SHORT TAKES Anderson got his start in Hollywood with a short film, and even since making it big, he hasn’t abandoned those roots. Along with his eight feature-length movies, he has also written and directed a handful of short films, often playing off the stories in his longer movies. Here are three of his best.
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Anderson’s first short film, which he wrote with Owen Wilson, eventually got made into a feature-length.
A 13-minute prologue to the longer Darjeeling Limited, the film was initially intended to be a stand-alone work.
This 8-minute film, presented by Prada, tells the story of a racecar driver crashing his car in an Italian village.
For many artists, the experience would have been a crushing blow to their burgeoning creative instincts, but for Anderson, it only strengthened his resolve. In his later films, like Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom, viewers can catch glimpses of the signature visuals from his first feature, such as overhead shots and hand-drawn maps. But beyond a novel cinematic approach, Anderson was doing something new: He was telling a story about flawed characters without being sarcastic, mean or jaded. Though Bottle Rocket is a story of three aimless criminal losers, it’s really about a couple of friends just looking for purpose. Reflecting on Bottle Rocket in 2000, filmmaking legend Martin Scorsese wrote in Esquire that the film didn’t possess “a trace of cynicism” and showed a sense of “tenderness” and “grace” uncommon in modern American cinema.
IN HIS OWN UNIVERSE Each Anderson film carries the polished style and hallmarks of their director—for most the part, you can instantly tell you’re watching an Anderson film. But each also manages to bring the viewer into its own unique universe. As Anderson tells it, that singular, project-to-project vision requires a level of dedication to the story. “I only do one movie at a time—I don’t have like six different scripts sitting around and think, ‘If this one doesn’t go, I’ll do the other one,’” he says. “This is all I’ve got.” Like The Grand Budapest Hotel, each of his films takes place in their own sort of unusual universe, where sets, locations and costumes are used almost like characters themselves. In Rushmore, the private academy is
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a symbol of Max’s longing for structure and stability. In The Royal Tenenbaums, wardrobe decisions represent attributes of individual family members. The Life Aquatic features an elusive “jaguar shark” that is both Captain Ahab’s great white whale and Gatsby’s green light. The brothers in The Darjeeling Limited carry literal and emotional baggage from their father. And, along with these, there are countless other examples throughout Anderson’s catalogue. The technique has allowed him to make his films into experiences that let viewers analyze every shot for meaning. But ironically, even though he’s attempting to convey deep meaning and truth with each shot, his aesthetic is intentionally artificial and playful. In Grand Budapest, the elaborate scenery and buildings carry a storybook quality, because in many cases, they were built by hand. “I don’t really have that much fun shooting on greenscreens. I would rather we make something,” Anderson says. “When we do this stuff, we use some paintings, we use some miniatures. We use some stuff they might have used in silent Georges Méliès-type movies [a turn-of-the-century filmmaker who specialized in handmade effects techniques].” Along with his artfully purposeful sets, another Anderson constant is his rotating cast of familiar faces. Together with the Wilson brothers (Owen even collaborated in writing Anderson’s first three features), Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Anjelica Huston, Jason Schwartzman and Tilda Swinton are among a few dozen actors who have appeared in numerous Anderson films. Anderson does admit to creating some of his greatest characters specifically for
certain actors. For one of the characters in Grand Budapest, he had his eye on Ralph Fiennes, but he was hesitant at first to ask him to play the role. “Sometimes I feel like the best way to make somebody not want the part is to offer it to them. I don’t know if it’s just actor psychology,” Anderson jokes about the casting process. “I’ve only got one guy that I thought could play this, so I was very anxious about it. I don’t think I would have accepted [Ralph] saying no. I’m sure I would have just been all over him and, at a certain point, he probably would have had to break down.” The use of a sort of rotating ensemble cast is another example of the filmmaker’s penchant for using dichotomy to tell his stories. In a series of films that feature uniquely distinct cultures and histories, the cast helps give each—no matter how stylized and alien—a certain familiarity.
A GRAND AMBITION After tackling topics like absent fathers (Royal Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic, Darjeeling Limited), adolescent rebellion (Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom) and criminal identity crisis (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Bottle Rocket) in films masquerading as heists, adventures and family dramas, Anderson has graduated to even bigger themes this year. The Grand Budapest Hotel finds the filmmaker grappling with the ideas of war, destruction and violence in a movie that is essentially a comedy caper about Gustave, a worldly concierge, and his young mentee. The filmmaker says the idea for Gustave— a more confident and self-actualized character than most Anderson protagonists—was actually inspired by someone he knew. Based on his quirky, real-life friend, the story started to come together about six years ago.