The Iconoclast

\\\ ressed in his trademark fitted suit—one size too small—Wes Anderson

zips down a winding Paris street on a Velib' bicycle, pedaling between

Jj; his apartment and his new office space, both in the Montparnasse

II11 neighborhood. The Texas-born director of such films as Rushmore,

i/ll The Royal Tenenbaums and Fantastic Mr. Fox came to Paris in 2004 while

// promoting his fourth film, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, and never

really left. In Paris Anderson conducts his life anonymously, just as he

likes it, and even after eight years, he doesn't speak much French.

, Wes Anderson, \\

the director who makes the films '

everyone loves but no one sees, is back.

The man behind Rushmore, The Royal

Tenenbaums and Fantastic Mr. Fox

explains the magic of Paris, the enduring

appeal of Bill Murray and why

It's fitting that Anderson would find himself living and working in Montparnasse, once the stomping ground of the artists, writers, photographers and filmmakers of the Lost Generation. A longtime F. Scott Fitzgerald devotee, Anderson credits two short works from The Basil and Josephine Stories as the inspiration for his second feature, Rushmore. And while his films have not been seen by large audiences, he is adored by an impassioned fan base that includes many film critics who applaud his propensity for nuance, a charge he doesn't deny. In fact, he embraces his obsessive attention to detail with pride and once made an American Express commercial lampooning his quirky image.

like many of his peers, including Paul

Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino and Noah Baumbach, Anderson never went to film school but was blessed with early praise for his first film, 1996's Bottle Rocket, a sardonic comedy that launched the careers of Owen and Luke Wilson and turned Anderson, then a part-time movie-theater projectionist at the University of Texas, into a cinema wunderkind.

His seventh and latest film, Moonrise Kingdom, opened the Cannes International Film Festival this past May. The coming-of-age story follows two 12-year-old kids who fall in love and run away—he from a Scout camp, she from her parents' summer cottage—on a car-free island off the coast of New England

in the mid-1960s. The movie is a return to form for Anderson. After making The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, two uneven films admired by diehard fans but largely panned by critics, and the successful stop-animation film Fantastic Mr. Fox, based on a Roald Dahl book, Anderson chose to work with Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, two unknown child actors. It was a risky move, putting two newcomers up against a roster of high-profile co-stars— Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand and Edward Norton— who are all cast in supporting roles.

Anderson is what he appears to be, skinny legs and all, as he tours his new office, which features half a dozen windows overlooking the street below. His button-down shirts are embroidered with the initials WWA—Wesley Wales Anderson—recalling the Jazz Age, when literary dandies were impeccable

dressers with their own distinct style. As Cate Blanchett, who appears in The Life Aquatic, said to The New Yorker about Anderson, "Is he Dorian Gray, I wonder? He is from another time, but completely and utterly genuine."

Sitting in his Montparnasse office, Anderson opened up in his own words about his life and career.

THE RELUCTANTAUTEUR

It's hard not to sound like an insane idiot when you say you're an auteur. I remember Barry Braverman, an old friend who shot the short film of Bottle Rocket. He also did aerial shots in this recent film and did a documentary about the making of The Darjeeling Limited. At any rate, when we were doing the short, we disagreed about something, and he said to Owen and Luke Wilson, right in front of me, "He thinks he's an auteur. He wants to put the camera here, and it's not correct. But what can we do, because he thinks he's an auteur?" You don't even have to write your own scripts to be one. Film is the kind of medium in which you can shape things a very specific way, and if you have your own way of doing that, well, you're probably an auteur. Or if you're writing your own scripts, then even more so you probably are one. I make the scripts. I don't know. Auteur. It just means author, doesn't it?

YOUTH RULES

With every movie I do, there's usually a period when I'm not quite sure about all the details. (continued on page 160)

WES ANDERSON

(continued from page 72)

People will ask me what I'm working on, and I'll try to describe it, and I can tell they're looking at me like they can't understand what I'm telling them. In the case of The Darjeeling Limited, I knew I wanted to do a movie about three brothers. I knew I wanted to do a movie about India. I knew I wanted to do a movie set on a train, and when I put those components together that's what it became. But any of those elements at one point could have been exchanged for something else. I knew I wanted Moonrise Kingdom to be a romance between two 12-year-olds that was bigger than they could handle and that sort of disturbed the people around them. And I wanted to do a movie on an island, like one in New England, with no cars. It was a time warp for me, because I've spent time in places like the island in the film.

The feeling of being in fifth grade and suddenly having this totally overwhelming crush on someone—in my experience I never even came close to telling her. I had virtually no communication with her in my lifetime. But she put the whammy on me, and I wasn't the only one. On Valentine's Day everyone had a white sack stapled to the wall for their valentines, and hers was overflowing with cards and hearts and candy. So Moonrise Kingdom is partly me calculating what I'd never actually been able to do back then, a fantasy of what could happen. Also, I relate to this crush—the female lead is carrying a big suitcase full of books around town. My feeling is that when you're that age and reading a novel you love, it becomes your whole world. I think kids desire fantasy at that age, and they very much want to believe it can become real. It's powerful to them, and you have your fingers crossed that there's some kind of luck element out there that they'll eventually tap into.

I grew up with people whose names inspired most of the characters' names in my films.

It usually takes me a long time to write a script. But in the case of Moonrise Kingdom, after a year of making notes and maybe a little dialogue, toward the end of that year I might have had only 13 pages. I showed them to Roman Coppola. I hadn't thought of collaborating with him on this yet; I was just getting his opinion on what I had. I wasn't getting anywhere. I had all these things I thought could go into it, but the underlying story wasn't yet there. And then I showed Roman the 13 pages. He read it, liked it and started asking questions, like "You have these two kids who are meeting in a field. What if they had met before and arranged to meet in the woods?" That became the answer to the first third of the film. I hadn't seen it until then.

STUDIO LIVING

In the older days I sort of looked at the studio system like it was a bank. You have to go to them, tell them you have a problem and ask for more money. I don't do that anymore. I didn't enjoy working that way.

It was sort of the way I learned it. I have a different way of seeing it now.

Our prep work on Moonrise Kingdom was advanced in some ways. We shot a number of scenes early, without the cast, just as practice so I could figure out how it would happen when we were all there. We're going to spend a little money going out there to shoot some scenes without the right people in them, but we're going to figure it all out, and it could be the thing that prevents us from losing a day of shooting later on, which can be a huge issue.

The most fascinating part about the beach communities on the island where we shot Moonrise Kingdom is that they are stuck in time. Most of these places are trying to preserve traditions, and you think to yourself, This is what life was like back then, which is fun.

CLASS OF 1965

Setting the film in 1965 was not something I had planned. I started writing narration to introduce the story, and I began with "The year is 1965." And I stuck with it. I have a theory about why I did this: The place where we shot was accessible from Newport, Rhode Island only by ferry in those days. It was a summer getaway island. Then in 1966 they started building a suspension bridge, and the island effectively became a suburb of Newport. The whole place changed, and everything that had existed for generations ceased to exist. My theory—if you can even call it that—is that this island is a metaphor for an America and, in fact, a whole planet that no longer exist, so you have to set this story in the past. That said, this is me trying to interpret what I already did. I only thought of that bit later.

UNKNOWN, PERIOD It would be impossible to overstate how Owen and I lucked out in the beginning with Bottle Rocket. We had a series of breaks; without them we would not have had access to any of the stuff we ended up with, and here we are almost 20 years later. It was a series of people we met, starting with L.M. Kit Carson, our first real mentor as filmmakers. He got our script and our short to Polly Platt, who was the second one. She chose us, and that was that. Polly was at the time working for James L. Brooks, and he essentially said to us, "Well, you guys get to work in the movies." Everything else we've done is because Jim, Polly and Kit permitted us to do so.

Owen was unknown, period, and I was the one who pressed him to act. He opposed this in the beginning because he thought it would be unprofessional to use him and Luke as actors. He was underestimating himself and his own powers. One of the reasons Jim and Polly wanted to work with us was because of Owen and Luke on-screen. They were natural actors. I partly credit that for my being able to make movies.

THE FANTASTIC OWEN WILSON

Bottle Rocket was the most collaborative movie I have worked on, and most of the collaboration was between Owen and me.

He would make up dialogue and was able to improvise in a way that we would have written. I never had any other situations with anyone, including Owen, on any of my other movies where it felt right to do that. But it's exciting to do. There are scenes in Bottle Rocket where Owen is just improvising right there on the spot.

THE BREAKOUT THAT WASN'T

If you think back, Rushmore wasn't a breakout hit at all. That movie made only about $17 million in America. It wasn't actually released overseas at all. To me those numbers sounded pretty good, but I had no frame of reference when it came out, truthfully. No one had seen Bottle Rocket. Luke, Owen and I went on a tour, which took us to the University of Texas, our school. We did a screening at the college theater. I had been the projectionist in this theater, in fact. Owen and I had seen a ton of movies there, and for us it was like, "Wow, we're going to finally show our movie here." There were 12 people in the audience. The place seated 1,000—it was a big room. Afterward, when we went to do the Q&A, it was insane. There were almost as many people on the stage as there were in the audience. For the five of us up there, it was not a great feeling. The film, I should note, was not beloved by the 12 people in the audience. Reactions were mixed.

I didn't think at the time that Rushmore was a success. To me it felt more like, Wow, this is going a lot better than the last one. What's clear is that the studio, before we test-screened it, thought it might make $40 million or so, and it didn't. When Out of Sight came out, I ran into Steven Soderbergh somewhere, and I told him how much I liked the film, congratulations for the success, etc. And he said, "Thanks, but it was a flop. It's a complete flop." He knew all the statistics off the top of his head, and he felt it was a failure. I think it's truly a matter of opinion whether a movie is a success or not.

THE PHILOSOPHY MAJOR GETS A JOB

I wanted to be an architect when I was a kid, and I've always liked writing short stories. Those two things, I suppose, are what I imagined I might be: architect or writer. I don't know if I could write a novel, but I did write some short stories. One of them was a one-page story that I never figured out. For years Owen would refer to it. The story was just a fragment, called "The Life Aquatic." But later on Noah Baumbach and I revisited it and wrote the script based on that page.

The guys we idolize—that 1970s gang of Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma, George Lucas, etc.—are a very film-school-oriented bunch. I guess Spielberg didn't go to school for film. I wanted to go. It just didn't work out.

My older brother was studying philosophy, I think. I don't know why I didn't pick something like English literature because, other than movies, that's what I was interested in—books. That was what I wanted to be doing. But

it was interesting to study philosophy. Those are things I would never have read in a million years. But truthfully, I haven't picked up any kind of philosophical text since. When you work your way into that culture of philosophy, it's like a foreign language I tried to speak.

By the time I was in college, there were Criterion laser discs. I didn't have a laser disc player back then, but they had them in the University of Texas library. Criterion, if you remember, more or less invented the idea of having a director or somebody talking over the movie while you're watching it. Those commentaries were amazing to me. I don't listen to them so much anymore now that I do my own movies. But when I was starting out, that was part of my own private film school. I had never heard of Michael Powell or Emeric Pressburger. Scorsese said, on those collections, "This is what inspired this. This is what inspired that." I wrote those things down, dug up the films and watched them. I may never have heard of them otherwise.

CHILDREN'S BOOKS AS FINE LITERATURE

In relation to Moonrise Kingdom, there were children's books. There was a series called The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. The first one I remember is Over Sea, Under Stone. That series of books is famous. I can remember the rhyme: "When the dark comes rising, six shall turn it back;/Three from the circle, three from the track." I don't remember what track that refers to. They're from the 1960s, I think.

I also remember a series of books written in the 1970s by Helen Cresswell, about a family called the Bagthorpes. The Royal Tenenbaums was very much influenced by those books. The first one is called Ordinary Jack, and it's about this kid who is the normal kid in a family of geniuses.

You can read Salinger's Glass family stories, see the influence, how it all fits together, what's stolen and so on. But in the case of the Bagthorpes we took practically the whole story line.

F. SCOTT AND ERNEST

In the case of Rushmore, two Fitzgerald stories are part of its central inspiration. Both are from The Basil and Josephine collection. One is "The Captured Shadow," about Basil Duke Lee putting on plays. I used to try to put on plays when I was a kid. That story made me think I could use that idea for the movie script. The other Fitzgerald story is "The Freshest Boy," about a teenager being sent off to school and how he clashes with it.

Hemingway had the most wonderful way of creating a mood. His execution of a scene is so clear and vivid. And his eye, how his details are communicated—you go right into a scene and stay there. With Fitzgerald, suddenly in the middle of a story you have a long sentence that takes you outside of what's happening. In "The Freshest Boy" there is a scene where the protagonist has been teased, hated and crushed at his new school. Now they're playing football. The popular kid calls out

to him using a half-baked nickname that nobody's even heard before. And there's a magical sentence I can't recite that says we cannot know, it's not given to us to know when or where, but there are moments when some people are right on the very edge, and with the slightest effort they can be pushed over or pulled back—and at this moment this person was saved. You should look up that scene in the story and read it. It's a Fitzgerald moment that is almost like Proust.

"BILL MURRAY IS ON THE PHONE"

I don't think I'm responsible for resurrecting anything. I think Bill Murray had already started to take on these different roles—what some would call the second part of his movie career. He had done Mad Dog and Glory and Ed Wood. I may have caught him when he was going in a different direction already, but when we did Rushmore, it was a fluke. We had always been told, "You can't get Bill Murray. It's not possible. You can't find him. He won't respond." So we weren't worried that he might say no because we were sure he would probably never respond in the first place. "Let's just send

il out there. It's probably not going to happen." And then one day he appeared. It's funny: A lot of people have come to me to ask for help with him, trying to track him down. And I have to tell them all: Our process with him was not like what most people experience. We just happened to capture him at a moment in time. I remember I was in the office of a Disney executive one day. I was probably there only one time in my life, and he got a call saying, "Bill Murray is on the phone for Wes." How does Bill Murray know I'm in Burbank right now meeting with Donald De Line at Disney? Donald told me to sit at his desk, and he left the room. I sat in there for an hour talking with Bill. He talked mainly about a Kurosawa movie called Red Beard the whole time. At the end I said, "Bill, are you going to do this movie?" And he's like, "Yep." Then I met him in person because I had to take a picture of him that we needed to make a painting, but I'm not a good photographer. I remember shooting three rolls of film, and we painted the picture from the first shot because it was the only good one. And then I didn't see Bill again until the day before we started shooting Rushmore.

Bill had never heard of me. He hap­pened to like the script. Why'd he read it? I don't know.

He still hasn't seen Bottle Rocket. I think he decided not to see it. It's almost an inside joke at this point. Anyhow, Bill had an agent at the time named Jessica, and we were shopping Rushmore around, and she must have said to him, "You need to read this script." It was a fluke but a very fortunate one for me.

STARTING WITH MUSIC

One of the things I always seem to start with is music. Sometimes it has to do with the characters, what their lives are like and what they're feeling, and sometimes it's more about the place where it all happens. Also sometimes I look for empty spaces in the movie where I can make something up, some visual thing, and set it to music and try to help tell the story that way.

There's a piece of music Benjamin Britten wrote to be performed by amateur groups in churches, an opera centered around Noah's ark. We did this in our church in Texas when I was growing up in the late 1970s. In fact, the costumes in the movie are taken from photos of our school production. My mother went back to our library to get them for me.

The other reason I have Benjamin Britten in Moonrise Kingdom is his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. That's at the beginning of the movie. And then there was this French pop song sung by Franchise Hardy called "Les Temps de l'Amour."

MIDCAREER IN PARIS

I always dreamed about moving to New York and living and working there. So I did that, and after a few years I started dreaming about moving to Paris and living and working here. But I still live in New York most of the time. What you see around you now is more of a fantasy.

In fact, I got an apartment in Paris when I came to do the French press for The Life Aquatic. I was supposed to stay for four days. Then I talked to the publicity people who were paying for it, and I asked them, "If I get a smaller room, how long can I stay?" Another 11 days. Then, at the end of that, Jason Schwartzman arrived to film Marie Antoinette, and I moved into his guest bedroom. When they finished filming, I moved into the apartment they had rented for Kirsten Dunst and took over that lease. That cost too much, so I got another place after that, directly above Cafe de Flore, and I didn't leave for a long time.

SOMEONE NO ONE HAS EVER SEEN Over the years, I've needed to cast children. Child actors are going to have only so much experience. It would be nice to discover someone no one has ever seen, so we start doing our auditions. Usually, whether they have previously been in something or not doesn't matter. You don't know when you're going to find the right person. You get a bunch of great ones in the first sessions. These are the ones who've done something before and somebody has already discovered them. Then for the next six months, it's slim

pickings. In Moonrise Kingdom, most of the better-known child actors made up the rest of the Scout troop: One played Billy Elliot on stage; one played Damien in the remake of The Omen; another has been in a Western.

The two main characters—first the boy, Jared Gilman. He lived in New Jersey, and I saw a QuickTime video of him. In his case, it wasn't the scene he played for the audition that grabbed me as much as the interview after the scene. He was so funny and interesting, and his conversation made me laugh. Then when I actually met him, I liked him even more. Once I saw the video, I started showing everyone, with the idea, I think we have our guy. The girl, Kara Hayward, is from outside of Boston, and I saw her on video as well. She seemed to make up all the lines herself. She was totally believable, and it hadn't happened like that for me before. We must have auditioned more than a thousand girls for the part.

WHEN A WUNDERKIND GROWS UP

I've been around too long to be a wunderkind. I'm too old. I've had ups and downs already. I think everybody who goes to a movie is going to come away with a different perspective. Everyone's right. If people like it or don't like it, it's valid. I have no issue with that, ever. But what I do have an issue with is the idea of a movie trying "too hard." I would say, "Yes, that is what I was doing. I was trying my hardest to make this work, to make this film better." It makes sense to me, though, if someone doesn't like the tone of it.

I'm just trying to make it better in my own opinion—more funny, more moving— or surprise someone with something they've never seen. To make an atmo­sphere, a stronger experience, hopefully.

All this is not really important. It's somebody's criticism. It's subjective, as are my and everybody else's films.

I try not to read things that will make me feel bad. But I've read plenty, including some horrible reviews. It's a huge mistake to get into it when people are just stirring up drama. I remember there was this thing a few years ago when someone wrote something about how my movies were racist. It was quite an elaborate piece, with plenty of examples, illustrating some alleged racist undercurrent running through my entire body of work. At the time I thought to myself, I have to do something about this. It's just plain wrong and horrible. But then I realized that this kid—or whoever wrote it—didn't really believe what he was arguing, did he? How could he? It was, on its face, ridiculous. There's no way this person could think that my movies—love them or hate them—are racist. Come on, that's just stirring up a little drama. There's plenty of actual racism in this world, so we don't have to pretend that it's secretly hidden in my movies. It's like Mel Brooks being considered racist for making Blazing Saddles. Although that one's actually kind of iffy.

Q

In the older days I looked at the

studio system like it was a bank.

I don't do that anymore.

/ don't think I'm responsible for resurrecting anything.

Bill Murray had already

started to take on these

different roles. When we did

Rushmore, it was a fluke.