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Wes Anderson brought an actual model of Mr. Fox to his roundtable interview for Fantastic Mr. Fox. Press were ordered not to touch it. It was probably worth more than the seven or eight journalists combined. The indie darling behind Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums and Darjeeling Limited brought his style to stop motion animation, based on the Roald Dahl story.
Q: How long before this Mr. Fox figure is on Sideshow Collectibles?
Wes Anderson: I think never. Because there aren’t that many of them and these things cost a fortune.
Q: How much?
Wes Anderson: I actually don’t know how we calculate it because there’s not that many of them that are made in the first place but there’s so much time that goes into designing them and testing them and all that stuff. Normally somehow that gets absorbed into how they calculate cost. A prototype is always more expensive than anything. These are all sort of prototypes I guess. The face, for instance, is filled with all these little metal palates and things that can move, be positioned and stay in place. It’s more complicated than it looks. I don’t mean to brag about the puppet.
Q: How hard was it to keep the spirit of your other films and not subscribe to the animated formula?
Wes Anderson: I don't think I made any effort to make it like my other movies or to make it even mine. My only effort was one, to try to make it seem to me like Roald Dahl and then to make it as fun and energetic and interesting as it could be. Really it was as simple as that. I don’t think I ever make choices trying to bring it closer to me. I just make choices to try to make it better but it ends up being my version of what I think is better and that ends up connecting to other [things].
Q: You and Noah Baumbach can’t get away from fathers and sons. Does working with stop motion fantasy allow you to explore that in a different way?
Wes Anderson: Yeah. Some of that kind of stuff, it’s a bit unconscious and then afterwards I say, “Gosh, this is like Gene Hackman.” But then on the other hand, in this one, we didn’t just look to the book as our inspiration. We also looked to Roald Dahl himself. We got a lot from that. Dahl is a kind of incredible figure but complicated. There are definitely layers to this guy’s personality. He’s sort of a fascinating person and we tried to weave in different aspects of him.
Q: You got to visit Dahl’s house. Was it strange?
Wes Anderson: No, very, great. It’s a wonderful place. From when I first went there, I’ve been there many times over the years because the movie has been 10 years from when I first approached the Dahl estate until making the film. But, you can see his hand at work at this house. There’s a gypsy caravan in the back that he bought from a family of gypsies that were traveling through there. He bought their caravan and that’s there. We in fact modeled some bunk beds in the movie on this gypsy caravan. The room where he wrote is kind of carefully modified just how he wanted it. He wrote not on a desk but a roll of cardboard that’s taped up that went across his lap with a board with pool table felt on it that leaned across it with his shape cut in it, and a suitcase full of bricks on the floor with a board nailed to keep it from sliding for his feet, and an electric heater that’s mounted on two kind of untwisted coat hangers that he could slide forward and back to control the level of heat. It’s all sort of jerry rigged the way he wanted it. There’s things like that all through the place. There’s a real personality there.
Q: Did “cuss” come from the books?
Wes Anderson: No, that was our thing. I don’t remember the exact moment of coming up with that, but I feel like we were in Los Angeles. At the very beginning of talking about writing this, we were here and kind of came up with that thing.
Q: What did you achieve with that?
Wes Anderson: Achieved might be too strong a word.
Q: To me it reminded me of frak but so much cuter.
Wes Anderson: What is Frak from?
Q: Battlestar Galactica says it instead of f***.
Wes Anderson: From Battlestar Galactica, oh my gosh, yeah. We may have been inspired by that. We certainly grew up with that show. Didn’t he have a dog? Is there a dog in Battlestar Galactica, like a robot dog?
Q: On a live-action movie, you get 5 pages on a good day. How does it affect your work to get five seconds a day?
Wes Anderson: The thing with this kind of movie is with a live action movie, we’ve got to do X number of shots in a day sequentially until let’s say the sun goes down, if that’s the kind of day it is. So you’re in a race through the day one thing, and as soon as you finish it, you’re already trying to get the next thing started. With this, you’re doing instead, say, 27 things all at once. You have different units and you’ve got 11 Mr. Foxes working and you’ve got six of his sons and each unit has a different animator. There are three main directors of photography but other guys too and there’s a lot of people. Everything is moving very, very, very slowly on each set. Plus, there’s the production designer and his team who are working on lots of stuff that’s coming up and the puppets department that during most of the movie are preparing puppets that have not started shooting yet, puppets that we’re still designing and testing. And the editorial team that’s with me and we’re making storyboards and editing the dialogue, so the process is instead bouncing back and forth from one thing to another all through the day as we move a tiny bit at a time. At the end of the day, I get these dailies that are all the shots, each shot with all the work that’s gone on the shot plus the new stuff of the day. So the process ends up being you watch each shot and at the very end of the shot, you say, “Okay, let’s see what happened here. That’s the new part.” You see how it went and hopefully it went well. Then I talk to the animators and we kind of discuss anything.
