Welcome to Wesworld: Wes Anderson

Some directors might be so inspired by a minor character that they will eventually build a whole movie around them. For Wes Anderson, it was a prop. In his second film, Rushmore, the prep-school protagonist Max Fischer checks out a book on Jacques Cousteau and finds a handwritten passage that flattens the first domino in his downfall into adulthood:

When one person, for whatever reason, has a chance to lead an exceptional life, he has no right to keep it to himself. -- Jacques Cousteau

Exactly. In his new movie, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson has brought his vision of a Cousteau-like world to the screen, a nameless, timeless fantasy realm where rickety research vessels, pirates and red knit caps are king and all of the undersea creatures are done in stop-motion animation by Henry Selig, who did some of the director's favorites, James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Like The Royal Tenenbaums before it, The Life Aquatic is a self-contained world, quirky yet strictly structured, grand yet shabby at the edges, funny yet ultimately bittersweet -- a world that could only come from the mind of Wes Anderson.

People imagine that Anderson will be like Max: precocious, grandiose, a zany, art-directing, do-it-all snob in a rep tie. But the slight, boyish 35-year-old who arrives at the photo studio in a rumpled tan-linen suit held together at the shoulder by a safety pin -- suede Wallabees even in 85-degree heat -- is a much more introverted version. "In some ways, I thought that character had the best version of my worst qualities," he concedes with a laugh. Calm, thoughtful and perfectly deadpan, he's the opposite of slick. It's hard to imagine this bony guy, whom James Caan once described as "a pinky in clothes," running a meeting of Hollywood executives. It's similarly difficult to imagine him stealing the go-carts from the set of Rushmore and racing them around Houston with his star and good friend Jason Schwartzman. But then again, we were mostly talking while a woman was patting his face with powder and smoothing his still-damp hair, now a French public-intellectual length, into something more adult.

"How is the film different from the other ones?" he asks in response to a question about The Life Aquatic, which stars Bill Murray as the Cousteau-like oceanographer Steve Zissou and Owen Wilson as his potentially long-lost son. "It's bigger. And it was very physical to make," he says of the shoot, which took place on and off the coast in Southern Italy. "It's kind of...wilder somehow. It's tonally probably maybe kind of similar to other things I've done before, and in other ways it has absolutely nothing to do with them." The estranged father-son theme is there, as are madcap adventures (revenge shark hunting) and the pretty smart girl with simple hair (Cate Blanchett as a journalist).

Anderson is still putting the finishing touches on the movie, which will open in December. It sounds like he's recovering from the intense nine-month shoot. He chose Rome as the base, shooting scenes in the hilltop town of Ravello -- including some in Gore Vidal's home -- on the Amalfi coast and in the Mediterranean on an old war ship that had been transformed into Team Zissou's vessel; the stage work was filmed at the legendary Cinecittà studios outside of Rome. "I thought it was going to be laid-back and eating great food all the time," he says with a knowing smile. "And we did eat great food, but the making of the movie was so intense that it wasn't like we were in Italy having relaxation time. The first day of shooting, we went out to an island called Ponza, and everyone on our ship got sick. The seas were really high, and we got stuck on the island for three days. It's not an easy place to make a movie." He begins to talk and catches himself. "Actually, I was about to speak too freely," he says. "We had an amazing time. It's just hard bringing a bunch of foreigners into a situation where things are done differently and do something really, really hard. When every day you're in another place that's a huge struggle to get anything done in and you're filming crazy scenes with crazy people, it's kind of overwhelming." He pauses while the makeup artist powders his chin. "People got really emotionally attached to it. In between shots, there were no trailers, so everyone [including Anjelica Huston, Willem Dafoe and Bud Cort of Harold and Maude] just found a place to be, and we were just taking a cruise" -- albeit in silver wet suits, Team Zissou's costume.

This time around, Owen Wilson appears in the movie, though he doesn't share the writing credit with his longtime friend as he did on Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. "He's a movie star now," Anderson says of the man he met in a playwriting class while a philosophy major at the University of Texas at Austin. "The reason I'm not writing with Owen is that he's just not available. But he's available to be in the movie." Instead, Anderson spent a year writing the script with Noah Baumbach (the son of Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown), director of Kicking and Screaming, Mr. Jealousy and the upcoming The Squid and the Whale, starring Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney.

Bill Murray, who began Act III of his career with an achingly funny-sad performance in Rushmore (1998), is back in tragicomic form for The Life Aquatic. "I don't know how we even managed to get in touch with him in the first place," Anderson recalls of Murray's pre-Rushmore days. "We had no money. One day I was in a meeting with some executives, and [Murray] called for me in that office. I was like, 'I don't know how this guy knows where I am,' and everybody else left the room. I spoke to him for an hour and a half about Kurosawa." As for the new film, "This part, I feel, has some of my own experience with him in it. He sort of has different modes of acting, because he'll do something that's very consciously comic, but when he's playing a role that he doesn't perceive that way, he will kind of avoid the more obviously funny thing. And also, anybody who'd see the movie would say there's a sadness [to him], and I respond to that." Anderson's assistant Dan arrives with more clothes for the shoot, including a rumpled pair of seersucker trousers with a striped web belt. Anderson examines a tiny stain. "Is that... chocolate?" he asks.

The sadness underlying Anderson's films is often washed away by a moment of visual or musical brilliance; you're shocked into laughter by a painting of sinister masked men riding ATVs or strains of the Who accompanying a boy in a beekeeper costume riding in a hotel service elevator. Music is indelibly linked to Anderson's films. "A lot of the time I have music in mind when I'm writing a scene," he says. "Once I tried to write a scene [in time] to music -- the character puts on a record." For The Life Aquatic, the soundtrack includes some old Spanish music (which he is still looking for the day of the interview) and, perhaps most excitingly, David Bowie songs translated into Portuguese and performed by Brazilian cast member Seu Jorge.

The degree of intricacy in Wesworld is approaching legendary status. "Everything is delicately and deliberately placed in his work," says Jason Schwartzman. "He cares about every single drop that goes into it." One magazine article focused on him spending two hours in the recording studio during the final days of editing The Royal Tenenbaums, trying to get a 23-second whistling track down. (He'd heard an editor whistling along with the soundtrack and thought it was perfect.) That applies to his life off the set as well. "Everything in his life is exactly how he loves it and wants it to be," says Schwartzman. "People don't always realize your life can be as you want it." For example, as is well known at this point, even Anderson's suits are custom-made two sizes smaller. Though Owen Wilson has said that Anderson wasn't an eccentric kid (he was into sci-fi and Maseratis like the rest of them), he will admit to expressing his directorial tendencies at a young age -- for instance, staging a grade-school adaptation of Star Wars and the battle of the Alamo (not unlike the Vietnam War scene in Rushmore). "I redesigned my brother's bedroom without his permission," he recalls. "I had this deconstructed thing on the walls: All his Navy posters were at odd angles, and the corners were chopped off. I remember being so shocked when I went back into his room and he'd returned everything to its original place. I was like, 'How could he do this? I had this whole place nailed!'" He shakes his head. "In my room, I got a lot of bookcases and focused on arranging things in them. I had a whole drafting table environment. But the most interesting thing was the room I was designing for myself on my drafting table."

Anderson moved to New York around eight years ago, expecting the city of his J.D. Salinger dreams. "My ideas of New York before I moved here were a romanticized version of New York, which is only kind of true," he says. For a while he lived on the Upper East Side, where he spent hours in Central Park. He also loved to visit the Frick Collection, whose unchanging exhibition and hushed, fusty atmosphere he found reassuring. Years later, he was able to create his own romanticized New York in The Royal Tenenbaums..

Right now, he's living with his girlfriend of three years, Imitation of Christ designer Tara Subkoff. Apart from that, his life is mostly editing, with a little reading (The Power Broker, Robert Caro's 2,000-page biography of urban planner Robert Moses, which he inches through a few pages at a time; Nancy Mitford's biography of Madame de Pompadour; Thornton Wilder's plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth), plus movies and dinner with the equally busy Subkoff. ("I haven't been with someone with that much to do except me," he says, sounding a little surprised.) He's trying to mix it up a tad: "A friend of mine, Waris, who's in the movie, we're gonna start playing tennis once a week," he says iffily. "We're actually going to buy rackets today. The apartment I bought was a weird painting studio for 40 years. I don't know how to paint, but I'd like to learn."

Will the racket and the special paint-mixing sink he bought ever be used? Next up is an animated version of a Roald Dahl story with Baumbach, and then he'll settle into envisioning his next feature. "I want it to be local and small, but for some reason I feel it being pulled toward India," he says with a helpless shrug. In Wesworld, it seems, even something small can take on a life of its own.

Hair by Lisa Garner@artistsbytimothypriano.com, hair product by Matrix * Wes wears a shirt by charvet. All other clothing by Mr. Ned.