Los orígenes de Bottle Rocket y Wes Anderson + Una conversación con Wes

En la página de la revista Filter, el 2 de febrero fue publicado un artículo más que interesante. Por supuesto, está inglés. Y yo, siempre actualizando mi blog a las apuradas, no puedo más que dejarles unos fragmentos, en su idioma original. Mil disculpas.

Even as you read this, Wes Anderson is thinking about movies. The thought may be on the forefront of his popping, hissing mind, or buried way in the back on that little iceberg of idiosyncratic id. It may be about something as exhausting as how to unify some sporadic, renegade plot element involving a talking fox, or something as delicate as how close to place a camera to a painted soldier marching in misstep. Can we put another coat of paint on that schooner? Did we get the rights for that Yves Montand track? Where’s Kumar? And why the hell won’t Bill Murray answer his phone? It could be that Mr. Anderson is asleep, tucked into his bed in his perfectly symmetrical apartment in Paris.
But even in that event, it’s a guarantee that the beloved filmmaker is positively dreaming cinema, snoring in Mark Mothersbaugh cadences with three little Zissou zZz bursts.

(...)

A Conversation with Wes Anderson

It’s said that a band’s first album is what their whole life has been leading up to, and then the follow-up is the problem. Is it that way with film?
Hmm, I don’t know. With Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and Life Aquatic, all of those Owen and I had had in mind for years before we started to make them. By the time we were making Bottle Rocket we had a series of things waiting in the wings; we had fleshed out Rushmore as well. It wasn’t like we were starting from square one after Bottle Rocket.You started off thinking that you would be a writer. How did that plan change? I wanted to be a writer when I was in high school. By the time I finished I had been making little films; by Bottle Rocket I was pretty set that I wanted to direct movies too.
Do you always write what you know or have some things been complete fantasy? Did you know those characters in the original Bottle Rocket short?
I think everything that I’ve ever had anything to do with has been a combination of people I have known and then also inspiration from books, movies, and other stories—some that I may have only heard about. I don’t think I’ve ever done a movie where I didn’t feel it was personal. Certainly, in The Life Aquatic there’s a fantasy element to the whole thing. And all of these movies have some of that. The whole criminal aspect of
Bottle Rocket was not exactly based on intensive, careful research. [Laughs]

(...)


It’s been said that you’re very headstrong because you know your vision.
When you have a bunch of people working together, if there isn’t somebody who has a point of view then the movie won’t have a point of view. I guess it doesn’t necessarily need one, but in the case of a movie like Bottle Rocket it does. Because it’s not that the subject matter is going to be the great thing about it, that the dramatic turns and moments are gonna be the answer; it’s more the personality of the thing. It’s either going to be good or bad based on that—based on these characters. Owen and I had a pretty good idea of what it ought to be. You need a good support group around you.

Does Owen take on that role when he’s immersed in his character? Will he still be a consultant for you on a script that he’s co-written?
Oh, yes. On Bottle Rocket we were re-writing it in the editing room. He’d never acted before so we just worked the way we always did.

Do the music selections for your films come solely from you? What comes first for you—the scene or the song?
Usually you’re trying to figure out the story and what happens next. But sometimes I have written scenes where I was inspired by a song, or probably more often figure out how we’re going to shoot a scene and what the visuals are gonna be based on music.

How did you learn about film?
I always liked movies a lot and when I was in college at the University of Texas, I wasn’t in film school but they have a gigantic library, and their collection of books on movies was vast. So I was watching and reading about a lot of movies, and when a book would refer to something else I could look it up and it would be on the next aisle over. I could just keep going. I had a good setup to educate myself about movies and it was the thing I was most interested in.