You’d think that as long as I’ve been doing this, I would have interviewed Wes Anderson by now.
You’d think, but you’d be wrong. Even though he’s released most of his movies while I’ve been covering film, and I’ve been an ardent fan since “Bottle Rocket,” which I still think is one of his most disarming films, it’s never worked out for the two of us to sit down to talk about his work.
That’s why when I was offered a chance to finally talk to him during the Cannes Film Festival about his new film, “Moonrise Kingdom,” I jumped at the chance. I’ll have several other interviews for you in the next few days, but we wanted to kick things off with Anderson himself.
Before we started rolling, his publicist mentioned that I used to be with Ain’t It Cool, and Anderson asked me what my spy name was. I confessed that I was Moriarty, and he smiled. “I thought so.”
Anderson is one of those guys who I could spend a full afternoon talking to, especially if we ever started discussing his other films and not just the new one. As always, I felt like we were finished talking just as soon as things started to get interesting. I think “Moonrise” is warm and charming in a way that makes it stand apart from his other work, and at least part of that has got to be the result of having Roman Coppola in the mix as co-screenwriter, something we discussed. We also heard quite a bit from everyone we interviewed about how Anderson changed up the conditions on the set, with everyone choosing to live together on location instead of in a hotel, and how that created a sense of community which I think comes through quite clearly in the end result.
“Moonrise Kingdom” is playing now in limited release and opens wider on June 8, 2012.