Wes Ander­son: ​‘I am drawn to mystery’

Hel­lo Sophie Monks Kauf­man, this is Wes.” In his slow, warm, con­tem­pla­tive drawl, my name sounds bet­ter than ever before. I am in seat 17C of easy­jet flight K54K39S which is rolling down a run­way at Nice Côte d’Azur Air­port. I had switched my phone off flight mode in the hope of receiv­ing a mes­sage that would stoke my excite­ment about bein­gin the French Riv­iera for the 76^th Cannes Film Fes­ti­val. Even in this antic­i­pa­to­ry state, a voice memo from Wes Ander­son was beyond any­thing that it would occur to me to expect.

His lat­est film, Aster­oid City, is set dur­ing the 1950s in a fic­tion­al Amer­i­can desert town named Arid Plans that has drawn out-of-town­ers for the Junior Stargaz­ers con­ven­tion. The Stargaz­ers, all pre­co­cious child genius­es, bring with them a more raggedy crew of adults with bare­ly con­cealed emo­tion­al prob­lems. Among them is war pho­tog­ra­ph­er Augie Steen­beck (Jason Schwartz­man) who has yet to break the news to his four chil­dren that their moth­er is dead. There is anoth­er lay­er to the film in that it is framed as a the­atre play writ­ten by louche South­ern play­wright Con­rad Earp (Edward Nor­ton) and direct­ed by the over­sexed and fresh­ly divorced Schu­bert Greene (Adrien Brody).

Aster­oid City is per­haps the most emo­tion­al­ly naked film that Ander­son has ever made and has instant­ly joined The Roy­al Tenen­baums, The Dar­jeel­ing Lim­it­ed and The Grand BudapestHo­tel as one of my favourites from his rel­a­tive­ly small canon. Yet every sin­gle thing he has ever made (includ­ing the adverts) has a play­ful­ness that under­lies all the very best expe­ri­ences that this life has to offer. Not least, in the char­ac­ter and place names. It makes me feel very warm indeed to imag­ine Wes and col­lab­o­ra­tors sit­ting around cook­ing up names like Schu­bert Greene and Con­rad Earp, or Arid Plains and Parched Gulp. He is seri­ous about enter­tain­ment and has built a real liveli­hood root­ed in the world of make believe, much like Schu­bert Greene and Con­rad Earp, who are tech­ni­cal­ly respon­si­ble for every­thing that comes to pass dur­ing Aster­oid City.

I am able to hear only ​“Hel­lo Sophie Monks Kauf­man, this is Wes” before the cap­tain blasts in over the plane inter­com wel­com­ing us to Nice where the local time is 7.10pm and the tem­per­a­ture is 21 degrees Cel­sius. After he wraps up this spiel I hit play on an audio file titled ​‘New record­ing 674.m4a’ that is 14 min­utes 10 sec­onds long. As my fel­low air trav­ellers sit rest­less­ly, wait­ing for the plane doors to open, I pray that it will take at least 14 min­utes 10 sec­onds until we are lib­er­at­ed. It so hap­pens that my prayers are answered and I lis­ten to the fol­low­ing in one unbro­ken flow feel­ing as though I am ascend­ing, even though we are ground­ed. Hel­lo Sophie Monks Kauf­man, this is Wes and I’m going to answer your ques­tions to the best of my abil­i­ty, per­tain­ing to the motion pic­ture, Aster­oid City.

[The fol­low­ing ques­tions were writ­ten and sent to Wes Ander­son in advance are read out by the sub­ject in a fast-paced abridged style. We include them here in full for ease of reading.]

LWLies: There’s a delight­ful­ly play­ful aspect to the way you cre­ate peo­ple and place names, in that they’re amal­gams from his­to­ry and cul­ture. What process do you go through to for­mu­late names, and how do you know you’ve land­ed on one that’s right?

Ander­son: I always have felt that char­ac­ter names are a bit cru­cial and, also, often find myself invent­ing pos­si­bly fan­ci­ful loca­tions for the sto­ries. I do tend to find that we wait for names to come to us, me and my col­lab­o­ra­tors, Roman Cop­po­la espe­cial­ly. We wait for the ones that amuse us and feel like they have some lay­ers and con­nec­tions to them in a way that tends to steer it a bit away from being as close to real­i­ty. Most of these things come from real­i­ty but maybe the slight­ly more eso­teric branch­es of real­i­ty. I want these details to be enter­tain­ing and to add some­thing to the sto­ry. I guess it depends on what the tone of your movie is. I feel like it’s right for my kind of movies, not for everybody’s. On the oth­er hand, in a Pre­ston Sturges movie they go much fur­ther. Every name is a gag, real­ly. So, any­way, we fall some­where in some weird oth­er area. I’ll just switch to the next question.

Many of your reg­u­lar com­pa­ny of play­ers appear in Aster­oid City – do you feel that you’re in search of a per­fect ensem­ble that you’re refin­ing with each new film?Also, do you feel the way you direct and treat actors has changed over the years? Do peo­ple such as Til­da Swin­ton, Jeff Gold­blum, Edward Nor­ton now require less of your time?

You hope that each movie is a per­fect ensem­ble and some­times it’s the group you think of right at the begin­ning when you’re writ­ing it, or when you’ve just fin­ished writ­ing it, and some­times it’s the group you end up with once you know who can do it and who can’t. Usu­al­ly with the peo­ple who end up in it, you can’t real­ly pic­ture any­one else by the time you’ve done the movie. Hope­ful­ly, you always feel glad that you end­ed up with who you end­ed up with. I’ve had the chance to work with so many actors who I love – who I loved before I worked with them or who I loved only when I found them. But I can’t say I’m work­ing towards the per­fect ensemble.

I feel like every movie has a dif­fer­ent flavour. I always like how in almost every movie there are lots of peo­ple I’ve worked with before but there are always new peo­ple that I’ve been want­i­ng to work with and then those peo­ple could become part of the ongo­ing group. I don’t know that I direct and treat actors dif­fer­ent­ly. I do feel like I’m more com­fort­able being bold with what I say to some­body who I know well and I’m not afraid that I’m going to upset them or some­thing by what I ask of them, but main­ly I love work­ing with actors. Once you start mak­ing a movie they’re the ones who are doing it, it’s all up to them. I spend the whole movie with them because we stay togeth­er while we’re work­ing and we stay togeth­er when we’re not work­ing so, to me, in a sense, they’re every­thing. I don’t know that they require less of my time. All I want to do is give them all the atten­tion that they want. Some want more and some pre­fer less, so I want to give them what they want. Oth­er than that I stand back and see what they do.

Across your many col­lab­o­ra­tions, how has Jason Schwartz­man helped to shape your cre­ative vision? Did you have any idea after Rush­more that you would be work­ing with him 25 years later?

Jason I met when he was 17 – it’s a very, very long time ago. I knew almost instant­ly when I met him that we seemed to be friends already. It was such an easy deci­sion. We’d been search­ing for months and months and prob­a­bly going on a year by the time I met Jason. It was only a mat­ter of sec­onds before I thought, ​‘I can final­ly stop look­ing.’ We were friends from that day for­ward. I’m sure I saw him the next day. In those days I had an office on the Colum­bia Sony lot. He and I went over there and we start­ed just walk­ing around. We weren’t des­tined to work in a movie stu­dio for many years – and rarely – but we were there in a movie stu­dio before going to Texas and shoot­ing in my old school. We just wan­dered around for days, read­ing these scenes and fig­ur­ing out how to go about doing our movie. I can’t tell you the num­ber of songs that Jason has sug­gest­ed to me that I’ve put in movies. A dozen, prob­a­bly, over the years. We’ve writ­ten scripts togeth­er and we’ve trav­elled the world togeth­er. Sud­den­ly, it’s 25 years later.

In light of Steve Carell’s tremen­dous cashier’s visor, would you com­ment on what your pitch to the cos­tume depart­ment was for Aster­oid City? What infor­ma­tion, doc­u­ments, resources (if any) did you pro­vide to them?

A green visor, isn’t it a clas­sic thing for a clerk? I work with Mile­na Canonero, our cos­tume design­er and I’ve worked with her for many years, since The Life Aquat­ic. That’s prob­a­bly 20 years. Mile­na is espe­cial­ly inter­est­ed in get­ting the details of the peri­od right, but she’s inter­est­ed in every­thing to do with cos­tumes and she’s inter­est­ed in char­ac­ters and she’s inter­est­ed in, what she calls, [adopts impe­r­i­al Ital­ian accent] ​‘the com­plete look’ of the movie. So, she’s inter­est­ed in what every­body else is doing too. The oth­er thing is she’s inter­est­ed in work­ing till mid­night every night if that’s what it requires. She has an enor­mous crew of peo­ple, many of them are Ital­ian and most of them I know well and have been friends with for years now. They sup­port her and she’s a spe­cial unit. She gets what­ev­er she needs because I know that she’s putting absolute­ly every­thing into the movie and if I’m work­ing at mid­night, I know she is too. I like that.

Can you tell us about your inter­est in clas­sic sci­ence fic­tion, films, nov­els, TV seri­als, which all appear to be ref­er­enced here?

Movies like… oh, I don’t know, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and maybe a bit of both ver­sions of… oh my gosh, what’s the one that Philip Kauf­man remade… The Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers. Prob­a­bly more Close Encoun­ters…. But that’s not the cen­tre of the movie to me. The cen­tre of the movie was two things. One, a sto­ry about peo­ple who work in the the­atre and what those peo­ple are like and what they want. Their whole lives become this make-believe that con­nects to life in a peri­od of the the­atre in Amer­i­ca. Then, about peo­ple from the West, or peo­ple who live in the West or things that hap­pen in the West. We thought about Sam Shep­ard quite a lot. We thought of a lot of Hol­ly­wood movies that are desert movies. There’s some­thing pecu­liar about them. I have a whole list of those that we can prob­a­bly give you. Okay… just to make note: ​‘Sophie Monks Kauf­man, list, movie inspirations’.

How long did you search for, and where else did you look, before find­ing your Aster­oid City in Chinchón, Spain?

I found the place myself on Google maps look­ing for places that, seen from satel­lite imagery, were yel­low in Europe. You end up in Spain and you look for flat places and, frankly, flat places with a very close 4‑star hotel – not too expen­sive of a hotel, but very com­fort­able where you can have a cast be hap­py and then be close by the set because, essen­tial­ly, what I like to do is live right next to the set. So we found the place to cre­ate our desert.

Aster­oid City has a gor­geous off-the-cuff line about the story’s cen­tral metaphor not being pinned down yet. How impor­tant is it to you to retain a cer­tain lev­el of mys­tery – in your cin­e­ma and in life generally?

I don’t know that I wish to give a sense of mys­tery, I just am drawn to mys­tery. You want it to be there and you don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly want to get too exact about what it all means because it becomes reduc­tive. I’d rather have the movie be expan­sive and speak in ways that we don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly control.

Many mem­bers of the neu­ro­di­verse com­mu­ni­ty find solace and inspi­ra­tion in your order­ly worlds and defi­ant­ly indi­vid­ual pro­tag­o­nists. To what extent are char­ac­ters like Woodrow in Aster­oid City and the run­aways in Moon­rise King­dom intend­ed to recog­nise neu­ro­di­ver­si­ty? What are your ref­er­ences for writ­ing char­ac­ters who are at odds with their (seem­ing­ly) neu­rotyp­i­cal peers?

I think that we are talk­ing about some­thing about me [charm­ing mini laugh]. What did we say about Woodrow…? [rereads this sec­tion of the ques­tion] There’s no inten­tion at all. I feel like what you’re prob­a­bly respond­ing to is some aspect of my own per­son­al­i­ty. If what you’re describ­ing is accu­rate, it’s prob­a­bly me relat­ing to peo­ple in a way that speaks in a lan­guage that we might appre­ci­ate together.

How involved are you with the prop exhi­bi­tions so beloved by your fans in Lon­don and NYC? How would you feel about a per­ma­nent Wes Ander­son theme park?

I am not that involved with those exhi­bi­tions and I’m always pleased and sur­prised that peo­ple are inter­est­ed in doing those. And a theme park, I would cer­tain­ly like to design some rides. I would be very eager to design some rides. Okay, thank you Sophie Monks Kauf­man, hope­ful­ly these answers will be useful.

[Record­ing ends]

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