Wes Anderson's movies are clever, but approachable, rather like the man himself. His new film, The Life Aquatic, is his most joyous so far, writes Suzie Mackenzie
At Wes Anderson's suggestion, we arrange to meet at The Inn on Irving Place in downtown Manhattan. It is in fact, as its name betrays, a hotel designed to look like a private mansion. Inside, the mood is one of an elegance precisely modulated to make you feel you have stepped into a 19th-century novel of manners.
The perfect setting, in other words, for Wes Anderson, a director sometimes compared to Scorsese for his ability to show that everything in a movie has meaning. What distinguished his first success Rushmore and later The Royal Tenenbaums was not so much their narratives as a visual style. The films teem with detail, chosen with the fastidiousness Mrs Wharton's characters display toward the placing of their fish knives.
Anderson's fourth and latest film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, is a fiction loosely based on the life of the legendary French marine explorer Jacques Cousteau, "one of those exaggerated larger-than-life people", and one of Anderson's childhood heroes. It is a story "about an oceanographer, set mainly on a boat, whose best friend gets eaten by a shark, and who sets out on a mission of revenge. Then . . . it turns into something else."
The thing about making a film, he says, is that it becomes your whole world. "This film took almost four years; we began thinking about it in 2001. There's so much stuff to plan out, the script, the design, the cast, the shots, the music . . . you set your whole life aside. And it's fun. Then one day you get up and it's over." When a movie is done, he says, "It's done. You can't go back and fix it. And I know that feeling of looking back and thinking, that part I'd like to fix. So I obsessively try not to compromise. To get it right."
He says two things about Cousteau which that might reveal something of Anderson's relationship to his film-making. "Cousteau began as a hunter and he became a conserver, what we think of now as an environmentalist. But in his early stuff there was no element of that whatsoever. He'd find a lagoon he wanted to survey and blow it up and count the dead animals on the beach. That was a time when we were all so naïve, when we thought nature was like God and would go on forever."
In Hollywood, Anderson is the opposite of a predator. Whatever else he is trying to do in his films, there is no doubt that he sees himself as a conserver, employing techniques, film-making processes he admires. His films look like no-one else's. He seems to be able to use film, almost like paint, to transfer what he sees in his mind's eye into the physical reality that appears on the screen. He explains how he achieved the saturated colour in The Life Aquatic. "We filmed part of the film with old Ektachrome reversal stock, which is how you get that grainy, high-contrast feel. And then I liked it so much, because it seemed to cast some weird nostalgic look, which I wanted, so I ended up trying to make the rest of the film look like that. That's why it's so warm and yellow. I think it makes you more sympathetic to the characters. So that's why we did that."
The animated aquatic creatures were done by Henry Selick. "He did all the stop-motion creatures using the old-fashioned animation technique, frame by frame. Like they did in King Kong and Sinbad." His next film will be an animation based on Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox. "That way, we can plan it all out, hand it over to Henry, and we don't have to go filming." When he talks about film-making, it is very often "we". He has co-written all his films, first with the actor Owen Wilson and now with Noah Baumbach. "Writing on my own is not fun for me. With Life Aquatic, Noah and I would meet every day at a restaurant before lunch and we'd stay six or seven hours. We'd make each other laugh. That's how we got it done." Even now, he says, he is sometimes surprised to discover he's done anything. "I am surprised because I always think of myself as someone who tries to do a lot of stuff and who is lazy. So I am happy to learn I can actually get things done."
For Cousteau, Anderson explains, the sea became the last frontier. "He introduced us all to that world. He saw it as what we'd have left when we had destroyed everything else." Yet Cousteau took up swimming only after a terrible car accident. "He used to swim to keep himself strong." So his passion for the underwater world . . .? "Yes," he says. "Started from need." As Anderson's desire to make films started from need.
Anderson's world, rather like Cousteau's, is peopled by all sorts of unusual creatures that we are, quite frankly, surprised to find afloat. They are what is sometimes described as "quirky", "oddballs", "misfits"; people who, unlike their aquatic counterparts, seem not quite synchronised with their environment. But they all make great efforts to look right for their world - part of the anticipatory pleasure of an Anderson film is what dreadful costumes he will get his team to submit themselves to this time. After the jump suits (Bottle Rocket) and the tracksuits (The Royal Tenenbaums), there was a certain inevitability, as Bill Murray's resigned face shows - he plays Zissou, the Cousteau character - that Anderson would one day have them all in frog suits.
Anderson started off thinking he was going to be a writer - something for which, given his reluctance to be alone, he was unsuited. As a child, with his younger brother Eric and their friends, it seemed easy. Anderson would mastermind the plot, work it out as a collage, then paste it on to a screen, which he would sit behind "planning their mission". Lamborghinis, chases, James Bond-type stuff. Stuff he still pastiches. But at the University of Texas, in Austin, he enrolled to study philosophy because it was what his older brother was studying and it relieved him of the burden of having to make a choice. Bored with that, he started going to story-writing classes. Sitting at the back, in a corner, he noticed someone in the opposite corner.
Meeting Owen Wilson was like a strange synchronicity. Both were one of three brothers, both came from Texas - Wilson from Dallas - and both had fathers who worked in advertising. With two others in the class, they wrote a play, acted in by Wilson but not directed by Anderson: "Some stupid play that was a cross between True West and Burn This . . . Owen and I worked well together. He had never acted before and he was good."
One of the things that is regularly said about Anderson is that he has great persuasive powers and picks his collaborators with skill. He wrote The Royal Tenenbaums specifically for the notoriously private Gene Hackman, who found the script too detached at first: "I am generally better at emotion," he said later. And too specific: he didn't like the fact that Anderson had every move scripted before the shoot began. He was persuaded when Anderson said he would not make the movie without him.
The first film he wrote, with Wilson, Bottle Rocket, was a 14-minute short - Wilson, his brother Luke and their college friend Bob Musgrave all appeared in it and Anderson directed. A showing at the Sundance Film Festival helped them raise the $5 million to make it into a feature film. The film was well reviewed but not successful. Two years later, their budget doubled to $10 million, came Rushmore. The film is set in Texas, co-written with Owen Wilson, with his brother Luke in a minor role. Something had shifted subtly; the vision had got darker, its mood was less manic. And Max's declaration at one point in the movie: "I think you've just got to find something you love and then do it for the rest of your life. For me, it's going to Rushmore", sounded very much like Anderson's declaration of intent.
Maybe it was act of friendship that made Owen Wilson absent himself from the writing of Anderson's third film, The Royal Tenenbaums. His own acting career wastaking off and, though they had intended to co-write it, Anderson finally did most of it alone. He hated it: "I had to lock myself in a hotel room until it was finished" - and you can sense this claustrophobia. It's a far blacker comedy than the more fantastical The Life Aquatic. Everyone in an Anderson movie is trying either to break in or break out of their world. Bottle Rocket opens with an escape from a mental institution and ends with incarceration in a prison. Rushmore is set in a school, The Royal Tenenbaums in a house. And then there's Zissou's boat.
Anderson says he has never aimed at verisimilitude. "I am not trying to make them naturalistic or normal. I am trying to come up with characters surprising to people and surprising to me. People who like weird people, I guess, are more likely to like my films than people who call people 'weirdos'." But it's a mistake to imagine that he thinks of them as cartoon characters; he has genuine affection for them, though it's not always apparent.
Anderson's childhood was "happy", as happy as it can be when your world falls apart at the age of eight. He was born in Houston, Texas, the middle of three boys to parents "averagely well-to-do", and went to the local prep school, St John's, the place where he would later make Rushmore. When he was eight, his parents divorced. What he recalls of himself at that time "is that I was a liar. I remember I was very dishonest, always trying to pretend to be rich." But then pretence, as he says, takes different forms. "It seems to me there is a lying which is just trying to bring fantasy into reality. Where you project an image of yourself that is false, maybe because you feel you are not exciting enough. The other is lying for deception. Where you want to cover your tracks, not get found out."
No-one in an Anderson movie gets punished for fantasy. But the real liars, most often authority figures and most often fathers, are always exposed: Bill Murray's character, the bad father, bad husband, in Rushmore; Gene Hackman's Royal - bad father, bad husband - in The Royal Tenenbaums. "Those are guys who lack some basic level of decency, they have done some unforgivable things. I have some compassion for them. I am interested in people with those kinds of faults and who turn it around. But I certainly don't want to be one."
Asked whether the Hackman character resembles his own father, he says: "He's sort of like the opposite of my father. He is one of those larger than life legendary crooks, exactly what my father isn't." But, of course, a good person can betray you just as catastrophically as a bad person.
His mother was an archaeologist - Anjelica Huston plays the archaeologist mother in The Royal Tenenbaums, and, as one of the props, Anderson asked her to wear his mother's glasses. "Wes, am I meant to be playing your mother?" she asked. In his latest film, Huston again plays the mother figure. It is a criticism he acknowledges that he works and reworks the same material, using the same elements, the same actors - most commonly, Murray, Huston, the Wilson brothers - and then rearranges these elements as if he were plundering the same vast dressing-up box over and over again.
Which, of course, he is. "With every movie I want to do something different. I have ideas that I've been saving, but then later I realise, this is a lot like something else. Anjelica is fulfilling the same role she did in the last one. I just can't seem to get away from it. I'll probably try harder with my next movie to make it different. But I dunno. It's all coming from the subconscious. I'm not really in control."
The Life Aquatic is Anderson's most successful film to date. A comedic, kaleidoscopic, Dionysiac joyride through his unconscious. In his underworld ocean he has finally found the perfect metaphor for his lost world. And in Murray's Zissou, a character whose solidity seems to dissolve as we watch him until all that is left is his Cheshire-cat smile.
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou goes on general release tomorrow
