Wesley Wales "Wes" Anderson (born May 1, 1969) is an American film director and screenwriter. His films are known for their distinctive visual and narrative style.
He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001 and Moonrise Kingdom in 2012, as well as the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009. He received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy for The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014.
Early life
Wesley Wales Anderson was born on May 1, 1969, in Houston, Texas, the son of Texas Ann (Burroughs), an archaeologist, and Melver Leonard Anderson, who worked in advertising and public relations. He is the second of three boys; his parents divorced when he was 8. His older brother, Mel, is a doctor, and his younger brother, Eric, is a writer and artist whose paintings and designs have graced several of Anderson’s films. Anderson has Swedish and Norwegian ancestry.
He attended St. Francis Episcopal Day School and graduated from St. John's School in Houston in 1987, which he later used as a prominent location throughout Rushmore. As a child, Anderson made silent films on his father's Superâ€"8 camera, starring his brothers and friends, although his first ambition was to be a writer. Anderson attended college while working partâ€"time as a cinema projectionist. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in philosophy in 1990, where he met future frequent collaborator Owen Wilson.
Film career
Anderson's first film, Bottle Rocket (1996), based on a short film that he made with Luke and Owen Wilson, was a crime caper focused on a group of young Texans aspiring to achieve major heists. Though well reviewed, it performed poorly at the box office.
Anderson's next film, Rushmore (1998), a quirky comedy about a high school student's crush on an elementary school teacher, starring Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman, was a critical success. Murray has since appeared in every Anderson film to date. In 2000, filmmaker Martin Scorsese praised Bottle Rocket and Rushmore.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Anderson's next comedy-drama film about a successful artistic New York City family and its ostracized patriarch, represented Anderson's greatest success until Moonrise Kingdom in 2012. Earning more than $50 million in domestic box office receipts, the film was nominated for an Academy Award and ranked by an Empire poll as the 159th greatest film ever made.
Anderson's next feature, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), about a Jacques Cousteau-esque documentary filmmaker played by Bill Murray, serves as a classic example of Anderson's style but its critical reception was less favorable than his previous films and its box office did not match the heights of The Royal Tenenbaums. In September 2006, following the disappointing commercial and critical reception of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen released a tongue-in-cheek "letter of intervention" for Anderson's artistic "malaise". Proclaiming themselves to be fans of "World Cinema" and Anderson in particular, they offered Anderson their soundtrack services for his Darjeeling Limited, including lyrics for a title track.
The Darjeeling Limited (2007), about three emotionally distant brothers traveling together on a train in India, reflected the more dramatic tone of The Royal Tenenbaums, but faced similar criticisms to The Life Aquatic. Anderson has acknowledged that he went to India to film the 2007 movie, partly as a tribute to the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, whose "films have also inspired all my other movies in different ways" (the film is dedicated to him). The film starred Anderson staples Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson in addition to Adrien Brody, and the script was co-written by Anderson, Schwartzman and Roman Coppola.
In 2008, Anderson was hired to write the screenplay of the American adaptation of My Best Friend, a French film, for producer Brian Grazer; Anderson's first draft was titled "The Rosenthaler Suite".
Anderson's stop motion animation adaptation of the Roald Dahl book Fantastic Mr Fox was released in 2009. Although the film did not earn much more than its production budget, the film was highly praised and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Following the critical success of Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson made perhaps his best received film to date, Moonrise Kingdom, which opened the Cannes Film Festival 2012. The film, emblematic of Anderson's style, was a financial success and earned Anderson another Academy Award nomination for his screenplay.
Anderson's latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), starred Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law, F. Murray Abraham, and Saoirse Ronan, among many others, along with several of his regular collaborators including Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Jason Schwartzman. Set in the 1930s, it followed the adventures of M. Gustave, the hotel's concierge, making "a marvelous mockery of history, turning its horrors into a series of graceful jokes and mischievous gestures," according to the New York Times. The film represented one of Anderson's greatest critical and commercial successes, grossing nearly $175 million worldwide and earning dozens of award nominations.
Anderson has also created several notable short films. In addition to the original Bottle Rocket short, Anderson made the Paris-set Hotel Chevalier (2007), which was created as a prologue to The Darjeeling Limited and starred Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, and the Italy-set Castello Cavalcanti (2013), which was produced by Prada and starred Jason Schwartzman as an unsuccessful race-car driver. Additionally, he has directed a number of television commercials for companies such as Stella Artois and Prada, including an elaborate American Express ad, in which he starred as himself.
Anderson's cinematic influences include François Truffaut, Louis Malle, Satyajit Ray, John Huston, Mike Nichols, Hal Ashby, Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, and Roman Polanski.
Directing techniques
Themes and stories
Anderson has chosen to direct mostly fast-paced comedies marked by more serious or melancholic elements, with themes often centered on grief, loss of innocence, parental abandonment, adultery, sibling rivalry and unlikely friendships. His movies have been noted for being unusually character-driven, and by turns both derided and praised with terms like "literary geek chic". The plots of his movies often feature thefts and unexpected disappearances, with a tendency to borrow liberally from the caper genre.
Visual style
Anderson has been noted for his extensive use of flat space camera moves, obsessively symmetrical compositions, snap-zooms, slow-motion walking shots, a deliberately limited color palette, and hand-made art direction often utilizing miniatures. These stylistic choices give his movies a highly distinctive quality that has provoked much discussion, critical study, supercuts and mash-ups, and even parody. Many writers, critics and even Anderson himself have commented that this gives his movies the feel of being "self-contained worlds", or a "scale model household". According to Michael Chabon, with "a baroque pop bent that is not realist, surrealist or magic realist", but rather might be described as "fabul[ist]".
From The Life Aquatic on, Anderson has relied more heavily on stop motion animation and miniatures, even making an entire feature with stop motion animation with Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Soundtracks
Anderson frequently uses pop music from the 1960s and 70s on the soundtracks of his films, and one band or musician tends to dominate each soundtrack. In Rushmore, Cat Stevens and British Invasion groups featured prominently, The Royal Tenenbaums included multiple songs recorded by Nico and The Velvet Underground, The Life Aquatic was replete with David Bowie including both originals and covers performed by Seu Jorge, The Kinks appeared on the soundtrack for The Darjeeling Limited, The Beach Boys in Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Hank Williams for Moonrise Kingdom. The Grand Budapest Hotel is notable for being the first Anderson film to eschew using any pop music from the 1950s, 60s or 70s, likely due to it being set in the early 1930s. The soundtracks for his films have often brought renewed attention to the artists featured, most prominently in the case of "These Days", which was used in The Royal Tenenbaums.
Personal life
Anderson is dating Lebanese writer and voice actress Juman Malouf. He lives in New York City but has spent extensive time in Paris.
His brother is artist Eric Chase Anderson, who illustrated the Criterion Collection releases of Anderson's films and provided the voice of Kristofferson in Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Anderson is the great-grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars.
Filmography
Features
Short films
Commercials and promotional videos
Recurring collaborators
Anderson's films feature many of the same actors, crew members, and other collaborators, including the Wilson brothers (Owen, Luke, and Andrew), Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Seymour Cassel, Anjelica Huston, Jason Schwartzman, Kumar Pallana and son Dipak Pallana, Stephen Dignan and Brian Tenenbaum, and Eric Chase Anderson (Anderson's brother). Other frequent collaborators include writer Noah Baumbach (who co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Fantastic Mr. Fox, with Anderson co-producing his film The Squid and the Whale), Owen Wilson (who co-wrote three of Anderson's feature films), cinematographer Robert Yeoman (A.S.C.), music supervisor Randall Poster, and composers Mark Mothersbaugh and Alexandre Desplat.
Awards and nominations
Academy Award for Best Director|| The Grand Budapest Hotel|| style="background: #FFD; color: black; vertical-align: middle; text-align: center; " class="partial table-partial"|Pending
References
- Bibliography
- Browning, Mark (2011). Wes Anderson: why his movies matter. Santa Barbara, Calif: Praeger. ISBNÂ 1-5988-4352-4.Â
- "Special Issue: Wes Anderson & Co.". New Review of Film and Television Studies 10 (1). 2012. ISSNÂ 1740-0309.Â
- Seitz, Matt Zoller (2013). The Wes Anderson Collection. New York, New York: Harry N. Abrams. ISBNÂ 978-0810997417.Â
External links
- Wes Anderson at Unsung Films
- Wes Anderson at AllMovie
- Wes Anderson at the Internet Movie Database
- Tête-à -Tête with Nic Harcourt at Los Angeles Times Magazine
- "Into The Deep", in-depth Anderson profile at The Guardian February 12, 2005
- "Wes Anderson", brief profile by Martin Scorsese. Esquire.
- Interview with Wes Anderson for The Darjeeling Limited at Ioncinema.com
- Wes Anderson Interview on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos (Video)
- "Notes on Quirky" Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, No.1, 2010