That would be interesting to revisit that character, but I guess sequels are not what you do.
I guess not, but I do feel like in some way I always related Jason Schwartzman to Jean-Pierre Léaud in the [Antoine Doinel] Francois Truffaut movies. You know he did his series of films, those are not the kind of things where you’d necessarily think anyone’s going to do a sequel, but he continues the stories.
Right, it’s more continuation than “sequel.” I wanted to ask you about music. I saw a cut of “The Royal Tenenbaums” back in L.A. and when the actual Beatles began and ended the film.
You saw it in the illegal phase. [laughs]
I’d always heard that you had enlisted Elliott Smith to do The Beatles covers once you couldn’t get the proper rights, but I could never confirm it. Is that true?
Yes. Elliot Smith had done – we had gone through a long process of trying to get permission for these Beatles songs and in those days they weren’t doing it. That changed but at that time we were trying to break the thing and get it to happen. The problem was we had some pretty good ins. We’d used some John Lennon music in “Rushmore” and Yoko Ono I always had a feeling that she’s been supportive of me, even though I don’t know her. It might be presumptuous of me to say that, but I would like to say Yoko has been supportive.
Paul McCartney had seen [‘Tenenbaums’] and he said yes, but George Harrison was sick and dying. You had to get everybody to sign off and George was just not possible, no one was going to say, “Oh before you die could you please watch this movie and tell us whether we can use the music for it?” So then we got Elliot Smith. Then I thought I’d like to see if Elliot Smith could do this. He did a version but he wasn’t in a great mental or physical space at the time and it just was not a successful recording session. It was kind of a mess.
So he was doing those Beatles covers? [The movie originally began with The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and ended with The Anthology version of “I’m Looking Through You”]
He just did “Hey Jude.” He did “Hey Jude” but he wasn’t happy with it and it didn’t really work. He wasn’t comfortable with the whole situation it seems. Then at the last minute I got asked by Mark Mothersabaugh, “Can we do this?” Mark and [music supervisor] George Drakoulias and I, we just went in and very quickly we did the whole thing and we had good revisions and Mark just made it happen. And then it was fine.
But you know we even tried to have some Beatles songs in another one later. At one point in “The Darjeeling Limited” we had some Beatles songs and that didn’t really work out either. It was another weird moment with the Apple people but then along the way in the process of that I had this concept of this cycle of Kinks song and it was better. We ended The Beatles process in the middle because I said, “You know what? We’ve got it.”
It’s hard to imagine that movie without its Kinks now. Are you going to use the Beatles at some point?
I don’t know. I don’t have any thoughts about it.
Your longtime music supervisor Randall Poster was telling me about “the vault.” [their code for songs that they sit on for years until they find the right movie for them]
Oh, things we’ve got and saved up. We had one, one that came out in a nice way was we had this song, “Let Her Dance” for “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and sort of late in the game we thought, “Maybe here’s our chance to use this song.” We’d had it sitting around for many years and we thought, “It’s going to end the movie, we’re going to do a dance scene to it.” We’ve had a few like that along the way where we’ve had sort of who knows how we’re going to use it and when and then it sort of reveals itself.
You wrote a script for Ron Howard’s company a long time ago [“The Rosenthaler Suite” a remake of the French film “My Best Friend”]. Would you ever revisit that?
It was for Ron Howard’s company producing actually, Image Entertainment. I think the studio didn’t like what I did, it probably wasn’t that good anyway but I did have a part of that script that I still like. I still think there’s a thing that I did…[trails off, perhaps not wanting to reveal]
There’s a caper element that reminds me of the caper element in ‘Grand Budapest Hotel.’
Yeah, that’s right. There were a couple of characters that I thought I might use in another way if they let me. I’m sure that it’s all owned by Universal.
Maybe they’ll let you do that. They should.
Who knows.
For more ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’ context and thoughts from Anderson, also check out this interview with the filmmaker from Berlin a few weeks ago. “The Grand Budapest Hotel” opens in limited release this Friday, March 7. The film goes wider on March 14.
