very different generations from very different countries, or, as Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) calls it in the film, a relationship between “two radiant celestial brothers, united for an instant, as they crossed the upper stratosphere of our starry window, one from the east, one from the west.” Which is to say, it’s also a kind of epic love story between two individuals who care deeply about one another, even to the point of risking their lives and livelihoods for each other. It’s a testament to the complexity of masculine relationships and the inability of our conventional narratives of male experience to capture the whole of that condition.
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| Costumes for the main leads in Moonrise Kingdom. Source: Moonrise Kingdom props - Arclight Hollywood. Author: pop culture geek. |
There’s definitely a difference—and thanks for pointing out the Anderson-Spielberg connection, which hasn’t received nearly enough attention. I think it’s very much a real influence: The Life Aquatic could almost be a Spielberg film with certain tonal changes, and Isle of Dogs gets very close to Spielberg territory again. But the depiction of boyhood in Anderson and Spielberg could hardly be more different. The experience of wonder is at the heart of the Spielberg Boy’s maturation process—an experience of wonder always tinged with fear, Spielberg’s primary artistic territory being that of the sublime. But the Anderson Boy is always old before his time (if not necessarily wise beyond his years), just as the Anderson Man is often fundamentally juvenile. The Anderson Boy is well past any capacity for wonder, and that sense of lost innocence is hardly ever recovered. Rather, it is the men who must reconnect with the mysteries of childhood (think Bill Murray’s Steve Zissou at the very end of The Life Aquatic, or Bruce Willis’ Captain Sharp adopting Sam Shakusky). For the most part, Anderson’s children must learn to navigate a world of adults constantly letting them down; it is often their demands for better treatment that ultimately prompts a change in the adult characters around them.
Anderson likes to work with the same actors. For viewers, this means that we can’t see Anjelica Huston in The Darjeeling Limited without recalling her from The Royal Tenenbaums, for example, and the same could be said of Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, and many others. What difference does this make for casual viewers? For film scholars evaluating his achievement?
For casual viewers, at least those familiar with more than one Anderson film, the recasting can become a kind of game. Who will Jason Schwartzman play this time? When will Waris Ahluwalia appear? It’s also a mark of in-group knowledge, like the intraseries references in all those new Star Wars movies or in the Avengers series. For film scholars, the recasting becomes a demand on Anderson’s part that we treat his films as connected entities, as part of a collection of films and total body of work. The question of motherhood in Anderson’s work, for instance, isn’t complete at the end of The Royal Tenenbaums; Angelica Huston’s reappearance as the mother in The Darjeeling Limited demands that we view the two films and the two characters as being in dialogue with one another. Likewise the exploration of wounded masculinity that connects Bill Murray’s many appearances across Anderson’s films. Anderson is engaged in an ongoing conversation with himself, and the approach to casting is one way of broadcasting that.
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| The Grand Budapest Hotel. Source: Eva Rinaldi un gi. |
I once worked with a student who wrote a long feature on the costuming in Anderson’s films for a campus publication. The whole thing was filtered through the question of uniforms in Anderson’s films, which I thought was a great approach—literal uniforms being omnipresent in films like Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel and metaphorical uniforms being definitive to characters like those in The Royal Tenenbaums, each of whom has a distinctive and repeated form of costuming. In a way, you could say that much of Anderson’s filmmaking is an attempt to come to grips with the issue of uniformity—both the struggles of being different and the dangers of seeming the same.
Have you noticed any changes in students’ response to his films over time? If so, what do you think might be responsible?
I first started teaching Anderson here at UT around the time that Fantastic Mr. Fox came out, and I feel like there was a sense among some students at the time (misplaced to be sure) that Anderson was primarily just an eccentric stylist, with his turn to animation being some kind of proof or apotheosis of that. In the wake of Moonrise Kingdom, Grand Budapest, and now Isle of Dogs, it has become clear that Anderson has real political interests as well. I’ve seen those films prompt a reevaluation of Anderson’s earlier works among students, who now feel emboldened to search for the kind of political and social commentary that has really been there all along.
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| Wes Anderson attends The Grand Budapest Hotel photo call at the 64th Berlin Film Festival in Berlin. Source: John Rasimus. |
As this interview is being conducted, Anderson is not yet 50. What does cinema history suggest we could expect from the next part of his career?
It’s very exciting to think of where Anderson might go next. The last two films in particular have shown a real political consciousness, and I expect we’ll see more of this in the future. On a stylistic level, I think we’ve also seen a real sense of consolidation and control in his use of filmic allusion and citation. Though cinephilic references continue to abound in his work, The Grand Budapest Hotel is unmistakably a love letter to Lubitsch, just as Isle of Dogs is indebted primarily to Kurosawa. I’ll be very interested to see if this trend continues and will be fascinated to learn what other acts of homage Anderson has in store. He’s really energized as a filmmaker by his love of film history, and I don’t expect that will ever change.
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