Transcription
When you're writing a story, it often feels less like you're doing architecture and more like you're doing excavation, like it's something that already exists and we're just unearthing it. And you know it's right because it just is.
[Music]
Hi, I'm Wes Anderson. I have made apparently 12 films, and I'm now going to walk us through every one of them in some way.
Bottle Rocket. The first film I made is Bottle Rocket. And, uh, that began when Owen Wilson and I, uh, started writing this script while we were going to the University of Texas. And we eventually made a short film, which Owen is in, and Owen's brother Luke. But we always had the script for our feature film, and it was meant to, we thought we were making a feature film. That does not make any difference. I bought the earrings for my mother on her birthday. I picked them out myself. I want—I can't be soaring through all that in the middle of a burglar. There's just not time for it.
When we were making our short film, there was a feeling suddenly of, "Wow, do we, do we know how to do this?" Because the first take we did was very bad. But, you know, we did it. And, and I was like, "No, this is good. We'll, we'll get there." Eventually, we just ran out of funds. And then we found our way to Poly Platt and James L. Brooks. And Jim Brooks was the one who, um, gave us the chance to make it as a feature film.
Used to be working at a motel in the middle of nowhere, lost and confused. Totally lost, incredibly unhappy person. Accidentally wanders in off the highway, and they meet, and they fall in love, and it's perfect. We worked with Jim on the script to improve it. We had a very, very, very long comedy, and we made it into a more manageable length and improved it a lot. We basically took a screenwriting class from James L. Brooks. But by the time we made the, the feature film, I think even then I was felt more, more prepared. Obviously, still a lot to learn. Still a lot to learn.
But those days are over now. It's just a matter of time before I pick up the phone and I say, "Mr. H, we are coming home." So don't worry about your future, man, because I am thinking. I think our idea was we were trying to make a movie about right then in our lives. I think everything about it is kind of comes from a bit of our experience in these two cities of Houston and Dallas, where we, where Owen grew up and I grew up. And it was the sort of disorder of our lives and the uncertainty of everything.
"What the hell are you wearing?" "Yes, it's a jumpsuit." "Clay, look at this guy. He looks like a rodeo clown. He looks like a little banana. Where are you from anyway, man?" "I'm from around here." "This guy used to mow our lawn." "No, yeah, it was great. Clipping the hedges, sweeping up, mowing the lawn." "What was the name of your little lawn mowing company?" "The Lawn Wranglers."
Future Man is a bit of a villain, as portrayed by Andrew Wilson. I think there are a lot of characters in these movies that are a certain kind of older man. I feel I've been, not maybe not exactly like father figures, but something like that. Always flawed, some sort of intense ambition, um, and strong personalities. The character that Bill Murray plays in Life Aquatic, let's say, or, or Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums. They do relate to people who I kind of, I partly admired and or just enjoyed and was drawn to over, over the years. Characters which who I don't really feel I'm much like, um, but I like the, but they're people who I [Music] like.
It was when we made that feature film, I met Robert Yeoman before we did it. And he was our director of photography. And he, he must have done 10 movies with me or more after that. We worked so closely together in the early films, and then we sort of, in a, didn't have to, the shorthand became so short that it was taken for granted. On the early films, I feel like, you know, I went to the set with Bob every day. He was the person who was kind of closest to me on the set because he was, in some ways, partly teaching me how a movie set works. So that was the beginning of a very long collaboration.
Rushmore. Before we made Bottle Rocket, the feature film, um, Owen and I had already been working on, uh, a script for, uh, what we called our school school movie. And that was eventually Rushmore.
"Hello, Dr. Guggenheim." "Hello, Max." "Hello, I'm Max Fischer. I just wanted to say that I strongly agree with your views concerning Rushmore. Um, your speech was excellent. Thank you."
Rarely do I feel like I'm, I've made a choice of what genre the movie is. Usually, I, somebody said, I said, "Well, it's kind of a comedy." I don't know. And that's, I don't say that's a good thing. It's just the way it is. Probably the approach to genre is that there are devices and methods and systems that are kind of consistent or, you know, anyway, that get, that get used in, in different genre movies for their deliberate purposes, and they're part of the DNA of all movie making somehow. And I feel like we often use them, but not for the purposes they're intended.
"It's time, homie. Kiss me, little one." "All right, then." "He kisses him." "Around. Okay. Is that for me?"
When it comes time to score a movie, there's one kind of score where you say, "Here's the effect we're trying to get. Here's what the audience needs to feel, or here's the, the trick we're playing on them. Here's the way we're going to manipulate them in a, in a good way." But I'm not so often doing that. Instead, the music has to do something else, and it's something more. It may have to do with the mood of the movie, or it may have to do with trying to achieve something tonally, and that the movie needs a certain spirit to work better.
"What's, uh, what's that you got there? A little flight plan or something?" "H. Pretty good. Do you know Durk Callaway?" "I don't think so." "Durk, this is Margaret Yang."
Well, music supervisor is Randall Poster. When we made Bottle Rocket, he kind of appeared. I met him at the farmers market, and he wanted to release the soundtrack album, which no one else did. This, the Sony, the studio that, who had done the movie, they didn't wish to do that. And so we did it with London Records, where Randy had this deal. And then he became the kind of guru, and he became the guy in charge of all the music from that point on.
Rushmore. I had all these British Invasion songs that I'd kind of picked out slowly over time. And that movie, there were, there was a lot of music where I had kind of planned the shooting of the things to the music. "We've got 8 seconds before he's got to be at the door. So we need to, this location isn't going to work." You know, we had a stopwatch a lot for some reason. It was quite choreographed, some of the music in that one.
[Applause] [Music] [Applause]
Jason just came in and auditioned. We, we had been told that he's perfect for it because his cousin Sophia heard from our casting director what this character was like that we were looking for. That just by chance, and she said, "That sounds like my, my cousin Jason." And he's here. When he auditioned for me in this little house that we had rented, I just, uh, was so impressed that his, with the way he approached the se, these scenes that he was doing. He just had a sort of attack. He was interesting, and, and he was funny. And then when I got to know him in the minutes after that and started to get to know him, I thought, "He's going to, we're going to be happy for him to be with us." And that's been the case ever since.
"Has it ever crossed your mind that you're far too young for me?" "It crossed my mind that you might consider that a possibility."
Yeah, I love the, the peculiarities of the anamorphic process and the real identity to it that comes in, in the, in the '70s, I think. Um, that, that at least was what I related to. During, during the shooting of Rushmore, it's a normal thing if you're a movie director. You, you want to do the big [Music] screen.
Some of the actors in Rushmore, I worked with again and again later. One was Seymour Cassell, who, who Seymour died. But Seymour was our very good friend for many years, and I loved having him on the movie. And Jason and Seymour and I together had a real kind of, um, bond from right when we were first in a room together. But the other person who I met on that movie was Bill Murray. And Bill Murray, we, it was just a stroke of luck that we succeeded to get him, that the movie interested him. When Bill appeared, he said, "I'll just work for whatever you're paying. You know, everybody else, I, the only thing I need is I need to be able to go to Pebble Beach, you know, at a certain point in the movie." He needed to go to, to a golf tournament. We figured out how to make that work. But he gave us a model for how to have what ended up being having sometimes actors who, if we were paying people properly, I'm sure Bill regrets this to this day, but we made it, figured out a way we can get a bunch of actors who we just couldn't afford. I, but Bill, a way we, we set up the production around, um, them, you know, pitching in like a theater troop, sort of. [Music]
"I just can't believe he was great in the part, but he was also very generous with the way he approached me and the production." "Hey, amigo." He took a kind of gentle mentor role. And in some ways, the way, the way we bring actors into movies from then on is all kind of based on that. And I think Bill has been in almost every movie I've ever done since then.
The Royal Tenenbaums. Anybody who's interested in the movie might know that there's some Salinger inspiration, um, pretty big one. And the fact that Salinger, um, didn't want movies made from the, from his books and stories. We didn't even think about, you know, we, our medium was this. It was always meant to be a New York movie. And I think even something around the New Yorker magazine, you know, it's, you know, Salinger had lots of stories in the New Yorker, and somehow that was it. It's, it's a broader New York, but a lot to do with, with that magazine, which has somehow been an inspiration to me for all, all along.
Royal Tenenbaum bought the house on Archer Avenue in the winter of his 35th [Music] year. Over the next decade, he and his wife had three children, and then they separated.
I think Kubrick has a lot of narrators over a lot of movies. As such things so often happen, these thoughts closely coincided with his setting first sight upon a lady who will henceforth play a considerable part in the drama of his life. It's partly Stanley Kubrick. I was thinking of, even though it doesn't sound like the most direct connection to that movie. Alec Baldwin. Now, I, you know, this was around the time of, um, Miami Blues, and he's so good in Glengarry Glen Ross, and, um, and he's in Married to the Mob. And anyway, Owen and I both, we just loved Alec Baldwin. But I had heard him read a story by Michael Cunningham. It was maybe the '92nd Street Y. Just listening to it, taking him away from this great actor and just hearing the voice was something, you know, that made a great impression on me because he did the greatest reading of this very good short story. He is the voice of that movie.
[Music]
Gene Hackman. When we did The Royal Tenenbaums, I had to try to get him to do the movie. Didn't want to do the movie. Nobody's going to do it if they don't like the script. And, um, and, you know, they know enough to, to, um, figure it out. But I did tell him, I think you're going to have a good experience. Because at a certain point, when he was unhappy on the movie, he said, "You promised me I was going to have a good experience." Like, "Well, I thought you would."
Every actor is has got his or her own way. And some actors, um, don't want anything. And some actors refuse any, anything almost. And some actors want a lot. It's less, um, what level they are, and more about just what each person is like.
"Friend, trying to cash some check. He's acting dumb. That's what you've come to expect."
We had a certain music that was in mind. That's Elliott Smith. That was planned for it. And we played it on the set. Luke had to cut off his hair and his beard and everything. And, you know, he did that. And that's a long, involved process. Um, and, you know, it's not, you don't just start shaving it off. You've got to fight it up to the point that he's actually gonna cut his wrists. There's a certain part of it that, that it's almost documentary. But it's documentary with a certain mood because he knows where he is in the story. And there's this musical atmosphere around him on the set. And there's basically nobody else there. I mean, sometimes on a movie, you might get into it to a point where you're kind of with the story. You're not necessarily leaving it every when you go home at night, even though you are, you, you're the, the, the thing is surrounding you until it's done. And that was certainly the case during that.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The very beginning of it was, I'd written this like one-page beginning of a short story when I must have been 18 or 19. And Owen really liked this thing. He was always kind of saying, you know, "You can't get past these four paragraphs." Crafts of this. And I never did. I never, I never continued the, the short story. There was a Jacquot book that maybe I saw in the library in Dallas, and it had to fold out of his ship. I brought it up to Owen and said, you know, "My little thing, and look at this, you know." And I feel like maybe this is a movie. By that time, Owen was working so much, and he didn't have time to work on the script with me. So I asked Noah Baumbach, um, to join me on it. And we were good friends by then. And I was already involved with trying to help him produce, um, The Squid, what was going to be eventually be The Squid and the Whale.
When The Royal Tenenbaums was released in Europe, well, I went to Italy. And while I was there, I went to Cinecittà. And it was there that I thought, you know, "Maybe this is where we want to do this." So Noah and I wrote for Italy, at starting at a certain point, um, ba, just based on that kind of traveling that I'd done.
"I want you on Team Zissou." "I don't think I can do that." "Why not?" "Well, it's not my field. I don't have the background for it." "No one here does. Klaus used to be a bus driver. Will Adarski was a high school substitute teacher. We're a pack of strays. Don't you get it?"
Every bit of the inspiration for the character is Jacques Cousteau. The filmmaking thing, um, is is Cousteau in a way. It's a way to kind of smuggle in filmmaking, to use all the things we love about movie making or that we're interested in. But it's also just biographically right for the, for this guy.
[Music]
I had seen City of God, um, and I loved this character. Is he called Knockout Ned? I think he's called. Uh, and this actor, I said, "You know, I'd like to see if this actor might be interested in playing this part." We have Seu Jorge. Uh, he's Brazilian, but he has to play music in it. And then when I saw George auditioning, I could see, "Wait, this guy is not, he's not learned to play the guitar for this audition. This guy is some kind of musician." Eventually, I understood he's a, he's a pop star who happened to be in a movie, not a, not a movie actor. So it was very good luck that the guy who we thought was perfect for the part also happened to have some particular skills suited to it. Then, which was that he was going to play David Bowie songs and sing them in Portuguese throughout the movie.
[Music]
I just didn't know that I'd brought somebody who was that talented as a musician into the, into the thing. And he's woven throughout the whole movie. And in the script, he wasn't. Once I saw, "Here's what he can do, and here's what he sounds like, and here's what his music is like," then I just said, "Well, let's do, I think we're going to do like 12 of these or something. Let's just have them, let's have him, uh, be a sort of chorus all through the movie." And he started doing these translations and making these, what I thought were translations. In fact, turned out eventually I realized he's made up his own lyrics. And I say, "Okay, well, at least let's, at least get, you know, some of the key, you know, um, some of the, you know, rebel rebel. We need to have those words." Um, so, but they're really his. They're really his interpretations of. They go, they're much more George than you might think right off the bat.
The Darjeeling Limited. Usually called The Darjeeling Express by anybody who brings it up to me, but it's not The Darjeeling Express. It's The Darjeeling Limited. I had seen The River, the Jean Renoir movie, The River, and just grabbed me. That movie, along with revisiting Satyajit Ray's movies, and then seeing lots more of his movies. It's a big body of work. And also Louis Malle's films that he had made in India. So all this just cinema related to India. Something was brewing. And so I went to India, and I went on, you know, I went on a kind of, uh, tour around India and was just, um, You really fell in love with the experience of being there.
"Let's make an agreement. A. I want us to become brothers again like we used to be, and for us to find ourselves and bond with each other. Can we agree to that?" "Okay." "Yeah." "B. I want us to make this trip a spiritual journey where each of us seek the unknown and we learn about it. Can we agree to that?" "Sure, I guess so." "C. I want us to be completely open and say yes to everything, even if it's shocking and painful."
You know, I like trains. And I like movies that are the stories that take place on trains. It's an interesting thing because you can have scenes that are playing in rooms and people going up and down corridors, but the whole location is on the move. So the story is moving forward, but also the place is moving. That gives some kind of mystique, I think, to a, to a movie. The idea of doing a movie on a train in India, I felt like, "This has the way we want to do this. Let's go on the adventure. Let's not set the movie here and live on a sound stage." So I said, "Let's, you know, let's do it on real trains." And let's, whatever that means. And we didn't know what that meant. And it was a complicated thing of getting train cars from all over India and building our train that we were going to sort of own for the movie. You know, it wasn't a great struggle to film on that train. We designed it in a way that it was suited to filming, and we could, we had our same compartment twice, one that faced one direction and one that faced the other. So if the direction of the train had to change, or the, the sun is doing something different, we, we were able to adapt to whatever situation we were in. You know, it was planned out because you, we had to have permission for which tracks we were on when, and all that. But we were very free with the way we did it. The other thing that was interesting was once everybody was on the train, you're either there or you're not. There's nowhere else to go. That's your unit for the day. Um, and it's made it very, it made it efficient.
"Music. Station right there. I'm kicking you up at the next station." "Please don't do that." "We're very sorry. It won't happen again." "I know it won't."
The main characters of of the movie are foreigners. They're not the best guests of any country. I think they're a little wild, and, um, they're in their own thing, you know, they're on their own trip. And I think what happens is that the, the little bubble that they're living in is just getting broken, and they're kind of having something that is changing them a bit. A train is always some kind of metaphor for something. But I would tend to say we don't tend to write toward a theme or towards a metaphor. Instead of, we sort of see what the movie wants to be.
When you're writing a story, it often feels less like you're doing architecture and more like you're doing excavation, like it's something that already exists and we're just unearthing it. And you know it's right because it just is.
"Your feathers mine blew towards the mountains." "That's not right. It's not supposed to get blown away. You're supposed to blow on it and then bury it." "I didn't get that." "I still have mine. You guys didn't do it right." "I asked you if you read the instructions." "You did it [Music] wrong." "I tried my hardest."
I'll say also that making the movie was a real adventure. I mean, from the beginning of it, from our, from going to India and writing there, to all the way through making the film. And it was also quite a heavy kind of emotional experience in all, in great ways. We all sort of came back from it feeling like we've been through something a little life-changing.
Fantastic Mr. Fox. It's the first animated film. It's a stop-motion animated movie. When we finished The Royal Tenenbaums, I reached out to Lisl Dahl, who was Roald Dahl's widow, and I, I asked her about, you know, could we do a movie of this? You had to audition, essentially. Um, so I had a lunch with Lisl, and in fact, during the lunch, I got this call. I was waiting for this call about whether we were officially getting the green light to shoot The Royal Tenenbaums. We were waiting for the studio to give us the go-ahead. And that happened during that. So it was a long time before we made the movie that I met Lisl. Then Noah and I wrote this script for this doll movie, which is a book I had had loved as a child, one of the first books I owned.
"I want you to be extra nice to him because he's going through a very hard time right now." "Where's he going to sleep?" "We're going to make a bed for him in your room." "I can't spare the space." "Put him in Dad's study." "Dad's study is occupied by Dad."
I had no experience doing anything with animation or any, I didn't know anything about stop motion. And I had a real whole other film school from making this film and learned all the processes of how we do it. And, and, you know, it was a bit of a bumpy process of figuring it out because I was working with professionals, and I wasn't one. I was just a guy with this script and with my own ideas of what I wanted it to be. And also directing an animated movie is quite a remote experience. Each animator goes off on his or her own, and they do it, and they work alone, and they close the curtains, literally. And, you know, they don't want anybody there because they don't want anybody to touch anything. And that was an unusual thing. Yeah, it was a big project to manage from afar. Um, and slowly I learned how to do it, and we made our own system that worked for our group. And once we got in sync, and we started to see what we were making, and everybody started to see together what this was like, then it became a better and better experience. And, uh, and, and yeah, we enjoyed it a lot.
"Oh, now, don't lose your heads. Now, let's do this properly. First, everyone have a drink of water."
Recording the actors, for instance, is like, just keep rehearsing. We record all of it, and we use everything, you know. And it's just like a great big rehearsal. At least the way we, the way we do do them. Anybody can say the line 11 different ways in a row, and it's, um, it has the same freedom, freedom you would have if you were just shooting close-ups and you knew you're going to be able to edit them any which way. The whole thing is like that. But then there's another part of the actor's performance. And when the actor is a, is cast with a different actor, the animator, and this person is going to have a, to, totally unique interpretation of what they're hearing from the voice performance and what the action of it is.
"A few beagles, as we discussed, but we're ready for that." "A few beagles, as we discussed, but we're ready for that." "No, they used to do a thing or if somebody saw Wolf." "Nothing. Never mind."
And every animator in this, in stop motion, anyway, the way they bring the puppet to life over the course of these few seconds of whatever it is, it's very spontaneous. It just happens. Extremely slowly. The thing that happens is just, you know, it, this thing starts to come to life. And they have in mind what they want to do, and they're, they know even frame by frame, but they don't quite know how it's going to turn out because it leads them through it. So I'm sure there's some study you could do of the neurological, something or others of this type of work because it's something strange, and it's they're working on some complex puzzle, and it's quite mysterious if you're, if you're not an animator. And that was new to me. And I, and it was great because I could see eventually I would say, "You know what, this shot would be better. We should have this shot done by this animator because what this character has to do here, this person is great at this, and this person should do, do this because he's going to do it in a day and a half instead of a week because he has a different approach." And, you know, um, and so there, yeah, all of that was new to me.
"I, I don't want to be put in the middle of this." "Thanks, Kylie." "Why is he wearing that bandit hat?" "His ears were cold." "He's not with us. Go back to bed." "If what I think is happening is happening, it better not be."
Meryl Streep. I've only worked with Meryl Streep for a couple of days in my life. Even just recording her voice was was kind of a, a dazzling thing because she, I could just see her saying, "Let me do this. Let me come at this differently." "They'll kill the children over my dead body. They will." "That's what I'm saying." "You'd be dead too in that scenario." Seeing her calculate and figure out and then do something totally spontaneous, and yet she's in command of it. And it's really, you know, there's something about playing a scene where it's almost like if you were trying to walk downhill, you can only go so slow. It's going to pull you. It's just going to go. And you can control however much you go, but it's going to just go. And that's sometimes what playing a scene is like. It's just going to go. And I'm a bit in control now, but now I'm just now I'm just going, and now I'm, now I'm just trying to remember the words. And to see somebody who has so much command over it is is kind of amazing.
"Have you watched this film with your daughter?" "I tried to show it to her once. She wasn't wild about it. And then she watched it without me and told me, 'No, it's actually quite good.'"
Moonrise Kingdom. Which people also usually call something else. Moonlight Kingdom. Moonlight Kingdom is what people usually call it. To me, half the time, for a long time, I had this idea. I'd like to make a movie about what it was really like to be a 12-year-old and to fall in love in a way that is just beyond your, anything that you can handle, really. My memory of this experience. And so I sort of had this brewing for some years in the, in the back of my mind. It was only, uh, when Roman Coppola and I sat down together, we were in Italy, we were in Tuscany, and when I told him what I had in mind, he was like, "I want to be a part of this. I, this, I have a lot that is coming to me." "As you say this, I'm on your side." "I know." And then when we wrote it, we wrote it very quickly. Um, you know, which is usually, I don't. We wrote it fast. And we even were doing a thing, which I've never done before since, which is because we were with our families, and we, we were sort of reading what we wrote to the group a bit in the evening. We were saying, you know, "I think we have a good scene here." And we were kind of performing the movie like it was a play or something, as we were writing it.
I hadn't made a movie in America in a long time. I guess I started to see America a bit like some foreign country. Um, and I was saying, "This is going to be American." This story.
"You are reported for a uniform violation." "How many rockets you have?" "Up to 16 and a half, sir." "Is that enough for the hullabaloo?" "Isaac, go fetch another pint of gunpowder from the armory shed." "Oh, I saw that. How fast were you just going?" "Safety, death, sir." "Come again?" "The vehicle appears to be in good working order. I'm just checking it for reckless cycling." "Second warning. Next time, I'll take away the key."
Anyway, we finally found this house called Canonicut Light, I think it's called. It's on Canonicut Island, Jamestown Island, in Rhode Island. Um, and it was seemed like the perfect spot for this part of the story. And, um, so we did the thing that we started to do at that point, which is try to figure out how to do the whole movie within this small perimeter. But that was the central thing was this house. And at the end, when all the instruments have finally come in, Susie, Vladimir, Rudy, Dinner's Melody, all the other instruments, go, "Don't make us ask twice."
[Music] [Laughter] [Music]
It was quite a low-budget movie, and so we knew we're going to have to make it kind of fast. And we're going to make it there. When you go and you start looking for locations, at least this is my experience, you go and you start looking for locations in a forest, you say, "Well, this, this place is amazing." Say, and then you take pictures and you go back and say, "This, it all just looks like more trees. They all, the pictures are all kind of looking the same." You're not. It didn't feel like that there. It's not automatic that an image captures the feeling of nature. And, you know, you see like Terrence Malick, you know, with, and also Terrence Malick with Chivo, with Emmanuel Lubezki, you see what the evolution of somebody's way of photographing nature can be, how much sophistication can go into capturing what exists, uh, conveying it. We have to find places where the shots are going to put you there, and you don't lose the spirit of the place. You kind of bring it to life. Anyway, that was that, that was one aspect of nature in it.
Another thing is that we, there are these little cameras called A-Minima cameras that, um, that I think were made at the request of, they were designed at the request of Jean-Luc Godard by this, by Aaton. I don't even know if Godard ever even used one, but I think they, I saw something like Godard asking for a certain camera in the early '70s. These are little bitty 16mm cameras that you hold like a video camera. You, you look through the top when you shoot, and they're, they're this big, and they have a small magazine. And we shot the movie on 16 millimeter because I thought, "We're going to have, I want to do handheld things in the woods with these kids." And as soon as you put a camera up on your shoulder, you're, it's not right for them. Um, so this was a great way to shoot 12-year-olds, and it sort of shaped how we made the whole movie. Those cameras, which we only shot certain things with, because they jam, and they get scratches, and they're not the most reliable cameras, but they're also kind of miraculous things. And, you know, we knew so much of the movie is going to be what happens between these kids that we found, that we spent all this time searching for and brought together.
"We're looking for you." "Why?" "Well, because you're a fugitive." "No, I'm not. I quit the Khaki Scouts." "Well, it doesn't matter anyway. You don't have that authority. We've been deputized. Now, you're going to come along peacefully, or not?"
The thing with, with working with a young cast is they have a different level of enthusiasm than than grown-ups are even capable of. Every 12-year-old is a sort of script supervisor because once they study it and memorize it, they know the entire script from start to finish. They have it memorized. They know, they, the, you know, the 50-year-old actor who's messing up his line, they're just, they can't believe it because they could do that. Part of what you're doing when you make a movie is you're saying, "Okay, pretend we're doing this." And often kids are great at pretending. "We're doing this." You know.
"You shouldn't be friends with him." "Why not?" "Because he's crazy."
I love Truffaut. And I mean, I guess Jason and I, we watched The 400 Blows together when I first knew Jason. And at least to me, I somehow always kind of associated Jean-Pierre and Truffaut. I felt like that's the thing we're kind of trying to emulate to some degree. But, you know, you, the other one who's so great, great with these, Spielberg is so good with kids. Down when you have a scene with, with children in a Spielberg movie, he uses the whole group, and many things happen at once. And the distraction that is natural for kids is built into the scene. And he's always finding ways to, to let them be free.
The Grand Budapest Hotel. So this was the result of my friend Robin. I met him through Hugo Guinness, um, who's my older friend. And I mean, Hugo introduced me to Robin. And Hugo and I started talking somewhere along the way about a story about a character like Robin. And we always said that Robin would probably be the greatest hotel concierge who ever lived. He, he's never been a hotel. He knows a lot of hotel concierges. He's a special person, um, with a special way of talking and approach to life. Then I read *Beware of Pity* by Stefan Zweig, and I thought, "I'd like to make this into a movie." And I, um, and I, uh, and I then I got to know the rest of his work. And somehow I started thinking, "There's a way to conflate these." The Grand Budapest Hotel is Hugo and I taking Robin and Stefan Zweig, and probably as much as Zweig, it's as much as there is Zweig in what we wrote, it's very filtered through something to do with with Lubitsch. But anyway, some mixture of these things, um, all started started mixing together, and we wrote this thing.
Well, it begins, as it must, with our mutual friend's predecessor, the beloved original concierge of the Grand Budapest. It begins, of course, with—I love the thing in a movie, or in a, well, in a book, where somebody meets somebody, and there's a bit of drama or intrigue, and eventually this person says, "Well, let me tell you my story. How did you come to buy it, if I may ask?" The Grand Budapest. And then we go to, we go into that. And this one has a couple of that. This one has that kind of shape with a little extra layers to it, too.
"I miss you deeply as I write from the confines of my regrettable and preposterous incarceration. Until I walk amongst you again as a free man, the Grand Budapest remains in your hands, as does its impeccable reputation. Keep it spotless and glorify it. Take extra special care of every little bitty bit of it, as if I were watching over you like a hawk with a horsewhip in its talons, because I am."
Ralph Fiennes was, you know, always the guy for this. At the beginning of starting to take shape, I thought, "This is Ralph." And I will say, people didn't really see it. I had a bit of Ralph in person to go with my experience of his, of his stunning body of work. I'd had enough, just a enough time with him, not a lot, but I knew him a little bit. He was planning to make *Coriolanus*, which he did make his film of, of *Coriolanus*. And I asked him, "When you do this scene, a speech, will it be like this?" He said, "No, no, no, it's like this." He did a Shakespeare scene for me on a sofa at, in very close, um, proximity. And it was, you know, kind of a staggering thing to have to, to experience. I mean, it was a great way to have Shakespeare performed. I thought, "He's the guy that who should play this." And, um, and, uh, and, you know, that's one of those ones where I think I was right.
Isle of Dogs. I started talking with Roman Coppola about an idea for a film that would be, um, an anthology of short stories, like articles in a magazine. One of the articles that we had was going to be this, um, short story by a Japanese writer that's published in the ma, in this magazine, and it was going to be a part of *The French Dispatch*. And somewhere along the way, you know, what, this is not, first of all, this has nothing to do with France. It might be in that magazine, but I don't know really how this relates to it in any other way. Second, this is bigger and more complicated, and I don't think this, the, the cost of the cost of making the 30-minute version of this is going movie too high. We had better just do the 85-minute version of this where, and it's a movie. And that's how it began. Um, and you and I had this thought of, of these, of a bunch of alpha dogs that were named Chief and Rex and Boss and Duke and whatever they are, of a garbage dump island in Japan. Why? I have no idea.
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I always like the idea of stop, of an animated movie that involved a garbage dump. The complexity and the, the, the visual of it just always somehow was something I had waiting to be used.
"I don't think I can stomach any more of this garbage." "Same here."
Words out of my mouth. During Fantastic Mr. Fox, we learned essentially everything. We were able to make a bigger movie, twice as many sets, it's quadruple as many characters and puppets. It's just bigger, but we were able to do it basically the same budget because we knew what's going to work for us, how to be efficient. When you make an animated movie, you start with an animatic, like a cartoon version, that's storyboards that get animated with a voice. And we had figured out a method of doing that. And we, you know, the usual way is there's a great big staff in it. I mean, on for Fantastic Mr. Fox, the animatic, we spent over a million dollars making this storyboard thing. And for Isle of Dogs, we, we spent, you know, maybe a fifth of that or something like that because it was all done with just two people. But that was the big difference was we made the whole movie in that format before we started shooting. And, um, and we were designing puppets and things in the meantime, but we waited until we had the whole story working until we started the movie. And so it was very carefully prepped.
Our technology is a bit like 1960-ish vision of the future, maybe something like that. The movie has a lot to do with Japanese cinema, at least in its inspiration. The technology, I think, comes from cinema.
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Really. I will mention one other thing. Two actors who were new to our group in that movie, Brian Cranston, Scarlett Johansson. And I've done other films with them, uh, since then. They've become a kind of part of our ongoing group. But they both were really perfect in the voice acting. We also, in Isle of Dogs, have Greta Gerwig, who, who, who is a really wonderful actress along with everything else she does, and she did a, a great job in these scenes. And we had Yoko Ono, uh, who was great too. Anyway, Isle of Dogs.
The French Dispatch. Which that whole title is *The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun*. I think that's what it's called. As I mentioned before, we had been talking about doing a movie that was a magazine, was a bit the New Yorker. And it's, uh, also the idea of doing a movie set in France, where I'd spent lots and lots of time by the time we were working on this movie. And I'd always wanted to do an anthology movie, a movie that's tells a bunch of totally unrelated stories, more or less. And I had a number of them. I think about like, you know, the Dica movie, *Golden Naples*, Laura Di Palma. Is a great anthology movie. And there's a, such Ray, teen Kanye, which, uh, short stories. The ones I liked the most were ones where it was one person who's decided to tell several stories in the, in this format. Um, and so that's what we set out to do.
"Good writers. He coddled them. He coaxed them. He ferociously protected them." "What do you think?" "For myself, I would start with Mr. Case Rack. These were his people."
I thought when we were making the movie, it was going to be like making a bunch of short films, and it was going to have a small scale. In fact, it somehow ends up feeling like you're making a bunch of feature films all at once because each one has, it has all these sets. And, you know, the thing where you might, in this, in a longer story, go to this set three times, and, you know, you shoot there. In this case, we're going to go there once, but we still have to build it. We still have to go there, shoot it. It's not exactly efficient. It's, it works against that efficiency. But I always like that kind of, um, story. You know, I like short stories. The only thing is that you have the problem, which is always say, "Well, I like this one, and I kind of like this one, and I didn't like that one." Um, and, you know, it's, that's, that's what happens when you have a, um, story like that. And that's my feeling about the one, the ones I love. There are stories in them that I'm, you know, the one, the, the funeral of the little boy, I like less than the one with the gambler and the little boy, you know, whatever it is. That's, that's the caveat for anyone who's interested to do this.
"All artists sell all their work. It's what makes you an artist. Selling it. If you don't wish to sell it, don't paint it." "Question is, what's your price?" "50 cigarettes." "Actually, make it 75." "Back." "Why do you keep looking at that guard?" "She's Simone."
By the time we did *The French Dispatch*, Robert Yeoman and I, we felt free to just do whatever we want. I mean, we tried, we'd done some things where we went from the color to black and white. We've done a little bit of that before, anxiously. And we'd done things where we changed the aspect ratio or the format of the photography, anxiously. When we were doing this, we just said, "If we want to do it, we're going to go to this aspect ratio for just this one shot." And that was fun.
"Stale cigarettes, burnt toast, her perfume of cheap gasoline, coffee on the breath, too much sugar, cocoa butter skin. Where does she spend her summers?" "They say it's the smells you finally don't forget."
The brain works that way. I've had real editors in mind. Ross versus Shawn at The New Yorker. They're very different. They both had this idea of how to make this magazine great. But our character, played by Bill, is kind of those two guys. Because I think, you know, Ross is somebody who, I think the what we read about him is he kind of felt like writers are childlike, incapable of, uh, taking care of any any practicality, and have to be pampered and tolerated and encouraged. And Shawn, on the other hand, was a little more, less kind of comical approach, and gentle, and deeply respectful, and very skilled as an editor. Both of them had this way of, you know, whatever it is, nurturing and shephering and whatever whatever it took. And so th those are the things that we were kind of looking for that went into that character.
Perhaps you failed to grasp that I was shot at and hand grenaded against my will. I only asked to be fed and was marvelously, as I described in some detail. This cafe only gets one line of dialogue. Well, I did cut something. He told me it made me too sad. I can stick it back in if you like. What did he say?
The stories in the movie are all, in their way, related to the work of other writers. They're all related to journalism, uh, and to to journalism and to authors, to people who write. But I will mention that it was my first chance to work with two actors who who I had long wanted to work with, Jeffrey Wright and Benicio Del Toro. And both the characters they play, those parts were written for them. I had a great experience of of getting to know them, uh, separately at different times of the movie, and you know, having them in the story.
Asteroid City. The truth is that there was this idea we had at the time of working on The French Dispatch that maybe something in it might be about the Actor's Studio. But I I I'd often thought I'd like to do something that's 50s Actor's Studio. I'm thinking of like Paul Newman and, uh, and, you know, all the whole group. Paul Newman joined Woodward because they're doing the theater, and they're doing, they it's an ongoing thing for them. But obviously Marlon Brando and, you know, everything else. And somehow Marilyn Monroe at two, but around the Actor's Studio, we had this idea of maybe a thing where we were exploring the creation of a play that was in an automat. But the automat thing started to, we started to move away from that because our idea of the play within the story that's being told began to grow and expand. And we sort of had this idea of a Marilyn Monroe and an Arthur Miller sort of couple. And it made its way out to the desert. And then we just realized that that's the movie is a is this, um, this play, you know, that could be like Bus Stop or something, a 50s theatrical production, but we're doing the movie version.
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I've always loved going to the theater. And but I what I love is the the feeling of putting on a show. Something about the feeling, the backstage atmosphere. To me, the idea of doing a play is a little scary because, you know, it's not like you can take it back in the editing room. It's going to happen right now. And and even before you are ready, you've got to say, "We're going to, we've got to book this theater and then we're going to rehearse." You don't know what you're going to be putting on the stage. But you know, when that's a little frightening, that's just, you know, that's also from not doing it. But I did like to put on plays when I was very young. I love the the the aura of the of the theater.
Schubert, Schubert, Schubert, huh? Schubert, yes. What's wrong? Are you on technically? But General Gibson just started the scene where the president doesn't accept his resignation. I've got six and a half minutes before my next line. I need an answer to a question I want to ask. Okay, am I doing him right?
The way the ideas in a movie come together is always quite, you know, it's a bit abstract. And it's sort of like you find it when it comes to the big questions that we don't know the answers to. The universe is this giant mystery that's right in front of us all the time. That's just there. Um, and, um, and so for us, our mystical search just felt natural. The other thing is that our story is set in the 50s, and there's a whole alien thing that goes with that period anyway. That's an alien in a top hat. That's an alien climbing a ladder. That's an alien on a racehorse.
Let's take it from the top. I told you 50 times. The alien picked up the asteroid. I know what I saw. It's called a meteorite. This is a microfiche of your school newspaper. Your byline accompanies an article criticizing the principal's disciplinary methods. Who were your sources? I was in the sixth grade, and I will not name names.
The Phoenician Scheme. So the new movie I have is The Phoenician Scheme. This one was written for Benicio Del Toro, who I had met during French Dispatch. It's a business story, you know, it's a it's about a businessman, a kind of tycoon. We always thought a tycoon like somebody who's in a 1950s Italian movie.
I've appointed you sole heir to my estate, which you may come into sooner rather than later. I'm provisionally manager of my affairs after the event of my actual demise, on a trial basis. Why? Why? What? Why sooner rather than later? Since you survived again? And why am I so late to your estate? You have eight sons, at last count. Nine sons. Nine sons. What about them? They're not my heirs.
He's confronting his death at regular intervals throughout the story. He's sometimes dying. Death was always a big part of it. And we had this notion that there was a sort of biblical thread that was going to be a that was going to be he was going to have visions. And so the daughter being a nun, I think comes from this sort of, I mean, I want to say it's a kind of a motif. I mean, you know, for me, these vision, I don't know how religious I would interpret our our biblical things. They're more like, um, a way of, uh, engaging with the big unknowns. And in his case, with the very present, uh, prospect of being dead.
Where's yours? I don't have a passport. Normal people want the basic human rights that accompany citizenship in any sovereign nation. I don't. My legal residence is a shack in Portugal. My official domicile is a hut on the Black Sea. My certificated abode is a lodge perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sub-Saharan rainforest, accessible only by goat bath. I don't live anywhere. I'm not a citizen at all. I don't need my human rights.
I don't know how much it relates to Bunwell in the end, but he's who we had in mind. We sort of thought these these are kind of surrealist visions or something. You know, I always, I think people say, "Well, how much do you, how improvisational is anything on your movie?" Nothing is improvis. Well, to me, actually, everything is improvisational. It's just, it's when is it improvised? Is it improvised on the set, or is it improvised when you're writing? And certainly when you're writing a script, you're you're coming up with something that wasn't there. It's all sort of improvised at a certain moment, at least that's what it feels like. If you're writing with a with a with with somebody else, there's often an aspect of performance in the writing, um, when you're because you're acting it out sometimes, right there.
But there was always this idea of does it have something to do with Bunwell? For me, I've always, I haven't had the moment where I don't know what what I want to do next. I so far, I've always had something else that sort of has presented itself to me from somewhere in my unconscious or whatever wherever it comes from. And I think that's an advantage, just because I always feel like I know I have a mission. You know, a mission is a great thing if you're going to do something that's a bit challenging, like making a film.
I've had a great experience of gathering collaborators, actors, but people in all different departments because I've worked in lots of different places all over the world, and I have people who've come with me from from all these travels and have stayed with me. I guess in the end, the continuity of of of the group, uh, is a is is a strength. New blood is great too, but a foundation of people who who believe in each other and are and have and have learned how to work together, and are great at their jobs. That's kind of an irreplaceable thing. That's a precious commodity.