Die-hard Wes Anderson fans might already be aware of a few of the facts below, but I have tried to fill this list with trivia that is not widely known. I found some interesting facts in my research of Anderson and even if these seem a little random, they are the most interesting facts that I learned:
1) He attended St. John’s prep school in Houston, Texas and became known at the school for his ambitious stage plays.
2) He and Owen Wilson met at the University of Texas at Austin, became roommates, and began working on the screenplay of Bottle Rocket together.
3) In an interview with Esquire, Martin Scorsese dubbed him the “next Martin Scorsese.”
4) Scorsese has also claimed that Bottle Rocket was one of the best movies of the ’90s.
5) He’s never won an Oscar.
6) When he screened Rushmore for Pauline Kael, she told him that “Wes Anderson” was a terrible name for a movie director and that he should change it.
7) The first day of shooting Rushmore, Wes Anderson was so in awe of Bill Murray that he delivered all his directions to Murray in a whisper.
8) To help Anderson during the shooting of Rushmore, Bill Murray helped haul equipment and even gave Anderson a blank check to pay for some of the film’s extra expenses.
9) He made short movies with his friends as a kid and Bottle Rocket was essentially made by him and his college friends. Anderson attributes his constant collaborations with the same actors and crew members to those early experiences making films.
10) Moonrise Kingdom was his most critically-acclaimed film as well as his second-highest grossing picture. The Royal Tenenbaums was his highest grossing movie.
Nice facts. I’ve heard quite a few of these. That does sound like something Pauline Kael would say.
Thanks. If you’re interested, the short story that Anderson wrote about his encounter with Kael is on the web. It’s a pretty entertaining read.
Cool facts. Very interesting.
Thanks!
Does anyone know how Pauline Kael actually responded to the film? There were several directors who sort of fawned over her (Peckinpah, Tarantino) but some who had no time for her at all.
Kael never wrote a review of the film, but the story goes that she wasn’t sure what to think of it. If you’d like to read about the encounter from Anderson’s point of view, you can find it at:
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/31/movies/film-my-private-screening-with-pauline-kael.html?src=pm
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