The Untold Truth Of Wes Anderson

The wonderful worlds of Wes Anderson are some of the most imaginative in modern American cinema. 

As a stylist, Anderson is unmatched. His best movies, including "Rushmore" and "The Grand Budapest Hotel," are known for their witty characters, audacious colors, and attention to detail in every frame. His lens captures a child-like wonder, juxtaposed with dark topics, perhaps best illustrated in "The Royal Tenenbaums." Through the creation of a distinct visual identity and a steady stable of actors including Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, and Anjelica Huston, the filmmaker's trademarks have made him a rarity in today's cinema: an artist whose every shot is immediately recognizable for the person behind the camera.

Details about Wes Anderson's background help explain the unique ways he has assembled his filmography. While many of his films may feel like they come out fully-formed, unconventional casting and directing decisions have often happened on the fly, bringing a certain quirky kismet to his ways that feels like something out of ... well... a Wes Anderson movie. From "Bottle Rocket" to "The French Dispatch," this is the untold truth of his life and career.

One of Anderson's earliest, most important and enduring friendships was forged when he met Owen Wilson in college. Both of them were attending the University of Texas at Austin.  

"Owen and I had a mutual friend who had gone to my school in Houston and had subsequently gone to military school with Owen in New Mexico, and we knew about each other through him," Anderson recalled while speaking to the Hollywood reporter in 2012. "We met without him introducing us, because we were in a class together — a playwriting class — and we never spoke during the class, but, at the end of it, we realized that we were the people who our friend knew. Somehow, it occurred to us; Owen just walked up to me in the hall one day and started talking to me as if we knew each other."

Hitting it off, they soon became roommates — and shortly thereafter, the duo began brainstorming ideas that would eventually yield their debut film.

"We were both writing short stories, and we started showing them to each other and getting help from each other with them," Anderson explained. "Owen was sharing an apartment with the mutual friend, who had moved to Austin along the way, after we'd been in this class together. They'd gotten the apartment that we shared together, and we started working on 'Bottle Rocket' as a feature script. We wanted to write a movie script, and that was the script we came up with. We started trying to film it as a feature with some money from our fathers — we each borrowed $2,000 — and we ran out of money, and it became a short."

Many Anderson aficionados still may not realize how much of his early work had an autobiographical element. "Rushmore" is perhaps the most explicit in this sense; the film was not only shot at St. John's School in Houston, where he went to high school, but also was largely based on his experiences there. 

The A.V. Club went back to Houston to explore the school and interview some of Anderson's old classmates, who had plenty of similarities to point out. In a 1999 interview with SFGate, Anderson compared himself to the film's plucky protagonist, Max Fischer.

"Max is like me, except he's not shy," he explained, saying that his fourth grade teacher would let him put on plays inspired by "Starsky & Hutch" to make him feel better about what was going on at home. "My parents were getting divorced. It was kind of horrible. I couldn't accept it for the longest time... I was having a problem with self-discipline. So this teacher who knew I liked to write plays made this deal that every two weeks that went by that I didn't have this self-discipline problem I got to put on another play."

Anderson eventually graduated from the school — unlike poor Max, who gets kicked out.

In "The Royal Tenenbaums," Gwyneth Paltrow plays Margot, the moody, promiscuous daughter of the family. She and Richie (Luke Wilson) take care of a hawk on the rooftop who they've affectionately named Mordecai. However, in real life, the bizarre saga of what happened to that hawk is as interesting as any of the animal's scenes in the movie.

The first hawk the crew was using to play Mordecai was kidnapped and held for ransom (via Far Out). Instead of paying the ransom, the producers decided the best move would be to simply replace the hawk. The kidnappers were never heard from again, to this day nobody knows what happened to the original Mordecai.

That strange on set switcheroo is cleverly referenced in the movie's dialogue. Late in the movie, Richie looks at Mordecai and says "see, now he has more white feathers on his neck."

Not long after the stop-motion puppeteering of "Aquatic," Anderson decided to take a left turn into animation. His first animated film was a warmly-received stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl's "Fantastic Mr. Fox." 

One unconventional method Anderson used to achieve the film's unique tone was making actors like George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Willem Dafoe and Bill Murray record their lines ... outside. 

Aside from providing a natural background din of crickets and birds, the move took the traditionally lonely, boxed-in experience of dubbing a voice in a recording booth and made it more of an adventure. In the behind-the-scenes short "The Making of Fantastic Mr. Fox — Recording the Voices," viewers can see Anderson, Clooney and others strolling in the grass, running their lines. 

Clooney, in particular, seems to have really enjoyed the experience. He can be seen running, tumbling and popping up with Mr. Fox's signature tongue click, clearly immersing himself in the role. 

Alongside "Rosemary's Baby," one of Wes Anderson's most unexpected influences might be Charlie Brown. 

The filmmaker is a huge "Peanuts" fan, and callbacks to the iconic characters of the comic strip and cartoons can be found throughout his filmography. In "Rushmore," Max's dad is a barber, the same profession as "Peanuts" creator Charles Schultz. In "Moonrise Kingdom," the dog is named Snoopy. And the list of homages goes on, including, but not limited to, musical references to the "Charlie Brown Christmas Special" found in multiple Wes Anderson movies (via Slate).

The "Peanuts" influence is felt in Anderson's characters and themes as well. Charlie Brown is a child dealing with some pretty dark thoughts and feelings. That same youthful melancholy can be seen in some of Anderson's young protagonists, like Max and Margot. 

Come to think of it, "Moonrise Kingdom" might just be the film most inspired by "Peanuts" animator Bill Melendez. In addition to the aforementioned Snoopy reference, the movie is about kids dealing with emotional issues without the help of parents.

A great deal of "The Grand Budapest Hotel" takes place inside the titular resort, owned and operated by Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes). Throughout the film, characters interact with a variety of extras who play the various staff working around the Grand Budapest. In real life, some of these people weren't "extras" at all — in fact, they were actual hospitality workers from real-life hotels similar to the Grand Budapest that Wes Anderson imagined for his now-classic movie.

A producer on the movie, Jeremy Dawson, told Variety in 2014 that all the workers behind the front desk in the film were from hotels the crew had stayed at while scouting locations. According to Dawson, two of the extras worked at German hotels in Gorlitz, and another was the concierge of the Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg.