10.13.09 UPDATE: W.ANDERSON INVOLVED IN NERDY FEUD

UPDATE: It’s not an update per se, but I added the Fantastic Mr. Fox featurette video after the jump which shows Wes Anderson directing and explains the process.

A while back, I reported on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, and how he’d directed the movie via email from Paris.  Since Fox is stop-motion animated, and it’s not really the director’s job to build the puppets or miniature sets, it’s debatable how big a deal him not physically being there is.  But his main reason for not being there seems to be “because I didn’t want to”, and his animators don’t seem to like him much.  The LA Times did a feature on it over the weekend:

Anderson [made the] unorthodox decision to hole up in Paris for most of the shoot’s one-year duration while principal photography commenced at London’s Three Mills Studios. He wasn’t working on another project, and nothing Paris-centric demanded he be there; Anderson simply “didn’t want to be at Three Mills Studios for two years.”

The move did little to endear Anderson to his subordinates. “It’s not in the least bit normal,” director of photography Tristan Oliver observed last spring. “I’ve never worked on a picture where the director has been anywhere other than the studio floor!”

For his part, Anderson implies that his crew might be disgruntled because he asked them to do things differently, not because he wasn’t there:

“It’s not the most pleasant thing to force somebody to do it the way they don’t want to do it,” Anderson said. “In Tristan’s case, what I was telling him was, ‘You can’t use the techniques that you’ve learned to use. I’m going to make your life more difficult by demanding a certain approach.’

Anderson made the animators work old school, with no effects, and from what I can tell, the movie looks pretty cool because of it.

Materials such as plastic kitchen wrap would stand-in for water, cotton balls would be puffs of smoke and green terry cloth grass. Even though it was much more difficult for fabricators and animators, everything had to be shot “in camera” rather than be added digitally later. As well, the writer-director stipulated that the animal puppets have real fur — long verboten in stop-motion circles for the material’s discontinuous, blown-by-the-wind look on film.

But when it came to implementing his ideas, Anderson exited London, stage left. “I thought I’d make the script and cast it and record the actors,” he said. “I’d work with some people to design it, get it to look a certain way. But at a certain point, I’d hand it over to the people that animate it. And they’d give it back to me and I’d work on the music and kind of spruce it up.”

Allison Abbate is a veteran of many stop-motion productions, including Selick’s epochal “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and Tim Burton’s Oscar-nominated “Corpse Bride.” She pointed out that it wasn’t unusual in the genre to issue directions from off-set. “Tim wasn’t here that much during ‘Corpse Bride,’ ” Abbate said at Three Mills Studio last spring. “He doesn’t need to be. Making stop-motion is like watching paint dry.”

Okay, so he’s a little demanding and unrealistic, but his name was on it and he wanted it do it his way.  Not much of a story there, right?  (*RECORD SCRATCH*)

Not everyone could muster a magnanimous word for Anderson’s M.O. — especially his on-set absence. “I think he’s a little sociopathic,” cinematographer Oliver said. “I think he’s a little O.C.D. Contact with people disturbs him. This way, he can spend an entire day locked inside an empty room with a computer. He’s a bit like the Wizard of Oz. Behind the curtain.”

Informed of Oliver’s discontent, Anderson said: “I would say that kind of crosses the line for what’s appropriate for the director of photography to say behind the director’s back while he’s working on the movie. So I don’t even want to respond to it.”

OH. MOTHERF–KING. SNAP.  This is just like Tupac-Biggie, or Megan Fox-Michael Bay, except way more twee and esoteric and I can’t even find a picture of Tristan Oliver on Google.  It’s basically like being at the independent coffee shop and two guys are having a terse-yet-respectful disagreement.  Oh my God everyone, drop your laptop and form a circle.  Did you hear how passive aggressive he was being?  FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!…