An online commonplace book
Ned Plimpton: I can’t believe I asked if I could call you “Dad.” Of course you said no.
Steve Zissou: I let you call me Stevesie. It sounds better.
Ned Plimpton: It doesn’t mean the same thing.
Anderson, Wes. 2004. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
It doesn’t mean the same thing.
Happy Father’s Day.
He is a free man,” De Laurentiis said of Spalletti. “After 50 years in cinema [as producer], and so many exclusives with directors, actors, when someone comes to you and says: ‘After all, I’ve done my best, a cycle of my life has ended, I still have a contract with you, but I’d rather have a sabbatical year.’ What are you going to do, are you going to oppose it?
“You have to be generous in life, I never expect anything in return. He gave us, I thank him, now it’s right that he continues to do what he loves to do.”
Garcia, Adriana. “Napoli boss Luciano Spalletti to leave, take sabbatical after Serie A title win.” ESPN, 29, May 2023, https://global.espn.com/football/story/_/id/37751868/napoli-boss-spalletti-leave-serie-title-win
When Napoli owner Aurelio De Laurentiis speaks we quote him. Might he be the most underrated owner in football? Maybe the most underrated character in football?
In 1974, I took a series of train trips all across India, as my father introduced me to the relatives I’d never had a chance to meet in my faraway English schools and home. Every detail of The Hero clamored around our compartment: the faces at the window, waving tiny cups of tea; the moralists eager to lecture anyone on everything; the slightly obsequious waiter explaining that there was nothing to drink but Coca-Cola. None of us in the carriage would have been surprised that the man who pontificated most furiously on the importance of liberating women would prove to be the one most eager to exploit them; projection can take many forms.
Depths and Surfaces, Iyer, Pico, Feb 22, 2018: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5413-the-hero-depths-and-surfaces
We’ve talked about reading “upstream” with your favorite authors, but I’m finding it a helpful practice with your favorite filmmakers too. For example ask yourself, what movies did Wes Anderson watch? What movies did he love? Then go watch those movies, and you’ll soon see the inspirations reveal themselves.
Satyajit Ray was an enormous influence on Wes Anderson. With each interior train hallway shot from The Hero, I kept thinking “Oh! That shot is in the Darjeeling Limited!”
These pamphlets in Wes Anderson’s Criterion Collections are worth the price of admission. They’re filled with drawings, interviews, and behind- the-scenes insights. An analog version of a blu-ray’s bonus features.
Here Wes shares a glimpse of his process:
When I’m writing, I keep notebooks of my ideas for sets, props, and clothes. I incorporate some of these ideas into the script, but I set the majority of them aside to give privately to the different department heads during preproduction. In the past, I have occasionally forgotten some of my favorite ideas until it was too late – – for example, after the movie is out on video. To prevent this from happening on THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (which contains more perhaps unnecessary visual detail than both my previous films combined), about three months before we started shooting, I asked my brother Eric, a skilled illustrator, to help me create a set of drawings that would include much of the information I wanted to communicate to the crew — and that would also suggest the overall look and feeling of the movie.
We had already found the house where I wanted to film (in the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem), and our production designer, David Wasco, had provided us with a set of blueprints, so I was able to very specifically plan the contents and arrangements of each of the rooms, and Eric was able to meticulously render them. Eric was, in fact, so meticulous that many of the sets had already been constructed by the time he finished the drawings. Eventually, however, his illustrations became the standard equipment on the walls of the production offices and art department and in the notebooks of everyone on the crew — a sort of manual to keep next to your script. We include a copy here for you.
— Wes Anderson
Criterion Collection Pamphlet. The Royal Tenenbaums
Eric Chase Anderson is underrated.
Is Wes Anderson the filmmaker with the highest percentage of his movies in the Criterion Collection? 9 from 10? I’m sure the French Dispatch is lurking at the door.
Found this one late. Will add to the original list of seven.
The decay of the body is irreversible. Death is non-negotiable. After that, what’s left? Stories. But not just the stories as the story tellers remember them and then recounted them to others. The stories that people adapt from other people’s stories which then are retold, remade, and handed down until only their essence remains.
Matt Zoller Seitz
All seven eight video essays adapted from the book: The Wes Anderson Collection.
There are few perfect books. The Wes Anderson Collection is one of them.
Enjoy.
Almost two decades after the production of Bottle Rocket he (Wes) speaks of the movie with great affection, as well he should. It’s a special movie. Audacious yet gentle. It’s got a loping rhythm that reminds me of what it’s like to stroll around Dallas in the early summer at dusk. Everything is kind of turning all blue. You can hear the cicadas whirring.
– Matt Zoller Seitz
There are few perfect movies. This is one of them.
– Matt Zoller Seitz
The Royal Tenebaums works because as hilarious as it sometimes is, in its heart it’s a drama rather than a comedy. And it’s not remotely kidding about the traumas that it shows us. There is a very specific darkness at the heart of this film, divorce. The bomb that detonates in the prologue.
– Matt Zoller Seitz
It feels lived in. Why? Maybe because it treats all of its characters as if they were real people. People whos dreams and fears actually matter.
– Matt Zoller Seitz
It was in the reign of George III that the the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now
Barry Lyndon
In all of these moments you’re aware that you’re seeing something that was made by people, and the movie is ok with that. It not trying to fool you. There’s nothing smooth about these stop motion animals. Wes is not taking his cues from Pixar here. He takes his cues from Willis O’Brien the stop motion animator who created King Kong. He takes his cues from Ray Harryhausen, who followed in Willis O’Brien’s footsteps. Jason and the Argonauts were a big one for Wes growing up.
The movie carries itself as a knockabout comedy-romance, a mere diversion, but it lingers in the mind, by communicating that the right choice is one based on empathy and attention and understanding. Not mindless obedience to ritual or an ostrich like evasion of unpleasant truths. The relationship between tradition and innovation. The old guard and the new. Is ongoing, never fully settled. Sam and Suzy’s ardor is funny because they aren’t fully grown yet, but it’s powerful because they’re doing almost everything else right. Each one is headstrong but not averse to bending if it will make the other person happy. It can be likened to a negotiation, or better yet a dance.
Matt Zoller Seitz
The decay of the body is irreversible. Death is non-negotiable. After that, what’s left? Stories. But not just the stories as the story tellers remember them and then recounted them to others. The stories that people adapt from other people’s stories which then are retold, remade, and handed down until only their essence remains.
Matt Zoller Seitz
From a 2013 designboom interview.
Read the interview in full here.
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.
Design Boom. eric chase anderson interview. 11/5/2015: https://www.designboom.com/art/eric-chase-anderson-interview-11-05-2013/
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.
From Ishiguro’s Top 10 movies of all time entry on the Criterion Channel site. Ishiguro wrote the screenplay for the modern version of Ikiru – Living, which released in select American theaters this weekend.
Read his list in full here.
I first saw Ikiru when I was a child growing up in England, and it had a profound influence on me. That’s not just because it was one of the very few Japanese movies I was able to see at that time, but because it said something really encouraging to me, something I held with me all through my student years and as I was becoming an adult. It told me you don’t have to be a superstar. You don’t have to do something magnificent that the world applauds you for. Chances are that life is going to be relatively ordinary—at least that’s what I had imagined for myself. For most of us, life is very circumscribed and humble and frustrating; it’s a daily grind. But with some supreme effort, even a small life can turn into something satisfying and magnificent.
Kazuo Ishiguro, January 6, 2023. https://www.criterion.com/current/top-10-lists/518-kazuo-ishiguros-top-10
Can we muster a supreme effort today? And build on that tomorrow, if granted?
A no fluff list of five Wes Anderson short films. Yes, some of these are commercials.
Castello Cavalcanti
Come Together
Moonrise Kingdom, book short
Candy L’Eau
My Life, My Card
MZS: How do you work out ideas for costumes before they’re sewn? Do you draw rough versions of them in a sketchbook and then have somebody do more elaborate illustrations when the ideas have settled a bit?
MC: On the other two movies I did with Wes, The Life Aquatic and the Darjeeling Limited, I applied traditional sketching methods to design the look of the characters. On this one, our illustrators used both Photoshop and traditional sketching to incorporate Wes’s and my own ideas. With Photoshop we could get very close to the actors’ likenesses, and then easily do variations and send them to Wes via e-mail. The actors were very pleased because they could relate easily to how their character would look. Having worked on two of Wes’s other movies, I had already worked with some of his “ensemble” actors and it was interesting to change them again to these other characters. Wes had decided that all the men in the movie would have moustaches or beards, save for Jopling and the nasty sergeant in the train. I loved this idea, and it is curios that hardly anyone notices this detail–but it gives a style to the men’s looks.
Zoller Seitz, Matt. The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel. New York: Abrams, 2015 (see page 89)
Costume design is an overlooked art form. When done well it’s hardly noticed, but adds to the world as a character. The 2017 American film Lady Bird is an excellent example. Anyone who grew up in 90s suburban America will recognize that movie and say yes! Yes! That’s exactly how a pre-teen leaving mass would dress 30 years ago.
Floodlights and Goalposts 