Latest news with #AgermanRoss
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
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.' Read more: 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 in to access your portfolio
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Wes Anderson's World, It's All About the Details
When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut 'Bottle Rocket,' the rookie director got a shock. Columbia Pictures had sent all the movie's props off to a store, which had then sold them for next to nothing. So when he made his next movie, 'Rushmore' (1998), Anderson decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into an S.U.V. when the shoot was over, then drove the hoard away to look after it himself. That decision ended up helping not just Anderson himself. Over the past two-and-a-half years, curators at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled Anderson's storage facility in Kent, England — which contains thousands of items from his movies — to compile a museum retrospective of the director's work. The show opened at the Cinémathèque Française this week, where it runs though July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in the fall. The Paris show includes over 500 exhibits, many of them well known to Anderson fans, including the candy pink hotel model that opens 'The Grand Budapest Hotel,' several sardine-blue explorer outfits from 'The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,' and a luxurious fur coat worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in 'The Royal Tenenbaums.' Items like these are key to Anderson's signature style — heavy on retro fashion, symmetry and pastel colors — as popularized by Instagram and TikTok accounts, and documented in books and magazine spreads. But Johanna Agerman Ross, a curator at the Design Museum, said it was a 'misunderstanding' to think of Anderson as a director defined by a few stylistic tropes. He also had 'an extreme interest in the creative process,' Agerman Ross said, and he believed that, because even the smallest items help create a world onscreen, they needed to be 'fully formed pieces of art and design.' Some of Anderson's best known props took weeks or months to conceive and make, including a faux-Renaissance painting, 'Boy With Apple,' that appears in 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'; a vending machine that mixes and dispenses martinis from 'Asteroid City'; and painted Louis Vuitton luggage that appears in 'The Darjeeling Limited.' Agerman Ross said that while developing the exhibition she had spoken with craftspeople who told her that they had lengthy email correspondences with Anderson to discuss every detail of the props they were making, right down to tweaking fonts and colors for magazine covers that appear for milliseconds in 'The French Dispatch.' Matthieu Orléan, a curator at the Cinémathèque Française, said that Anderson's attention to detail shaped his projects from their beginnings. The exhibition includes a vitrine filled with yellow spiral-bound notebooks in which the director jotted down his ideas. They contain notes for scripts, in careful capital letters, and minute storyboards for scenes. The exhibition also includes a screen showing an animatic: a black-and-white animated storyboard that Anderson uses to show actors and crew how he wants scenes to appear onscreen. Orléan said that Anderson had produced these for all his movies since 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' in 2008, adding that the director then records himself reading the script over it so that the actors know how he wants the lines to be delivered. 'Fantastic Mr. Fox,' Anderson's first stop-motion animation movie, was a turning point in his almost 30-year career. On a tour of the show earlier this week, Andy Gent, a model maker who has worked on seven Anderson movies, said that the director had 'totally changed the look' of stop-motion films by insisting the puppets in that movie have real animal fibers, even though they were hard to control and could move between shots, creating a screen effect known as 'boiling,' where the puppet's fur appears to be constantly moving. Gent and his fellow puppet makers would 'slave over the tiniest whisker' to ensure the figures looked exactly as Anderson wanted, he said, though he added that the director gave his craftspeople freedom, despite his reputation for perfectionism. While making 'Isle of Dogs,' for instance, Gent recalled that Anderson's opening instruction was simple: 'Sculpt some dogs!' So, Gent and his team spent months making hundreds of mongrels, with Anderson choosing bits he liked from individual models and asking the puppet makers to bring them together. 'It was amazing fun,' Gent recalled. At the opening of the Paris exhibition on Monday, one item drew more attention than any other: the model of the Grand Budapest Hotel. Before giving a brief speech, Anderson, who declined to be interviewed for this article, posed in front of its pink walls for photos, including with a French pop star in a cutesy outfit, like a character in an Anderson movie. Simon Weisse, who oversaw the making of the prop, said that six craftspeople spent three months building the model, which includes glass windows and sheer curtains. The color choice, though, was all Anderson's, he said. Weisse said that when the color samples had first arrived at the studio, he couldn't believe it. 'I said, 'Pink? Bright pink and dark pink? No!'' he recalled. 'I asked the art department to check there wasn't a mistake, but they said, 'It's right. Wes has chosen these colors.'' It was only when Weisse finished the job, he said, that he appreciated Anderson's decision. The colors were quirky, but they echoed real central European buildings, and fitted perfectly with the movie's eccentricities. Anderson might sweat the smallest details, Weisse said, but 'in the end, he's always right.'
