Wes Anderson knows as well as anybody that around this time every year, we all have it pretty easy predicting the winner of the Best Animated Feature prize at the Oscars -- just inscribe the statuette with Pixar's most recent production, and move along to the harder categories. Not so in 2009, when a surfeit of excellent animation resulted not only in an expansion of the Animated Feature category, but a handful of legitimate contenders to upset Pixar come March. Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of them, a lovingly hand-crafted stop-motion gem that signified a creative milestone for a director long prone to accusations of merely repeating himself with every film. Fox's ambition, warmth, humor and style amount to the most accomplished and mature of Anderson's films to date -- a kid's film for grown-ups, a wry meditation on innocence lost. Those qualities -- not to mention its A-list voice pedigree boasting George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Bill Murray -- should position Mr. Fox well in the ongoing Oscar race against Up.
Anderson spoke to Movieline last week about making the most of awards season, the virtues of animation versus live-action, how he accidentally cast himself as a weasel, and how the French messed up his plans to see Avatar.
I quite enjoyed your animated acceptance speech from the NBR. How did that idea come about?
It just jumped into my head! I don't know exactly. I just thought, "Well, if I animate something, then I won't have to stand up and say anything in front of anybody else. So that'll take a lot of pressure off me, and I'll have a much better time over the course of the evening."
I would have thought after all the time and effort expended in the feature you might not revisit it again for a while. Like, a long while.
You know, in fact, my colleague, Jeremy Dawson -- who's one of our producers -- his reaction was, "This is just an excuse to do animation." Because even though the movie was a very long process, and it took a long time to figure out how to do it, I really liked doing it very much. I really enjoyed it. We were doing this with an animator who I worked with a lot on the movie, and he's actually a very fast animator. We have such a system in place for how to do it that it was fun to do it -- just to do it.
How did you settle on Weasel for yourself both here and in the movie?
I didn't settle on it. When we recording the voices, we were on this farm in Connecticut when we did our first recordings. We were doing a scene where the weasel real estate agent is showing the house. And I did the voice on that day because we all just had to choose parts. George's part was set, Bill Murray's part was set, Jason Schwartzman's part was set, my brother Eric's part was set. But other people -- me and Jeremy and other friends who were there -- were just playing whatever part needed to be played. For that one, I did a lot of talking at the same time as George. So I was sort of casting myself by virtue of not doing the dialogue carefully enough that I could be removed. But I kind of thought, "Well, I can do fine with this one." So it was just a practicality.
Are you generally pretty happy with how general audiences received Mr. Fox? Do you feel like you or the studio could or should have done anything different?
I couldn't be happier with the way audiences have responded to it, and critics, and things like that. It would be great if we had managed to get more people into the theater. But I'm hoping that we'll do well with it internationally. And then of course there's the DVD and that kind of stuff. But there's no question that it would be great if the film had done better in America.
Your writing and directing is famously rigorous and precise. How did that translate to directing actors in a studio as opposed to on a physical set?
We did most of the recording of the actors on location, in fact. We did some of it outside in nature; we kind of worked in houses and barns. We did some in Italy, and we did some in studios. The funny thing is that with this sort of thing, you can work very quickly because you're not setting up any shots. The blocking is not significant. You're recording rehearsals, basically. We can do it 20 different ways very quickly, and the thing I like about that is that there's tremendous spontaneity in it. That's what I liked. Often I do shots where there's very precise blocking, and the actors have to keep the whole equation in their head and hit a lot of marks as they go along. But with this, the animators had to do that. There's careful planning and precision as far as the animation goes. But for the performances, it was just total spontaneity.
Did that change you as a director, or at least your general approach to filmmaking?
I think... it was very fun. And because we went on location, even though we didn't have to work as carefully in the recordings as I often end up having to do -- just because of what I want to accomplish -- you still had the feeling of being on location with your cast. One thing that I felt is [how] the process with a movie like this is very out-of-order compared to a normal movie. You record the actors first, and then you edit the movie with drawings, with storyboards. And then you shoot it. And because you're working in that order, you're always looking at a cut of the whole movie. I think on the next live action movie I do, I'll want to do some of that -- particularly with action sequences, or important sequences. I think that pre-visualization type of approach, which I've never used before, might be very helpful to me. But then also, I think there might be something from the way we did these voice recordings. It might be nice to capture that spirit. But it's such a different process. With a live-action movie, you're working your way through consecutive shots during the course of the day. With an animated movie, you're simultaneously working on 30 shots, moving back and forth among them and not really finishing anything during the day. The rhythms are so different. But I'm sure those experiences will interact with each other.
Speaking of your next live-action project, what is going on with The Rosenthaler Suite -- your rewrite of the French comedy My Best Friend? Are you definitely not directing that?
I don't have a plan to direct that. I wasn't hired on to direct it; I was just hired to write. It was something where I thought that, while I was doing Mr. Fox, I'd be able to make this script for Brian Grazer. But in the end I liked a lot of it very much.
There's a debate among awards purists about whether animated performances should be eligible for acting prizes. It's not new, but your film and Avatar have especially stimulated that discussion this year. Where do you stand?
Well, I feel that on any reasonable legal basis I would be forced to recuse myself from that debate. Because at the moment, my first [reaction] is to say, "They should all be nominated!" I would fight for that. But in general, I don't see any reason why not. I don't know if audiences who watch the Academy Awards would particularly say, "We should add categories." I feel like I've experienced very memorable performances from actors in animated films, but I feel like my opinion about what ought to be available for awards is probably not very valid.
As a Futura loyalist, what's your take on Avatar's own loyalty to Papyrus?
I don't know the Papyrus font! Though I do know the Avatar font. I need to study it. I actually haven't seen Avatar yet, but I'm going to L.A., so I'm hoping to go to the Cinerama Dome or The Grove and see it properly. I've been in England lately, but not in London; they show it sometimes and it's not 3-D. Or in France, at the theaters I was near, they had it in French and in 3-D, or in English and 2-D. Anyway, I'm going to see it in California.
Are you interested in making a 3-D film?
Well... with our movie, what sort of drew me to it was the old-fashionedness of the animation. Digital 3-D is the farthest opposite extreme from what I was charmed by. But I have a feeling that when I walk out of Avatar, I may have a whole new feeling about 3-D. Is it really stunning?
Pretty much, though I'd like to see what it looks like in 2-D.
I haven't been to a 3-D movie in a long time. They used to have that IMAX 3-D where you had to wear a weird helmet. But I remember that technology was very effective 3-D, and I'm sure what's happening now is 50 times more powerful. So I'm expecting to be impressed.