Friday, Sep 5, 2008
"Rushmore" director Wes Anderson talks about his first "collaborative" writing effort, his recent pilgrimage to the home of Pauline Kael and New York telephone booths.
Jan 21, 1999 | Director Wes Anderson's rise from cable-access obscurity to Hollywood buzz boy is the stuff of indie auteur reverie. After graduating from the University of Texas, Anderson and his roommate, Owen Wilson, wrote and shot a 15-minute short on a shoestring budget. Through a combination of luck, talent and some well-connected family friends, the film found its way to Hollywood, where it gained the support of producer-director James L. Brooks. Brooks helped the duo hone their screenplay and secure a $5 million budget. The resulting feature, 1996's "Bottle Rocket," which starred Wilson and his brother Luke, is the story of a couple of suburban slackers whose aimlessness leads them to commit a series of half-baked heists. Though it opened to critical raves, it was more cult hit than blockbuster, but Hollywood took notice: Anderson commanded an eight-figure budget from Disney for his second feature, "Rushmore."
Wilson and Anderson again share writing credits for the upcoming film about 10th-grade prep school student Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), whose enthusiasm for extracurricular activities belies his foundering academics. He heads the bee-keeping club and the dodgeball society and stages ridiculously gritty plays (such as an adaptation of "Serpico") while nearly flunking out. The school's dyspeptic tycoon benefactor (Bill Murray) becomes Max's unlikely co-conspirator, and later his rival, in winning the affections of a widowed first-grade teacher. The film (to be released by Touchstone Pictures Feb. 5) was the unofficial hit of the New York Film Festival, and Murray's modulated performance is already creating a healthy Oscar buzz.
The gangly 29-year-old Anderson seems an unlikely next big thing. But with two pictures in the can and writing begun on his third feature, an ensemble New York comedy, the Houston native who counts Disney Studios chairman Joe Roth as an enthusiastic supporter is currently generating quite a bit of what Hollywood refers to as "heat." Anderson spoke with Salon in between bites of hamburger at Disney's corporate offices in Los Angeles.
Your characterization of the private school in "Rushmore" was so fully formed. How much of the film was autobiographical?
Really just the plays. Most of it was just from me and Owen Wilson, my writing partner. It developed mostly from the character of that kid. Once we figured that out, it all started to go from there -- the Bill Murray character, too.
So you weren't really like Max?
Just with the plays. The idea of taking all the clubs was just made up.
Eighteen hundred actors tried out for the part of Max. What was it about Jason Schwartzman that fit the bill?
I didn't want to have some Hollywood kid. That's why I did this long search. I did not expect to find somebody in Los Angeles. The last thing I wanted to do was to have some kid who's from a movie family. [Schwartzman is a nephew of Francis Ford Coppola.] But the fact is, there's a reason why so many people in [Coppola's] family are working and doing interesting things. They've got good genes. I guess that's what I responded to. His personality was much stronger than most of the people in there. Some people can just be real when they're doing a scene. I was always thinking of someone different, but when he came in then I started thinking in more like a Dustin Hoffman kind of way, which wasn't what I originally pictured.
What were you originally thinking?
Did you ever see this movie "Flirting"? There's an actor named Noah Taylor who was in "Flirting," he's Australian. He was also [David Helfgott] in "Shine," you know, when he was younger. That was more like what I was thinking -- a pale, skinny kid. Schwartzman was not pale and not skinny. He's short. He's not like anyone else who had come in. And I just knew I would get along with him.
Bill Murray delivered an excellent performance as well. In most movies, he seems to place himself above whatever's going on in the scene, but he didn't do that in "Rushmore." You wrote the part with him in mind, right?
Yeah.
Did you know that he was capable of such a serious performance?
Yeah. There are several movies he's done where he's very different from his persona -- "Mad Dog and Glory," "Ed Wood," "Tootsie" and this movie called "Razor's Edge." Did you ever see that one? That one was just a straight dramatic role. He's funny in it, but there's none of the making fun of people, the sort of sarcasm where everything's kind of ironic.
But you got something out of him that those four didn't.
Well, those were mostly little roles, for one thing. "Mad Dog and Glory" is a bigger role, but it's different because he's playing a mobster. He's not showing much weakness or vulnerability.
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