Man, just when you thought the whole “controversy” about Wes Anderson directing parts of his upcoming animated film, “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” via video chat, phone and email was over, the L.A. Times stirs it up again with quotes from both parties and quite a few rather stinging and unfavorable ones from Anderson’s British animation crew.
It’s probably safe to say that Anderson won’t ever be working again with cinematographer Tristan Oliver. “It’s not in the least bit normal,” Oliver said about Anderson’s proclivities to work via email and not on the East London set. “I’ve never worked on a picture where the director has been anywhere other than the studio floor!”
While the Times notes that many animation films are made in this manner and got testimonials as such from people like Allison Abbate who produced Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” or “Corpse Bride” and said it wasn’t unusual for Burton to be absent from both (though he never did direct the former, that was Henry Selick), the crew of this one seems to not have been having it.
“Honestly? Yeah. He has made our lives miserable,” director of animation, Mark Gustafson told the Times. “I probably shouldn’t say that.”
The paper says that Anderson had a near-total ignorance of stop-motion production design which sounds like it led to battles between the animators that were a little stuck in their ways, whereas Anderson set guidelines early on about techniques he didn’t want to see (CGI, etc.). “He’s pushed it further than I would have been comfortable pushing it,” Gustafson continued. “He definitely doesn’t have some of the reservations that I have from working with this stuff for years. But that’s good. I came here to be challenged. And he’s certainly challenged me.”
Oliver’s final quote is downright nasty. “I think he’s a little sociopathic. I think he’s a little O.C.D. Contact with people disturbs him. This way, he can spend an entire day locked inside an empty room with a computer. He’s a bit like the Wizard of Oz. Behind the curtain.”
Anderson doesn’t really care to respond and makes no apologies for his direction noting that even when he was on set, he was on at a computer dealing with “thousands of decisions to be made.” As for Oliver, Anderson simply says of his final remarks, “I would say that kind of crosses the line for what’s appropriate for the director of photography to say behind the director’s back while he’s working on the movie. So I don’t even want to respond to it.”
Definitely the smart way to handle it. While we’re not convinced that Anderson isn’t OCD given his increasingly hermetically-sealed directorial style, we do feel bad for the guy seemingly getting beat up on by his crew and of course they’re going to demonstrate hostility and skepticism for a guy that isn’t as experienced in animation and wants to jump in with his way. It’s possibly akin to a young director given the reigns of a big project and have to deal with a Union crew that sneer and not-so-quietly think, “who the fuck is this kid?” Either way, hopefully this is the last back and forth salvo on ‘Fox’ because shit is getting ugly. Another friend of ours in the U.K. who knows several people who worked on the set also defended Anderson’s techniques and feels some of this has been blown out of proportion.
We’ve been fairly lukewarm on “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” so far this year, but we must reiterate, the second trailer was rather excellent and really changed our point of view. We’re not necessarily expecting masterpiece, but we are now very curious and greatly looking forward to the film (we put it on our London Film Fest picks too).
Here’s a new little featurette about the making of the film and the animation process. Maybe you’ll see some perturbed Englishman in it? “Fantastic Mr. Fox” hits U.S. theaters in limited release on November 13 and then goes wide November 25.
Update: Tristan Oliver has commented on this article over at a Wes Anderson fansite. He says he’s been getting death threats because of it, or he probably means people in comments section are threatening him. “I stupidly made a couple of ill-advised throw away remarks at a press junket and these have been decontextualised and refined into hard black and white print causing a furor that never existed.” He basically disavows the L.A. Times article, but if you called a director a “sociopath” in print, you too might want to say the comments were taken out of context.