The rookie director was shocked when Wes Anderson was just beginning and wanted to reshoot the scene from his 1996 debut, “Bottle Rocket.” Columbia photos sent all the film props to the store.
So, when he made his next film, Rushmore (1998), Anderson decided that the same thing would never happen again. He put everything in the SUV when the filming was over and then drove away the hoarding to take care of himself.
That decision was to support Anderson himself as well. Over the past two and a half years, the curator of Ciné Mathè è Française in Paris and the London Design Museum have retrospectively edited Anderson's storage facility in Kent, England (including thousands of items from his films) as directors.
Items like this are key to Anderson's signature style (retro fashion, symmetry, heavy pastel colours) as popular on Instagram and Tiktok accounts and documented in book and magazine spreads. However, Johanna Agarman Ross, a curator at the Museum of Design, said it was “a misconception” to think of Anderson as a director defined by several styles of ratios.
He also “was very interested in the creative process,” Ageman Ross said, and he believed that they had to be “fully formed art and design” as even the smallest items would help create the world on screen.
Some of Anderson's most famous props took weeks or months to make when pregnant, such as the fake Renaissance painting “Boy with Apple,” which appears in the “Grand Budapest Hotel.” A vending machine that mixes and distributes martinis from “Asteroid City.” We painted the Louis Vuitton luggage that appears in “The Darjeeling Limited.”
Agerman Ross said he was talking to the artisan who was talking to the artisan. She said she told her there was a long email communication with Anderson to fine-tune the font and color of the magazine cover that was displayed for milliseconds in “The French Dispatch.”
Matthieu Orléan, curator of Ciné Mathè que Française, said Anderson shaped the project from the start with attention to detail. The exhibition includes Vitrine, filled with notebooks tied to yellow spirals, in which the director has written down his ideas. These include script notes, in careful capital letters, and fine storyboards for the scene.
The exhibition also includes a screen showing a black and white animated storyboard: animated, which Anderson uses to show actors and crew how they want to display the scene on screen. Orléan said Anderson produced these for all the films since 2008's “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” and the director reads the script on top of it and adds that the actor knows how he wants to deliver the line.
“Fantastic Mr. Fox” Anderson's first stop motion animated film was the turning point of his almost 30-year career.
On tour of the show earlier this week, model maker Andy Ghent, who worked on seven Anderson films, said he “completely changed” the appearance of a stop motion movie by claiming that the director has real animal fibers by making it difficult for the film to control the dolls in the film, allowing them to move between shots and creating a screen effect known as “boiling.”
He said Ghent and his fellow doll makers “enslaves the smallest whiskers” to make sure Anderson looks exactly what he wanted, but added that the director gave him the freedom of the artisan despite his reputation as perfectionist.
For example, while building “Dog Island,” Ghent remembers Anderson's opening instructions were simple: “Dog Sculpture!” So the gentleman and his team spent months making hundreds of Mongrels, and Anderson chose the bits he liked from the individual models and asked the puppeteer to tie them together. “It was amazing and fun,” recalled Ghent.
At the opening of the Paris exhibition on Monday, one item attracted more attention than any other. This is a model for the Grand Budapest Hotel. Before giving a brief speech, Anderson, who refused to interview this article, posed in front of a pink wall for a photo, including a French pop star in cute costumes, like the characters from Anderson's film.
Simon Weiss, who oversaw the production of the props, said six artisans spent three months building the model, which included glass windows and thin curtains. But the color choices were all Anderson's, he said.
Weiss said he couldn't believe it when the colour samples first arrived at the studio. “I said, 'Pink? Bright pink and dark pink? No!” he recalled. “I asked the art department to make sure there were no mistakes, but they said, 'That's right. Wes chose these colors.' ”
He said that only when Weiss finished his job he appreciated Anderson's decision. The colours were quirky, but they reflect real Central European buildings and perfectly suited the quirkyness of the film.
Anderson said that the details might be minimally sweating, but “after all, he's always right.”
