Inside the Wes Anderson exhibition at the Design Museum: ‘fans will be blown away'
Somewhere in Kent, on the edge of a field, stands a warehouse full of old props from Wes Anderson films. Ahead of the launch of the new Wes Anderson exhibition at the Design Museum this November, curator Johanna Agerman Ross got to do what many lifelong fans could only dream of: she rifled through the director's storage unit to find the best items to put on display.
'It's as you would expect any storage facility to be,' Agerman Ross tells City AM. 'With racks of shelving and utility crates that you can safely store objects in. it's quite anonymous in a way, it's not necessarily a space that speaks of Wes Anderson's artistic work, but it's not trying to.'
You can't help but picture the director pottering about, lifting up items and gently suggesting they may be interesting to include in his first ever retrospective. 'Such a picture would not be a correct picture,' says Agerman Ross. 'We don't work side by side with him, it's more of an exchange, us going about our business as curators and museum people, not necessarily sitting in the archive together selecting the objects. He has a team through American Empirical Pictures who work with him on all his films, it's the same team who look after the props.'
Though, of course, Anderson was involved. 'His expertise and insight into his own archive is bar none, so we're relying on his memory and his stories in order to bring this to life.'
Featuring over 600 items used in his film catalogue, including the original scale model of The Grand Budapest Hotel used in the film, and props from Asteroid City, The Royal Tenenbaums and The French Dispatch, the exhibition offers fans a closer look at Anderson's creative process.
There will be particular emphasis on his collaborative skills, and graphic designers, set designers, puppet makers and prop makers all contributed to the conversation about which items, including storyboards, notebooks, costumes, and backdrops, are included. 'It really isn't just Wes, it's so many people that he's gathered throughout the years and continues to collaborate with. When you're on the outside looking in it's easy to associate it with just one person, but I think that idea of collaboration is such a strong thread through everything he does.'
Agerman Ross says she and her co-curator Lucia Savi have been able to build 'a very cohesive picture of how he works,' and believes visitors will be surprised by the 'vast amount of time and effort' that goes into creating Wes Anderson's universes. 'That's not something you necessarily gather from looking at a film. A film is one way of experiencing an artwork.'
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As an example, Agerman Ross describes models from feature film The Isle of Dogs that break down the process of stop motion animation. 300 different dog faces, 'or face plugs as they're called in puppet making,' were used to create each separate character in the film. 'That kind of extreme attention to detail to make sure a story comes to life, that's something I certainly marvel at and I'm sure other people will marvel at that too. Also the extreme beauty of the objects. It's something you can't really experience or understand through the medium of film but when you see it in the exhibition. It really comes to life in a different way.'
Wes Anderson: The Archives follows the Design Museum's The World of Tim Burton and Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition in celebrating the life's work of one filmmaker with a singular creative vision. The Kubrick exhibition became the museum's most successful exhibition in terms of ticket sales, and the Burton exhibition was the most pre-sold in the venue's history.
It comes amid a challenging period for some of the capital's museums and gallery spaces, such as the Tate Modern and National Gallery, which have experienced drops in football. Analysts suggest the rise in experiential cultural events like the Squid Game exhibition and the Bubble Planet show may be detracting audiences from more traditional experiences.Sign in to access your portfolio
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CNN
11 hours ago
- CNN
Wes Anderson on the secrets and struggles behind his impeccably stylish men
Wes Anderson has a message for London's finest tailors: he'd love a Savile Row suit — if someone will give him a discount. 'Hopefully if we put this out there someone will contact me,' he said on a call from New York. '(They're) quite a lot of money, but it will see you out, as they say.' This would be a radical move for the sartorially-minded director. Anderson is loyal to New York tailoring institution Mr. Ned for his custom-made clothes, he said, though has been known to stray to legendary Italian atelier Battistoni when in Rome. But he would be willing to give a London tailor a shot. After all, if they're good enough for his characters, they should be good enough for him. Anderson's latest film, 'The Phoenician Scheme,' is bulging at the seams with suits, some crafted by Taillour Ltd., a bespoke tailoring label in East London, founded by Fred Nieddu and Lee Rekert. The movie centers on 1950s business magnate Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), who wheels and deals his way around a fictionalized Middle Eastern country while fending off assassination attempts. In tow is his heir, a novice nun called Leisl (Mia Threapleton), who's out to save his soul, and bumbling tutor Bjorn (Michael Cera), along for the ride with his employer and his crush. Together they bring an odd thrupple dynamic to what might otherwise have been a series of business meetings with deep-pocketed characters played by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Jeffrey Wright, Benedict Cumberbatch, and more. A crime caper with a smattering of existential angst, it's the director's most accessible work in a while. It's also, even by Anderson's standards, a showcase for fine tailoring — marking a new high point for the director whose films often feature impeccable menswear. When Anderson was young, he used to play dress up. 'There were so many costumes in movies when I was a child that I tried to imitate,' he shared. How characters presented themselves through their clothes was something he was always conscious of. 'From the first moment of the first short film I made, I thought of that,' Anderson recalled. Making that short film, 'Bottle Rocket' (1993), which Anderson turned into his feature debut in 1996, he remembered debating actor Owen Wilson over a shirt. 'We'd written it together, and he knew exactly how to inhabit this person,' Anderson said. 'But the visual part of the character… I had to sort of coax (Wilson) into something he would never wear.' Five years and a bigger budget later, Anderson was making 'Rushmore' (1998). Jason Schwartzman's character, the preppy student Max Fischer, dresses beyond his years. Anderson, Schwartzman and the film's costume designer Karen Patch commissioned a tailor in the director's native Houston, Texas, to reflect that in the form of a perfectly cut, blue school blazer. 'That's the first time there was a costume that I thought, 'Let's make this from scratch. We can make it exactly, 100% right,'' Anderson said. Then came 'The Royal Tenenbaums' (2001) — also costumed by Patch — whose sartorial ripples continue to spread today. Anderson turned to Mr. Ned for help with tailoring and liked what they came up with. Years later, he sat for an interview with the New York Times wearing the exact jacket worn by Bill Murray in the film, he told the reporter. However you look at it, Anderson never stopped playing dress up — including having his characters wear his inspirations on their sleeves. When conceiving the look for Korda in 'The Phoenician Scheme,' Anderson said he had in mind the businessmen played by Hollywood's Golden Age actors William Powell ('The Thin Man') and Herbert Marshall ('Trouble in Paradise'). Meanwhile, Threapleton's nun was styled in green tights as a twisted nod to the titular Irma, a sex worker played by Shirley MacLaine, in Billy Wilder's 'Irma la Douce' (1963). 'I think it is probably quite a generous gesture by Wes to be so conspicuous with some of his references,' said Adam Woodward, editor-at-large of Little White Lies magazine and author of 'The Worlds of Wes Anderson.' 'That has been the case throughout his career,' Woodward continued, speaking on a video call. 'I think he's adding new layers to that as he continues, and I suppose as he enters this middle period of his career, his work for me feels like it's getting maybe more mature. He's hitting a really interesting groove now.' 'The Phoenician Scheme' saw Anderson reteam with Italian costume designer Milena Canonero, a four-time Oscar winner who has worked on most of his films since 2004's 'The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.' Theirs is the kind of longstanding collaboration that allows for creative disagreement, which was the case when creating the backbone of 'The Phoenician Scheme's' wardrobe: its suits. 'My suggestion in our script is that all the businessmen wear double-breasted gray chalk stripe (or) pinstripe suits in the classic tycoon look,' Anderson recounted. 'And Milena's suggestion is, 'That's a terrible idea,' and 'Why would we have everyone wearing the same thing? It's been done a thousand times before and it's a cliché.'' But Anderson had his reasons: One being that a good piece of clothing, such as tailoring, takes on a protective quality. 'If you don't like what you're wearing or you've got a bad haircut, you don't feel as strong, you know. It's all armor,' he said. Korda (Benicio del Toro's character), he added, 'wants all the armor he can have, because someone's going to try to kill him at any moment, and he wants to kill them back.' While Korda's wardrobe is dominated by gray pinstripes, there's room for a safari suit and a thobe. The impression is that whether behind a desk or the wheel of a plummeting airplane, Korda is a worldly man of action. In a video interview with CNN, Del Toro described the film's costuming as '50% of my performance,' heaping praise on 'legend' Canonero. 'She does your character from the bottom up,' he added. 'She's super specific. The shoes are from the period, even the underwear.' Anderson said he felt strongly about giving all the other businessmen suits too because 'these tycoons, these very rich men with tremendous ambition, they have symbols of power that they adorn their offices and their residences and their bodies with,' he explained. 'This is part of how they say, 'We're in the same club, we rule the world, and we are the ones in power.' The genius of Canonero, the director said, was 'how to make the American (suits) a little different from the European ones and how to give them each their own personality — because it is a lot of gray pinstripe suits in one movie.' Take Hanks and Cranston's West Coast railroad men: They may be holding a Coca-Cola and a Hershey's bar, but to tell they're American, one need only look at their sack suits. There's also a subtle narrative thread running through the pinstripes and chalk stripes. (As consensus builds among the businessmen who come aboard Korda's scheme, if they weren't already, they begin wearing stripes.) Once again, Anderson is playing with the idea of uniform and visual coding; it rears its head in everything from 'The Grand Budapest Hotel's' concierges to 'Bottle Rocket's' boiler-suited robbers and Steve Zissou's red beanie-sporting explorers. In 'The Phoenician Scheme,' by the time we meet Cumberbatch's character Uncle Nubar, who's wearing a running stitch-like stripe, his tailoring marks him out as different, even before his nefarious intent is revealed. This use of costuming is par for the course for the director, said Woodward: 'It's always in service of the story, it is never frivolous.' Naturally, fashion is not there for window dressing; it advances the plot. Just like Richie Tenenbaum's sweatband doesn't just signal his arrested development but signposts his forbidden love for his adopted sister in 'The Royal Tenenbaums'; M. Gustave's Society of the Crossed Keys badge foreshadows his ace-in-the-hole network of concierges when he's in a pinch in 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'; and Mr. Fox's severed tail, worn by the evil Mr. Bean as a necktie, becomes motivation for a heist in 'Fantastic Mr. Fox.' 'Everything is about storytelling,' said Anderson. 'Movies, as much as they are dialog, and as much as it is all about emotion and energy, the main thing you do with a movie is watch it,' the director said of building his visual language. 'The movie is how do we take all this information, all these ideas, these characters, these observations from lives and bits of imagination, and order them into the shape of a thing we think of as a story,' he continued. 'It's very much a rational, orderly process.' 'The Phoenician Scheme' is currently in US and UK theaters.
Geek Tyrant
13 hours ago
- Geek Tyrant
Wes Anderson Reflects on His Filmography Like an Archaeologist of Emotion and Aesthetic — GeekTyrant
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, director Wes Anderson talked about all 12 of the films he's made, offering a surprisingly introspective look at the method behind his meticulously designed madness. For over nearly an hour in the video below, he he talked about everything from his Texas upbringing and early friendship with Owen and Luke Wilson, to the unexpected helping hand of James L. Brooks that launched Bottle Rocket into the world. The filmmaker said: 'When you're writing a story, it often feels less like you're doing architecture and more like you're doing excavation–we're just unearthing it.' The video came with the note: 'Wes Anderson had made 12 films over 29 years, making his name widely known for his distinctive visual style of symmetrical compositions, vivid color palettes and unique camera movements. From his very first film Bottle Rocket to his great hits like The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Royal Tenenbaums , Wes Anderson takes a look at all of his films and discusses in detail how they came to life.' If you've ever been drawn to Anderson's symmetrical worlds and bittersweet characters, this video offers a peek into the mind where all those stories were gently unearthed. As a fan of Anderson's work, I really enjoyed this video video and the insights that it offers.
San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Wes Anderson created a ‘Phoenician Scheme' immersive experience at S.F.'s Alamo Drafthouse
If you ever wondered what it's like to be inside a Wes Anderson movie, well, you likely will still be wondering after exploring 'The Phoenician Scheme Immersive Experience.' The new installation at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission unveiled Wednesday, June 4, as part of a promotion for the new film ' The Phoenician Scheme ' is more of a vibe than an immersion. But it's admittedly ambitious and kinda fun. The display at the San Francisco movie house comes just two days before Anderson's latest star-studded project opens in theaters on Friday, June 6, and will be up through June 20. Developed by Alamo and Focus Features, the distributor of the film, the installation was created with input from the director himself along with the film's production designer, Adam Stockhausen, and set decorator, Anna Pinnock. The movie, which stars Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson and many others, is set in the 1950s and is among Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola's sweetest films. Mike Sampson, Alamo Drafthouse's director of field marketing, noted that an installation based on Anderson's last movie, ' Asteroid City ' (2023), was created for the Alamo Drafthouse in New York, but the production design of 'The Phoenician Scheme' demanded an older theater. The New Mission at 2550 Mission St. was built in 1916 and was renovated into an Alamo Drafthouse cinema in 2015. 'We realized that the aesthetics of the film really matched the ornate architecture here in New Mission, and we knew it might be a tougher ask to say that we wanted it to be exclusive here,' Sampson said. 'But once we showed (Focus) the space and did a video walk-through with them, they immediately bought into the vision, and they were on board with having it here and having an exclusive.' Spanning two floors, 'The Phoenician Scheme Immersive Experience' includes recreations of a train used by characters played by Hanks and Bryan Cranston, and part of the plane used by the billionaire played by del Toro. The New Mission also is featuring a cocktail menu inspired by the film, with concoctions such as Espresso Human Rights (Casamigos Reposado Tequila, Mr Black Cold Brew Coffee Liqueur, almond orgeat, Averna Amaro and cold brew coffee) and the Hemingway Daiquiri (Don Q Cristal rum, Luxardo Maraschino liqueur, pressed lime and grapefruit juices, and a cherry).
