“I like when I’m working on something that I don’t understand,” seven-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker Wes Anderson says about how he cracked his new off-kilter comedic period opus Asteroid City, which hits theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Friday. The Focus Features release goes wide on Friday, June 23.
“It’s not that you got an idea for a movie, you have an idea for two movies,” he tells Crew Call about his latest, set in 1950s Arizona. It is a story in a story that straddles the backstage inner workings of Broadway actors staging a play that’s set in a desert town (the majority of the movie we’re watching). A science fair for the youth, the Stargazer convention, is occurring in a desolate town where a Hollywood starlet (Scarlett Johansson) rolls in with her daughter and connects with a widower (Jason Schwartzman) and daughters; their car having broke down. Meanwhile, he hasn’t told his kids their mother has died. And that’s just one of the story strands in the ensemble pic, which premiered at Cannes and also stars Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe and Edward Norton among several others.
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Anderson drew inspirations from the lives of East Coast actors, read Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward whose careers were interwoven between the Provincetown Theater Festival in Massachusetts and the Hollywood cinema of the day.
He further expounds, “It was about the ’50s: The men who came back from the war and the women dealing with their mental illness.”
And in regards to how well he knows the fictional desert town he’s set his new movie in, the Houston, Texas born-Anderson admits, “I’ve passed through it many times.”
“I use to drive from Texas to Los Angeles. I made that that drive many times. This is somewhere along the route, probably along the old route, off the interstate,” he tells us.
“We built the desert in the middle of nowhere, which is an odd thing to do; we brought in a lot of sand.”
Anderson also teased his next movie, which he bills as a “three-hander” and “character study…it might read as sort of an adventure, it has some globe-trotting to it.” While not naming names, it would not be shocking to see some of the directors’ acting clique returning, i.e., Schwartzman and Owen Wilson.
And despite the controversy that Bill Murray weathered last spring with the unplugging of his Aziz Ansari movie Being Mortal, Anderson still stands behind his Rushmore and Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou star.
“I can’t imagine not working with Bill again. With our movie, he got Covid, so he couldn’t be in the film. Steve Carell replaced Bill in Asteroid City,” Anderson explains.
He adds about Murray, “He’s literally my daughter’s godfather, but for me, he’s kind of a godfather.”
We also chat with Anderson about the dynamics of his films at the box office and the state of streaming versus of the arthouse.
Listen to our intriguing conversation below:
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