"When you're writing a story, it often feels less like you're doing architecture and more like you're doing excavation–we're just unearthing it." Wes Anderson had made 12 films over 29 years, making his name widely known for his distinctive visual style of symmetrical compositions, vivid color palettes and unique camera movements. From his first film 'Bottle Rocket' to his latest work 'The Phoenician Scheme,' Wes Anderson takes a look at all of his films and discusses in detail how they came to life.
Director: Claire Buss
Director of Photography: Nicolas Demousseau
Editor: Matthew Colby
Talent: Wes Anderson
Producer: Amaury Delcambre, Madison Coffey
Line Producer: Natasha Soto-Albors
Associate Producer: Zayna Allen
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Production Coordinator: Elizabeth Hymes
Talent Booker: Maxine Poirier, Meredith Judkins
Camera Operator: Plume Fabre
Audio Engineer: Hubert Rey Grange
Production Assistant: Melina Fructus
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo
Additional Editor: Rachel Kim
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Director: Claire Buss
Director of Photography: Nicolas Demousseau
Editor: Matthew Colby
Talent: Wes Anderson
Producer: Amaury Delcambre, Madison Coffey
Line Producer: Natasha Soto-Albors
Associate Producer: Zayna Allen
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Production Coordinator: Elizabeth Hymes
Talent Booker: Maxine Poirier, Meredith Judkins
Camera Operator: Plume Fabre
Audio Engineer: Hubert Rey Grange
Production Assistant: Melina Fructus
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo
Additional Editor: Rachel Kim
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Category
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00When you're writing a story,
00:01it often feels less like you're doing architecture
00:05and more like you're doing excavation,
00:07like it's something that already exists
00:09and we're just unearthing it.
00:11And you know it's right because it just is.
00:19Hi, I'm Wes Anderson.
00:21I have made apparently 12 films
00:24and I'm now going to walk us through
00:27every one of them in some way.
00:29Bottle Rocket.
00:30The first film I made is Bottle Rocket
00:33and that began when Owen Wilson and I
00:37started writing this script
00:38while we were going to the University of Texas.
00:41And we eventually made a short film,
00:44which Owen is in and Owen's brother Luke.
00:46But we always had the script for our feature film
00:48and it was meant to,
00:49we thought we were making a feature film.
00:51That does not make any difference.
00:52I bought the earrings for my mother on her birthday.
00:55I picked them out myself, I went.
00:57Well I can't be sorting through all that shit
00:59in the middle of a burglar.
01:00There's just not time for it.
01:01When we were making our short film,
01:03there was a feeling suddenly of,
01:05wow, do we know how to do this?
01:08Because the first take we did was very bad.
01:12But, you know, we did it a few ways.
01:14And I was like, no, this is good.
01:16We'll get there.
01:17Eventually we just ran out of funds
01:20and then we found our way to Polly Platt and James L. Brooks
01:24and Jim Brooks was the one who gave us the chance
01:27to make it as a feature film.
01:29Used to be working at a motel in the middle of nowhere.
01:31Lost and confused.
01:34Totally lost.
01:34Incredibly unhappy person.
01:37Accidentally wanders in off the highway.
01:41Can they meet?
01:44Can they fall in love?
01:46And it's perfect.
01:47We worked with Jim on the script.
01:49To improve it, we had a very, very, very long comedy.
01:54And we made it into a more manageable length and improved it a lot.
01:58We basically took a screenwriting class from James L. Brooks.
02:02But by the time we made the feature film,
02:05I think even then I felt more prepared.
02:08Obviously still a lot to learn.
02:11Still a lot to learn.
02:12But those days are over now.
02:14Just a matter of time before I pick up the phone
02:16and I say, Mr. H, we are coming home.
02:20So don't worry about your future, man,
02:22because I am thinking.
02:24I think our idea was we were trying to make a movie about
02:30right then in our lives.
02:32I think everything about it is kind of comes from
02:35a bit of our experience in these two cities of Houston and Dallas
02:39where we, where Owen grew up and I grew up.
02:42And it was the sort of disorder of our lives
02:47and the uncertainty of everything.
02:49What the hell are you wearing?
02:50Yeah.
02:51It's a jumpsuit.
02:52Clay, look at this guy.
02:54He looks like a rodeo clown.
02:55He looks like a little banana.
02:57Where are you from anyway, man?
02:59I'm from around here.
03:00This guy used to mow our lawn.
03:01Oh, shit.
03:02Yeah, he was great.
03:03Clipping the hedges, sweeping up, mowing the lawn.
03:08What was the name of your little lawn mowing company?
03:11The Lawn Wranglers?
03:12Future Man is a bit of a villain as portrayed by Andrew Wilson.
03:19I think there are a lot of characters in these movies that are a certain kind of older
03:25man.
03:26I feel I've been, maybe not exactly like father figures, but something like that.
03:32Always flawed, some sort of intense ambition and strong personalities.
03:41The character that Bill Murray plays in Life Aquatic, let's say, or Gene Hackman in The Royal
03:47Tenenbaums, they do relate to people who I kind of partly admired or just enjoyed and was drawn to
03:55over the years.
03:56Characters who I don't really feel I'm much like, but they're people who I like.
04:09It was when we made that feature film, I met Robert Yeoman before we did it and he was our
04:15director of photography and he must have done 10 movies with me or more after that.
04:20We worked so closely together in the early films and then we sort of,
04:25in a way, didn't have to.
04:26The shorthand became so short that it was taken for granted.
04:31On the early films, I feel like, you know, I went to the set with Bob every day.
04:35He was the person who was kind of closest to me on the set because
04:40he was in some ways partly teaching me how a movie set works.
04:45So that was the beginning of a very long collaboration.
04:51Before we made Bottle Rocket, the feature film,
04:55Owen and I had already been working on a script for what we called our school movie.
05:01And that was eventually Rushmore.
05:04Hello, Dr. Guggenheim.
05:05Hello, Max.
05:06Hello, I'm Max Fisher.
05:08I just wanted to say that I strongly agree with your views concerning Rushmore.
05:12Um, your speech was excellent.
05:16Rarely do I feel like I've made a choice of what genre the movie is.
05:22Usually somebody says, well, it's kind of a comedy.
05:25I don't know.
05:26And that's, I don't say that's a good thing.
05:29It's just the way it is.
05:30Probably the approach to genre is that there are devices and methods and systems that are kind of
05:37consistent or, you know, anyway, that get used in different genre movies for their deliberate purposes.
05:44And they're part of the DNA of all movie making somehow.
05:48And I feel like we often use them, but not for the purposes they're intended.
05:52When it comes time to score a movie, there's one kind of score where you say,
06:06here's the effect we're trying to get.
06:09Here's what the audience needs to feel, or here's the trick we're playing on them.
06:14Here's the way we're going to manipulate them in a good way.
06:19But I'm not so often doing that.
06:22Instead, the music has to do something else.
06:24And it's something more, it may have to do with the mood of the movie,
06:27or it may have to do with trying to achieve something tonally,
06:32and that the movie needs a certain spirit to work better.
06:39What's that you got there, a little flight plan or something?
06:42Hmm, pretty good.
06:44Do you know Dirk Calloway?
06:46I don't think so.
06:47Dirk?
06:47This is Margaret Yang.
06:49Well, the music supervisor is Randall Poster.
06:52When we made Bottle Rocket, he kind of appeared.
06:56I met him at the farmer's market, and he wanted to release the soundtrack album,
06:59which no one else did.
07:00The Sony, the studio who had done the movie, they didn't wish to do that.
07:05And so we did it with London Records, where Randy had this deal.
07:09And then he became the kind of guru, and he became the guy in charge of all the music from that point on.
07:16Rushmore, I had all these British Invasion songs that I'd kind of picked out slowly over time.
07:23And that movie, there was a lot of music where I had kind of planned the shooting of the things to the music.
07:28We've got eight seconds before he's got to be at the door, so we need to, this location isn't going to work.
07:34You know, we had a stopwatch a lot.
07:36For some reason, it was quite choreographed, some of the music in that one.
07:40Jason just came in and auditioned.
07:50We had been told that he's perfect for it, because his cousin, Sophia, heard from our casting director
07:57what this character was like that we were looking for, just by chance.
08:01And she said, that sounds like my cousin Jason, and he's here.
08:04When he auditioned for me in this little house that we had rented, I just was so impressed
08:10with the way he approached these scenes that he was doing.
08:15He just had a sort of attack.
08:16He was interesting, and he was funny.
08:19And then when I got to know him in the minutes after that, I started to get to know him,
08:24I thought, we're going to be happy for him to be with us.
08:28And that's been the case ever since.
08:30Has it ever crossed your mind that you're far too young for me?
08:39It crossed my mind that you might consider that a possibility, yeah?
08:42I love the peculiarities of the anamorphic process and the real identity to it that comes in the 70s,
08:52I think. That at least was what I related to during the shooting of Rushmore.
08:58It's a normal thing. If you're a movie director, you want to do the big screen.
09:12Some of the actors in Rushmore, I worked with again and again later.
09:16One was Seymour Cassell, who, Seymour died, but Seymour was our very good friend for many years,
09:22and I loved having him on the movie. And Jason and Seymour and I together had a real kind of bond
09:30from right when we were first in a room together. But the other person who I met on that movie was
09:35Bill Murray. And Bill Murray, it was just a stroke of luck that we succeeded to get him,
09:42that the movie interested him. When Bill appeared, he said, I'll just work for whatever you're paying,
09:47you know, everybody else. The only thing I need is I need to be able to go to Pebble Beach,
09:53you know, at a certain point in the movie. He needed to go to a golf tournament. We figured
09:56out how to make that work, but he gave us a model for how to have what ended up being,
10:01having sometimes actors who, if we were paying people properly, I'm sure Bill regrets this to
10:07this day, but we made it, figured out a way we can get a bunch of actors who we just couldn't afford,
10:12and Bill built the way we set up the production around them, you know, pitching in like a theater
10:20troupe, sort of. He was great in the part, but he was also very generous with the way he approached me
10:37in the production. Hey, amigo. He took a kind of gentle mentor role, and in some ways, the way we
10:50bring actors into movies from then on is all kind of based on that. And I think Bill has been in
10:54almost every movie I've ever done since then. The Royal Tenenbaums. Anybody who's interested in the
11:02movie might know that there's some Salinger inspiration, a pretty big one. And the fact
11:08that Salinger didn't want movies made from his books and stories, we didn't even think about,
11:15you know. Our medium was this. It was always meant to be a New York movie, and I think even something
11:21around the New Yorker magazine, you know. Salinger had lots of stories in the New Yorker, and somehow
11:27that was, it's a broader New York, but a lot to do with that magazine, which has somehow been an
11:36inspiration to me for all along. Royal Tenenbaum bought the house on Archer Avenue in the winter
11:42of his 35th year. Over the next decade, he and his wife had three children, and then they separated.
11:54I think Kubrick has a lot of narrators over a lot of movies. As such things so often happen,
12:00these thoughts closely coincided with his setting first sight upon a lady who will
12:05henceforth play a considerable part in the drama of his life. It's partly Stanley Kubrick I was
12:12thinking of, even though it doesn't sound like the most direct connection to that movie. Alec Baldwin,
12:18now I, you know, this was around the time of Miami blues, and he's so good in Glengarry Glen Ross,
12:27and he's in Married to the Mob, and anyway, Owen and I both, we just loved Alec Baldwin,
12:33but I had heard him read a story by Michael Cunningham. It was maybe the 92nd Street Y. Just
12:42listening to it, taking him away from this great actor, and in just hearing the voice was something,
12:49you know, that made a great impression on me because he did the greatest reading of this
12:53very good short story. He is the voice of that movie.
13:12Gene Hackman, when we did The Royal Tenenbaums, I had to try to get him to do the movie. He didn't
13:17want to do the movie. Nobody's going to do it if they don't like the script, and, you know, they know
13:22enough to figure it out, but I did tell him, I think you're going to have a good experience,
13:30because at a certain point, when he was unhappy on the movie, he said, you promised me I was going
13:34to have a good experience. I'm like, well, I thought you would. Every actor has got his or her own
13:41way, and some actors don't want anything, and some actors refuse anything, almost, and some actors
13:50want a lot. It's less what level they are, and more about just what each person is like.
14:07We had a certain music that was in mind that's Elliott Smith that was planned for it, and we
14:13played it on the set. Luke had to cut off his hair and his beard and everything, and you know, he did
14:18that, and that's a long, involved process, and you know, it's not, you don't just start shaving it
14:25off. You've got to fight it. Up to the point that he's actually going to cut his wrists, there's a
14:30certain part of it that's almost documentary, but it's documentary with a certain mood, because he
14:36knows where he is in the story, and there's this musical atmosphere around him on the set, and there's
14:41basically nobody else there. I mean, sometimes on a movie, you might get into it to a point where you're
14:47kind of with the story. You're not necessarily leaving it when you go home at night, even though
14:52you are, the thing is surrounding you until it's done, and that was certainly the case during that.
15:01The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The very beginning of it was, I'd written this like one
15:06page beginning of a short story when I must have been 18 or 19, and Owen really liked this thing. He
15:14was always kind of saying, you know, you can't get past these four paragraphs of this, and I never
15:21did. I never continued the short story. There was a Jacques Cousteau book that maybe I saw in the
15:27library in Dallas, and it had to fold out of his ship. I brought it up to Owen, I said, you know my
15:35little thing, and look at this, you know, and I feel like maybe this is a movie.
15:43By that time, Owen was working so much, and he didn't have time to work on the script with me,
15:48so I asked Noah Baumbach to join me on it, and we were good friends by then, and I was already
15:56involved with trying to help him produce the squid, what was going to be eventually be the squid and the
16:01whale. When the Royal Tenenbaums was released in Europe, well, I went to Italy, and while I was
16:09there, I went to Cinecitta, and it was there that I thought, you know, maybe this is where we want to
16:14do this. So Noah and I wrote for Italy, starting at a certain point, just based on that kind of
16:22traveling that I'd done.
16:23I want you on Team Zizou.
16:26I don't think I can do that.
16:28Why not?
16:29Well, it's not my field. I don't have the background for it.
16:33No one here does. Klaus used to be a bus driver.
16:36Wolodarski was a high school substitute teacher.
16:39We're a pack of strays. Don't you get it?
16:41Every bit of the inspiration for the character is Jacques Cousteau.
16:44The filmmaking thing is Cousteau. In a way, it's a way to kind of
16:48smuggle in filmmaking to use all the things we love about movie making that we're interested in,
16:57but it's also just biographically right for this guy.
17:09I had seen City of God, and I loved this character.
17:15Is he called Knockout Ned, I think he's called? And this actor.
17:20I said, you know, I'd like to see if this actor might be interested in playing this part we have,
17:25Pele dos Santos. He's Brazilian, but he has to play music in it.
17:32And then when I saw George auditioning, I could see, wait, this guy is not,
17:37he's not learned to play the guitar for this audition. This guy is some kind of musician.
17:42Eventually I understood he's a, he's a pop star who happened to be in a movie, not a,
17:46not a movie actor. So it was very good luck that the guy who we thought was perfect for the part
17:54also happened to have some particular skills suited to it. Then, which was that he was going to play
17:59David Bowie songs in, sing them in Portuguese throughout the movie.
18:03I just didn't know that I'd brought somebody who was that talented as a musician into the, into the
18:21thing. And he's woven throughout the whole movie. And in the script, he wasn't. Once I saw, here's
18:28what he can do. And here's what he sounds like. And here's what his music is like. Then I just said,
18:33well, let's do, I think we're going to do like 12 of these or something. And let's just have them,
18:37let's have him, uh, be a sort of chorus all through the movie. And he started doing these
18:41translations and making these, what I thought were translations. In fact, turned out, eventually,
18:46I realized he's made up his own lyrics. He, and I was like, okay, well, at least let's at least get,
18:52you know, some of the key, you know, uh, um, some of the, you know, rebel rebel. We need to have those
18:57words. Um, so, but they're really his, they're really his interpretations of they, they go, they're
19:03much more George than you might think right off the bat. The Darjeeling Limited, usually called the
19:09Darjeeling Express by anybody who brings it up to me, but it's not the Darjeeling Express. It's the Darjeeling
19:14Limited. I had seen The River, the Jean Renoir movie, The River, and just grabbed me. That movie,
19:22along with revisiting Satyajit Ray's movies, and then seeing lots more of his movies, it's a big
19:28body of work. And also, Louis Mal's films that he had made in India. So all this just cinema related
19:35to India, something was brewing. And so I went to India, and I went on, you know, I went on a kind of,
19:40uh, tour around India, and was just, um, you really fell in love with the experience of being there.
19:48Let's make an agreement. Do what? A, I want us to become brothers again like we used to be,
19:53and for us to find ourselves and bond with each other. Can we agree to that? Okay. B, I want us to
19:59make this trip a spiritual journey where each of us seek the unknown, and we learn about it. Can we
20:04agree to that? Sure. I guess so. C, I want us to be completely open and say yes to everything,
20:09even if it's shocking and painful. You know, I like trains, and I like movies that are the stories
20:15that take place on trains. It's an interesting thing because you can have scenes that are playing
20:18in rooms and people going up and down corridors, but the whole location is on the move. So the story
20:24is moving forward, but also the place is moving. That gives some kind of mystique, I think, to a, to a movie.
20:30The idea of doing a movie on a train in India, I felt like this has, the way we want to do this is
20:36let's go on the adventure. Let's not set the movie here and live on a sound stage. So I said, let's,
20:43you know, let's do it on a real trains, let's, whatever that means. And we didn't know what that
20:46meant. And it was a complicated thing of getting train cars from all over India and building our train
20:52that we were going to sort of own for the movie. You know, it wasn't a great struggle to film on that
20:57train. We designed it in a way that it was suited to filming and we could, we had our same compartment
21:03twice, one that faced one direction and one that faced the other. So if the direction of the train
21:08had to change or the sun is doing something different, we were able to adapt to whatever
21:14situation we were in. You know, it was planned out because you had, we had to have permission for
21:17which tracks we were on, when and all that, but we were very free with the way we did it.
21:21The other thing that was interesting was once everybody was on the train, you're either there
21:28or you're not. There's nowhere else to go. That's your unit for the day. And it's made it very,
21:35it made it efficient.
21:36I'm kicking you up at the next station. Please don't do that. We're very sorry. It won't happen again.
21:54I know it won't. The main characters of the movie are foreigners. They're not the best guests of any
22:01country. I think they're a little wild and they're in their own thing. You know, they're on their own
22:08trip. And I think what happens is that the little bubble that they're living in is just getting
22:15broken and they're kind of having something that is changing them a bit. A train is always some kind
22:21of metaphor for something, but I would tend to say we don't tend to write toward a theme or towards a
22:30metaphor. Instead, we sort of see what the movie wants to be. When you're writing a story, it often
22:36feels less like you're doing architecture and more like you're doing excavation. Like it's something
22:42that already exists and we're just unearthing it. And you know it's right because it just is.
22:48Your feathers. Mine blew towards the mountains. That's not right. It's not supposed to get blown away.
22:53You're supposed to blow on it and then bury it. I didn't get that. I still have mine.
23:00You guys didn't do it right. I asked you if you read the instructions. You did it wrong.
23:08I tried my hardest. I'll say also that making the movie was a real adventure. I mean,
23:15from the beginning of it, from our, from going to India and writing there to all the way through
23:21making the film. And it was also quite a heavy kind of emotional experience in all, in, in great ways.
23:30We all sort of came back from it feeling like we've been through something a little life-changing.
23:35Fantastic Mr. Fox. It's the first animated film. It's a stop motion animated movie. When we finished
23:43The Royal Tenenbaums, I reached out to Lissy Dahl, who was Roald Dahl's widow. And I asked her about,
23:52you know, could we do a movie of this? You had to audition, essentially. So I had a lunch with Lissy.
23:58And in fact, during the lunch, I got this call. I was waiting for this call about whether we were
24:03officially getting the green light to shoot The Royal Tenenbaums. We were waiting for the studio
24:08to give us the go-ahead. And that happened during that. So it was a long time before we made the
24:12movie that I met Lissy. Then Noah and I wrote this script for this Dahl movie, which is a book I had
24:19loved as a child. One of the first books I owned. I want you to be extra nice to him, because he's
24:24going through a very hard time right now. Where's he going to sleep? We're going to make a bed for him
24:27in your room. I can't spare the space. Put him in dad's study. Dad's study is occupied by dad.
24:32I had no experience doing anything with animation. I didn't know anything about stop motion. And I
24:40had a real, a whole other film school from making this film and learned all the processes of how we
24:47do it. And it was a bit of a bumpy process of figuring it out because I was working with
24:53professionals and I wasn't one. I was just a guy with this script and with my own ideas of what I
24:59wanted it to be. And also directing an animated movie is quite a remote experience. Each animator
25:06goes off on his or her own and they do it and they work alone and they close the curtains literally.
25:12And you know, they don't want anybody there because they don't want anybody to touch anything.
25:16And that was an unusual thing. Yeah, it was a big project to manage from afar. And slowly I learned
25:24how to do it. And we made our own system that worked for our group. And once we got in sync
25:29and we started to see what we were making and everybody started to see together what this was
25:34like, then it became a better and better experience. And, uh, and, and yeah, we enjoyed it a lot.
25:43Oh, now don't lose your heads now. Let's do this properly. First, everyone have a drink of water.
25:49Recording the actors, for instance, is like, just keep rehearsing. We record all of it and we use
26:00everything, you know, and it's just like a great big rehearsal, at least the way we, the way we do
26:05them. Anybody can say the line 11 different ways in a row. And it's, um, it has the same freedom,
26:10freedom you would have if you were just shooting closeups and you knew you're going to be able to
26:14edit them any which way. The whole thing is like that. But then there's another part of the actor's
26:21performance when the actor is a, is cast with a different actor, the animator. And this person
26:27is going to have a totally unique interpretation of what they're hearing from the voice performance
26:35and what the action of it is. A few beagles as we discuss, but we're ready for that. A few beagles
26:40as we discussed, but we're ready for that. And every animator in this in stop motion,
26:53anyway, the way they bring the puppet to life over the course of these few seconds of whatever it is,
26:59it's very spontaneous. It just happens extremely slowly. The thing that happens is just, you know,
27:06this thing starts to come to life and they have in mind what they want to do and they're,
27:10they know even frame by frame, but they don't quite know how it's going to turn out because it leads
27:15them through it. So I'm sure there's some study you could do of the neurological something and others of
27:22this type of work because it's something strange and it's, they're working on some complex puzzle
27:29and it's quite mysterious if you're, if you're not an animator. And that was new to me and I,
27:33and it was great because I could see eventually I would say, you know what, this shot would be
27:38better. We should have this shot done by this animator because what this character has to do
27:43here, this person is great at this and this person should do this because he's going to do it in a
27:49day and a half instead of a week because he has a different approach and you know. And so there,
27:55yeah, all of that was new to me. I don't want to be put in the middle of this. Thanks Kylie.
28:01Why is he wearing that bandit hat?
28:06His ears were cold. He's not with us. Go back to bed.
28:10If what I think is happening is happening, it better not be.
28:15Meryl Streep. I've only worked with Meryl Streep for a couple of days in my life. Even just
28:22recording her voice was, was kind of a dazzling thing because she, I could just see her saying,
28:28let me do this. Let me come at this differently.
28:31They'll kill the children.
28:33Over my dead body they will.
28:35That's what I'm saying. You'd be dead too in that scenario.
28:39Seeing her calculate and figure out and then do something totally spontaneous and
28:45yet she's in command of it. And it's really, you know, there's something about
28:49playing a scene where it's almost like, if you were trying to walk downhill, you can only go so slow.
28:56It's going to pull you. It's just going to go. And you can control however much you go but it's
29:00going to just go. And that's sometimes what playing a scene is like. It's just going to go. And I'm a bit
29:04in control now, but now I'm just, now I'm just going and now I'm done. Now I'm just trying to remember
29:09the words. And to see somebody who has so much command over it is kind of amazing.
29:15Have you watched this film with your daughter?
29:17I tried to show it to her once. She wasn't wild about it. And then she watched it without me and
29:22told me, no, it's actually quite good. Moonrise Kingdom, which people also usually call something
29:29else, Moonlight Kingdom. Moonlight Kingdom is what people usually call it to me, half the time.
29:34Moonlight Kingdom. For a long time I'd had this idea I'd like to make a movie about what it was
29:39really like to be a 12 year old and to fall in love in a way that is just beyond your,
29:48anything that you can handle really. My memory of this experience. And so I sort of had this brewing
29:56for some years in the, in the back of my mind. It was only when Roman Coppola and I sat down
30:03together. We were in Italy, we were in Tuscany. And when I told him what I had in mind, he was like,
30:10I want to be a part of this. I, I, this, I have a lot that is coming to me as you say this.
30:17I'm on your side. I know.
30:24And then when we wrote it, we wrote it very quickly. Um, you know, which is usually I don't.
30:29We wrote it fast and we even were doing a thing which I've never done before or since,
30:33which is because we were with our families and we, we were sort of reading what we wrote to the
30:38group a bit in the evening. And we were saying, you know what, I think we have a good scene here.
30:41And we were kind of performing the movie like it was a play or something, um, as we were writing it.
30:46I hadn't made a movie in America in a long time. I guess I started to see America a bit like
30:52some foreign country. Um, and I was saying, this is going to be a American, this story.
30:56You are reported for a uniform violation.
31:02How many rockets you up to, Pennegal? 16 and a half, sir.
31:04Is that enough for the hullabaloo?
31:05Aye, sir, go fetch another pint of gunpowder from your armory shed.
31:08Bedford, oh, I saw that. How fast were you just going?
31:12Safety test, sir. Come again?
31:14The vehicle appears to be in good working order. I'm just checking if...
31:16Reckless cycling. Second warning. Next time I take away the keys.
31:19Anyway, we finally found this house called Kananicut Light, I think it's called.
31:24It's on Kananicut Island, Jamestown Island in Rhode Island. And, um, and it seemed like the perfect
31:30spot for this part of the story. And, um, so we did the thing that we started to do at that point,
31:37which is try to figure out how to do the whole movie within this small perimeter.
31:45But that was the central thing, was this house.
31:47And at the end, when all the instruments have finally come in...
31:50Susie, Latimerie, Rudy, dinner!
31:52...and the other instruments...
31:54Don't make us ask twice!
31:56It was quite a low budget movie, and so we knew we're going to have to make it kind of fast, and we're going to make it
32:16there. When you go and you start looking for locations, at least this is my experience,
32:22you go and you start looking for locations in a forest. You say, well, this place is amazing,
32:27and then you take pictures, and you go back and say, this, it all just looks like more trees.
32:32They all, the pictures are all kind of looking the same. You're not, it didn't feel like that there.
32:36It's not automatic that an image captures the feeling of nature. And you know, you see like
32:43Terrence Malick, you know, and also Terrence Malick with Chivo, with Emmanuel Lubezki.
32:50You see what the evolution of somebody's way of photographing nature can be, how much sophistication
32:56can go into capturing what exists, conveying it. We have to find places where the shots are going to
33:05put you there, and you don't lose the spirit of the place, you kind of bring it to life. Anyway,
33:10that was, that was one aspect of nature in it. Another thing is that we, there are these little
33:17cameras called a minima cameras that, that I think were made at the request of, they were designed at
33:27the request of Jean-Luc Godard by this, by Aton. I don't even know if Godard ever even used one,
33:32but I think they, I saw something like Godard asking for a certain camera in the early 70s.
33:38These are little bitty 16 millimeter cameras that you hold like a video camera. You look through the
33:42top when you shoot and they're, they're, you know, they're this big and they have a small magazine.
33:47And we shot the movie on 16 millimeter because I thought we're going to have, I want to do the
33:53handheld things in the woods with these kids. And as soon as you put a camera up on your shoulder,
33:58you're, you, it's not right for them. Um, so this was a great way to shoot 12 year olds and it sort of
34:06shaped how we made the whole movie. Those cameras, which we only shot certain things with these because
34:10they jam and they get scratches and they're not the most reliable cameras, but they're also kind
34:15of miraculous things. And you know, we knew so much of the movie is going to be what happens between
34:20these kids that we found that we spent all this time searching for and brought together.
34:26We're looking for you. Why? Because you're a fugitive. No, I'm not. I quit the khaki scouts.
34:34Well, it doesn't matter anyway. You don't have that authority. We've been deputized.
34:37Now you're going to come on peacefully or not. The thing with, with working with a young cast is
34:44they have a different level of enthusiasm than, than grownups are even capable of. Every 12 year
34:51old is a sort of script supervisor because once they study it and memorize it, they know the entire
34:57script from start to finish. They have it memorized. They'd know they, the, the, the, the, you know,
35:02the 50 year old actor who's messing up his line. They're just, they can't believe it because they
35:07could do that. Part of what you're doing when you make a movie is you're saying, okay, pretend
35:11we're doing this. And often kids are great at pretending we're doing this.
35:15You know, you shouldn't be friends with him.
35:17Why not?
35:19Because he's crazy.
35:20I love Truffaut. And I mean, I guess Jason and I, we watched the 400 blows together when I first
35:26knew Jason. And at least to me, I somehow, somehow always kind of associated Jean-Pierre and
35:32Francois Truffaut. I felt like that's the thing we're kind of trying to emulate to some degree,
35:36but you know, you know, the other one who was so great, great with these Spielberg is so good with
35:40the kids.
35:40When you have a scene with, with children in a Spielberg movie, he uses the whole group and many
35:49things happen at once. And the distraction that is natural for kids is built into the scene. And
35:55he's always finding ways to, to let them be free.
36:01The Grand Budapest Hotel. So this was the result of my friend, Robin. I met him through Hugo Guinness,
36:12who's my older friend. And Hugo introduced me to Robin. And Hugo and I started talking somewhere
36:21along the way about a story about a character like Robin. And we always said that Robin would
36:29probably be the greatest hotel concierge who ever lived. He's never been a hotel. He knows a lot of
36:35hotel concierges. He's a special person with a special way of talking and approach to life.
36:42Then I read Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig. And I thought, I'd like to make this into a movie. And
36:51then I got to know the rest of his work. And somehow I started thinking there's a way to conflate
36:56these. The Grand Budapest Hotel is Hugo and I taking Robin and Stefan Zweig. And probably as much as
37:05Zweig, it's, as much as there is Zweig in what we wrote, it's very filtered through something to do
37:11with Lubitsch. But anyway, some mixture of these things all started mixing together. And we wrote this thing.
37:19Well, it begins as it must with our mutual friend's predecessor, the beloved original concierge of the
37:27Grand Budapest. It begins, of course, with...
37:31I love the thing in a movie or in a, well, in a book where somebody meets somebody and there's a bit of
37:39drama or intrigue. And eventually this person says, well, let me tell you my story.
37:43How did you come to buy it, if I may ask? The Grand Budapest.
37:47I miss you deeply as I write from the confines of my regrettable and preposterous incarceration.
38:00Until I walk amongst you again as a free man, the Grand Budapest remains in your hands,
38:05as does its impeccable reputation. Keep it spotless and glorify it. Take extra special care of every
38:11little bitty bit of it as if I were watching over you like a hawk with a horsewhip in its talons,
38:16because I am. Rafe was, you know, always the guy for this. At the beginning of starting to
38:23take shape, I thought, this is Rafe. And I will say, people didn't really see it. I had a bit of
38:31Rafe in person to go with my experience of his, of his stunning body of work. I'd had enough,
38:38just enough time with him, not a lot, but I knew him a little bit. He was planning to make
38:45Coriolanus, which he did make, his film of Coriolanus. And I asked him, when you do this
38:52scene, this speech, will it be like this? He said, no, no, no, it's like this. He did a Shakespeare
38:58scene for me on a sofa in very close proximity. And it was, you know, kind of a staggering thing
39:06to experience. I mean, it was a great way to have Shakespeare performed. I thought he's the
39:12guy who should play this. And, you know, that's one of those ones where I think I was right.
39:20Isle of Dogs. I started talking with Roman Coppola about an idea for a film that would be
39:27an anthology of short stories, like articles in a magazine. One of the articles that we had was going
39:34to be this, um, short story by a Japanese writer that's published in the, in this magazine. And
39:40it was going to be a part of the French dispatch. And somewhere along the way, you know what,
39:44this is not, first of all, this has nothing to do with France. It might be in that magazine,
39:49but I don't know really how this relates to it in any other way. Second, this is bigger and more
39:54complicated. And I don't think this, the cost of, the cost of making the 30 minute version of this
40:01is going to be too high. We had better just do the 85 minute version of this where, and it's a movie.
40:09And that's how it began. Um, and, and I had this thought of, of these, of a bunch of alpha dogs
40:15that were named Chief and Rex and Boss and Duke and whatever they are, of a garbage dump island
40:23in Japan. Why? I have no idea.
40:40I always liked the idea of stop, of an animated movie that involved a garbage dump. The complexity and
40:45the, the, the, the, the visual of it just always somehow was something I had waiting to be used.
40:53I don't think I can stomach any more of this garbage.
40:56Exactly the words out of my mouth.
40:58During Fantastic Mr. Fox, we learned essentially everything. We were able to make a bigger movie,
41:03twice as many sets. It's quadruple as many characters and puppets. It's just bigger. But we were able to do it
41:11basically the same budget because we knew what's going to work for us, how to be efficient. When you
41:17make an animated movie, you start with an animatic, like a cartoon version that's storyboards that get
41:22animated with a voice. And we had figured out a method of doing that. And we knew, you know,
41:27the usual way is there's a great big staff and it, I mean, on, uh, for Fantastic Mr. Fox, the animatic,
41:33we spent over a million dollars making this storyboard thing. And for Isle of Dogs, we, we spent,
41:39you know, maybe a fifth of that or something like that because it was all done with just two people.
41:44But that was the big difference was we made the whole movie in that format before we started
41:51shooting. And, um, and we were designing puppets and things in the meantime, but we wait until we
41:56had the whole story working until we started the movie. And so it was very carefully prepped.
42:09Our technology is a bit like 1960-ish vision of the future, maybe something like that. The movie
42:26has a lot to do with Japanese cinema, at least in its inspiration. The technology, I think, comes from
42:32cinema, really.
42:40I will mention one other thing. Two actors who were new to our group in that movie, Bryan Cranston,
42:46Scarlett Johansson. And, uh, I've done other films with them, uh, uh, uh, since then. Um, they've become
42:53a kind of part of our ongoing group, but they both were really perfect in the voice acting. We also in Isle of
43:00Dogs have Greta Gerwig, who, who, who is a really wonderful actress, along with everything else she
43:07does. And she did a great job in these scenes. And we had Yoko Ono, uh, who was great too. Anyway,
43:14Isle of Dogs.
43:16The French Dispatch, which that whole title is The French Dispatch of the Liberty Kansas
43:21Evening Sun. I think that's what it's called.
43:25As I mentioned before, we had been talking about doing a movie that was a magazine. It was a bit
43:29The New Yorker, and it's, uh, also the idea of doing a movie set in France, where I'd spent lots and
43:35lots of time by the time we were working on this movie. And I'd always wanted to do an anthology
43:41movie, a movie that tells a bunch of totally unrelated stories, more or less. And I had a
43:46number of them I think about, like, you know, the De Sica movie, um, Golden Naples, Laurel de Napoli,
43:54um, is a great anthology movie. And there's a Satyajit Ray, Teen Kanya, which is, um, short stories.
44:01The ones I liked the most were ones where it was one person who's decided to tell several stories
44:05in the, in this format. Um, and so that's what we set out to do.
44:09Good writers. He coddled them, he coaxed them, he ferociously protected them.
44:14I thought when we were making the movie, it was going to be like making a bunch of short films,
44:30and it was going to have a small scale. In fact, it somehow ends up feeling like you're making a
44:35bunch of feature films all at once, because each one has its, has all these sets. And, you know,
44:40the thing where you might in this, in a longer story, go to this set three times, and you know,
44:44you shoot there. In this case, we're going to go there once, but we still have to build it,
44:48we still have to go there, shoot it. It's not exactly efficient. It's, it works against that
44:54efficiency. But I always like that kind of, um, story. Uh, you know, I like short stories.
44:58The only thing is that you have the problem, which is, it's always, well, I like this one,
45:03and I kind of like this one, and I didn't like that one. Um, and you know, it's, that's,
45:07that's what happens when you have a, um, story like that. And that's my feeling about the one,
45:12the ones I love. There are stories in them. And I'm like, you know, the one, the funeral of the
45:17little boy, I like less than the one with the gambler and the little boy, you know, whatever it is.
45:22That's a, that's the caveat for anyone who's interested to do this.
45:26All artists sell all their work. It's what makes you an artist, selling it. If you don't wish to sell it,
45:31don't paint it. Question is, what's your price?
45:3850 cigarettes. Actually, make it 75. Why do you keep looking at that guard?
45:51She's Simone. By the time we did the French Dispatch, Robert Yeoman and I, we felt free to
45:56just do whatever we want. I mean, we tried, we'd done some things where we went from the color to
46:01black and white. We'd done a little bit of that before anxiously. And we'd done things where we
46:06changed the aspect ratio or the format of the photography anxiously. When we were doing this,
46:12we just said, if we want to do it, we're going to go to this aspect ratio for just this one shot.
46:16And that was fun. Stale cigarettes, burnt toast. Her, perfume of cheap gasoline, coffee on the breath,
46:24too much sugar, cocoa butter skin. Where does she spend her summers?
46:30They say it's the smells you finally don't forget. The brain works that way.
46:34I've had real editors in mind. Ross versus Sean at the New Yorker, they're very different.
46:40They both had this idea of how to make this magazine great. But our character, played by Bill,
46:48is kind of those two guys. Because I think, you know, Ross is somebody who, I think what we read
46:53about him is he kind of felt like writers are childlike, incapable of taking care of any
47:01any practicality and have to be pampered and tolerated and encouraged. And Sean, on the other
47:08hand, was a little more less kind of comical approach and gentle and deeply respectful and
47:17very skilled as an editor. Both of them had this way of, you know, whatever it is, nurturing and
47:23shepherding and whatever, whatever it took. And so those are the things that we were kind of looking
47:28for that went into that character. Perhaps you failed to grasp that I was shot at and hand-grenaded
47:35against my will. I only asked to be fed and was marvelously as I described in some detail.
47:41Miss Caffier only gets one line of dialogue.
47:47Well, I did cut something he told me. It made me too sad. I can stick it back in if you like.
47:55What did he say?
47:56The stories in the movie are all in their way related to the work of other writers. They're
48:02all related to journalism and to, to journalism and to authors, to people who write. But I will
48:09mention that it was my first chance to work with two actors who I had long wanted to work with,
48:15Geoffrey Wright and Benicio del Toro. And both the characters they play, those parts were written for
48:21them. I had a great experience of, of getting to know them separately at different times of the movie.
48:27And, you know, having them in the story. Asteroid City. The truth is that there was this idea we had
48:35at the time of working on the French Dispatch that maybe something in it might be about the actor
48:40studio. But I, I, I'd often thought I'd like to do something that's 50s actor studio. I'm thinking like
48:45Paul Newman and, uh, and you know, all the whole group. Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward because they're
48:52doing the theater and they're doing, they, it's an ongoing thing for them. But obviously, Marlon Brando and,
48:57you know, everything else. And somehow Marilyn Monroe too, but around the actor studio. We had this
49:02idea of maybe a thing where we were exploring the creation of a play that was in an automat.
49:08But the automat thing started to, we started to move away from that because our idea of the play
49:16within the story that's being told began to grow and expand. And we sort of had this idea of a Marilyn
49:24Monroe and an Arthur Miller sort of couple and it made its way out to the desert. And then we just
49:30realized that that's the movie is, uh, is this, um, this play, you know, that could be like the bus
49:36stop or something, a fifties theatrical production, but we're doing the movie version.
49:52I've always loved going to the theater and, but I, what I love is the, the feeling of putting
50:04on a show something about the feeling, the backstage atmosphere. To me, the idea of doing a play is a
50:10little scary because you know, it's not like you can take it back in the editing room. It's going to
50:16happen right now. And, and even before you are ready, you've got to say, we're going to, we've
50:23got to book this theater and then we're going to rehearse. You don't know what you're going to be
50:27putting on the stage, but you know, when that's a little frightening. That's just, you know, that's
50:32also from not doing it, but I did like to put on plays when I was very young. I love the, the,
50:39the aura of the, of the theater.
50:41Schubert! Schubert! Schubert!
50:43Huh? Schubert!
50:44Yes. What's wrong?
50:47Are you on?
50:47Technically, but General Gibson just started the scene where the president doesn't accept his
50:51resignation. I've got six and a half minutes before my next line. I need an answer to a
50:54question I want to ask.
50:55Okay.
50:55Am I doing him right?
50:57The way the ideas in a movie come together is always quite, you know, it's a bit
51:02abstract and it's sort of like you find it. When it comes to the big questions that we
51:09don't know the answers to, the universe is this giant mystery that's right in front of us all the
51:15time. That's just there. And, and so for us, our mystical search, what just felt natural. The other
51:24thing is that our story is set in the fifties and there's a whole alien thing that goes with that
51:29period anyway.
51:30That's an alien on a top hat. That's an alien climbing ladder. That's an alien on a racehorse.
51:33Let's take it from the top.
51:35I told you 50 times.
51:37The alien picked up the asteroid.
51:39Alleged alien.
51:39I know what I saw.
51:40It's called a meteorite.
51:41This is a microfiche of your school newspaper.
51:43Your byline accompanies an article criticizing the principal's disciplinary methods.
51:47Who were your sources?
51:48I was in the sixth grade.
51:50Just answer that question.
51:50And I will not name names.
51:53The Phoenician Scheme.
51:55So the new movie I have is the Phoenician Scheme.
51:58This one was written for Benicio del Toro, who I had met during French Dispatch.
52:04It's a business story.
52:05You know, it's a bit, it's about a businessman, a kind of tycoon.
52:09We always thought a tycoon like somebody who's in a 1950s Italian movie.
52:13I've appointed you sole heir to my estate, which you may come into sooner rather than later.
52:18I'm provisionally manager of my affairs after the event of my actual demise on a trial basis.
52:24He's confronting his death at regular intervals throughout the story.
52:42He's sometimes dying.
52:43Death was always a big part of it.
52:45And we had this notion that there was a sort of biblical thread that he was going to have visions.
52:53And so the daughter being a nun, I think, comes from this sort of, I mean, I want to say it's a kind of a motif.
53:00I mean, you know, for me, I don't know how religious I would interpret our biblical things.
53:09They're more like a way of engaging with the big unknowns and, in his case, with the very present prospect of being dead.
53:24Where's yours?
53:29I don't have a passport.
53:32Normal people want the basic human rights that accompany citizenship in any sovereign nation.
53:37I don't.
53:38My legal residence is a shack in Portugal.
53:41My official domicile is a hut on the Black Sea.
53:44My certificated abode is a lodge perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sub-Saharan rainforest accessible only by goat path.
53:51I don't live anywhere.
53:53I'm not a citizen at all.
53:54I don't need my human rights.
53:57I don't know how much it relates to Bunuel in the end, but he's who we had in mind.
54:03We sort of thought these are kind of surrealist visions or something.
54:08You know, I think that people say, well, how much do you, how improvisational is anything on your movie?
54:13Nothing is improvisational.
54:14Well, to me, actually, everything is improvisational.
54:16It's just, it's when is it improvised.
54:19Is it improvised on the set or is it improvised when you're writing?
54:23And certainly when you're writing a script, you're coming up with something that wasn't there.
54:28It's all sort of improvised at a certain moment.
54:31At least that's what it feels like.
54:32If you're writing with somebody else, there's often an aspect of performance in the writing when you're, because you're acting it out sometimes right there.
54:43But there was always this idea of, does it have something to do with Bunuel?
54:48For me, I've always, I haven't had the moment where I don't know what I want to do next.
54:54I, so far, I've always had something else that sort of has presented itself to me from somewhere in my unconscious or whatever, wherever it comes from.
55:04And I think that's an advantage just because I always feel like I know I have a mission.
55:09You know, a mission is a great thing if you're going to do something that's a bit challenging, like making a film.
55:14I've had a great experience of gathering collaborators, actors, but people in all different departments,
55:20because I've worked in lots of different places all over the world.
55:24And I have people who've come with me from, from all these travels and have stayed with me.
55:29I guess in the end, the continuity of, of, of the group is, is, is a strength.
55:36New blood is great too, but a foundation of people who believe in each other and are, and have, and have learned how to work together and are great at their jobs.
55:47That's kind of an irreplaceable thing.
55:49That's a precious commodity.
55:50That's a precious commodity.
55:52That's a precious commodity.
55:53That's a precious commodity.
55:54That's a precious commodity.
55:55That's a precious commodity.
55:56That's precious commodity.
55:57That's precious commodity.
55:58That's precious commodity.
55:59That's precious commodity.
56:00That's precious commodity.
56:01That's precious commodity.
56:02That's precious commodity.
56:03That's precious commodity.
56:04That's precious commodity.
56:05That's precious commodity.
56:06That's precious commodity.
56:07That's precious commodity.
56:08That's precious commodity.
56:09That's precious commodity.
56:10That's precious commodity.
56:11That's precious commodity.
56:13That's precious commodity.
56:14That's precious commodity.
56:15That's precious commodity.
56:16That's precious commodity.
56:17That's precious commodity.
56:18That's precious commodity.