Wes Anderson

Wesley Wales "Wes" Anderson

1 May 1969

An American film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor. He attended St. Francis Episcopal Day School and graduated from St. John's School in Houston in 1987, which he later used as a prominent location throughout Rushmore. Anderson graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, where he met future frequent collaborator Owen Wilson.

He has chosen to direct mostly fast-paced comedies marked by more serious or melancholic elements, with themes often centered on grief, loss of innocence, parental abandonment, adultery, sibling rivalry and unlikely friendships. His movies have been noted for being unusually character-driven, and by turns both derided and praised with terms like "literary geek chic". The plots of his movies often feature thefts and unexpected disappearances, with a tendency to borrow liberally from the caper genre.

 As director, producer, writer, actor

• Bottle Rocket (1996)
• Rushmore (1998)
• The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
• The Squid and the Whale (2005)
• The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
• Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
• Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
• Castello Cavalcanti (2013)
• The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
• She's Funny That Way (2014)
• Sing (2016)
• Isle of Dogs (2018)

Quotations

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Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I've never been down before is like going to a movie or something. Just wandering the city is entertainment.

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There's no story if there isn't some conflict. The memorable things are usually not how pulled together everybody is. I think everybody feels lonely and trapped sometimes. I would think it's more or less the norm.

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That's the kind of movie that I like to make, where there is an invented reality and the audience is going to go someplace where hopefully they've never been before. The details, that's what the world is made of.

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I have a way of filming things and staging them and designing sets. There were times when I thought I should change my approach, but in fact, this is what I like to do. It's sort of like my handwriting as a movie director. And somewhere along the way, I think I've made the decision: I'm going to write in my own handwriting.

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I wouldn't say that I'm particularly bothered or obsessed with detail.

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Any romantic feelings for a 12-year-old are like entering into a fantasy world.

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When you're 11 or 12 years old, you can get so swept up in a book that you start to believe that the fantasy is reality. I think when you have a giant crush when you're in fifth grade, it becomes your whole world. It's like being underwater; everything is different.

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Kids are always open to anything. It's very rare that a kid isn't extremely eager to make you happy.

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One of the things I enjoyed the most is just working as an actor.

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Sometimes when you're editing a movie, you have the thing that you don't expect - which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.

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I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.

* * *

Every time you do a take on a movie, you're not sure if it's going to succeed. Even if you have a great cast, like we had, every scene you're kind of waiting for the release. 'Oh, yes; it happened. We got it!' There's always the possibility that it's just not going to work.

* * *

I don't know what is in store for the movie business any better than anybody else does, but it does seem like my kind of movies are a little trickier than it used to be - or maybe a lot trickier.

* * *

I have always wanted to work in the theater. I've always felt the glamour of being backstage and that excitement, but I've never actually done it - not since I was in 5th grade, really. But I've had many plays in my films. I feel like maybe theater is a part of my movie work.

* * *

I've never had a movie that got great reviews. I've had movies that got different levels of good and bad reviews, but you can more or less count on plenty of bad reviews.

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Anytime I make a movie, I really have absolutely no idea how it's going to go over. I've had the whole range of different kinds of reactions.

* * *

I love working with actors. That's what the set really is, for me. It's my time with the actors.

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