In 2013, the great culture critic Matt Zoller Seitz, who writes for
New York Magazine and edits RogerEbert.com, put out a book, his first, called
The Wes Anderson Collection. Ostensibly a coffee table book, inasmuch as any volume about Anderson and for that matter any critical work by Seitz can be, it surveyed the filmmaker’s career to date in an aptly insightful, visually rich, drolly detail-minding style.
Probably the best precedent for such a tome was François Truffaut’s hulking interview-intensive study of Alfred Hitchcock. The only problem with Seitz’s book was necessary incompleteness: No sooner had the
The Wes Anderson Collection been published than Anderson had made another film — a 12-layer wedding cake of a movie, as it’s been described by Seitz, who responded accordingly with a new book,
The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Like its predecessor, Seitz’s new book was designed by San Francisco-based designer Martin Venezky, so it seemed like a no-brainer that the author should make a tour stop here in town, at the Booksmith, to talk about it. Beforehand, he talked to us about it on the phone. Topics discussed included the fact that Seitz and Anderson go way back. Both grew up in Texas, and something in the faint, warming drawl in Seitz’s voice makes him sound a little like an Anderson character being played by Owen Wilson. Here’s what else we discussed:
Congratulations on another fine contribution to the burgeoning field of Wes Andersonology. Should we get in the habit of expecting each new Anderson film to be followed up by a huge glorious book from you?
[Laughs.] Thank you. I certainly was pleasantly surprised that the first book did well enough that the publisher wanted to do a second one. In the beginning Wes was kind of in an awkward period of his career. I like to defend people that I think are under-appreciated or misunderstood. At the time I started, in 2009, Wes needed defending. There was a growing consensus that his best days were behind him, and I thought that was bullshit. But by the time we got the green light,
Fantastic Mr. Fox and
Moonrise Kingdom had turned it around for him. Now with this one, the original idea was a slim supplementary chapter on
The Grand Budapest Hotel — like, should we just put out a second edition that includes it? But it didn’t seem fair to ask people to buy a whole new book just for that. After this, I certainly wouldn’t mind doing another one. I’ve joked to Wes that I want him to consider doing a science-fiction movie sometime soon.
Has anything changed in your rapport with him, or his fans, or his anti-fans, since putting out that first book about his previous films?
Well, it gave hardcore fans some meat for their arguments on behalf of Wes as a major artist. I love imagining someone dissing
The Life Aquatic at a party and then somebody else happens to haul out my book.
Please describe the first Wes Anderson experience you remember.
Seeing the short-film version of
Bottle Rocket, on a VHS, in Dallas in 1994. I don’t remember how I did it, but I sought out Wes and Owen Wilson. I told them I wanted to write about them. And I assumed Wes Anderson was older. I met him and Owen at the Stoneleigh P, a restaurant in Dallas, and I was shocked to see that he was just 25 or something. He had big glasses, and his hair was swept up in this almost knife blade, like Bob Dylan circa 1965. They just seemed like Butch and Sundance. It was really quite something. We continued to communicate after the Dallas days. Then he entered his international phase, and for a while I lost track of him. He doesn’t live anywhere longer than 6 months if he can help it.
Would you say he’s come a long way, artistically?
If I could go back in time and ask him if he could ever imagine doing what he’s doing now, he would say no. He couldn’t have made
The Grand Budapest Hotel if he hadn’t discovered his other talents. The revelation here is of how much of an artist’s style is made up of accidents. There’s an impression of Wes as a control freak who doesn’t leave anything to chance. I think people tend to overlook his openness to accidents. There are accounts in these books of how he wanted to make a film one place but ended up making it another place, or he wanted to shoot something one way but had to simplify it on the fly. In my interview for this book with Ralph Fiennes, he tells a good story about that.
Yes, it was fun to hear from Ralph Fiennes, who’s great in The Grand Budapest Hotel in an unexpected way. In reviewing it I said I thought Anderson may now be the one American director most actors most want to work with. What do you think?
I think that’s true. I’ve interviewed some actors who own the
Collection and have asked me if I know Wes and can put in a word for them. Everybody wants to work with Wes, and it’s great. It’s because actors want to work in different modes. They want to be part of somebody’s world. In order to be an actor you have to be willing to give up your identity and become someone else, and become part of someone else’s vision. Wes can be very intimidating on the crew side because he knows everybody’s field. But acting is a different thing. There’s a sort of a reverence for acting that sets it apart. He doesn’t talk about it in the same way. It’s almost like it’s a holy thing to him. And he’s good at finding hidden aspects of people’s talents. I say Wes was the first to understand that Bill Murray was sad. Or, yeah, that Ralph Fiennes is really funny.
Talk about Wes Anderson as an absorber of influences. The Grand Budapest Hotel consciously evokes the writings of Stefan Zweig, but as you discuss in the book, it also harkens to films by Ernst Lubitsch, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and others. In your interview with composer Alexandre Desplat, he says of Wes Anderson, “He invented a tone.”
I don’t really understand how he is able to have so many influences — not just cinema but literature, painting, music — and not seem like he’s quoting things. I think it’s because he’s prideful. He doesn’t want you to see the footnotes. That’s been a thing from the beginning. You don’t get that the scene in
Bottle Rocket with the two guys playing pinball is a reference to
The 400 Blows because he reversed the screen direction. This is great because it assumes rather generously that we’ve seen these works already and we’ve moved beyond congratulating ourselves for recognizing things.
You’ve said that you wanted this book to have an architectural aspect. How did you go about planning and organizing it?
There are many disciplines represented in making a feature. I just picked the ones that were most interesting to me. Obviously I wanted it to be in the spirit of Wes Anderson in general, and this movie in particular, but if I’m just blindly and clumsily trying to approximate his style, that’s no good. There’s an entire cottage industry of people who’ve tried to imitate his style. I know that Wes is a little bit uncomfortable about that. I don’t think that any artist would be comfortable with the idea that his style could be easily imitated. There are a couple of things we did that really tickle me. The book changes its aspect ratio like the movie does, for example. Really, so much is thanks to the designer. Martin Venezky is just great at visualizing abstract notions and making them real. And of course, over the years, Wes has really fed my imagination as a critic, and there are some interesting resonances.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is the story of a writer sitting and listening while the master tells him the story of his life. It reminds me of sitting and hearing from Wes. So we’re trying to mimic that, hopefully in a humorous way.
Matt Zoller Seitz discusses The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel
7:30pm Tuesday, February 11, at the Booksmith.