By Alex Marshall
When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut “Bottle Rocket,” the rookie director got a shock. Columbia Pictures had sent all the movie’s props off to a store, which had then sold them for next to nothing.
So when he made his next movie, “Rushmore” (1998), Anderson decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into an SUV when the shoot was over, then drove the hoard away to look after it himself.
That decision ended up helping not just Anderson. Over the past 2 1/2 years, curators at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled Anderson’s storage facility in Kent, England — which contains thousands of items from his movies — to compile a museum retrospective of the director’s work.
The show opened at the Cinémathèque Française last week, where it runs through July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in the fall.
The Paris show includes more than 500 exhibits, many of them well known to Anderson fans, including the candy pink hotel model that opens “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” several sardine-blue explorer outfits from “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” and a luxurious fur coat worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in “The Royal Tenenbaums.”
Items like these are key to Anderson’s signature style — heavy on retro fashion, symmetry and pastel colors — as popularized by Instagram and TikTok accounts and documented in books and magazine spreads. But Johanna Agerman Ross, a curator at the Design Museum, said it was a “misunderstanding” to think of Anderson as a director defined by a few stylistic tropes.
He also had “an extreme interest in the creative process,” Agerman Ross said, and he believed that because even the smallest items help create a world on screen, they needed to be “fully formed pieces of art and design.”
Some of Anderson’s best-known props took weeks or months to conceive and make, including a faux-Renaissance painting, “Boy With Apple,” that appears in “The Grand Budapest Hotel”; a vending machine that mixes and dispenses martinis from “Asteroid City”; and painted Louis Vuitton luggage that appears in “The Darjeeling Limited.”
Agerman Ross said that while developing the exhibition, she had spoken with craftspeople who told her that they had lengthy email correspondences with Anderson to discuss every detail of the props they were making, right down to tweaking fonts and colors for magazine covers that appear for milliseconds in “The French Dispatch.”
Matthieu Orléan, a curator at the Cinémathèque Française, said that Anderson’s attention to detail shaped his projects from their beginnings. The exhibition includes a vitrine filled with yellow spiral-bound notebooks in which the director jotted down his ideas. They contain notes for scripts, in careful capital letters, and minute storyboards for scenes.
The exhibition also includes a screen showing an animatic: a black-and-white animated storyboard that Anderson uses to show actors and crew how he wants scenes to appear on screen. Orléan said that Anderson had produced these for all his movies since “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in 2008, adding that the director then records himself reading the script over it so that the actors know how he wants the lines to be delivered.
“Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Anderson’s first stop-motion animation movie, was a turning point in his almost 30-year career.
On a tour of the show earlier this week, Andy Gent, a model maker who has worked on seven Anderson movies, said that the director had “totally changed the look” of stop-motion films by insisting the puppets in that movie have real animal fibers, even though they were hard to control and could move between shots, creating a screen effect known as “boiling,” where the puppet’s fur appears to be constantly moving.
Gent and his fellow puppet makers would “slave over the tiniest whisker” to ensure the figures looked exactly as Anderson wanted, he said, though he added that the director gave his craftspeople freedom, despite his reputation for perfectionism.
While making “Isle of Dogs,” for instance, Gent recalled that Anderson’s opening instruction was simple: “Sculpt some dogs!” So Gent and his team spent months making hundreds of mongrels, with Anderson choosing bits he liked from individual models and asking the puppet makers to bring them together. “It was amazing fun,” Gent recalled.
At the opening of the Paris exhibition Monday, one item drew more attention than any other: the model of the Grand Budapest Hotel. Before giving a brief speech, Anderson, who declined to be interviewed for this article, posed in front of its pink walls for photos, including with a French pop star in a cutesy outfit, like a character in an Anderson movie.
Simon Weisse, who oversaw the making of the prop, said that six craftspeople spent three months building the model, which includes glass windows and sheer curtains. The color choice, though, was all Anderson’s, he said.
Weisse said that when the color samples had first arrived at the studio, he couldn’t believe it. “I said, ‘Pink? Bright pink and dark pink? No!’” he recalled. “I asked the art department to check there wasn’t a mistake, but they said, ‘It’s right. Wes has chosen these colors.’”
It was only when Weisse finished the job, he said, that he appreciated Anderson’s decision. The colors were quirky, but they echoed real central European buildings, and fitted perfectly with the movie’s eccentricities.
Anderson might sweat the smallest details, Weisse said, but “in the end, he’s always right.”
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