If anyone understands the importance of detail, it’s Wes Anderson. From The Royal Tenenbaums to Moonrise Kingdom to his new release, The Grand Budapest Hotel, each of his films showcases instantly recognizable, intricate diorama worlds, often stocked with preciously arranged camping tents, Crayola-colored portable record players, and pleasingly worn copies of National Geographic. Everything about his work signifies a man who likes things just so. All of which practically obliges one to wonder whether Anderson’s own life resembles a painstakingly curated vintage store. Below, one of America’s great and most idiosyncratic film auteurs gives us a glimpse into his world.
THE HOUSTON-BORN creator ofMoonrise Kingdom’s Khaki Scouts was a Boy Scout dud: “I think I only got through a couple of meetings. I didn’t earn any rank.”
THAT SAID, he fared better in Indian Guides, the local Y.M.C.A.’s version of the Cub Scouts, where all troop members were assigned Native American names: “Mine was Leaping Jaguar. My older brother was called Hawk. No, Orca. Wait, maybe it was Killer Whale and I’m reducing it to Orca in later years.”
HE LOVES going back in time. Around the holidays, he visits a Champs-Élysées booth where “you go and type your address into a laptop, and they’ll show you the place 50 or a hundred years ago. I am totally their target audience.”
THE FIRST film he saw in a theater: it might have been a Peter Sellers Pink Panther movie.
THE FIRST movie he remembers walking out of: Sellers’s The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu(1980).
HIS FILM The Royal Tenenbaums is often compared to J. D. Salinger’s fictional Glass-family stories, but Anderson says the idea for the movie was partly inspired by “The Bagthorpe Saga,” a children’s-book series by Helen Cresswell; it follows the lives of several relentlessly precocious siblings whose domicile is called Unicorn House. The series made a “very big impression” on him as a child.
HE TAKES production notes in “little beige spiral notebooks with slightly green pages the size of a mass-market paperback” and always uses seven per movie.
DESPITE THE systematic precision, the books are archived somewhat casually: “I put them in a drawer wherever I am working.”
HE KNEW by seventh grade that he’d wind up in Paris. “I just assumed it,” he says breezily, as though this were the most natural aspiration in the world for a pre-adolescent Texan. Years ago, he turned up in the city for three days of work on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and “ended up staying for a year and a half.”
HE HAS apartments in Montparnasse and New York City’s East Village.
DESPITE BEING a toast-of-Paris expat, he doesn’t speak French: “One day, I want to convince myself I can learn it, but there’s just no guarantee. Some people don’t have the gift.”
HIS FAVORITE work of art is in the Louvre: a mid-19th-century François Rude sculpture of Joan of Arc “hearing schizophrenic voices with her hand to her ear and her stone eyes glazed over.” He says the statue’s appeal lies in her “kind of out-of-it detachment.”
HE HATES flying. Trains are his preferred mode of travel.
THE DRINK he most associates with himself at present: Becherovka, a spicy Czech herbaldigestif he discovered while filming The Grand Budapest Hotel.
THOUGH KNOWN for his alienated characters, he actually loves communal living. During the filming of The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson and his team commandeered a small hotel near the Polish-German border: “The hair and makeup was at the far end of the lobby. Dinner was cooked in a little breakfast kitchen. It was a great kind of a commune.”
EVEN HIS ideal version of solitude isn’t particularly solitary. His preference: “Two people being completely alone in the world together, which probably undermines the desolateness of it.”
HIS FILMS sometimes contain unintentional homages: “I tend to shoot . . . like an imitation of Stanley Kubrick whether I mean to or not.”
ALL OF his screenplays have multiple screenwriter credits (frequent collaborators include Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and Owen Wilson; The Grand Budapest Hotel is his first collaboration with Hugo Guinness, the artist), but Anderson says that he’s the only one “who does the physical writing; I’m putting it into words. The rest of the collaboration is endless talking.”
IF HE could cut a deal with the cosmos to bring certain Old Hollywood luminaries back from the dead, he’d write roles for William Powell, Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable—and a fellow named Chester Morris, the onetime star of the 1940s Boston Blackie detective series.
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