To follow up on
the other day’s story about Wes Anderson ‘directing’ production at The Fantastic Mr. Fox’s London studio via email from Paris (and FMF is stop-motion, so there actually is a physical set involved), I was able to get the original
Empire Magazine story. Here’s a little more from it:
…For reasons best known to himself, Anderson is directing the film via email from Paris [...] which has disquieted some of the crew. “I didn’t meet him before I got the job,” admits cinematographer Tristan Oliver, renowned for his work with Nick Park on Chicken Run and the Wallace & Gromit movies. “That was all done at a remove; he obviously saw my showreel and CV and stuff, but we didn’t meet. And when we finally did meet, it was after he sent me a number of DVDs. He has a lot of favourite films that he likes to reference. He’s in love at various points with various genres, I think, and when we started, he was playing around with a kind of Bergman/Fellini feel. Really just specific scenes in specific films. And so the process of interpreting what he wanted started at that point, because you think, ‘I’ve got 15 DVDs here — what does he want?’”
Hold on, you mean to tell me a hipster icon is into Bergman and Fellini? Excuse me while I stop my bow tie from spinning comically. In any case, the movie looks good from what I’ve seen so far. See, sometimes being a director is like being psychologist. You just hire talented people to do your work for you and whenever they ask what you want, you just say, “What do YOU think I want?” and take a
puff from a big pipe. I’d like to see Wes Anderson direct Terrence Howard. Wes Anderson would explain a scene by sending him a Koyaanisqatsi DVD, and Terrence Howard would express his response to it via interpretive dance, and the crew would snap their fingers in appreciation.
[Thanks to giantcowofdoom for the scans]
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