“I lived in the house with Wes, and he did this thing there where he said, ‘OK, I’ve got us a private chef,’ which sounds like a great deal,” Murray explains. “But it also means you can work until 9:30 at night. Private chef will be cooking a meal that serves at 11:30. So I actually could work till 10:00 at night and then it would be 11:30. And you get there, and you go, ‘Oh great. We’ve got a great meal coming.’ So we would have a glass of wine or whatever, and then the food would come and the food would be really good. And then you’d go, ‘That was great. That was really good. Good days. That was a long day’s work, wasn’t it?’ And then bam! And you’re out. And then the next day the personal chef has gotten Wes his granola and all that kind of stuff. You got a great start and then you do it all over.”
A less pleasant memory occurred while filming “Life Aquatic” in Italy when the production visited a trash heap for a scene at the end of the movie. Anderson wanted a shot of seagulls following the boat at the end of the movie and was told the most seagulls were at the dump in Rome.
“So we went to the dump in Rome with a couple of pickup trucks and drove around, and I was supposed to wave at the birds,” Murray recalls. “Well, have you ever been in a real dump? They have these breather pipes that just breathe methane and it just pops out as a semi-liquid, semi-gas. And you’re driving around in this stuff and your eyes start to get a little weird. And the gulls would not follow us. We were chasing the gulls out and around the garbage dump for a few hours. And it’s like, ‘O.K, cut. Hmmmm.’ And at the end of the movie, when you take a fishing boat back to port and you will get gulls. I don’t know why they didn’t think that was gonna happen.”
“Aquatic” also was the last film Anderson made with Walt Disney studios which had produced and released his relative hits “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.” He’s worked with Fox Searchlight and Focus Features primarily since.
“Well, back then they were kind of pushing it around a little bit, you know. It was Disney, and they weren’t giving him what he wanted to do,” Murray says. “I didn’t think they were particularly kind to him. I don’t think they’ve got him. He made two movies in a row with them and I still didn’t think they knew what they had. And finally he ended his relationship with them and [I] don’t think they ever delivered the goods. I don’t think they worked as hard as he did. Like he would look at their notes and go, ‘That’s great.’ They would try to give him notes and to his credit, any artist’s credit, he’s like, ‘Ehh, that’s not going to happen.’ So that doesn’t happen anymore. He’s lucky enough to find [Indian Paintbrush financier] Steve Rales, who is the perfect guy.”
Finally, on this particular day at least, if you figured he’s grabbed a prop or two from Anderson’s immaculate sets you guessed correctly and “Moonrise Kingdom” provided the bounty.
“I ended up with some tables and a canoe,” Murray says. “The set decorator is my friend. The canoes are wildly unstable…don’t ever…They’re beautiful and they float, but if you got in you’d die.”
“Isle of Dogs” is now playing in limited release.
