Were it only for the text of his introductory essays and extended interviews with Wes Anderson, Matt Zoller Seitz’s book “The Wes Anderson Collection,” which discusses all seven of Anderson’s feature films in copious detail, would be an indispensable resource, as well as a delight. Most of my favorite movie books are composed mainly of interviews with directors. Though good directors are virtual presences just over the borders of the screen (and many are actually present, seen and heard, onscreen as actors in their own movies), very few movies are thorough-going first-person disquisitions. It usually takes in-depth interviews to liberate the director’s self-critical voice. The primordial template is François Truffaut’s collection of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, but Truffaut and Hitchcock—though they had met a few times—weren’t exactly friends. Seitz and Anderson, however, go back a long way—Seitz is from Dallas and, seeing the black-and-white short “Bottle Rocket” there, in 1993, was the first critic to discern Anderson’s prodigious artistry and, soon thereafter, to interview him. The two have stayed in touch, and this book is the magnificent result.
It’s odd to remember that taking Anderson seriously was, until recently, an unduly uphill critical battle. Misunderstood as self-enclosed when his work is centrifugal, as artificial when it’s symbolic (in a register that I’ve likened to Hemingway and Hawks), as ironically remote when it’s agonizingly (though subtly) emotional, Anderson is one of the few instantly adjectival directors in the history of film. And Seitz’s book, with its full investigation of Anderson’s art—including, with a touching frankness, his confession to Anderson of his numerous and insightful “theories” (his word) about the films (these interviews are two-sided discussions)—unfolds the densely compressed layers of thought and experience, impulse and intention, that go into the making of Anderson’s films.
But the text isn’t all there is to it: the book is entirely in the Andersonian spirit—it’s a beautiful object, not a coffee-table book (except in size) but one that’s designed and thought out to its slightest detail, with its amazingly wide and deep offering of visual documentation. (Far be it from me to diminish the images and artifacts by calling them “illustrations.”) Still photographs from the set, frame enlargements, storyboards, influences (from “Peanuts” to Holbein to Welles), references (record covers, school insignias), and memorabilia (newspaper clippings, casting snapshots) are matched with informative and discursive captions that play like stage whispers, and all are brought together with taste, insight, and joyful celebration.
On Sunday at 2 p.m., Seitz will present, at the Museum of the Moving Image, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” his favorite of Anderson’s films, and will follow the film with a discussion with Anderson’s production designer, Mark Friedberg, and his cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, who has shot all of Anderson’s live-action features, including the forthcoming “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” (Here’s the trailer.) The event should be as festive as the discussion will be substantial.
