Wes Anderson on the set of Asteroid City. Contributed by Roger Do Min/Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features
The tiny desert town where Wes Anderson shoots his latest film Asteroid City is not quite like any other tiny desert town. First, it's deliberately fake, a fictional setting set in the 1950s, in which a group of New York actors play a bunch of weirdos assembled for a science convention.
A pastel motel and dining table stand in the foreground against a dreamy blue Hockney sky. In the distance, mountains of red rock surround the action like the perimeter of a Monument Valley western. When people step up to play their part—say, Tom Hanks in a neat yellow-and-blue golf uniform that flips the dominant palette on the x-axis—they have to be strangers in the place, yet come across as insiders. in excellence. This is Anderson at his finest.
The director's style is by now so recognizable that it has spawned a viral Instagram account (@accidentallywesanderson) and a TikTok trend (#wesanderson), but he certainly isn't became fully formed — as his sketchy debut in 1996 «Bottle Rocket» shows. transparent. It was not created by Anderson alone.
Among the loyal team that joined the director along the way are: his longtime cinematographer Robert Yeoman, a veteran of nine Anderson films; production designer Adam Stockhausen (five films and growing); costume designer Milena Canonero (also five) and German fashion designer Simon Weisse (three). Here they share the secrets to achieving this Anderson magnificence.
Place, place
Anderson is known to enjoy filming his films in hard-to-reach places, often in the old world. like the Italian island of Ponza for The Life Aquatic (2004), the cobbled streets of Angouleme for The French Dispatch (2021) and the cities scattered across Rajasthan for The Darjeeling Limited (2007).
For Asteroid City, they needed to find a desert, but delays caused by the pandemic meant that the city had to be digitally modeled first. According to Stockhausen, they then dropped these models “into the American Southwest; Death Valley, California; Spaghetti Western in Spain» to see what works. After being drawn to Spain, the connection with Orson Welles began to intrigue Anderson: Welles rented a house in the small town of Chinchon, near Madrid, and filmed several scenes there for the film Chimes at Midnight (1965). As a practical solution — only 47 minutes from the center of Madrid and flat as a pancake — it was perfect.Wes' world: Anderson (in white) and Robert Yeoman (on camera) on the set of Asteroid City. Photo: Roger Do Min. Pop. 87 Focus Production/Functions
Meanwhile, Yeoman watched films like John Sturges' Bad Day in Black Rock (1955) and Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984), in which the desert appears almost as a character. “Wes really wanted to use the harshness of the light to convey a sense of where this city is,” he says. “Usually, as a cinematographer, I hate to shoot at noon. Many times I have laid out giant silks to soften the light. But it wasn't supposed to be part of our repertoire this time. First, it was windy! But it also kind of sanitized everything.”
Constructed reality
Subtlety is everything in Anderson's work; rarely disguises himself as much as he sounds the klaxon that we are in his universe. The beauty of the Grand Budapest Hotel from his 2014 film is that we see it as a structure — an idealized, toy-like façade created by Weisse and his team in the form of an exquisite chocolate box-style façade. The same can be said for the cross section of a boat in The Life Aquatic or a cargo plane in The French Dispatch with their storybook interiors.
Toy: model for Asteroid City Authors: Pop. 87 Focus Production/Functions
For Asteroid City, Yeoman explains, the painted desert backgrounds gave the entire city a deliberately «forced perspective» while «the rocks and cacti were all done by the art department. And Adam [Stockhausen] did a fantastic job of making it all look believable. And yet there is something unreal about it.”
Perfect palette
Think back to a Wes Anderson movie, and you tend to think of the color palette first — baby blue and yellow in Moonrise Kingdom (2012), what you might call «royal Tenenbaum pink», and the predominance of red and teal in Moonrise Kingdom (2012). Water life. Stockhausen immediately received a briefing on the asteroid city with its «red earth, red stones and earth». “We were looking at photos of the Southwest and Monument Valley taken at the right time of the day, so they glow, almost like in Looney Tunes — it's unrealistic how light they are.” On the contrary, “we are talking about the blue of the sky. There's the blue-blue sky, the relentless sunlight — as the script says — and these whitewashed buildings on this red planet.»
Pastels are back: Asteroid City Credit: Pop. 87 Focus Production/Functions
When Yeoman came to shoot, the color palette was already essentially locked down, and Canonero's costumes played their part, including Hitchcock-inspired outfits for Scarlett Johansson. But there was more to be done in the certification process. Yeoman says, «Wes and the colorist definitely went beyond what we originally shot — they made it more pastel with colors and gave it a low contrast look.»
Small Worlds
After designing deluxe spacecraft kits for Paul W. S. Anderson's Event Horizon (1997), Weise thought his game of model building was over due to the advent of widespread CGI. It took someone almost 20 years to show Wes Anderson the way when miniatures seemed like the most original option during the filming of the Grand Budapest Hotel in Germany. Weiss has been part of the Anderson family ever since.
Putting the finishing touches on the train model used in the movie < img src=" /wp-content/uploads/2023/06/e1d307b495bd0eabff5306828c770999.jpg" /> Model maker: Simon Weiss on the set of Asteroid City. Photo: Pop. 87 Focus Production/Functions
Asteroid City begins with a fully functioning ⅛ scale model train entering the city, which Weiss's department shipped piece by piece — «Ikea-like» — from Texas and fully refurbished to the director's vision. “The main engine at the front is a bit like 1950s trains,” he explains.
“But all this is behind you, you have cars with avocados and grapefruits, and bags with different things. And a nuclear bomb. It's crazy, but that's what Wes wanted.»
Random Ingredients
The final set the production needed was a writer's lair for the character of Edward Norton, a playwright who lives in a cabin modeled after Truman Capote's home in the Hamptons . It is unlikely that they could find a more Andersonian place to place this scenery, incompatible with literary seclusion. “Fantastic,” says Stockhausen, “and I'm so happy to say it, it was in a garlic warehouse. A lot of garlic is grown in this area of Spain. There is a drying warehouse that smells strongly of them. So while they're eating ice cream in that scene, the whole place was soaked in garlic.»
Asteroid City is in theaters now
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