Filmmaker Wes Anderson has a signature style to his films, from the symmetrical shot compositions and interesting use of color and contrast to the quirky performances.
One look at almost all his films, you can immediately tell they’re made by the same person. It turns out though, he doesn’t consider that he has one.
Speaking in a just-published interview with Deadline at the Venice Film Festival, the interviewer pointed out how “The Royal Tenenbaums” was probably the first of his films to fully show his aesthetic to which Anderson replied: “I don’t have an aesthetic.”
When the interviewer responded to that with “I think some people will disagree with that,” Anderson reportedly laughed and explained what he meant:
“Even I can say, ‘Well, yes, I can tell that’s the same person.’ But it’s an invention, you know? What I was doing in Bottle Rocket [his first film] was what I had. That was my aesthetic. And it changed in this one. And, every time, so much of the next movie is informed by something we did in the one before.
Like, people often refer to me doing these kinds of dolly shots, and Asteroid City begins with a long one. We go from one place to the next, and we run around. It’s a certain kind of way to film a sequence that is not so typical for everybody. And I do it a lot.
He then goes on to explain his love of dolly shots came from him having to improvise one for a scene in “Rushmore” after a planned location shoot at a baseball diamond had to be reconfigured because rains had flooded it. He then adds:
“Often I feel like that’s the way things kind of evolve when you’re doing movies. You know, you find the thing you like, and then you do it again, do it a bit differently, and then you say, ‘OK, I’m going to try a different thing here. I’ll go another direction.'”
Anderson also revealed he and Roman Coppola had just finished a script before the writer’s strike began and says: “When the time is right again, we’ve got a movie to make with Benicio Del Toro.”
However he wouldn’t reveal a title or any further details beyond having cast Michael Cera in it, an actor he first met fifteen years ago.
Anderson’s newest is four short films based on Roald Dahl’s works with the first, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” releasing on Netflix on September 27th. The remaining three will be released daily afterwards through September 30th.
