Wes Ander­son says Isle of Dogs is inspired by Aki­ra Kurosawa

Wes Ander­son recent­ly gave an hour-long tele­vised mas­ter­class for Arte Cin­e­ma in which he dis­cussed his influ­ences and expe­ri­ences as a filmmaker.

His next film, Isle of Dogs, sees a return to the world of stop-motion ani­ma­tion for the first time since 2009’s Fan­tas­tic Mr Fox. The idio­syn­crat­ic Amer­i­can direc­tor named stop-motion pio­neer Ray Har­ry­hausen as a source of inspi­ra­tion, as well as var­i­ous Amer­i­can Christ­mas TV spe­cials from his youth. Even more intrigu­ing­ly, he also revealed that his ninth fea­ture is ​“less influ­enced by stop-motion than it is by Aki­ra Kurosawa.”

When pressed, Ander­son sim­ply smiled and nod­ded, appar­ent­ly unwill­ing at this stage to divulge any­thing more about how the icon­ic Japan­ese auteur fac­tors into the film. ​“Every­body is influ­enced by every­body.” he says, ​“You can’t real­ly pre­dict what someone’s process is or what they draw from.”

Lat­er on in the inter­view, Ander­son names Alfred Hitch­cock as mak­ing a strong impres­sion on him as a teenag­er, see­ing video tapes of his lat­er films ​“released with his name – the director’s name – above the title.” He goes on to dis­cuss the dif­fer­ent direc­to­r­i­al meth­ods required for dif­fer­ent actors, explain­ing that ​“every actor has their own way they want to be direct­ed”, spec­i­fy­ing that ​“an actor like Jeff Gold­blum wants you to tell him every­thing that you can”, while Gene Hack­man ​“would be hap­py if you didn’t speak to him.”

Lit­tle is known about the plot of Isle of Dogs, but we do know that it is set in Japan and fea­tures Edward Nor­ton in the lead role (a dog named Rex). In addi­tion the voice cast includes Ander­son reg­u­lars Bill Mur­ray, Jeff Gold­blum and Til­da Swin­ton, along­side new col­lab­o­ra­tors Bryan Cranston, Scar­lett Johans­son and Gre­ta Gerwig.

Isle of Dogs is cur­rent­ly in pro­duc­tion and is sched­ule for release in 2018. Watch the full video inter­view below…