DB: what or who has had the biggest influence on your work? ECA: my family certainly was a big influence on me. my father was a geologist and draftsman for a texas oil company in the early 60s, and I got my love of tiny, neat writing and labeling things from him, as well as an affinity for maps. my mother was a painter whose oil portraits were all around me growing up. of course both of my older brothers influenced the stories and kinds of imaginary experiences I was exposed to and liked.
but my biggest influence as an illustrator and storyteller is walt disney. he is if anything in my book, an underrated storyteller/artist. to me, he’s focused completely on impact. all he cares about is how is this going to work on the viewer? his philosophy and mission is to be the stand-in for the viewer before a thing is made. so he’s focused on clarity and emotion and speed and pleasure and the whole symphonic experience of the story. as opposed to, say, making a totally faithful adaptation of kipling. this is what a storyteller should be like, a kind of advance team for the viewer/reader.
during the period in my early twenties when I was starting to do more writing (at the same time when I re-captured my love of maps in stories) I also started watching the movies I’d loved as a kid again. I’d sort of forgotten most of them. it was good timing, because I was finally out of the educational system, free from critique and judgment. I was just immersing myself in the works, free to embrace and love them on their own and to scrutinize what it was they were doing, how they were made, and why they worked. re-visiting the great works of your childhood is maybe a good thing for anyone to do who’s interested in stories and illustrating.
Fascinating how Eric’s father was a geologist and draftsman, and his mother a painter of oil portraits.
Eric’s work appears to combine each of his parent’s professions. The colored pencils, the portraits, the maps, the neat small writing, the labeling. The influences are there from both sides.
We all know Wes Anderson. But Wes’s younger brother, — Eric Chase Anderson, is way underrated. He’s an illustrator, documentarian, and novelist. He also played the voice of Kristofferson in the Fantastic Mr. Fox.
In this excerpt from The Life Aquaticwith Steve Zissou Criterion Collection edition collectors pamphlet, Eric and Wes share their drawing origin stories and how Eric’s drawings influence Wes’s movies.
It begins with little drawings. Little drawings lead to the set and character details that show up on film:
WES ANDERSON: In a review of somebody else’s movie in the paper the other day, a critic referred to me as a miniaturist or something like that. I guess because I put in a lot of physical details, and I like cooking up extra ideas to add to the sets and costumes, and inventing an imaginary world. But what I’m more inspired by is something that happened to me or someone in my life who had a strong effect on me, or a novel, short story, play, or a movie where the characters moved me, or where I was swept up in it. I do like little drawings, however. We do have stuff in the movies that is tiny, you know? A Swiss Army Knife, a punctuality award pin, something written in the margin of a book.
CRITERION: What’s a little thing in The Life Aquatic?
WA: The Kentucky Zissou fly.
Here they describe how their father’s work notebooks act as inspiration and source material:
ERIC CHASE ANDERSON: Which is one of two pieces of artwork I did for The Life Aquatic. The second is when they get to the bottom of the ocean and Bill Murray takes out a notebook and looks at it.
WA: This notebook is not exactly a crucial element of the story, or a crucial element of anything at all, but it’s personal because to me it’s really inspired by our father’s work notebooks.
ECA: Oh, yeah, right. Exactly.
WA: The way he organizes his stuff is very much, like, this points to that, and the little note indicates this over here, with lots of arrows. His brain is kind of graphic.
ECA: The source material is deeply embedded in our minds.
The Anderson brother’s drawing origin story:
C: Who started drawing first?
WA: Well, I started drawing first, because I had a four-year jump. I’m older.
ECA: I didn’t start drawing until I was in my midtwenties.
C: Really?
ECA: Yeah. I wasn’t necessarily good at it. I had to draw once in college. I had to design a poster for a play I directed. It looks just like my drawings now, except it was a cutout of an ant—like an old Saul Bass cutout—and I labeled the legs of the ant with things from the movie: mystery, car crash, dead brother.
WA: I had three types of drawings that I would obsessively draw. One was trees. Giant trees that people lived in, with people doing motorcycle jumps on one branch, a swimming pool built on another branch, elevators in the trunk, and a helipad.
C: Tree cities?
WA: Tree cities, basically. Then I had imaginary mansions. Then I had giant drum sets that would fill five pages taped together, with a guy in the middle and about two thousand drums.
This is obvious, but drawings make excellent gifts:
ECA: I made a Christmas present for Wes that was a map of this famous country house where I house-sat in Virginia. I didn’t know much about paints. It was something I was doing without really thinking about it. I gave it to Wes, and a year went by. The next Christmas, I made a couple more maps: a house map of where we grew up, with different things that we had experienced as kids, like escape routes from the second floor, you know, a loose floorboard, or where a pencil sharpener was, a strange angle in the bathroom. Wes and I had been collaborating on a Christmas present for my sister, which was a map of a minivan. We talked about it, and we both came up with the text that each of the four kids would have in relation to the van, Then overnight, Christmas Eve, I drew it. It was a good Christmas present.
WA: It was the process of him segueing from the maps being something that represent a space to telling stories—although even the first one that you did had an element of that.
ECA: Wes had an idea that I should make a map for the people at St. John’s, where we shot Rushmore. I sent it to Wes, but I didn’t package it well. It arrived spindled via FedEx, with a hole punched through it. He said, “It’s really good, but I think there’s a couple of changes you can make, and you can do it one more time.” That was fine, because the next time I did it, many more of the ideas were in much better shape to be presentable. Wes liked it so much he said, “There’s no way I’m giving it to St. John’s.”
WA: I made a good dupe for them.
And the process of how Eric’s drawings will influence Wes’s movie’s directly:
C: So, turning to The Royal Tenenbaums—now the drawings precede the making of the film.
ECA: I made wall paper for Richie’s room. First, I made drawings at home really small. Then those went to a warehouse, I think in Queens, where they used blueprint machines to blow up each little tiny drawing. Then they used a stencil to punch through and leave a charcoal line. Then they finished the outlines with a Sharpie.
WA: What it’s supposed to be is, the walls were painted on by Richie Tenenbaum, and they’re his record of the family’s memories. So for Tenebaums, Eric made, one, a set of drawings of all the sets I asked him to do; two, Richie’s drawings on his walls; three, a series of portraits of his sister; and four, the DVD itself— which has, I think, the best cover.
ECA: I have a memory of sitting in a coffee shop in Houston. I was there with Wes, and he was figuring out how to tell the beginning of The Royal Tenenbaums through a tour of the house and how to introduce all this information. He was thinking out loud, and I was kind of following him. It might have been one of those Christmastimes when mapmaking was in the air. I remember him saying, “It’s a map, but it’s not a map on paper. It’s a map in movie style. We have eight minutes of movie map.”
C: How much of this material comes from your shared experiences?
WA: Well, there’s always some inspiration from real life or from my personal experience. Some characters are inspired by a couple of my friends rolled together, and some come from two lines of a play I saw, and some come out of nowhere. There are a few drawings on Richie’s walls, for instance—an image of an archaeological excavation with the mother—which refer to our own past. There’s one thing on Richie’s wall that I didn’t suggest—an image of a day a tiger escaped from the zoo near their house. Well, that’s not in the movie or referred to anywhere. That was something Eric made up. Only now, at this moment, I realize, we should have added that into the movie. That would have been good for that beginning-of-the-movie section where it refers to different things in the family’s history. You can hear Alec Baldwin say . . .
ECA: “One day, a Bengal tiger walked down Archer Avenue.” The kids would be inside the basement, looking out the window through the burglar bars.
WA: What would be the thing he would say after that? There would be a cut to the front page, a tiger in the snow — we would have to make up the newspaper — “The Morning Sun reported that it was killed after eating three dogs and a Siamese.”
ECA: But the drawings sometimes have little bits of echoes of stories that we liked as kids — even if they didn’t really happen to us — because we all traded books and things. Imaginary events can be shared experiences too.
WA: That’s good. That’s what books and movies are. Imaginary events can be shared experiences too.
I find Eric Chase Anderson is similar to the late Jason Polan, in that whenever you see his illustrations, it compels you to pick up a pencil and draw.
He wrote of Brasília the way some write of Paris or New York. With reverence and adoration. Three exclamation points and an all caps shout-out? That’s love right there.
Up into the sky! To the broad heavens! High above the earth: the white city, the Venus city: BRASÍLIA!
Representative Marco opens every door to me. But Brasília has no doors: it is bright space, an extension of the mind, radiance become architecture. The public areas throb with children, the palaces lend implicit dignity to their institutions. The architect Italo, a friend of Niemayer’s, has been ten years in Brasília, and takes us on a tour of the new Itamaraty, the Congress, the still-unfinished theater, and the Cathedral, a rose of iron whose great petals open toward infinity.
Brasília, isolated in its human miracle, in the midst of Brazilian space, testimony to man’s supreme creative will. From this city one would feel worthy of flying to the stars. Niemayer is the terminus of a parabola that begins with Leonardo: the utility of constructive thought; creation as social obligation; spatial satisfaction of intelligence.
Neruda, Pablo. Passions and Impressions. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Ed. Matilde Neruda and Miguel Otero Silva. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. (see pages 193,194)
But why Neruda’s adoration of Brasília? Over Sao Palo? Over Rio? Timing I suspect.
When Passions and Impressions was printed in 1978, Brasília was a bebê. An infant city of eighteen years. The Cathedral of Brasília had only been completed eight years previously. And the intent of Brasília’s creation was to be a global city of progress. The E.P.C.O.T. or World City of South America.
Brasília was an ambitious project. Not only in design and scope, but in time. A city built from scratch in only five years? It deserves a spot on Patrick Collision’s “Fast” list.
I have sketched my house at Easton Pierse and marked with a cross my grandfather’s chamber where I was born. If it had been my fate to be wealthy man I would have rebuilt my house in the grandest of styles. I would have added formal gardens in the Italian mode of the kind I have seen at Sir John Danvers’s house in Chelsea and at his house in Lavington. It was Sir John who first taught us in England the way of Italian gardens. I would have erected a fountain like the one that I saw in Mr Bushell’s grotto at Enstone: Neptune standing on a scallop shell, his trident aimed at a rotating duck, perpetually chased by a spaniel. I would have carved my initials on a low curved bridge across the stream. I would have remade my beloved home in the shape of the most beautiful houses and gardens I have visited in my unsettled life, tumbling up and down in the world. But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
We should take these excerpts with some reservation. These aren’t John Aubrey’s copied diaries, but rather an original format historian Ruth Scurr uses to deploy John Aubrey’s biography.
John Aubrey is a man who knew what he wanted. We see this in the detailed descriptions of the gardens and fountains he dreamed of constructing:
I would have added formal gardens in the Italian mode of the kind I have seen at Sir John Danvers’s house in Chelsea and at his house in Lavington. It was Sir John who first taught us in England the way of Italian gardens. I would have erected a fountain like the one that I saw in Mr Bushell’s grotto at Enstone: Neptune standing on a scallop shell, his trident aimed at a rotating duck, perpetually chased by a spaniel. I would have carved my initials on a low curved bridge across the stream. I would have remade my beloved home in the shape of the most beautiful houses and gardens I have visited in my unsettled life, tumbling up and down in the world.
John Aubrey was a man who embraced his fate. He accepts his fate twice in one paragraph. This was probably a more common character trait in the 1600s. In the modern west we’re taught to battle against our fate. We’re told anything is possible. That if we’re passionate, put our minds to it, we can bend our fate to be anything – yeah, yada, yeah. So when you hear someone admit their fate was not to be a wealthy man, and they accept that, it catches the ear.
If it had been my fate to be wealthy man I would have rebuilt my house in the grandest of styles.
and
But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
John Aubrey sketched! It’s not surprising. Photography was still two hundred years away, so people captured images by drawing. They preserved memories by drawing. They dreamed with their drawings:
I have sketched my house at Easton Pierse and marked with a cross my grandfather’s chamber where I was born.
and
But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
Alomar came to the United States in late 2008 to join his mother and older brother who had emigrated in the 1900s. The fact that he was willing to leave behind and established career as a writer for an uncertain life speaks to the hopelessness of the situation in Syria even before its decent into open Civil War. He and I made these translations together in difficult circumstances: most were done in the front seat of his taxi in a Chicago suburb heavy with the ache of immigration and the unimaginable pain of watching one’s country implode from afar. With books and dictionaries piled on the dashboard, hoping the taxi line wouldn’t advance too quickly and force us to break our concentration with another “load,” we were able to make some part of that lost world in Damascus live again, however briefly. This pamphlet is some of the fruit of that soul-affirming work.
C.J. Collins, Fullblood Arabian, from the translators note, pg 62.
Osama Alomar‘s Fullblood Arabian deserves more attention. It’s a perfect book for returning to the office. You can get through five or six short stories while eating your lunch in the shade. Five or six meaningful stories while eating your lunch in the shade.
C.J.’s depiction of the translator’s life, sitting in Alomar’s Chicago taxi cab, getting through pages, stacked dictionaries on the dash, all the while hoping the taxi line doesn’t move, is a reminder of the hidden work that brings a book to life.
I cherish writers, like C.J. who bring you back to a moment with specific, clear, descriptions. It’s like I was in the backseat of the cab, watching a dream unfold.
Whenever it’s bad weather, I draw at home and lend a hand to raise my little boys. They will never know what we are doing to give them everything they need.
Mostly, it seems, she spent her days drawing. She drew compulsively, rapturously, from a young age, in a sketchbook that she made from drawer-lining paper and stationery. “It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye,” she wrote. She drew when she was unsettled, regardless of the subject. “I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever, and settles on the queerest things,” she wrote in her journal. “Last time, in the middle of September, I caught myself in the back yard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round.”
Floodlights and Goalposts 