Full name: Wesley Mortimer Wales Anderson.
Age: 40.
Height: 6’ 1”.
Occupation: Auteur filmmaker.
Influences: John Ford, Francois Truffaut, J.D. Salinger.
Originally an aspiring novelist, Wes Anderson decided to become a movie director after meeting aspiring actor Owen Wilson in a playwriting class at the University of Texas, Austin. The two of them hit it off, entered a short film in Sundance, got noticed by a producer, and launched their cinematic careers. As an auteur, Anderson writes, directs and produces his own films, often acting as soundtrack supervisor and art director as well. Anderson was nominated for an Oscar for co-authoring the script of 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums.
Long, long ago, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I sat in a sticky-floored multiplex with a handful of Jujubes and saw this commercial:
Back then the only film directors I knew were Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, grizzly, humorless veterans who wore frumpy T-shirts and rumpled parkas and mumbled during interviews. They didn’t hold much interest for me. But right away, this guy got my attention. He was different. For one thing, he was young. And unlike Lucas and Speilberg, he seemed friendly, spoke quickly, and wore a safari jacket. In one minute and thirty seconds he illustrated the ins and outs of filmmaking, making demands of prop people and giving orders to underlings, all the while eating half a sandwich. I was impressed.
“My life is about telling stories,” The Mysterious Young Director said as he hopped in his director’s chair and swung up on a big dolly facing the camera. As an aspiring novelist myself, I found that pretty intriguing. I asked myself, “Who is this guy?” I went home and tried to find out who he was, because I was the sort of kid got a kick out of researching things thoroughly. I was a quintessential nerd. By the age of fourteen I’d written a novella, started a desktop publishing business, and authored my life plan for the next decade. I was obsessed with pirates, astronauts, and extraterrestrials. I spent more time in my artistic and academic pursuits than in the company of peers, and consequently I was a lonely kid, and kind of melancholy too.
But whoever this director guy was, he seemed to get it. He was nerdy and unafraid, and he seemed like the kind of guy who’d get a kick out of research too. Unfortunately, I found out that all of his movies were rated R, and as a fourteen-year-old living in a socially conservative household, I wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies. I thought this meant I would never see any of the Mysterious Director’s films. Cue more melancholy.
I forgot all about this until some years later when I had a friend who, after obsessing over T.S. Eliot and Stephen Sondheim, went through a Wes Anderson phase. He wouldn’t shut up until I had watched The Darjeeling Limited. And boy, am I glad he didn’t. I was hooked from scene one, and to this day, Darjeeling is the only film where I have sat through the entire end credits.
Like most Anderson fans, what arrested me at first was his style. Each of his films boast a look so meticulously assembled that they’re sometimes accused of coming off as phony and contrived. This infamous clip from The Royal Tenenbaums, for instance, is strictly Andersonian:
I loved every facet of Wes’s style, though, from the heavily symbolic Louis Vuitton luggage featured in Darjeeling to each carefully composed frame of The Royal Tenenbaums. His films made sense to me, and I felt at home in them.
The more I watched Wes Anderson’s movies, the more I realized that his characters were like me. They were outsiders. In short, they were weird. They were self-contradictory eccentrics who sometimes spewed banalities like “I’m going to go sit on that thing over there” and sometimes spoke in Latin, just like I did. They were morally ambiguous, virtuous and heroic one day, and the scum of the earth the next. They were strange people with strange problems, and I could relate to all of them. Take, for instance, Max Fischer, the son of a barber who gets into elite Rushmore Academy on artistic merit and becomes a career Renaissance man:
Or take the titular hero of Anderson’s latest film, an egotistical fox who can’t kick his chicken-stealing habit:
“I think I have this thing where I need everybody to think I’m the greatest—the quote unquote Fantastic Mr. Fox—and if they aren’t completely knocked out, dazzled, and kind of intimidated by me, then I don’t feel good about myself.”
Here, Mr. Fox has stumbled upon something important, for with all this outsiderness comes an undeniable, self-induced pressure to be exceptional. I can relate to this too: I’ve written fourteen step-by-step career plans for myself over the last couple of years, and most of them have involved becoming famous. Max Fischer also has delusions of grandeur:
But after this scene, Max wakes up from his dream, and he’s drooling. At the end of the day he’s just another poor kid with too many hobbies. Things are little easier for Mr. Fox, and his son, Ash, a scrawny fox who lacks the athletic or academic prowess of his older cousin, Kristofferson. Like me and my astronaut obsession, these guys just don’t really fit in anywhere.
As I watched Anderson’s films, I asked myself, “Why all these outsiders? Why all this misfit-hood?” I couldn’t figure this out until I saw Wes interviewed on Charlie Rose one day:
After watching this clip, I finally understood why this man and his work appeal to me so much: he’s a misfit too. He admits that when writing Fantastic Mr. Fox, he accidentally based Ash’s character on himself and Kristofferson on his older brother. “My brother was the perfect one, and I was the maladjusted, awkward kid,” he said.
In fact, I’ve discovered that most of the people I talk to on a regular basis feel like outsiders. Perhaps not coincidentally, I’ve successfully made Anderson fans out of several of them. It could be that I’m just attracted to outcasts and thus unconsciously surround myself with them. But I think what’s more accurate is that everyone, on some level, feels inadequate. Everyone thinks that everyone else is part of some super secret club, and if we try hard enough and if we’re just plain lucky, one day we’ll be part of it too.
Maybe there is a secret club. I don’t know. And I’m not going to pretend that after thinking about this I’ve suddenly stopped feeling left out and am in harmony with the rest of the world. That’s just not true. Ask my mom. I was pretty darned irritated at the rest of the world when Fantastic Mr. Fox only made $9 million on its opening weekend, an injustice I tried my best to remedy by seeing the film four times.
But after becoming an Anderson fan, I’ve learned to embrace my outsiderhood, if for no other reason than knowing that there are others of us out there. And who knows—maybe my obsessive research tendencies and NASA knowledge will come in handy someday. At the end of Fantastic Mr. Fox, our hero and his son are only able to save the day because they are eccentric.
Perhaps it is Mrs. Fox who puts it most succinctly. “We’re all different,” she says to Ash, putting her paw on his scrawny shoulder. “Especially him.” She points at her flamboyant husband, who is wearing yellow- and red-striped pajamas. “But there’s something kind of fantastic about that, isn’t there?”
Indeed there is, Mrs. Fox. Indeed there is.
