The director Wes Anderson is making a movie in a large studio in the East End of London while seated at his desk in Montparnasse, in Paris. His workspace is as carefully arrayed as the set of one of his films. A boxy nineteen-seventies touch-tone telephone rests on a dark-wood Art Deco desk, alongside a new Apple keyboard, a big computer screen and a scanner, a modern cordless phone, and a pair of small speakers. Behind the desk stand bookcases filled with art books, encyclopedias, uniform editions of literary classics, and a variety of tastefully selected objects, including a battered leather suitcase with metal corners and a postcard of Albert Camus. The walls are the color of Chinese mustard; yellow curtains shade high windows. The windows are cracked open, and the airy room, one of many in the bright and spacious apartment, is alive with the buzz of scooters and the whirr of cars from the street below.
The phone rings, and Anderson, a tall, slender man of forty, answers it. He’s wearing brown thin-wale corduroy pants, a purple sweater over a sky-blue shirt, and beige socks without shoes. He stays on the phone for about twenty minutes, talking while sending and receiving e-mails, which come with a blip and go with a whoosh. Anderson speaks clearly and rapidly, with a disarming blend of serenity and intensity; his ideas spiral out in an avid yet smoothly flowing rush. “The only real issue, I think, that we want to deeply explore is, What can we do to the ending?” he says to Andy Weisblum, the film’s editor, who is in New York. “I had always pictured it being more positive, even though everything I’ve done to the set and to the way it looks has made it more bleak.”
For more than a year, Anderson has been engaged in the production of an animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s book “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the story of a fox whose pilfering from three grotesque farmers provokes them into absurdly violent and extreme attempts to capture him, as he leads his family and friends on increasingly wild and desperate adventures in order to survive. Anderson, who has made five previous feature films, including “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” is using a hoary technology known as stop-motion animation, in which figurines are placed in a physical décor, moved infinitesimally by hand, and photographed, frame by frame, in each new pose; the succession of these poses, edited together, simulates motion. The same technique was used to bring King Kong to life in 1933, as well as in the “Wallace and Gromit” films, Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride,” and Henry Selick’s “Coraline.” Anderson could not have chosen a more painstaking way to make his first animated film. And doing it on the industrial scale required for a studio motion picture—this one is being produced by Twentieth Century Fox Animation—is a gigantic undertaking. It occupies two buildings at 3 Mills Studios, on London’s River Lea; in one, a vast, hangarlike stage, animation is taking place simultaneously on twenty-nine sets.
Anderson initially assumed that, given the exactingly technical format, his participation in the day-to-day shooting would be limited. In fact, though, he “found a way to insanely micromanage the movie anyway.” He did his micromanaging almost entirely from his apartment in Paris (a city that he loves, and in which he has spent much of his time since 2005), fielding phone calls and answering dozens, even hundreds, of e-mails a day from his colleagues in London and New York. At Anderson’s request, new systems were devised that allowed him real-time access to the pictures that were being shot. As Jeremy Dawson, one of the film’s producers, told me, “The animators are like musicians, in that they take an inanimate object and infuse it with life.” Anderson conducted them, for the most part, via remote control. “On this one computer is almost the entire history of the film,” he said, pointing to the Apple Mac Pro on the floor beside his desk. Allison Abbate, another of the film’s producers, who also worked on “Corpse Bride,” said, “His vision is serious, and it’s driving our technology.” She added, “In the past, we sent videotapes.”
At dinner that evening, in a bistro on the Rue de Vaugirard, Anderson said, of working on the movie, “It’s a weird combination of sedentary and frantic that I’ve never quite experienced before.” It wasn’t what he’d expected, but Owen Wilson, his close friend and a longtime collaborator, pointed out that the process “seems to suit how meticulous Wes is about getting things exactly as he imagines them.” He added, “When I was with him in Paris, he wasn’t even leaving his apartment. I was joking that it would be like the middle of ‘Shine,’ where the kid plays Rachmaninoff and then collapses. . . . It seemed like his work was never over, because he could control the whole universe of the movie.”
Anderson’s renown as a director was sealed in 2000, when, at the age of thirty, on the basis of his first two films, “Bottle Rocket” (1996) and “Rushmore” (1998), he was named “the next Scorsese,” by Martin Scorsese himself, writing in Esquire. Scorsese was right in one respect: Anderson’s first films, like Scorsese’s, introduced to cinema a new tone, an original mood. But it was hardly the tone or the mood of the early Scorsese. Anderson’s characters are rarely violent or even particularly demonstrative; their dialogue is understatedly droll, and their behavior is at once quietly idiosyncratic and startlingly sincere. The performances are controlled, tamped-down. The action takes place amid eye-catching décors and anachronistic furnishings. The scripts offer a winking catalogue of inside movie references, and the soundtracks are replete with a carefully curated collection of recordings, heavy on British Invasion classics. Anderson frames his images simply; their straightforward precision betrays a skeptical, comic edge and a zone of reserve. His emotional investment in his characters is offset by engaging antics that deflect bathos and refine dark and painful doings to a single, sharp point. “I like to do things that are a little surrealistic but with characters who are real,” he told me. “So that, even if things are a little unusual, the emotions will come through anyway.”
If his first two films and the one that followed in 2001, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” suggested the work of an extraordinarily sensitive and sophisticated hothouse talent, Anderson’s two subsequent films, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” (2004) and “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007)—both of which were shot on location, under challenging conditions, one at sea in a Second World War-era minesweeper and the other on a moving train in India—revealed a more intrepid aspect of his nature. In these movies, Anderson emerged as an heir to the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Howard Hawks, rugged adventurers whose daring exploits were matched by their dandyish style statements. (Louis Vuitton made luggage for Hemingway, and Vanity Fair issued a paper doll of him, with a variety of outfits; Hawks, a pioneering pilot and racecar driver, was equally renowned for his game of croquet.) Anderson shares their self-discipline; their coolness under pressure; their appreciation of the exacting work ethic behind the beauty of objects; and their physical joy in the presence of danger.
Anjelica Huston, who met Anderson after seeing “Bottle Rocket” (and then appeared in three of his movies), found him to be “very courtly and proper.” He “had that old-fashioned deportment,” yet had infused the movie with a kind of energy and a “rogue presence” that she hadn’t seen “since the old movies with Jack”—Nicholson—“and Dennis Hopper.” Cate Blanchett, who appeared in “The Life Aquatic,” said of Anderson, “Is he Dorian Gray, I wonder? He is from another time, but it’s completely and utterly genuine.”
In short, Anderson resembles his films, a fact that, he knows, has played a role in their success. “In the course of doing these first few movies, I found a way that felt instinctively right for me, and I didn’t feel constrained,” he told me. “The end result is that they’re very personal movies in a way that some people really connect with.” Anderson’s idiosyncrasies, personal and artistic, resonated from the start with a certain segment of the population: hipsters—young bourgeois bohemians—who came of age with the Internet and took from it both a trendsetting attunement to pop culture and a chance to make quick money while remaining artists at heart. A generation born of a paradox, its members recognized themselves in the romantic ironies of Anderson’s movies, as well as in his embrace of the expressive power of luxury objects. Robert Lanham, in “The Hipster Handbook,” a 2002 comic sociological portrait of the new urban youth culture, says that “ ‘Rushmore’ defined Wes Anderson as the quintessential Hipster director for today’s savvy filmgoer,” and puts him near the top of the list of “Celebrities Hipsters Have Crushes On,” right behind Beck and Edward Norton. In 2004, Gothamist called Anderson “the anointed hipster auteur,” and Elbert Ventura, writing in Slate earlier this year, claimed, “These days, the Tarantino imitators have been replaced by the Wes wannabes. A popular strain in recent American indie cinema has been the Andersonian quirkfest, a tendency that runs through movies like ‘Juno,’ ‘Napoleon Dynamite,’ ‘Son of Rambow,’ ‘Charlie Bartlett,’ and ‘Garden State,’ among others.”
Still, the acclaim that greeted “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums” didn’t carry over to “The Life Aquatic,” which was a critical and a box-office disaster; “The Darjeeling Limited” received mixed reviews and did not attract large audiences in the United States. Over a drink at Le Select, in Paris, Anderson admitted that he was troubled by the reception of “Darjeeling,” especially in light of the success, the following year, of Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire.” “Why did this India movie become a big hit and mine didn’t?” he said. He answered his own question: “With my style, I can take a subject that you’d think would be commercial and turn it into something that not a lot of people want to see.”
Anderson is acutely aware that a lot depends on the reception of “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” It is, by his standards, an expensive movie. (He puts its budget at forty million.) To be a commercial success, it will have to appeal to young people, many of them, and the question that Anderson raised on the phone with his editor—about finding the right tone for the ending—is of great importance, both for him and for Fox Filmed Entertainment. Tom Rothman, the company’s co-chairman, said the studio knew all along that it had an unusual project on its hands. “The trick,” he told me, “is, from the business side, to try to be fiscally responsible so you can be creatively reckless. If it cost what ‘Ice Age 3’ did”—an estimated ninety million dollars—“it would have to be more conventional.”
In early May, Anderson and his girl friend, Juman Malouf, a writer and costume designer, took the Eurostar to London, so that Anderson could work with Bill Murray in a recording studio and visit the set where the movie was being shot. (The two men were also making a promotional video for the movie.) Murray was nominated for a Golden Globe for his supporting role in “Rushmore,” and has appeared in all of Anderson’s subsequent movies. In “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” he lends his voice to the badger who is Mr. Fox’s lawyer.
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I joined them at 3 Mills Studio, which occupies the rustic site of a group of tidal mills that were up and running in the Middle Ages and continued to function until the nineteen-forties. Its restored buildings, with their distinctive squat and pointy towers, are situated on an island in the river and are closely watched by security guards. (When I got lost walking toward the set, the disembodied voice of a guard who had been keeping tabs on me by remote camera gave me directions.) The studio’s expanse was subdivided by walls of black cloth running from the floor almost to the ceiling, thirty-five or forty feet high. The vividly decorated sets—depicting farmhouses, factories, a supermarket, fields, and even a three-dimensional twenty-foot-long city (based on a street in Bath)—would have been the dollhouses and dioramas of a child’s most extravagant fantasies, were they not surrounded by a highly focussed horde of more than a hundred animators and crew members.
Though silence didn’t prevail in the studio—it was not a sound stage, since the voices had been prerecorded—quiet did. The business of moving the figurines—which the crew call “puppets”—and the cameras with them, requires surgical concentration. Anderson spoke with the animators, set dressers, camera crew, and production associates. On one set, a computer screen played a video of him miming the gestures that a figurine was to be given. On another, he decided that the head of a fox looked different from the one that he had seen earlier and called for it to be replaced. As Anderson fussed over the details, the unifying principle of his design became clear: to imbue the artifice of stop-motion animation with a strong air of reality.
Anderson wanted the figurines to have “a believable sort of finish, a lifelike quality,” according to Andy Gent, the puppet master. Although the largest of the figurines were only about eighteen inches tall, their fur was, indeed, fur (which, Gent said, came from “safe sources,” such as “food production”). They had been crafted for maximum pliability of expression: Mr. Fox’s eyes were poseable, and his foam-latex face had a jointed framework that could register the slightest sneer or snarl or raised eyebrow. Moreover, the figurines had tailored clothing, made with fabric. (Anderson designed the clothes himself, having his own tailor send fabric samples. He has a suit made from the same corduroy as Mr. Fox’s.) In closeup, not only are the buttons on Mr. Fox’s white shirt visible; so is the stitching at the edge of the collar.
