Castello Cavalcanti
Wes Anderson did a short film for Prada. The film contains race cars, Jason Schwartzman, Italy, and tweeness.
(via digg)
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. ❤️
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
kottke.org posts about Wes Anderson
Video essay series on Wes Anderson concludes
Speaking of Wes Anderson, Matt Zoller Seitz has finished his video essay series on Anderson’s movies. You can find the entire collection of videos on Vimeo and transcripts and notes are on Seitz’s blog. Here are the final two to get you going:
And if that’s not enough for you, here’s the book that the videos are based on.
The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders
Wes Anderson is coming out with a new horror movie. Here’s the trailer:
Ha ha just kidding it’s a SNL spoof. Ed Norton does a pretty ripping Owen Wilson.
Wes Anderson’s Star Wars reference
Nestled in the midst of Matt Zoller Seitz’s video essay on Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is this bombshell: the movie contains a Star Wars reference no one seems to have noticed. Seitz synced the scenes for us:
There have to be others, right? Many of Anderson’s films end with all of the characters gathered together like at the medals ceremony in Episode IV…someone even synced up the end of the movie with the closing credits music from Zissou and it works really well:
And of course, there’s Conan O’Brien’s take on what a Star Wars movie directed by Anderson might look like.
The Wes Anderson Collection: The Motion Picture
Matt Zoller Seitz is doing a video essay series based on his new book, The Wes Anderson Collection. The first two installments, on Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, are already up:
I love what he says about Rushmore:
There are few perfect movies. This is one of them.
The book and video essays came about because Anderson saw Seitz’s earlier video essay series, The Substance of Style, an examination of Anderson’s stylistic influences. Great resource for fans of Anderson and film.
RIP, Kumar Pallana
Kumar Pallana, one of Wes Anderson’s cast of regulars, has died at age 94. Pallana appears as Kumar in Bottle Rocket, Mr. Littlejeans in Rushmore, and as Pagoda in The Royal Tenenbaums.
Pallana led a massively interesting life before hitting the big screen at nearly 80. Born in colonial India, he lived all around the world, and first made a name for himself as an entertainer in America in the 1950s. Back then he was known as Kumar Of India, and his specialty was spinning plates-he even appeared on Captain Kangaroo in 1961. (Other feats included magic, balancing, swordplay, and juggling-you can see him do a handstand in The Royal Tenenbaums.)
The Wes Anderson Collection
Out today is The Wes Anderson Collection (at Amazon), a coffee-table book about Wes Anderson’s career.
The Wes Anderson Collection is the first in-depth overview of Anderson’s filmography, guiding readers through his life and career. Previously unpublished photos, artwork, and ephemera complement a book-length conversation between Anderson and award-winning critic Matt Zoller Seitz. The interview and images are woven together in a meticulously designed book that captures the spirit of his films: melancholy and playful, wise and childish — and thoroughly original.
Vulture has an excerpt of the chapter on The Royal Tenenbaums.
Q: Gene Hackman - it was always your dream for him to play Royal?
A: It was written for him against his wishes.Q: I’m gathering he was not an easy person to get.
A: He was difficult to get.Q: What were his hesitations? Did he ever tell you?
A: Yeah: no money. He’s been doing movies for a long time, and he didn’t want to work sixty days on a movie. I don’t know the last time he had done a movie where he had to be there for the whole movie and the money was not good. There was no money. There were too many movie stars, and there was no way to pay. You can’t pay a million dollars to each actor if you’ve got nine movie stars or whatever it is - that’s half the budget of the movie. I mean, nobody’s going to fund it anymore, so that means it’s scale.
That’s right, Gene Hackman (and probably the rest of them as well) worked for scale on The Royal Tenenbaums.
Anderson also talks about the scene in The Darjeeling Limited where they show everyone on the train:
Q: When you turn to reveal the tiger, what is that, the other side of the train?
A: No, it’s all one car. We gutted a car, and that is a fake forest that we built on the train, and it is a Jim Henson creature on our train car. The whole thing is one take, and I think because we did it that way, while we were doing it, we did feel this electricity, you know? There’s tension in it because it’s all real. Fake but real. I mean, that was the idea. The emotion of it, well — there’s nothing really happening in the scene, you know? They just kind of sit there, but it was a real thing that was happening. But I did at the time have this feeling like “I don’t know.”
Moonrise Kingdom typography
The Art of the Title chats with the excellent Jessica Hische about the lettering and type design she did for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.
To me, that was really fun because if you think about New England in the ’60s… it’s not like most places would be staying on top of the most current trends in type, using typefaces that were released that very year. So, using something from the ’40s made sense to me. If you think about a small, conservative New England town, lord knows all the printers and designers in town are probably still using type from years ago. I think when people think about historical type references, they often don’t think about that. You should be reaching from that time period to 15 - 20 years earlier and then you’ll be getting stuff that’s quote-unquote “current.”
And she’s releasing the typeface commercially so everyone can use it! Yay!
The watches of Fantastic Mr. Fox
Of course the watches worn by the characters in Fantastic Mr. Fox are going to be classic 70s and 80s timepieces.
New details about Wes Anderson’s new film
Anderson has finished filming his next movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, with the likes of Tilda Swinton, Jude Law, Bill Murray, and Owen Wilson. Screen Daily has some plot details:
The Grand Budapest Hotel tells of a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars and his friendship with a young employee who becomes his trusted protégé. The story involves the theft and recovery of a priceless Renaissance painting, the battle for an enormous family fortune and the slow and then sudden upheavals that transformed Europe during the first half of the 20th century.
Wes Anderson on Star Wars, Bill Murray, and his new movie
A nice interview with Wes Anderson. He discusses how he got his start in filmmaking, his prospects as the director of the next Star Wars movie, and his new film with Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel.
DEADLINE: Star Wars was among the films that influenced you early on. What would the world get if Wes Anderson signed on to direct one of these new Star Wars films Disney will make?
ANDERSON: Well I have a feeling I would probably ultimately get replaced on the film because I don’t’ know if I have all the right action chops. But at least I know the characters from the old films.
DEADLINE: You are not doing a good job of selling yourself as a maker of blockbusters.
ANDERSON: I think you are reading it exactly right. I don’t think I would do a terrible job at a Han Solo backstory. I could do that pretty well. But maybe that would be better as a short.
Wes Anderson’s Star Wars
Finally, the answer to the question “what if Wes Anderson directed Star Wars”.
Kanye Wes Anderson
Kanye Wes Anderson is a Tumblr posting screencaps of Wes Anderson moves mashed with Kanye West lyrics resulting in a good time for all. Plus, Kanye and Wes totally hang out.
(via @ryansholin)
The books of The Royal Tenenbaums
Back in July, we covered the Criterion Collection release of The Royal Tenenbaums. Recently, Criterion Collection posted a gallery of 9 books and magazines from the movie, which because of said gallery, I want to watch right now.
Everyone knows [X], what this post presupposes is maybe [Y].
See also The Royal Tenenbaum portraits. (thx, alex)
The Royal Tenenbaums on Criterion Collection Blu-ray
Speaking of Wes Anderson, The Criterion Collection is releasing The Royal Tenenbaums on Blu-ray in August (pre-order at Amazon). In this age of watching streaming movies on small screens, there are still many that are better in HD with surround sound. (via @moth)
Wes Anderson’s next film: The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Johnny Depp will be in Wes Anderson’s next movie.
No details regarding the film’s plot or Depp’s character have been revealed, but the project is said to be titled The Grand Budapest Hotel and will mark Texas-born Anderson’s first time shooting in Europe.
A bunch of Anderson regulars are also rumored to be involved: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, Jeff Goldblum, Adrien Brody, and Willem Dafoe. IMDB has it listed as Untitled Wes Anderson Project, described as “a European story”, and Owen Wilson is the only listed cast member.
Update: I am reminded, via Twitter, that Anderson has done several projects in Europe. The Life Aquatic was filmed in Italy, Hotel Chevalier was filmed in Paris, and Fantastic Mr. Fox was produced in the UK. Anderson lives in Paris full-time now, I believe, so I would expect that many of his projects moving forward will be filmed/set there.
Wes Anderson’s best commercials
Adweek has a list of some of the best commercials Wes Anderson has made. It’s tough to beat his two-minute spot for American Express.
“Can I get my snack?”
“You’re eating it.”
Wes Anderson’s Hyundai commercials
Wes Anderson recently directed a pair of television advertisements for Hyundai Motor Group. They are typically Wes Andersonian.
Moonrise Kingdom trailer
We interrupt this internet to bring you the very first trailer for Wes Anderson’s new movie, Moonrise Kingdom.
Set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, MOONRISE KINGDOM tells the story of two twelve-year-olds who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As various authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing off-shore — and the peaceful island community is turned upside down in more ways than anyone can handle.
It’s Wes Andersonmas, y’all!
The Fantastic and Inglourious Mr. Fox
A trailer for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox using dialogue from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
(via biancolo)
Wes Anderson’s next film
It’ll be called Moon Rise Kingdom, it’s set in the 1960s, and check out this cast:
I’m told that Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton are all in talks to star in Moon Rise Kingdom, a script that Anderson wrote with Roman Coppola and which Anderson will direct late next spring.
Tilda + Wes? Major swoon.
Bill Murray as other Wes Anderson characters
Man, what if Spike Jonze had made Being Bill Murray instead? Casey Weldon did a series of paintings of Bill Murray as characters from Wes Anderson’s movies…but non-Murray characters like Max Fischer, Margot Tenenbaum, and the Baumer.
Prints are available. And these were a part of a show called Bad Dads, consisting of art inspired by various Anderson films. Again, prints are available.
The auteur’s Super Bowl
What if the Super Bowl was directed by Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino? You’d get something like this. The Werner Herzog bit at the end is great.
Stop motion thanks
The National Board of Review gave Wes Anderson a Special Filmmaking Achievement award for Fantastic Mr. Fox; Anderson accepted the award in the medium of stop motion animation.
Fantastic Mr. Fox animation process
From Making Of, a further look at how the animation of Fantastic Mr. Fox was coordinated through the use of a custom-built software system that allowed for remote direction.
The best part about the setup is that the software interface for the cameras has a “Live to Wes” button that will stream the live feed from a particular camera to Wes Anderson for immediate viewing.
Fantastic Mr. Fox
In stop motion animation, Wes Anderson has found the perfect medium for telling his special brand of precise yet fanciful tales. I won’t go so far as to say that it’s his best film — Rushmore will be difficult to dislodge from its perch — but there are some pretty special moments in Fantastic Mr. Fox.
While the film deviates from Roald Dahl’s book quite a bit — only the middle third is straight from the book — the story holds true to the sense of playful mischieviousness evident in Dahl’s books for children. (I especially liked the drugged blueberry bit that Anderson purloined from Danny, the Champion of the World, my favorite Dahl story.) I can’t say for sure whether or not the movie is good for kids, but the two nine-year-old boys sitting next to me in the theater loved it…although they also loved the Tooth Fairy and the Alvin and the Chimpmunks: the Squeakquel trailers, so YMMV.
Hotbox!
Wes Anderson at NYPL tonight
Somehow not sold out yet: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach talk about The Fantastic Mr. Fox at the 42nd St. NYPL tonight. Tickets here.
When stop-motion meets the auteur
After doing the script, working with the actors, and supervise the set design, Wes Anderson directed Fantastic Mr. Fox over email. He also didn’t want to use many contemporary stop-motion animation techniques. Both of these decisions ruffled some feathers.
“It’s not the most pleasant thing to force somebody to do it the way they don’t want to do it,” Anderson said. “In Tristan’s case, what I was telling him was, ‘You can’t use the techniques that you’ve learned to use. I’m going to make your life more difficult by demanding a certain approach.’
“The simple reality is,” Anderson continued, “the movie would not be the way I wanted it if I just did it the way people were accustomed to doing it. I realized this is an opportunity to do something nobody’s ever seen before. I want to see it. I don’t want afterward to say, ‘I could have gone further with this.’”
(via @WaitingCasually)
Stay Connected