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:

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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]

Take this with a grain of salt as it comes from the print version of last month’s Empire magazine, which I’m still waiting to get a scan of, but the magazine has an interview with Tristan Oliver, the cinematographer on the (awesome-looking) Fantastic Mr. Fox.  Oliver seems to imply that Wes Anderson directed the film via email.  Which sounds a lot like, you know, not directing.  From this guy:

According to an inadvertently extraordinary interview with the animators in this month’s Empire, [Wes Anderson] is keeping his distance from the set and directing via e-mail*, sending in his favourite DVDs to give an impression of what he’d like to see. Cinematographer Tristan Oliver, asked about his working relationship with Anderson, replies: [Quoting Empire]  “I think Wes doesn’t understand what you can do, and he often wants us to do what you can’t do, and the length of time the process takes … I don’t think he quite comprehends that, and how difficult it is to change something once you’ve started. It takes a big amount of someone’s time to change a very small thing. I think he also doesn’t understand that an animator is a performer. An animator is an actor. And this is the secret to animation: you direct your animator, you do not direct the puppet, because the puppet is an inanimate object. You direct an animator as if you’re directing an actor, and they will give you a performance. So we’ll get a note back from Wes saying ‘that arm movement is wrong.’ But that arm movement is part of a fluid performance. And that has been really quite difficult for the animators.”

Read the rest of this entry »

POSTER FOR Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Between this, that indie abortion I posted this morning, and the Inglourious Basterds titles, I think it’s pretty clear that yellow title text is, like, the new thing.  It’s funny, because me and Zooey Deschanel were just talking about this at the opening of this new Vegan BBQ place over in DUMBO.  [full poster below, via FirstShowing]

MIKE JUDGE’S NEXT movie will be “Brigadier Gerard. It’s based on these short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle… So it’s kind of a big movie, I guess. It’s set during the Napoleonic Wars, where this character is kind of like Clouseau, similar to that.”  So basically, Napoleon asks Clouseau if he misses fighting in the Napoleonic Wars, and Clouseau says, “I vouldn’ say I’ve been meesing eet, Napoleon…”  [ThePlaylist]

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE has a new poster too.  Wow, it’s like hipster Christmas.  Thanks, Santa, I got everything I could ever want!  And yet I still feel vaguely dissatisfied…. [MSN]

COLIN HANKS TO PLAY a serial killer who wins the lottery, then sets off to win over his crush.  It’s good casting, because a serial killer who wins the lottery is pretty much the life story of this mouth-breathing oaf.  (I’m sure he’s nice, though, really). [Variety]

Read the rest of this entry »