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Wes Anderson on The Life Aquatic...
Photo: Dave Butler/BVI UK
Wes Anderson & Anjelica Huston enjoy themselves after our masterclass
The Stanley Kubrick Masterclass with Wes Anderson
following a preview of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Co-presented by The Script Factory together with the National Film & TV School
Screen on the Green, London
Sunday 13 Feb 2005
This was the first of a new series of events co-presented by The National Film & Television School, supported by Skillset and the Stanley Kubrick Foundation.
A packed house enjoyed the UK's only sneak preview of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou courtesy of Buena Vista International, and then gave a rapturous welcome to its co-writer/director Wes Anderson in a conversation chaired by Kevin Conroy Scott. By day a literary agent, Kevin is also a freelance journo who has recently edited a volume of Screenwriters' Masterclasses in which screenwriters - Wes Anderson included - talk about their Greatest Movies. After the session Wes and his guests - including Anjelica Huston, and Noah Taylor, enjoyed a party peppered with audience members and celebrity guests - from Clive Owen (clutching his still-warm Bafta collected just the night before) to Brian Cox. Then as if the film, the masterclass, and the celeb crowd wasnt enough, the wonderful Seu Jorge picked up his guitar and serenaded the crowd with songs from the film. Heaven!
Kevin Conroy Scott: Welcome Wes Anderson!
Obviously there are similarities between Steve Zissou and Jacques Cousteau. Can you talk a little bit about where the idea came from?
Wes Anderson: Well, yes. I don’t know if anybody noticed the disclaimer at the end of the film? The movie is dedicated to Cousteau but his society was not involved in making the film. That was a legal thing we had to put on at the end. I used to not be able to mention that it was inspired by Cousteau in any way, but it seemed sort of obvious, so now I’m allowed to mention that it was completely inspired by Cousteau. When I was a kid, they had an ABC primetime show, and every week he was on TV. For me, he was a real hero – he was an inventor, an adventurer, a scientist, a filmmaker and sort of a movie star.
Wes Anderson's Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
KC: He won the Palme d’Or too…
WA: Yes, with his first feature, he won the Palme d’Or. So he has always been a hero for me. In the end though, it’s not really based on him – parts of his life were the inspiration for the movie, but this character is also based on some American…a kind of Bill Murray…
KC: You told me previously that when you graduated from university you had three ideas that you wanted to make. One was Rushmore, one was Bottle Rocket and the third turned out to be The Life Aquatic.
WA: Well I wrote a short story many years ago – it wasn’t really a short story, more like a long paragraph. I didn’t really get to page two. In this story, I think the character was called Steve Cocteau [laughter], but he had the Belafonte and his wife Eleanor and there was the jaguar shark. That was all the paragraph was about. Owen Wilson who went to school with me really loved this paragraph. It was a really over-written, but it stuck in both of our minds.
KC: I’d like to say that we have a few cast members here tonight – Seu Jorge, the Brazilian popstar is here; Angelica Huston is here; Noah Taylor is here. [Applause]
WA: Where is Seu? Is he here?…oh yes he’s outside having a cigarette….
KC: Could you talk a little bit about casting. You have such wonderful ensemble casts, I was just wondering how these casting ideas come to mind?
WA: Well, there were three or four characters which were written for the actors. Bill Murray’s role was written for Bill; Angelica’s was written for her. This is the second movie that I have done with Angelica, and what basically happens is that we under-write a part for Angelica and then we give it to her. Then she says she isn’t going to do it unless we make it better. And she has a bunch of ideas – she helps us shape the character. In the case of this one, she not only shaped her character, but this also helped the narrative work to the degree that it works, and to the degree that there is a narrative.
KC: It’s very interesting to hear those David Bowie songs in Portuguese. That seems to me a real Wes Anderson signature…they are David Bowie songs, but yet they aren’t, they are something else.
WA: I just knew I wanted one of the members of the crew to sing on the deck – and I’d always wanted to use David Bowie songs because there are so many I like. Then when we decided to make the crew more international, we ended up casting Seu and having those songs in Portuguese. He adapted all those songs himself. It’s odd, because we cast him having seen City of God, but I didn’t know he was sort of a rock star in Brazil.
[Seu Jorge walks in and shouts ‘I’m here’]
WA:: Will you do a song for us later? Did you bring your guitar?
Seu: I bring my guitar…
Photo: Dave Butler/BVI UK
Seu Jorge serenades the party after our preview with David Bowie tunes portuguese-style
[Laughter]
KC: Bill Murray is great in the film. He was really brilliant, but when I talked to you in September, you said he was carrying around a lot of anger with him when you were shooting this?
WA: I said that? Well, it probably wasn’t in front of 500 people! As I recall that was in the back corner of a restaurant… [Laughter]. Given that the question has been asked, I’ll respond! For him, the movie was painful to do because it was a long shoot and he was there all the time and he was separated from his family – he has six kids. Plus the character is really unhappy, and physically, it’s very gruelling. You wouldn’t necessarily think this of him, but he can get very methody. When we shot the submarine scene, there were 12 people in there and Bill never said a word to anyone for the two days of that scene. I’m sure Angelica could say more on this, but they all seemed to be having a good time…though it did seem like a fire hazard…. There was an Italian approach to it; there were no hinges or latches. There were bolts. The actors go in and then they bolt them in. So I feel like he was really living that role. I do remember after we shot that scene, that it was like a weight had been lifted for him, and it was the other Bill again.
KC: You also have Bud Cort in there as the bond company stooge, who we recognize from the Hal Ashby films.
WA: Yes, Bud’s was the fourth character that we wrote with the actor in mind. I had gotten to know Bud in California and I loved him in his early movies, but more recently he was in Pollack and in Heat, which I also loved him in, so we wanted to write a part for him and came up with the bond company stooge. There are many actors in this who I haven’t worked with before such as Noah, Willem Defoe, Jeff Goldblum and Michael Gambon. One of the great things about working on this film…well, for example, my brother came to visit us on the shoot in Italy, and there were all the actors who we both love, like Noah who we loved in Shine and The Year My Voice Broke, and Flirting… It was all of our favourite actors together on a terrible ship that was about to sink…
KC: I have one more question before we open it up to the audience. You had two versions of the Belafonte [the ship used in the film] – and this ties into you shooting at Cinecitta, Fellini’s usual soundstage – and you told me that the Belafonte was so big that when you cut it in half, you still couldn’t get back far enough to do the filming, which I found intriguing.
WA: Yes, well we bought two ships in South Africa. One wasn’t good, and the other was fine. Well we stripped the bad one and then we patched it and loaded it up with the gear and sailed it to the Mediterranean. Well, we later discovered that we had actually stripped the good one, and that had an implication on the whole production, in a fairly severe way. Yep…that would have saved us a lot of time… The idea of filming the cross-section of the ship was one of the things I had originally wanted to do way back. It was like one of those foldouts from the Time Life books, or like an encyclopedia page, but in three dimensions, and in this case it was like 5 stories high and 150 feet long. This stage 5 at Cinecitta had this aura and it’s known as Fellini’s stage and it was great to be there, but I guess we were kind of playing it by ear when we built the boat. When we went to get the shot, we couldn’t get it all in, so we removed a wall and we still couldn’t get hold the shot. Then they pushed the set across the room with these giant pistons that could move it 4 inches at a time, and for 10 days we were just moving this boat. It would have been kind of nice if they could have just built it that spot in the first place. Finally we had to get a hold of this giant lens that NASA had which was this huge fish eye lens, and it finally worked. At least we kept the lens and we used it a lot.
AUDIENCE: Can you tell us a little bit about how you go about preparing to write, in terms of research and such?
WA: We don’t do research. That is one of my cardinal rules. Really for me, it’s like absorbing information over years without really intending to. I watched a lot of Cousteau films over the years, but in the end with things like all the marine life, nothing can really prepare you for that. There is no amount of research that could give you this because it doesn’t exist. I sort of wanted to avoid research so I could just make up the animals. What we would find was that anything we tried to invent, would end up existing in some form already. For me, the thing is that we couldn’t compete with the Discovery Channel so we wanted to do something totally different.
AUDIENCE: Again, on script: I wondered with a script with so many characters, and when you know the story you want to tell, how do you find your way into that? You produced a script with such a rich beginning.
WA: The way I tend to work is really to just build the characters. We had a group of characters in mind and a series of events we wanted to get to and we spent probably a year and a half working on that, to force that all to work. I think the traditional thing for most movies is to have a plot. We’ve never had that luxury.
AUDIENCE: How did you finance the first version of Bottle Rocket and get it to Sundance?
WA: Ok, this was supposed to be my first feature and originally we had a plan to make it on 16mm in black and white and we thought that we could make the feature for like $25,000 or something. First we got $2000 and shot some of it. Then we got another $2000 and shot some more, but that was all we could get. So it became a short. Most shorts usually have a concept with all the stuff that is going to work perfectly into 12 minutes, but ours seems to be going along fine, and then it just ends. [Laughter] I do feel it left people wanting more…even just an ending!
KC: I like the story about when the short was shown at Sundance, and Polly Platt [the producer] saw it and she showed it to James L. Brooks, the famous writer/director/producer. Then I believe you did a reading of the feature for him. How long did the reading last?
WA: About 5 hours. Because I didn’t understand about the fonts, I had printed the text very small. We really thought we had a lot of ‘gold’. At that time in my life, I was unbelievably optimistic in any situation, so even though everybody in the room was completely sweating when we finished, I was like ‘so, have we got it?’. I was ready for him to green light it immediately. I think I felt that way at almost every stage in the film process until the feature was done and we were showing the film to small groups and there was a lot of concern that it was going to be difficult to market. I was like ‘just wait…you’ll see’. Then we were showing the film to a test audience in a room about this size and there were 380 walk-outs. I watched from the projection booth and would try to figure out if this person might be coming back, but no, they were taking their handbag… [huge laughter]. That was when my confidence level shifted completely. I have never felt as confident as I did before that night.
KC: Well it’s a great film, if anyone gets to see it.
AUDIENCE: I just recently discovered Hal Ashby and saw Harold and Maude and the ending sort of left me with the same feeling as Rushmore. I wondered whether he was an influence?
WA: Well, Hal Ashby is one of my favourites. Whatever it is that I stole from Harold and Maude – I don’t know what it is. But it is something. Big. I love all his movies. There are like five movies in a row: Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Last Detail, Being There and Coming Home. Those are five of the best movies of the 70s.
AUDIENCE: Watching The Royal Tenenbaums, I found the Pagoda to be a wholly artificial thing, just there to create plot points and then I found the shark in this film the same. Your films almost tend to speak of themselves opening as artificial things. I wonder if you could comment on that?
WA: Which thing in …Tenenbaums? Pagoda the man? Well, that’s interesting, the reason he is there is that that guy is my friend and I wanted to make a part for him, so it’s sort of the opposite of what you are saying. But I do understand what you are saying about artificiality. The first day of that movie, Gene Hackman can be…[pause] surly. The first day, the Pagoda is having a conversation with Gene’s character. I remember Gene saying to me that it was great for location – it was before we had gotten to know one another and he was being kind of warm to me – and Gene really liked the Statue of Liberty in the background. When I told him that Kumar, who was playing the Pagoda was going to be blocking that, he said ‘well, that’s fucking stupid.’ [huge laughter]. I don’t know why I thought of that; it was just a nice memory, I guess. Well, anyway, back to your question about artificiality. There is an unreality to everything in this movie – and not just the underwater scenes with the stop motion photography, which we wanted to be sort of old-fashioned. It’s also true on the ship at sea when they are wearing these crazy aquamarine outfits. The whole feeling is unreal. Yet I did always hope to keep the balance in check, because the things that are really important to me are the relationships between the characters. The things that inspired the movie are things I have seen in my family and friends, and I don’t want to make the mistake of overwhelming that with the artificiality. On the other hand, I am also very interested in creating the world I have been imagining. I feel like that shark represents all kinds of things, but that fact that the shark is so clearly a work of art and imagination links into the idea of the whole movie: that these people are trying to work as a team to create something, to make art together and it somehow relates to that. That was a very weird answer to your question, I know…
AUDIENCE: Music seems so central to your movies and there is always a crucial song in each film. In Rushmore with Creation ‘Making Time’; in Tenenbaums it was the Elliot Smith song; and in this, it was ‘Search and Destroy’. Do you rely on Music Supervisors for this, or is it all you?
WA: Those were all music cues that I had had in mind. In the case of the Iggy Pop song, I actually hadn’t planned to use it in the shoot out with the pirates, but rather when they arrived on that island. Yet fairly early in the process, it found itself in the spot where it is in the film. With the other two, they were actually written to that music. It’s a mixture, really. Some I plan in advance and some don’t come in until the end of the editing process, and then everything in between. I remember that there were times on Rushmore when I knew ‘this person has to walk from here to here, and he has exactly six seconds to do it because that’s when Pete Townsend…’; it was all exactly planned out.
[Pause while microphone reaches audience member]
AUDIENCE: Why do you so grudgingly conform to the trite ‘dear ole blightly’ stereotype of the English reporter who is just sort of there on the ship and doesn’t really do anything else. It just seems she is a ‘tick in the box’ and that she doesn’t inform the narrative in any kind of intellectual way.
WA: I sort of wish we’d just let you say it without the microphone…[huge laughter/audience applause…]
let’s see, ‘grudgingly’, ‘trite’… I guess I just did it because I wanted it to be overly familiar and clichéd! She wasn’t originally English, and I actually had a couple of people in mind for that role who are trite clichéd people and I guess it was sort of inspired by them.
KC: I’m just curious, why was she pregnant?
WA: It was just something, my co-writer and I had thought of for the character…was it a cliché that she was pregnant?
AUDIENCE: You create such an interesting world with vivid characters, and beautiful sets and it seems there is so much more to look at than what is in the frame. I wondered if you have ever thought about making a film for IMAX?
WA: Well, there are only about 40 IMAX screens in the US, so maybe I could just do a short film. I do think IMAX is really beautiful; it’s amazing to watch. With Bottle Rocket, I originally wanted to do it in a square format, like one of the old Hollywood movies. The problem was for projection – you would basically have to buy a square gate for every cinema and make sure the projectionist changed it and basically, they just would never do it. I would love to work in that format.
Cate Blanchett & Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic
KC: What about Henry Selick [the animator]? Could you tell the audience a little about his creations? I particularly loved the pony crown fish.
WA: Well I had been speaking to him about doing an adaptation of a Roald Dahl story, all in stop motion. I really love stop motion, particularly the homemade feel of it. But I was really involved in this movie while we were having those conversations, so I thought, maybe the best thing to do would be to create our own animals for this one and he seemed the perfect person to do it. That process was unlike anything I had ever done – it was almost like working with another actor. The way an actor takes a scene and tries to bring it to life, Henry’s job is to take a little model and really make it seem alive. He is observing all kinds of behaviour in any animal he is trying to recreate, and his questions are very strange things about behaviour. He was doing all of his work in San Francisco, while we were filming in Rome. He would send me things and then we would talk about them – it was fascinating.
KC: So your next project is going to be The Fantastic Mr. Fox?
WA: Yes, I have two things: one is The Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is the Roald Dahl thing, which we are now working on the script for. Then I also have an idea for something in India that I really want to do. I should talk to Angelica about it…maybe I should talk to her privately…[laughter].
AUDIENCE: You always have amazing casts. Do you now find that actors are knocking on your door to be in your films?
WA: There are a few people who are in this movie that I did meet because they got in touch with me – like Willem and Jeff Goldblum. Their agents had called and said they wanted to meet, and then I just kept them in mind, because I am a great fan. Yet with Gene Hackman and Angelica, it was the opposite. I had asked to meet them and then afterwards, I made these parts with them in mind.
AUDIENCE:: I love the art direction in your films. How much of it do you have in mind when you write the script, and how much of it do you leave to the art director?
WA: It’s both. With art direction and costume design – I see it as one big project and I do put a lot of what I want into the script. The production designer we had, had a huge project; he did lots of research. I am being glib about not doing any research because I really knew the Cousteau stuff fairly well, so I knew the details of that, and he did too. That does really go into it. I get very particular about the clothes, and I have many strong ideas, but Milena Canonero, our costume designer, has many, many great ideas that she brings to the table. For instance, Angelica has painted green contact lenses and blue in her hair in this film, which are things Milena contributed; it really is a combination.
AUDIENCE: There are a couple of things in The Life Aquatic, that I picked up on, like how so many of the characters are smoking - and in a couple of other films where guns are used. I wondered if you ever use your films to get across a message, or whether it is just characterisation?
WA: I think that the thing with smoking…I don’t smoke, I just think it looks cool! And guns, well…the gun play in this movie is not utterly realistic, I feel [Laughter]. A lot of bullets get fired, but not a lot of people get hit - although the one intern does take a pretty bad blow. Still, he seems fine afterwards. I don’t know if Bill Murray had ever fired a gun in a movie before but once you get him going, it’s hard to get him to stop. I guess I just think you should do anything you can to make the movie entertaining, but at the heart of it for me, I want it to be connected to me, or to something in my life. It’s funny, sometimes, I am not even aware of what it is in my own life the film reflects until someone I know points it out. Then it is obvious. Usually it has to reveal itself to me, I guess.
AUDIENCE: This is the second time I’ve seen this film, and I adore it. I first saw it in America and I’ve been banging on about it since I can back. I’m just interested in what your reaction to the reaction to the film has been, which is not all favourable, and which I don’t understand.
WA: It’s kind of a hard thing to ask. I know that my job is to get people excited about the movie, but usually by the time my movies are done, I don’t know what to feel about them. Even years later, I don’t always know what to feel. With this one, I think I’m actually pretty happy with it. But it is a lot to absorb. We don’t make a really clear statement that ‘this is what the film is about’. It’s tonally all over the map. I am aware that we really tried all of the things we wanted to try – and some of these were sort of crazy in terms of making a movie – but it is the movie I wanted it to be. I don’t know, of course I’d love it if everyone really thought it was great, but some people really hate this movie, and others have the opposite reaction.
AUDIENCE: …but I don’t understand. It’s CLEARLY a great movie.
WA: Well, I’ll let you have had the last word!
Clive Owen enjoys a drink after our Life Aquatic masterclass
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