Right, so everyone’s interviewing Wes Anderson, ok? But everyone’s asking the same boring-ass questions (shame on you unimaginative press – and one more person asks about the return of Max Fisher gets a slap in the face).
But someone (we say someone because more than one source has the same interview, ugo and ioncinema) asked some decent – ‘what’s next?’ follow-up questions.
Asked about his next film, the animated his stop-motion animated take on Roald Dahl‘s “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Anderson said the budget and scope of the film would be much bigger than his current effort.
“Well it’s bigger than ‘Darjeeling,’ but just because that’s a movie where you have to build everything. And you know, you’re building it in miniature. It’s stop-motion, he said.
Anderson went on to confirm the rumor that noted stop-motion animator Henry Selick (“The Night Before Christmas”) had left the project. “Henry has his own movie that he’s directing,” Anderson said. “But [Selick] introduced me to Mark Gustafson who’s one of his colleagues at this place Vinton [Studios] where he works. So he’s going to be in charge of the animation. But it’s very low-budget for an animated movie. It’s like $40 million or not even that.”
‘Fox’ will feature the voices of Bill Murray, George Clooney and Jason Schwartzman (though Cate Blanchett and Angelica Houston are rumored to be onboard as well. Update: Blanchett is confirmed for “Fox’). And Anderson’s said in a few recent inteviews that he was getting ready to fly off to London to start shooting the film, but as of late last week, it hasn’t happened yet.
“We’re still designing the characters,” he said. “We just got the money two months ago. We were at one studio that went out of business. We’ve been through a lot of different phases of getting this sorted out. But finally we’re all rolling.”
Asked whether he was worried whether he would have less control then he normally does by depending on animators that loosening his tight grip was something he relished.
“I kind of like to not be- like, the way we shot in India, I feel like what I enjoyed the most about it were the things that we couldn’t control,” he explained. “Because I’m pretty good at controlling it all. And India is a place you can’t control; it was just full of surprises. But the animated stuff, we control everything. The actors will bring a lot to it. The animators are like actors also, so they bring their own thing to it.”
Yet Another Baumbach Collaboration?
‘Fox’ was written with “The Life Aquatic” writing partner Noah Baumbach (who’s own feature “Margot At The Wedding” hits theaters in November), but Wes mentioned that before writing ‘Aquatic,’ the two writers made a completely different story together. Essentially it sounds like they have another script to finish that could easily be another film collaboration.
“Noah [Baumbach] and I started working on a…story for a movie without really realizing we were doing it. It wasn’t ‘The Life Aquatic.’ It was something else that we haven’t even finished writing. Whenever we would go to dinner or something, we’d just start making up scenes for this thing and then we just started writing them down because [we realized] that we’ve got a lot of stuff now.”
Of course the interviewers don’t follow up and ask what that movie was, but that’s pretty typical.
MTV has a little video interview feature with Anderson and Schwartzman online and the main subject seemed to be the idea of Anderson not repeating himself. As he similarily told the AP, he can’t apologize for who he is. “The only thing that I can do reliably is just say, ‘What do I think is the best thing for this scene? What is the story I’m most interested in telling?'” Anderson said. “Whenever I see the dailies, I’m always surprised: ‘So that’s what it looks like when you make all of these decisions. It adds up to this.'”
Anderson Doesn’t Want To Repeat Himself