Opening this weekend:
2012 opens this weekend. You know it, I know it, the kids in my rape van know it. I’ve already featured the trailer, the disaster porn version of the trailer, the no-effects trailer, and my favorite, the Raising Arizona music trailer. Anyway, it looks fun, and it’ll probably make a lot of money. Other than that, you’ve got Pirate Radio, which has a great cast but also a guy walking into a lamp post in the trailer, Fantastic Mr. Fox opening in NY and LA, Black Dynamite playing a few more places, and probably some other stuff that I don’t want to look up because it’s Friday. How about you just watch this awesome clip from Bad Lieutenant and we call it a week, shall we?
Wes “Little Lord Fauntleroy” Anderson took time out of his busy v-neck sweater-buying schedule this week 
to talk to David Poland about the “beef” between him and his DP, Tristan Oliver. Oliver had previously said of Anderson, who’s been taking heat for directing The Fantastic Mr. Fox via email from Paris, “I think he’s a little sociopathic, I think he’s a little OCD. Contact with people disturbs him.” Well la di da, Mr. I Have Human Friends. Here’s what Anderson had to say:
The word that I think gives one pause is ’sociopath’. That is the unexpected one. Well, I have another DP I’ve worked with for many years. There are moments in production…where I think he would have unkind words to say about me as well. Because movies are hard to make, and sometimes you’re making people do things that are the last thing they want to do, and the last way they want to do it. And with this movie, there are a lot of things that people who work in stop motion are used to doing digitally, and I wouldn’t do it.
Tristan said a bunch of stuff that is a bit outrageous for someone to say about their boss, while they are working for them. I didn’t know the details of it, but i knew some of it. And he was obviously a bit mortified because he spoke completely out of turn. But our relationship got better after that. [Oliver's quote was from April] By the time the piece [the LA Times article from Sunday] comes out, it’s a bit of a drag because it puts a wrinkle in a relationship that we’ve already smoothed out.
Leave it to captain bow tie to explain their disagreement with a fancy clothing metaphor. Obviously I’m disappointed they’re not fighting more, but what can you expect from guys named “Wes” and “Tristan”? I imagine they’d settle disagreements through barbershop quartet. Otherwise Wes could get grass stains on his breeches, and that makes the headmistress ever so cross.
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:
Below you can watch the newest trailer for The Fantastic Mr. Fox, the movie Wes Anderson email-directed, featuring voice work by handsome father figures George Clooney and Bill Murray, plus Meryl Streep, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, and others. It looks like they’ve given this new trailer the full Wes Anderson treatment, by which I mean it has big yellow text and Rolling Stones songs. It’s not 3D or CG… and I like that. Not to mention, Willem Dafoe as a rat? He was born to play this role.
To follow up on the other day’s story about Wes Anderson ‘directing’ production at The Fantastic Mr. Fox’s London studio via email from Paris (and FMF is stop-motion, so there actually is a physical set involved), I was able to get the original Empire Magazine story. Here’s a little more from it:
…For reasons best known to himself, Anderson is directing the film via email from Paris [...] which has disquieted some of the crew. “I didn’t meet him before I got the job,” admits cinematographer Tristan Oliver, renowned for his work with Nick Park on Chicken Run and the Wallace & Gromit movies. “That was all done at a remove; he obviously saw my showreel and CV and stuff, but we didn’t meet. And when we finally did meet, it was after he sent me a number of DVDs. He has a lot of favourite films that he likes to reference. He’s in love at various points with various genres, I think, and when we started, he was playing around with a kind of Bergman/Fellini feel. Really just specific scenes in specific films. And so the process of interpreting what he wanted started at that point, because you think, ‘I’ve got 15 DVDs here — what does he want?’”
Hold on, you mean to tell me a hipster icon is into Bergman and Fellini? Excuse me while I stop my bow tie from spinning comically. In any case, the movie looks good from what I’ve seen so far. See, sometimes being a director is like being psychologist. You just hire talented people to do your work for you and whenever they ask what you want, you just say, “What do YOU think I want?” and take a puff from a big pipe. I’d like to see Wes Anderson direct Terrence Howard. Wes Anderson would explain a scene by sending him a Koyaanisqatsi DVD, and Terrence Howard would express his response to it via interpretive dance, and the crew would snap their fingers in appreciation.
[Thanks to giantcowofdoom for the scans]
