Page 2 of 4
Anderson now lives in Paris, an event that, like his move to New York, was less planned than just happened. He had been in Europe promoting The Life Aquatic and wound down the tour in Paris for a few days. Meanwhile, his friend Schwartzman ended up in town shooting Marie Antoinette. After a while, Anderson moved in with the Rushmore star for a couple of months. "Then, I got my own apartment and it kind of went from there," he says. "I didn't leave Europe for a year and a half. I didn't come back. I was supposed to go away for two weeks on this trip and I didn't come back."
I wonder if the choppy waters his picaresque, big-budget Cousteau send-up was navigating back home encouraged the exile, but Anderson says it was simply a matter of wanting a new experience.
"For me, in France, I'm a foreigner all the time. If I'm walking down the street and I turn a corner that's not familiar to me, it's like going to a movie or something," he says. "I feel like I'm on an adventure and seeing something new."
Anderson has a measured, folksy way of telling a story — even when he's reading from cue cards, as when he introduced Fantastic Mr. Fox at the sold-out AFI screening by reminiscing about "the last time I was in this famous movie palace."
It was in 1996 for a midnight showing of Independence Day, July 3 turning into the Fourth. "You could tell this movie was going to be a hit," he deadpanned. "There was a lot of excitement. And unlike tonight, we paid money for our tickets. I don't think it was any more crowded than it is now and I personally would like to believe that there is at least as much excitement here at this moment, at least for me. ..."
It was impossible to tell whether or not he was poking fun at something—Independence Day, the American Film Institute, himself. He went on to thank lots of people involved with the production of the film. Pointedly, he left out his director of photography, Tristan Oliver, who, along with animation director Mark Gustafson, had been quoted in an October 11 Los Angeles Times piece blaming Anderson for tension during the Fox shoot.
"He made our lives miserable," Gustafson said.
"I think he's a little sociopathic," Oliver added. "I think he's a little OCD. Contact with people disturbs him ... he's a bit like the Wizard of Oz. Behind the curtain."
Any way you slice it, an animated film done entirely in stop-motion — an exacting process that employs puppets, figurines, and microscaled sets that are moved in tiny increments and shot frame by frame to simulate movement — is going to be a bitch. Anderson also insisted his animators refrain from using their favorite tool, computer-generated imagery. In other words, every shot in Fox was built from scratch. But the real issue for Gustafson and Oliver was that Anderson rarely set foot on the studio floor during principal photography. Instead, he called the shots from his Paris apartment via a system that allowed Anderson and his editor, Andrew Weisblum, to look through some 30 cameras on the film's London set remotely from their computers.
In effect, principal photography was directed via e-mail and phone.
Tension between a strong-willed director and his crew on a long, complicated shoot (more than a year in production) isn't exactly news. Still, having two key collaborators go on the record with their grievances is uncommon, and the Times piece seemed to be pleased that Anderson was being thrown under the bus.
The controversy was then aired on a fanboy site called the Rushmore Academy — The World of Wes Anderson. Oliver posted twice apologizing for "a couple of careless, flip remarks" that he says were taken out of context at a press junket, and stating that he has nothing but "the utmost respect" for Anderson. He also asked that the death threats stop.
For his part, Anderson says he initially misjudged how the movie would be made. His original plan was to write the script, record the actors' voices, work with the production designer to create the sets and puppets, draw some pictures, and plan the shots. Then, he would hand the project off to the animators, who would send him back the shots.
"That's not the way it happened," he says. "In fact, all those things were kind of happening at once. And in the process of animating, I realized I wanted to be more involved than I thought. So we kind of had to make a system. What ended up happening was, for two years, all I was doing was working on this movie. I thought when the animation would be going on, I could direct another movie. Instead it was all day, every day, all weekends, a continual thing. And it was fun."
Fantastic Mr. Fox's unveiling comes after a lengthy gestation. Anderson, a huge fan of the original 1933 King Kong movie, had wanted to adapt the classic Roald Dahl children's story for years.
"The idea of doing stop-motion and doing this book kind of occurred to me together around the time when we met before — a long time ago," he says. "Before we did The Royal Tenenbaums, I'd already met with Roald Dahl's wife."
Various snafus, including the difficulties Anderson's Rushmore champion (and former Disney Studios chairman) Joe Roth was having getting traction for his startup Revolution Studios, put the project on hold. "So, I did other movies in between," Anderson says.
Those movies have comprised an oeuvre saturated with droll humor, signature color palettes, and nostalgia for an often idealized past. His trademark moves — deadpan, retro, British Invasion, eccentricity, pastiche, a fetish for objects/artifacts, and, not least, characters in various states of arrested development — have formed a trademark aesthetic. Whether that aesthetic serves to leaven his films' pathos or hedge their emotional bets by creating a safe distance for both auteur and audience is debatable. What isn't, though, is that by the time The Royal Tenenbaums came out in 2001, the highly literate, postmodern, Prozac-popping kids who listened to Elliott Smith and read McSweeney's had made Anderson their Chosen One. And Tenenbaums, which more than tripled the box office of Rushmore while earning Anderson and Owen Wilson an Oscar nomination for their screenplay, was a generational movie.
