In director Wes Anderson’s world, it is all about the details

PARIS – When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut Bottle Rocket, the rookie American writer-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), he decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into a sport utility vehicle when the shoot was over, then drove the hoard away to look after it himself.

That decision ended up helping not just Anderson. Over the past 2½ years, curators at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled the 55-year-old’s storage facility in Kent, England – which contains thousands of items from his movies – to compile a museum retrospective of the film-maker’s work.

The show opened at the Cinematheque Francaise on March 19, where it runs through July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in autumn.

The Paris show includes more than 500 exhibits, many of them well known to Anderson fans, including the candy-pink hotel model that opens The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), several sardine-blue explorer outfits from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004) and a luxurious fur coat worn by American actress Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

Items like these are key to Anderson’s signature style – heavy on retro fashion, symmetry and pastel colours – as popularised by Instagram and TikTok accounts and documented in books and magazine spreads. But Ms 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”, she said, and he believed that because even the smallest items help create a world on screen, 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 (2023); and painted Louis Vuitton luggage that appears in The Darjeeling Limited (2007).

Ms Agerman Ross said that while developing the exhibition, she had spoken with craftspeople who told her that they had lengthy e-mail correspondences with Anderson to discuss every detail of the props they were making, right down to tweaking fonts and colours for magazine covers that appear for milliseconds in The French Dispatch (2021).

Mr Matthieu Orlean, a curator at the Cinematheque Francaise, said 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 on screen.

Mr Orlean said 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, Mr Andy Gent, a model-maker who has worked on seven Anderson movies, said the director had “totally changed the look” of stop-motion films by insisting the puppets in that movie have real animal fibres, 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.

Mr 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 (2018), for instance, he recalled that Anderson’s opening instruction was simple: “Sculpt some dogs.”

So, Mr 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,” he recalled.

At the opening of the Paris exhibition, 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.

Mr 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 colour choice, though, was all Anderson’s, he said.

Mr Weisse said that when the colour samples had first arrived at the studio, he could not 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 colours.’”

It was only when Mr Weisse finished the job, he said, that he appreciated Anderson’s decision. The colours were quirky, but they echoed real central European buildings, and fit perfectly with the Oscar-winning movie’s eccentricities.

Anderson might sweat the smallest details, Mr Weisse said, but “in the end, he’s always right”. NYTIMES