The Playlist blog has uncovered (via Film Music Reporter) a new release of Alexandre Desplat’s Academy Award nominated score from Fantastic Mr. Fox. The collection features unused music from Desplat’s score, recorded at the famous Abbey Road studios. You may remember that a a similar, albeit unofficial release was done of Mark Mothersbaugh’s music for The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic was done during the awards campaign, and that there was an official release of the Seu Jorge sessions done for the latter film aswell.

You can see a full tracklisting, along with links to purchase the collection, after the break.

1. Moving In
2. Mr. Fox In The Fields Medley
3. Trains
4. Side Car Escape
5. Shoot Out
6. Kristofferson
7. Plan B
8. Trains 2
9. Looking For Cider
10. Death Of Rat
11. Whack-Bat Majorette Ensemble
12. Canis Lupis
13. Trains 3
14. Rat Fight
15. Dig!
16. Mr. Fox’s Promenade
17. Three Farmers
18. Kristofferson 2
19. Boggis Bunce And Bean (Reprise)
20. Trains 4
21. Mr. and Mrs. Fox
22. Canis Lupus 2
23. Finale
24. Choir Boys Farewell (To The Puppets)

Amazon

iTunes

Rhapsody

You can buy the Deluxe Edition of the soundtrack on iTunes.

Sounding Fantastic. If the trailers for Wes Anderson’s stop-motion-animation adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s book Fantastic Mr. Fox aren’t enough to suggest great stuff ahead (the film opens Nov. 20), the sound track should clinch the deal. An integral component of the writer/director’s movies thus far (think John Lennon’s “Oh Yoko!” in Rushmore, Nick Drake’s “Fly” in The Royal Tenenbaums), the collection of songs and tunes for Fantastic Mr. Fox includes such furry numbers as “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” from the Wellingtons, two from the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones‘ “Street Fighting Man,” and a handful of Burl Ives incantations – yes, Burl Ives! – guaranteed to spark a Burl revival. Throw in some Art Tatum, Jarvis Cocker, and Bobby Fuller Four, plus beautiful instrumental sketches from French composer Alexandre Desplat, and you have one of the loveliest, most eccentric sound tracks to come along since – well, since Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. (Philadelphia Inquirer, October 25, 2009)

Wes is interviewed by the great French director and Criterion labelmate Arnaud Desplechin in this month’s Interview magazine. They touch on Paris, Proust, the Movies and working on Fantastic Mr. Fox. It’s really terrific. Full interview after the break and at their website.

Wes Anderson

By Arnaud Desplechin

In the five films that Wes Anderson has directed, from his 1996 debut feature Bottle Rocket to 2007’s picaresque The Darjeeling Limited, he has managed to assemble a constellation of actors who might best be described as “Wes’s Gang.” This tragicomic fraternity includes Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston, Luke Wilson, and, of course, his college friend and longtime collaborator Owen Wilson. Like Woody Allen before him, Anderson has constructed his own immediately identifiable cinematic landscape, one so distinct that certain clothes, music, expressions, and cleverly awkward situations in the real world can be dubbed as being “very Wes Anderson.”

This year, however, the 40-year-old Anderson seems to have given the slip to his frequent playmates—at least in bodily form—by swapping human actors for puppets and the concrete world for an imaginary one in his latest effort, Fantastic Mr. Fox. The film, due out in November, is a stop-motion animated adaptation of the Roald Dahl book about a family of foxes that is besieged by a group of angry farmers and forced to outmaneuver them in order to survive. Anderson tapped some of his usual collaborators—along with George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and Jarvis Cocker—to record the dialogue. He then used those vocal tracks to inspire a mesmeric fantasyland of puppet performances brought to life by a team of animators on an elaborate soundstage in London.

Fantastic Mr. Foxcertainly marks a departure for Anderson. French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin recently sat down with Anderson at the Cinéma du Panthéon in Paris—one of the city’s oldest movie theaters—to discuss the ever-evolving architecture of Anderson’s idiosyncratic universe.

ARNAUD DESPLECHIN: When do you finish shooting?

WES ANDERSON: We finish shooting tomorrow.

DESPLECHIN: Tomorrow? Are you depressed?

ANDERSON: We’ve been shooting for one year, so I’m not depressed yet.

DESPLECHIN: And you don’t have a wrap party?

ANDERSON: We had a wrap party.

DESPLECHIN: You already had it?

ANDERSON: Yeah. The wrap party had been scheduled in advance, and we went over schedule. It’s been a very long time shooting. The thing is, with the animation, you finish shooting, and then the whole thing is done. Everything else has already been put into place, so shooting is the last step, although we were mixing today on rue d’Enghien.

DESPLECHIN: The weather in Paris is terrible now, quite depressing. I was just wondering, while sitting at my desk depressed by the weather, what kind of weather you had growing up in Texas.

ANDERSON: Well, Texas is hot. I went to school in Austin, but I grew up in Houston, which is on the Gulf of Mexico. It’s hot, hot like India, and humid, and full of mosquitoes.

DESPLECHIN: And you don’t miss it? [Anderson laughs] I ask because I am looking out the window and this city is all gray, and I don’t understand how you could stay in such a city. It’s quite different from where you are from. So you went to school in Austin?

ANDERSON: College in Austin. Then I lived in California for a while. Then in New York.

DESPLECHIN: Where did you meet Owen Wilson?

ANDERSON: In Austin. We must have been 18.

DESPLECHIN: And you both wanted to work in cinema?

ANDERSON: I guess we did. I don’t know. I was studying philosophy, and he was studying English. But we met in a playwriting class. We first started talking about writers, but we also talked about movies right off the bat. I knew I wanted to do something with movies. I don’t know if he had realized yet that it was an option.

DESPLECHIN: I think I read somewhere that in college, you were working on Proust?

ANDERSON: No, I was never working on Proust, but I read Swann’s Way, which made a big impression on me . . . At that time, literature students in America didn’t seem to read Proust—at least not where I was going to school. It took me a long time to finish reading the first book, and I only read the one.

DESPLECHIN: I never read it at all.

ANDERSON: You didn’t? [laughs]

DESPLECHIN: Because in my family it was a snobbish thing—you know, to read Proust. I thought if I read this book, it would take something like one year. Instead, I could spend the year reading strange, odd books that my father or sisters wouldn’t read. Plus I wanted to work in cinema, so I didn’t feel that I should start with a serious thing. I was supposed to focus on futile things that belong to popular arts. It was really an impression that I imposed on myself. I will never read Proust as a commitment.

ANDERSON: You still hold to that?

DESPLECHIN: Yeah. I read 10 or 12 books about Proust to know the different books. I mean, it was a sort of stupid decision to make as an adolescent— against the teacher and for the cinema. But it has to do with the fact that I’m French. Proust was sacred, so I didn’t want to be a part of it.

ANDERSON: The opening of Swann’s Way is about being on the verge of falling asleep. The book is filled with images that have never left my mind.

DESPLECHIN: So when you started to write films, was that the moment you and Owen split parts, where one would be the director and the other would be the actor?

ANDERSON: Well, we started writing together. I was always going to be the director, but he didn’t really want to be an actor—or I don’t know if he knew he wanted to be an actor. As far as he was concerned, he was strictly a writer.

DESPLECHIN: Does he still consider himself strictly a writer now that he has become such a big movie star?

ANDERSON: Nope. [laughs] Now he considers himself an actor, too. But he’s a very good writer.

DESPLECHIN: You wrote Fantastic Mr. Foxwith Noah Baumbach.

ANDERSON: Yes. We wrote most of it in New York, some of it in Los Angeles, some of it in England. Actually, we wrote for a little while at Roald Dahl’s house, in Buckinghamshire. And we wrote a little bit in Paris, too.

DESPLECHIN: I thought you were trapped here, that you couldn’t escape from this rain. But you still can escape to New York and places like that.

ANDERSON: I can go to different places, yes. I live in New York most of the time.

DESPLECHIN: Would you call what you are experiencing—jumping around from one city to another—nomadism? Or would you call it an exile? Either way, to me, it is a typical American thing, these ideas.

ANDERSON: The thing is, you’re French. You’re French for generations. You’re genuinely French.

DESPLECHIN: I’m not that French.

ANDERSON: Well, you’re quite French. But most Americans will say, “I’m Swedish.”

DESPLECHIN: Are you Swedish?

ANDERSON: Yes, I’m half Swedish, half Norwegian. If somebody asks you what your background is, you don’t have to go back very far before it’s outside of America—unless you’re part Cherokee or something. Anyway, I certainly don’t think I’ve chosen to be nomadic. I always wanted to live in New York, and it took me a long time before I got there. But once you start moving around a lot . . . I don’t know. The difference between exile and nomadism is probably just your mood.

DESPLECHIN: You’ve seen a lot of movies. I wonder if you learned to watch a lot of films from someone like Martin Scorsese. One could say that there are two kinds of directors: those who love to see films and those who actually don’t see that many.

ANDERSON: If you are going to pick directors that make you feel like you should watch old films, I think that would be Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich. There are so many films I was introduced to by them in one way or another. For example, on the laser-disc commentary of Raging Bull[1980],Scorsese mentions something about MichaelPowell, and I had never heard of the Powell and [Emeric] Pressburger films before. From Bogdanovich, I think I first learned about Howard Hawks and LeoMcCarey. Bogdanovich saw everything. He had this metal file cabinet with drawers filled with notes. Every time he saw a movie, he typed up a little card that would list the title, director, writer, description, the date he saw the movie, and what he thought. He’d give it a rating. Then if he saw it again, he’d take the card and add a note: “I saw it again, and actually I thought it was a little better this time.”

DESPLECHIN: Do you do that?

ANDERSON: No.

DESPLECHIN: I think it’s a critic thing.

ANDERSON: Bogdanovich started it when he was, like, 15 years old. But I think he stopped the week that he went to Texas to make The Last Picture Show [1971]. He stopped as soon as he really became successful as a filmmaker. I think the first director I was ever aware of was Alfred Hitchcock—before I even understood the idea of a director. I was aware of Hitchcock because of The Alfred Hitchcock Collection. That was the first time I was aware that there’s a guy who is not in the movie who’s on the front of the box. He’s responsible. I loved those movies.

DESPLECHIN: Those were the first films that mesmerized you as a kid?

ANDERSON: Well, they were the first films I took note of and thought, This is interesting, and it was directed by this particular man. Before that I was interested in Star Wars [1977] and The Pink Panther [1963]. Actually, the first movie I saw when I got to Paris was one of the Pink Panthermovies. I remember because I remember having to figure out how to say “Un billet pour La Panthère Rose . . . ”

DESPLECHIN: I’m not able to name the moment I wanted to be a director because I also didn’t know the word for that. I couldn’t distinguish between producer, director, and author. I just wanted to be the guy in charge—the guilty one! [Anderson laughs] But, you know, as a kid I was not precocious at all. I had such bad taste. I loved Hitchcock but for the wrong reasons.

ANDERSON: What are the wrong reasons?

DESPLECHIN: I don’t know. Today I try to see some of his films and, you know, I’m failing him because I’m not moved. But other times I’m shivering and crying because what he tried to achieve is so amazing. It’s such dedication. I think he’s almost a saint. I can see all the unbelievable emotion in it. Before, I thought the big thing with him was that he was clever. Actually, I don’t know what I love about him. Is it that he accepts that he’s stupid? That he’s clever? That’s he’s vulnerable?

ANDERSON: He follows the thing that he’s drawn to over and over again. Sometimes, if I have to do a scene that involves suspense or drama or just some basic genre storytelling, I think, What’s the Hitchcock way to do it? There’s a Hitchcock solution that’s clear and simple and sort of professional and says, I want the audience to feel something specific. Usually when I’m doing a scene, I don’t want it to feel specific—I want to make something that different people will feel in different ways. But the greatest thing about Hitchcock is that his scenes do have very specifically intended effects—even while the overall film would still be interpreted wildly differently from person to person.

DESPLECHIN: Are there other directors who you think about like that?

ANDERSON: Yeah. I mean, it depends on the thing I’m working on. One other director I feel thatI always think about when I don’t know how to approach something is Steven Spielberg. He would know how to do it. But, ultimately, if you’re asking me which director I think about in terms of just living my life—maybe this is crazy, but I’m going to have to say Stanley Kubrick, which I think is a bad sign because that is someone whose whole thing was about controlling his life. I mean, he apparently had a great family life, and he had his work arranged in a way that fit into the way he wanted to live. And people went to see his movies. And he only did the movies he liked to do. He didn’t do one movie for the money, so he could do the next one because he liked it. He only did the ones he wanted to do. He had total, utter, complete creative control over not just the movies but also the life of making them. He had a system, which you need because there are too many things to keep track of.

DESPLECHIN: I have a friend who visited Hitchcock’s house when he was really old. My friend had written a famous book on Hitchcock and was so proud to visit. Hitchcock showed him his basement. At this time, he wasn’t allowed to eat anymore because he was too fat. But he was keeping food in a basement storage area. He had enough to feed, like, 100 people, just to be sure he wouldn’t ever lack any food, which was absurd because he wasn’t allowed to eat it. He was just visiting his food. That’s beautiful, no?

ANDERSON: That’s beautiful, yes.

DESPLECHIN: I wanted to talk to you about music in your movies. You have a very personal way of working with scores—such an exact taste and combination of songs.

ANDERSON: I like working on the music for my own movies—which is about the only music I’m interested in working on.

DESPLECHIN: Do you play an instrument?

ANDERSON: A little bit, but barely anything. For Fantastic Mr. Fox, we had Jarvis Cocker make a great song—he’s also the voice of one of the animated characters in the film. And, right now, we have Alexandre Desplat in the middle of doing the score. There’s much more music than I had any idea we were going to need. It’s like an hour or more of music that he’s written.

DESPLECHIN: Were you with Jarvis Cocker when he recorded the music?

ANDERSON: Yes. We recorded it in Jean Touitou’s basement studio. We have a French banjo player who’s very good. I don’t think there are that many wellknown French banjo players, but we found the best one.

DESPLECHIN: I was surprised when you said you studied philosophy and read Proust, because it sounds so serious. But your films are also quite entertaining. The first time I had to introduce one of your films in Paris, it struck me that that you are to American cinema what J.D. Salinger is to American literature. You create a sort of pure cinematic world and the characters connect from one film to another and the films together are drawing a world that is constantly expanding. It seems so close in style to what Salinger did.

ANDERSON: I do feel a bit like my characters from one movie could walk into another one of my movies and it would make sense, whereas people from other peoples’ movies would probably feel a bit uncomfortable there. [both laugh]

DESPLECHIN: But it’s quite rare, no? To have created such a collant world. It reminds me of Francois Truffaut because you need to create life, jokes, cries . . .

ANDERSON: Your movies have the same thing, except they’re more realistic, so it becomes more subtle.

DESPLECHIN: I wouldn’t say that.

ANDERSON: Well, I suppose I mean the characters in A Christmas Tale [2008] and Rois et reine [2004]—I can’t really say the r’s right in Rois et reine—they are part of an imagined world, but those characters feel more like real life to me.

DESPLECHIN: You have all these guys who are really big fans of your movies because there is something so intimate about them. Even if we don’t know a thing about you, there is something so revealing in your films, something we see about your life there. If there is another director who gives me the same feeling, it’s Quentin Tarantino. To me, you and Tarantino are two brothers in the American cinema.

ANDERSON: I feel like with Tarantino, when he was doing Pulp Fiction [1994], there’s all this genre that he’s working with in this inventive way. But you also kind of get the feeling that he’s been traveling in Europe and he’s never been there before and he has just come back to town to report on some of the things that have happened in his life. Your film Ma Vie Sexuelle [1996] has the complete feeling of somebody reporting about their life, but it’s not like a documentary-style movie. Was your life at the time anything like that movie?

DESPLECHIN: Not at all. But there is a truth that when you learn a character or write a scene for a film, you can make it part of your life. I had an actor who didn’t smoke before he was cast as a chain-smoker in my film. Now he does. But even from a line in a film—writing it or acting it—you can think, “I could say this and also be funny. The girls might stop and laugh and I could get laid.” It’s true: You find a good line and after that you try to use it in real life. So, in a way, you are taught by your own films and the characters you impersonate. When people see the results of your work, they guess they can see something about your private life.

ANDERSON: But when your experience of making the movie turns into your life—what Kubrick called “pure cinema” then—that’s probably a bad sign.

DESPLECHIN: Well, thank you, Wes. On va manger?

ANDERSON: Oui.

Arnaud Desplechin is an award-winning French director, screenwriter, and cinematographer.

Photo by SØlve SundsbØ

Watch our slideshow of the Fantastic Mr. Fox premiere in London

Includes photos from The Gap on Regent Street courtesy of jazzt. All photos copyright their respective owners.

Transcribed by iFlicks:

George and Wes – what was the appeal of Fantastic Mr Fox? Why did you want to work on a film, particularly a stop-motion animation, based on that book?

WA: Well, we all grew up with Roald Dahl’s writing. Fantastic Mr Fox was the first book I owned, so it made an impression upon me. I always wanted to adapt the book as stop-motion, using puppets with fur, because there’s something sort of magical about that.

GC: I just did it for the paycheck. The money. [Laughs] But it was also the chance to work with Wes, which really appealed to me.

George, in what ways do you identify with the character of Mr Fox? What did you think of him as a fox?

GC: What I thought of him…as a fox? [Laughs] Well, he’s an optimist, which was really fun to play. I had a lot of fun on the film, working with such a great cast. I didn’t enjoy working with Bill, though. There was a lot of hatred there at first. We’re okay now, though.

The father-son relationship between Mr Fox and Ash is very central to the movie – did that make you feel broody at all?

GC: Broody? That’s a word we don’t understand in America!

You’re in a few films this festival, and you seem to be playing irresponsible characters who then become more responsible. Do you think that’s why you get repeated questions about marriage and children?

GC: That’s a really good question! There’s a real heavy swing on that one. I don’t have an answer for it, though. I mean, I love kids.

BM: Maybe you could adopt?

GC: Yeah, I’ll adopt some kids. I’ll adopt some of Brad Pitt’s. He owes me a couple anyway. [Laughs]

The choice to use stop-motion animation, was that in anyway influenced by its origins, in the films of Czech director Ji?í Trnka? Were you trying to use the medium as a means of political subversion?

[In steps Bill Murray.]

BM: Wow, thank you! That’s the question we’ve all been waiting for. That’s the reason we flew here today! [Laughter] You go get ‘em, Wes…

WA: Well, yeah, we were influenced by old stop-motion films. But politically, I suppose he’s sort of a Robin Hood figure. A kind of communist -

BM: – but also British. Very British. [Laughter]

What do you think the moral lesson of the film is?

GC: Stealing is good. It honours thievery. Theft is a good thing. [Laughs] Ok, let me try again… [Clears throat] Well, we were all about just trying to be true to your animal nature… Is that better?

Would you work on an animated film again?

GC: Yeah, it was great fun. Doing the voices, we just got to muck around for a few weeks and have a good time. But Wes, he was working on it for 1 ½ years, so you really need to ask him!

WA: It’s a very slow process. But I did find that the voices made such a difference. They really helped to create the characters.

What was the highlight of working on the project for each of you?

WW: It was just a lot of fun to work on – I’ve done voice work before with The Simpsons and stuff, but usually in feature films you don’t record with the rest of the cast. Here, we were all alongside each other on a farmhouse having great fun actually doing stuff. You know, where we were running, we actually ran. And when we were hiding behind bushes, we actually hid behind bushes.

JS: I just loved the chance to work with people I really admire. It’s a pleasure to work with them, but also just to take a step back and look at them too, like George. Not just for those obvious reasons, but yeah, I liked to watch them. I know that sounds really strange… [Laughter]

JC: Do I even still have a line in the film? Oh, I do? Well, I put a lot of feeling and preparation into that one line, and I just hope you can feel the pain and effort that went into it… [Laughter]

Felicity Dahl said that Roald Dahl, just in the weeks before his book got published, would get really stressed and angry, worrying that it might be his last book. Can you identify with that?

BM: Well, I was with Felicity just the other day, and she made me feel exactly the same way… [Laughter]

GC: This is your last film?

BM: Yes. Good bye! But yeah, she really makes you feel the fear. Whatever went on in that house between them two stays in that house, you know. The important thing is that he’s safe now – he’s dead! Seriously, Felicity is a lovely person. If I got remarried, I would definitely consider her.

Roald Dahl used to like to scare children. Did you aim to do that with the film?

WA: Well, yeah, I remember his books scared me as a child. In the film, the characters are in constant danger – Mr Fox gets his tail shot off – and if they’re not in danger of getting hurt, they’re in danger of getting killed. It’s exactly the same in the book. We tried not to make it more or less dark, but to keep the film as dark as the book.

How American do you feel the film is, given that it’s based on a British novel?

WA: Well, Noah Baumbach and I, who co-wrote the script, are both American. And we feel we write better dialogue for Americans than for English people; it’s more natural to us. So we made all the animals American, and kept the humans, the farmers, British.

BM: Because they’re the bad guys. [Laughter]

Bill, you do a lot of improvisation – does the animation process help or hinder that?

BM: Well, ultimately, you try to be yourself whatever you’re playing, be it a badger, or a doctor, or a housewife. But pretty much the worser the script, the more improv you end up doing. The best people in the film, for me, though, were Eric and Wally, over there. Their perfomances were incredible. But none of that would have been possible without George, who created such a great character for us to all maypole around.

How did you find yourself connecting with your character? How did you channel the badger?

BM: Channeling the badger?! Well, erm, we all have little critters inside us, don’t we? But my little animal secrets will remain my little animal secrets! I mean, we all burrow deep, deep, deep down to be safe or to get away from other people… This doesn’t really make any sense to you, does it? Look, you know what, if you haven’t played a badger, we can’t have this conversation. [Laughter]

Sources: HuffPost , Getty, @eldiabolik, @BFI, Mark Romanek (via Edgar Wright), @debbsperks

Some video. A bit more.