I certainly don't feel like a
part of any establishment because
I do feel kind of like I've
got my own style and voice.
There's a rhythm that's
not quite reality.
Old-fashioned movie techniques.
It's hard wiring
that I'm not really
able to reconfigure.
I don't mind terribly building
up a collection of films
that are linked together,
but I would love not
to have someone say,
"Well, that's just like
what you did before."
[Intro Music]
[Crowd noise]
- Wes is one of those people
who's managed to maintain a
childlike perspective on the world.
- Action,Action,Action.
- This infinite capacity
for story and play.
- Bang, Bang, Bang,
Bang, Bang, Bang.
- Wes`s films I think
have this quality of
unusual sense of humor,
which actually is holding
very serious themes
and quite serious
emotions, in fact.
Wes`s films have
an unusual blend
that no one else can repeat.
"- And so it begins."
- The first thing I wanted to do when
I was a kid was to be an architect.
And then when I
was in high school,
I really wanted to be a writer.
[Music]
But I did always do little
short plays as a kid
and I made Super 8 movies.
- Yeah.
- So what I do now combine
some of these things.
People always refer
to my movies as quirky
and they think the
characters are weird.
Almost every character in
any movie I've ever made
is based on somebody in real life are
based on a combination of real people.
[Music]
- How much is "Rushmore"
mirror your high school years?
- I think it's a combination of my
high school years and Owen Wilson`s,
so, you know,
we wrote it together.
[Music]
And we filmed in my school.
You know,
literally in the same classrooms.
These characters put`s
on plays in the movie
and those plays are based
on plays I did as a kid.
Action!
These are pretty
personal movies,
like this movie "Rushmore"
is very personal.
- What does that mean personal?
- Like in high school,
one of the central
things is to be cool.
And this is a kid
who's not cool at all,
but he has his own ideas
of the way he wants to be,
things he wants to
kind of accomplish.
And he has this great
enthusiasm for those things
and this kind of drive
about it and a resilience.
"Just gotta find something you love to do
and then do it for the rest of your life."
You know, all the movies that
I've made have been movies
that aren't entirely comedies.
Halfway through the
movie, there's a shift,
it turns into something
darker, I guess.
[Music]
There's some degree to which
whatever is coming
from my imagination is
inspired by my background
and my own psychology.
Without me controlling
it or choosing to,
I'm in the movies.
To make a good movie,
you need a lot of ideas
and you need a lot of material.
That's I think
where it can start to
be a bit of a painting,
a bit of a theater production.
[Music]
The sets and the costumes
and all those things,
there's a certain exaggeration
in all that stuff.
And they're almost jokes in
the clothes and the mustaches.
I do like clothes
there's no way tonight.
I like costumes for
characters and stories,
you know, the costume means
a lot about the character.
With "Grand Budapest
Hotel" it has ski chases,
it's got trains
and it's got a huge grant hotel.
It's a big movie.
If we did take this script
and just hand it over to
somebody who makes movie budgets,
they would come
back with something
much, much, much,
higher than, you know,
an ushootable movie.
But I prefer to get
to a point and say,
"Okay,
I've done something impossible.
How are we going to do it?"
That's more fun to me, anyway.
[Music]
I've got a lot of people
who have worked with
not just the actors
but lots of the people
who work in other
capacities on these movies
and we've figured out lots
of different approaches
that work well for
my kind of movie.
As this visual stuff that you can
link from one movie to another.
[Music]
A lot of things that I do
the same way every time
but it's just the way I like it.
[Music]
- What struck me the most
is just the symmetry.
- This comes from Wes and
I've been working with him,
so I've done seven
movies with them,
so I kind of know
what to expect.
What we do is I have
the camera assistants,
take a piece of tape,
so we put one on one side of one matte
box, and the other on the other side
and we always just run to
the corners of the room
to make sure the camera is
right in the dead center.
Because I know that
when Wes walks in
the first thing he's
going to say to me,
"Are we square to the wall there?"
and I`ll say, "Yes,we are."
So we kind of do that by habit.
You know, what's great for me is
that he so concerned
about the frame
and so if people are
hitting their marks,
he will be the one to say,
"Excuse me. Could you be two
inches that way, you know."
- Do that for a moment but
not leaning back so much.
Yeah, that's it.
We're doing swish pans
where we you know start
center on the door
we go over to the -- everything's
got to be very symmetrical.
[Music]
"- That's all for now."
- I feel always feel like any
character from any one of my movies
could walk into another
one of the movies
and be at home there.
- Do you ever want
to do something
that is dramatically different
from anything you've ever done?
- Yeah, I do.
[Music]
We started the movie by saying,
we have this Roald Dahl
book we're going to do.
[Music]
I read the book when
I was very young.
I loved the digging.
I love that,
they were spending all
this time underground.
"- But I guess we have--
- I`m sorry. Maybe my
invitation got lost in the mail.
Does anybody know what this
badgers talking about?"
[Music]
"Moonrise Kingdom" is
really based on a fantasy,
a sort of dream I had
as a child of a romance
that didn't actually happen.
"- Dear Sam. My answer is yes.
Dear Susie - When?
Dear Sam - Where?"
- That's really the
inspiration for the movie.
"I love you, too."
To make a movie,
it's got a hold a lot of feeling
and you've got to
build up something
and you've got to kind of
research and gather ideas.
[Music]
Our first inspiration, really,
was Japanese cinema.
Kurosawa and Miyazaki.
Those are the ones who
were really inspiring us.
But the other two
are the woodblock prints
makers: Hiroshige and Hokusai.
We were steeping
ourselves in their work
and putting the
pictures of the walls.
We wanted for the movie to be
as Japanese in our foreign way,
as we could make it I guess.
If I feel like I have an idea what
the best thing is for the story,
I just want to follow that.
And most of my life is
spent making these movies,
I mean,
this is a main thing I do.
I mean,
it's really the only thing I do.
- You have no life
outside of movies,
- Not a lot.
The thing that got me my first
chance to make a feature film
was Owen Wilson and I,
we went to school together.
We had a few thousand dollars
that we borrowed from our fathers
and we made a short film.
"Just be practical, Anthony.
When we do a job,we do to the
best of our abilities, right?
We're trying to do it
like professionals.
`Cause that's what we are--"
- Wes and I were movie fanatics
and just wanted to begin
working on something together.
To coffee shop and come over
as a nice place to work.
- There was a real
sense of melancholy
to wear as we got
towards the end.
And I thought,
"Well, you know, this will be
the only movie ever get to make
and I really love movies
and, you know, least got to make
one with my brothers and Wes."
- We've managed to get
that in the right hands.
And that was how I got the
chance to make a feature film.
[Music]
"- Good intensity. - High."
We've been able to do
this the way we wanted to.
You know, with the cast that
we wanted of our friends
and the story that
we wanted to tell.
We've been able to do it
on a big enough scale,
but without having
to really compromise.
- How are you feeling
after these years or so
that there is a theme
or a sense of what a
Wes Anderson movie is?
There`s that an
outside perception.
- It's probably better for me if
it stays in outside perception
because the more I think about
it the more confused I get.
I, you know,
I have the choice of saying,
here are things
that people can say,
"That's like what
you've done before."
And I can actively,
aggressively avoid them
and steer away from
them or I can say,
"What do I want to do?"
How what would I like it to be?"
And accept
that there's might be some
very clear threads and things
that are going to connect
my movies together.
I have tended to say, I think I
would rather just do what I love.
