Category: Wes Anderson

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Spencer Krug on Wes Anderson

Spencer Krug wants to hear from Wes Anderson, and I would love to hear from either of them. Sunset Rubdown‘s lead man, Spencer Krug, mentioned Wes in a recent Pitchfork “Guest List” interview in which the band talks candidly about virtually everything.

Artist I’d Most Like to Collaborate With

SK: I can’t totally decide, but I will say that for a long time now I’ve had this fantasy where Wes Anderson just calls me up, casually introduces himself, and explains that he’s run out of cool 1960s and 70s pop to use for soundtrack material and would really appreciate it if I could try writing some tunes for his upcoming film. Then I’d say that I’m super busy right now but his ideas sound “interesting,” and that we should talk about it over a beer.

Krug happens to be a personal favorite musician of mine, and Sunset Rubdown is my favorite of his many projects (read: Wolf Parade, Swan Lake, et al). Needless to say, I was excited to read Wes’s name in Pitchfork’s sub-head.

Full interview can be read here (Wes is mentioned once more): http://pitchfork.com/features/guest-lists/7674-sunset-rubdown/

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New Toy Movies?

Slow news week… A *very* brief Wes Anderson homage (?) three or so in…

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Full Wes/Jarvis interview from Interview now available

We posted excerpts from Wes’ interview/conversation with Mr. Fox collaborator Jarvis Cocker last week.

The interview has now been posted in its entirety here.

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From the vault: “Welcome to the Dahl House”

“Welcome to the Dahl House”
August 18th, 2002 – New York Times
By Wes Anderson

My brothers and I grew up reading Roald Dahl’s stories. Our mother had gotten us nameplates to put in our books, and we used to steal one another’s copies of ”Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and ”The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” tear out the other’s nameplates and replace them with our own. Dahl was our favorite.

For me the best were ”Danny the Champion of the World” and ”Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

Last year I decided to find out what it would take to make a movie from ”Mr. Fox.” I arranged to meet with Dahl’s wife, Felicity, or Liccy, who runs the Dahl estate and helps to produce the films, operas, etc., that have come from his books.

She is a very charming and energetic woman, with an infectious enthusiasm for her husband’s work. She invited me to Gipsy House. I knew about Dahl’s residence in Great Missenden near Oxford, and I was especially eager to see the tiny hut where he wrote for four hours each day in an armchair with a green-felt-upholstered board across his lap for a desk.

Continue reading “From the vault: “Welcome to the Dahl House””

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Wes and Jarvis talk Mr. Fox in the new issue of Interview

In this month’s issue of Interview (June 2009, Björk on the cover), Wes Anderson interviews (more of a discussion between close friends than an interview) Fantastic Mr. Fox collaborator Jarvis Cocker. Be sure to pick up a copy at your local newsstand!

Jarvis: I wanted to ask you something, actually. It’s an obvious question, I suppose, but on the film that you’re making now, Fantastic Mr. Fox, you’re using old puppets — well, do you call them puppets? What do you call them?

Wes: I think puppets more or less covers it.

Jarvis: So you’re used to working with live actors. How have you found the experience of working with things that will do exactly what you tell them to do?

Wes: Well, as it happens, they won’t. As you know, the voices are recorded before it’s animated, and that process is more familiar to me — working with actors in that way. So when we’re recording the voices, there can be the same sort of excitement that working with actors normally has — there can be the same surprises and spontaneity. But then when it comes time to animate it, I’m working with people who each bring their own interpretations to it, even if we have very carefully determined what is going to happen in the scene. Sometimes I will do a video version of myself doing what I think the puppet ought to do, and then I’ll discuss it with the animator — and there are many different animators working on different stages all at once. But in the process of going one frame at a time to bring the puppet to life, the animator will sort of sculpt things out, and they have somehow trained their brains to sync in this ultra slow-motion so there’s a performance that they’re giving. And so you can find in that process that you’re going very slowly being pleasantly surprised over the course of several days or weeks and saying, “Oh, look at what’s happening here…” Or you can slowly see the shot falling apart before your eyes and see that it’s not working. So there’s no real corollary in live-action movies, but it’s interesting anyway — and fun.

Jarvis: So the animators are kind of the nearest thing you get to actors in that process, basically.

Wes: They’re the nearest thing you get to working with actors in a sense, yeah.

Continue reading “Wes and Jarvis talk Mr. Fox in the new issue of Interview”

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“5 Ways to tell if your life is a Wes Anderson film”

From 10 minute ramble:

In Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, main character Will says, “The thing is, a person’s life is like a TV show …”

Or a movie.

And if your life is a movie, how do you know what type it is? How do you know who’s making it

Here’s five ways to tell if you’re in a Wes Anderson film.

1. You are or you see a lot of Bill Murray. He’s been in all of Anderson’s movies except one … where presumably James Caan took his place. So, Bill Murray is a good indicator your life is in the middle of a Wes Anderson plot. (Note: This also holds true if you are or you see a lot of Kumar Pallana.)

2. Your soundtrack has 70s rock-n-Roll or other obscure music. Soundtracks are the thumbprint of movies, and Anderson’s print is distinctive, colorful, out-of-the-ordinary, and a little pretentious … which pretty much reflects his movies. So, if you own Seu Jorge …

3. Your surroundings are bathed in bright, distinctive colors (unless you’re going to make a suicide attempt … then it’s cool colors). If soundtracks are one thumbprint, this is the other. Especially if you wear greens and yellows or a range of reds and oranges.

4. At the end of the day, things go in slow motion. This holds true unless you’re running after a train; then it’s slow motion, followed by regular motion. So, #4 should read “At the end of the day, or in the next-to-last part of the end of the day …”

5. You have a strange relationship with a parent or parental figure. Especially if the strange relationship involves #1.

    If more than 3 1/2 of these things describe you, smile, crank up your music, and slow down … you’re life, though crazy, is pretty good fodder for the rest of us.

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    Yusuf/Cat Stevens on Colbert

    Yusuf (a.k.a. Cat Stevens) was a guest on The Colbert Report a few weeks back. Two of his songs are featured on the Rushmore soundtrack, and he is one of our favorites. He has a great new album called roadsinger.

    The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
    Yusuf
    colbertnation.com

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    The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
    Yusuf – Roadsinger
    colbertnation.com


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    Film: The making of ‘Rushmore’

    The really great “making of” documentary for Rushmore by Eric Chase Anderson, thanks to elkemonkey’s YouTube channel.

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    Wes Anderson YouTube channel

    YouTube user elkemonkey has put together a fine collection of Wes Anderson videos, including “making of” films for The Life Aquatic and The Royal Tenenbaums.

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    Note that only a few videos are available in the widget above. I will post these to the A/V Club soon.

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    Slate: The Ubiquitous Anderson

    Today, Slate looks at The Brothers Bloom and “the problem of Wes Anderson’s pervasive influence.” Problem? Hrmm…

    Rian Johnson’s caper comedy The Brothers Bloom begins its nationwide rollout already burdened with a reputation as an imitation of an American original. If Johnson’s terrific debut, Brick, crackled with the borrowed brio of the Coen brothers, early notices for The Brothers Bloom have identified a new muse: Wes Anderson. It’s an assessment that the preview and opening sequence hardly dispel.

    But The Brothers Bloom is only the latest addition to a burgeoning subgenre. Over the last few years, Anderson’s movies have become touchstones for indie culture. In the 1990s, it seemed every NYU graduate and Sundance contender was making his own Tarantino knockoff. These days, the Tarantino imitators have been replaced by the Wes wannabes. A popular strain in recent American indie cinema has been the Andersonian quirkfest, a tendency that runs through movies like Juno, Napoleon Dynamite, Son of Rambow, Charlie Bartlett, and Garden State, among others.

    Read and watch the slideshow essay.

    Above all, the essay rehashes an old argument, about the alleged “decline” of Wes Anderson:

    If Anderson’s ascent was swift, so has been the backlash. His last two movies, The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, were received coolly by critics. Some of that has to do with the ubiquity of the Anderson aesthetic, an overexposure that has had the effect of watering down the originator’s own vision. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Aquatic and Darjeeling are rediscovered as unfairly maligned classics a decade or two from now, removed from the fickle context.) But part of it has to do with the elements of his style that Anderson has chosen to cultivate. The Royal Tenenbaums inaugurated the current Anderson period, defined by whimsical bricolage and diorama-style mise-en-scène. His recent movies give off the sense of an artist receding ever deeper into a dollhouse of his own making-or, worse, becoming his own imitator, repeating moves that we have become all too familiar with.

    These criticisms are not new. I end with a quote from our interview with author Derek Hill from September of last year:

    So if we castigate Anderson for these cinematic sins then we have to scold Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford and David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick and Yasujir? Ozu and Luis Buñuel and on and on. I think the criticism is unfair and displays a lack of awareness about how some directors choose to work. If you don’t like Anderson’s style, so be it. It’s the way he’s chosen to tell stories and I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative thing that he may have a limited thematic or stylistic palette. There’s nothing wrong with that. Look at the films of Lynch in regards to style. They’re distinctive yet rather limited; same with his themes. Even Kubrick, who tried his hand with various genres and style, was repeatedly working his way through ideas concerning control systems and the chance that what we label individuality wasn’t even possible within these constraining social and biological systems. Big, bold themes… but “limited” as well. Anderson is no different.