10 Unmissable Highlights from Wes Anderson: The Archives

For his early films, Wes Anderson used Polaroids to scout filming locations, audition for extras and document life on set. In these Polaroids from Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, we see many of Anderson’s long-time collaborators including cast and crew, such as actors Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston and Jason Schwartzman, cinematographer Robert Yeoman and Anderson’s brother the illustrator Eric Chase Anderson.

Laura Wilson, photographer and mother of Owen Wilson, notes that Owen and Wes saw the practice of film documentation as deeply important: “Wes and Owen sat at our kitchen table, and they actually had Dick’s [photographer Richard Avedon’s] book open in front of them, as they were looking at their own Polaroids of people they were thinking of casting.”

Storyboards help the film director to plan shots and communicate ideas to the crew. Wes Anderson drew these storyboards in preparation for shooting the feature film version of Bottle Rocket. Anderson’s use of storyboards has evolved over the course of his career, with later versions developed by storyboard artists and taking on the form of animated storyboards or ‘animatics’. An example of these animatics with a voiceover by Wes Anderson can be seen in the section dedicated to The Grand Budapest Hotel.

During the production of The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson enlisted his brother Eric Chase Anderson to help realise aspects of the Tenenbaum home, 111 Archer Avenue. For example, Eric designed the wall paintings in Richie Tenenbaums’ bedroom, that in the film are created by Richie himself. The original illustrations on display in the exhibition are no larger than A3 in size, but for the film they were enlarged on a blueprint printer then pierced with dots and stencilled onto a muslin fabric, which was hand tinted and installed on the walls of the location house.

Weaving in Anderson's fascination with New York the drawings were inspired by the walls of Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel. The Bemelmans walls were illustrated by artist and author of the ‘Madeline’ children’s books Ludwig Bemelman.

In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the search for the elusive Jaguar Shark becomes the centre of Team Zissou’s expedition. Following the fateful death of oceanographer Steve Zissou’s research partner Esteban, Zissou pledges to avenge him and find the creature responsible. The Jaguar Shark, an invention of Anderson’s, is realised as a stop-motion puppet in the film, alongside a dozen other fantastical sea creatures.

Anderson worked with ‘Sea Creatures Supervisor’ Martin Meunier and Lead Animator and filmmaker Henry Selick to develop the puppets and the Jaguar Shark is one of the largest stop-motion puppets ever made, measuring over two metres long. Selick has described the making of the Shark as trying to strike a balance “between fantasy and reality, between artifice... and moviemaking”. The Jaguar Shark puppet was rigged on blue rods and filmed in stop-motion against a blue screen, rendering the rods invisible in the final sequence. The rods are still attached to the puppet which weighs over 100 kilos.

In Moonrise Kingdom the young protagonist Suzy Bishop packs her luggage with six stolen library books of young adult fiction before running away with Khaki Scout Sam Shakusky. Anderson commissioned six artists and illustrators – Sandro Kopp, Juman Malouf, Eric Chase Anderson, David Hyde Costello, Andrea Dopaso and Kevin Hooyman – to design the covers for these fictional volumes for the film. On display in the exhibition is also an original artwork by Juman Malouf for the cover of The Francine Odyssey.

For Anderson’s second stop motion animation Isle of Dogs, the art department at Arch Model Studios in east London built hundreds of intricate sets in order to bring to life the city of Megasaki and Trash Island. Miniature set builders first sculpted draft structures from Styrofoam and tested them in camera. The sets were then adjusted to fit the exact framing of each scene. Once the skeleton of the set was built, set dressers added detail and texture. Every detail of this noddle bar is carefully handmade, with the lanterns being carved in resin and all graphics painted by hand.

Built at a 1:18 scale, this intricately detailed model was used for the film’s exterior shots of the Grand Budapest Hotel. By constructing the hotel as a miniature Anderson and production designer Adam Stockhausen were free to create an entirely original building, drawing inspiration from the many hotels they had visited across Eastern Europe to research the film.

The model was made by Atelier Simon Weisse in Berlin and filmed at Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam. This project marked the beginning of Anderson’s collaboration with Weisse, who has since created miniature sets and props for all the director’s films, both stop-motion and live action.

Boy with Apple plays an important part of the narrative of The Grand Budapest Hotel. In the film it is an invaluable 17th century masterpiece by the fictional Dutch artist Johannes van Hoytl the Younger. It was in fact painted by the British portrait artist Michael Taylor and actor Ed Munro modelled the boy. It took Taylor four months to create the painting commissioned by Anderson for the film and the portrait has now reached cult status, even enjoying its own Wikipedia page.

The ten monumental paintings were created for The French Dispatch of the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun by artist Sandro Kopp. They feature in a segment of the film titled ‘The Concrete Masterpiece’ which sees the incarcerated artist Moses Rosenthaler paint an immovable artwork directly onto the prison’s concrete walls. Kopp was given three months to create the monumental paintings on location in Angoulême in France.

The style and materials were developed in close conversation with Wes Anderson who was inspired by the motifs, scale, abstraction of landscapes and heavy impasto texture seen in the work of 20th century abstract painters; such by Frank Auerbach, Anselm Kiefer and Willem de Kooning. Kopp recalls “he [Anderson] said, it needs to be your own thing. It shouldn’t look like any other artist particularly; it needs to be idiosyncratic.”

The line of original vending machines created for Asteroid City includes one selling ammunition, another selling plots of Arid Plains real estate, and another which mixes gin martinis with a twist. The objects form the finale of Wes Anderson: The Archives.

The graphic designer Erica Dorn and model maker Simon Weisse developed the pastel-coloured vending machines for the film using references from authentic 1950s product design and packaging even if some delve deeper into the realm of imagination. Each machine uses hand lettering to complete the period look.