MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: Do you remember the first movie you saw?
WES ANDERSON: I think it might have been a PinkPanther movie. I remember a lot of Disney moviesI know for a long period of time my favorite moviewas the one where Kurt Russell was the strongestman in the world or something like that. Do youremember that?
I started watching Hitchcock movies. We hadthe Betamax, and we had these Hitchcock mov-ies-Rope and The Man Who Knew Too Much andRear Window and The Trouble with Harry. Theman whose name was on the box was not in themovies. He was the director. Well, I didn‘t know any other movies that quite fell into that category.
The star was behind the camera. That made a bigimpression on me. Maybe I was eleven or twelveby the time I saw those.
What was the first movie you researched-where you sought out material that discussed the making of the movie-ratherthan simply enjoying the movie?
I guess you‘d have to say Star Wars. There wasa lot available. There were a lot of supporting materials. There was every possible kind of information. Books. Weapons. Death Stars and X-wings and so on. And, you know, before muchof anything was really out on tape, there werealready bootlegs of Star Wars. The idea of apirated anything was introduced to me by the factthat Star Wars was playing on the TV set in my doctor‘s office.
I guess that was one of the ideas that evolved.
They were more classic cornball swashbuckling. They didn‘thave that hard edge that the Star Wars films had.
Well, they had a Landspeeder in there.
That‘s right. Did Star Wars and this material that surrounded it have an effect on your imagination?
Did you shoot the movie?
Yep. It was based on a library book. It was onereel, 180 seconds, I think. Cartridges.
Did it have a plot?
I doubt it. It had characters, but the characters were basically modeled on the people playing them, as I recall.
Do you recall a moment where you made a conscious decision that you wanted to be a filmmaker?*****
Well, I remember I always kind of felt that that was what I was working on. But then I decided tobe a writer, and then when I went to college I sort of switched back.
What happened was, in the library at theUniversity of Texas at Austin they had a very good collection of books about movies. And they also had several different libraries. There was thefine arts library, and then there were two other big libraries. Each had a movie-book section, and they also had movies you could watch there. I hadmuch better access to books about movies than Idid before. So I started reading book film-makers I was interested in, and then watching their movies, going back and forth.
I feel like they built up the collection, and then it didn‘t keep growing. A lot of the books were about Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, and people like that, and then there were books about Scorseseand Francis Coppola and some seventies movies.
One of the biggest sections was European moviesof the sixties. Plus, there were some books on John Ford and Raoul Walsh, but that seemed tobe related to the French New Wave and to theAmericans who followed. The library had Peter Bogdanovich‘s littler books about directors. Theyhad Peter‘s John Ford book and his Allan Dwanbook and I think a Howard Hawks? And they hada collection of his articles about movies-Pieces ofTime, I think it‘s called.
***In The Royal Tenenbaums,
Margot writes a play titled The Levinsons in the Trees; the idea of characters living in trees is central to Fantastic Mr. Fox, and a treehouse figures in Moonrise Kingdom. Ininterviews, Anderson said he wasn‘t entirely sure where the treehouse obsession came from, but noted that he has long been fascinated by Johann David Wyss‘s 1812 novel The Swiss Family Robinson, about a family that gets wrecked in the East Indies and builds a number of structures, includinga treehouse, to survive. The 1971 Walt Disney film version of the novel, which Anderson saw and loved as a boy,
makes the treehouse a central location.
Were you making movies at that point, or were you not quite there?
I started doing some things. There was a public-access station in Houston, and I got to use their equipment. I made a documentary about my landlord Karl Hendler. I made it on commissionfrom him in order to pay him some debts I owedhim, but he didn‘t like it.
He didn‘t like the documentary?
No, but he was up-front about it. I don‘t think he was mad. He just didn‘t think it was going to be helpful to him.
Were you in the lab together or separately?
We were there together. We did a writing lab, butit was at a time when they were really doing the directing lab. I feel like we didn‘t really get in, but somehow Kit convinced them to take us anyway.
Everybody else was filming scenes, and we were just there to talk with the mentors.
So it was almost like you were auditing a class?
A bit. We did get the attention of these guys to help us talk about our project, but they didn‘t say, "OK, now you‘re ready to go film your scene."
Everybody else filmed scenes. We just talked about our script. So somehow we must not have quite made the cut. - P52
So you were hoping to build on what you already had and keep adding sections until it was done?
Yep. We were shooting sections of a script. - P52
I want to take a little detour here and ask you about James L.Brooks because, of course, he‘s one of the big guys. And yet, when I look at films James L. Brooks has directed, and films he has produced for other filmmakers whom he has mentored, in every single case I can say, "Yes, of course, it makes perfectsense that he would be attracted to this filmmaker." Not somuch in your case, though. Except for the gentleness and thedry humor. Visually, in terms of rhythm, the use of music, thecamerawork, everything, your work is not Brooksian.
Hmm. - P52
FANTASTIC MR. FOX
The 1,194-Word Essay - P237
Perhaps because it is overwhelmingly and comfortably a comedy,
starring stop-motion animated creatures.
voiced by the likes of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Willem Dafoe, Jason Schwartzman, andMichael Gambon. There are no drastic tonal shifts into trauma and grief. It‘s entertainment,
spry and colorful, chock-full of made-up facts(beagles love blueberries; foxes are mildly aller-gic to linoleum) and extravagantly silly visuals, including fast burrowing that makes it seem as though the animals are swimming through the earth. - P237
The film lays out these themes in its opening sequence. Mr. and Mrs. Fox (Streep)are on a chicken run. Mr. Fox smugly points.
out a trap they avoided and accidentally cagesthem. Moments later, Mrs. Fox locks Mr. Foxin a psychological cage by revealing that she‘s pregnant and making him swear he‘ll give up chicken stealing and be responsible. - P238
Under the guise of moving the family toward a brighter future, the sly fox isplanning his own regression. "And how can afox ever be happy without-you‘ll forgive theexpression-a chicken in its teeth?" he asks. It‘s a rhetorical question. - P238
MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: Did you always want to make an animated film?
WES ANDERSON: No, not really, but I‘d been thinkingabout this one for ten years before we did it.
And you had read Roald Dahl before, as a child?
Yep.
What was it about Fantastic Mr. Fox, of all the things he‘s written, that made you fixate on it?
Just that I liked it. And I wanted to try stop-motion, and to work with animal charactersrather than human ones. I wanted fur. I liked the digging, that a lot of the film would be under-ground in these tunnels. The book was one of myfavorites as a child. Plus, it hadn‘t been adapted yet, and most of them have been. - P243
But you seem to be quite adamant about trying to have things actually exist when they‘re going to be photographed by the camera.
Yes. - P244
I‘m always aware that your movies are being made by people,
and that even goes all the way down to the individual camera moves. Like, it‘s not a smooth, robotically controlled move when you pan from one character to another. There‘s a feeling-it‘s like someone‘s head is moving. And when you do a zoom, it‘san old-fashioned, crank-it kind of zoom. You feel it. It‘s not mathematically exact.
I don‘t know the reason, but certainly what‘salways appealed to me is a more handmade feel-ing. Or not a handmade feeling, just handmade.
And certainly that carries through to Fantastic Mr. Fox. You had miniature sets built, right?
You have no choice. The puppets are little. - P244
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