Wes Anderson Unpacks ‘Asteroid City’ With a Little Help From Jarvis Cocker
Curiosity is indispensable in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. It’s demanded from the characters within the film and in turn, is required from the audience. Only the truly curious will appreciate the production in all its glory. There has been much discussion about what the film is actually about. Director and screenplay writer Anderson admits that most of his cast didn’t fully understand it.
The challenge: Asteroid City is a play within a televised show within a film. The televised broadcast introduces the play, titled “Asteroid City,” set in 1955 in the American desert. Separated into acts and scenes, with interspersed backstage content, the black and white TV screen gives way to an explosion of intense but soft-hued colors when we are welcomed to the fictional city which forms the setting of the desert-based production.
The eclectic group of players, led by Jason Schwartzman as war photographer Augie Steenbeck and Scarlett Johansson as actress Midge Campbell, have found themselves in the sand-stricken location to mark the Junior Stargazers convention at the Research and Experimentation Division of the United States. When an alien visits Earth and steals the asteroid which gave the city its name some 5000 years ago, the group is placed under strict quarantine by the government and suddenly the vast desert feels microscopic. It’s very much a case of art imitating life, as Anderson was in lockdown when writing the film.
Within its complexities, at the heart of the play lies a deeply profound exploration of humanity. Everything is up for discussion: the intentions of the alien, the existence of God, scientific advancement and what lies ahead. The characters grapple to not only find but also understand, the meaning of life and their existence in an expansive universe. During a glimpse of backstage action, we see one of the actors confess: “I still don’t understand the play.” Upon which he’s promptly told, “It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story.” That’s the very approach the audience must take, also. You don’t need to understand every facet of the multilayered production to follow, and appreciate the essence of, the story.
Ahead of the film’s theatrical release, I attended a special screening at the BFI Southbank in London, which included a Q&A featuring Anderson and hosted by Jarvis Cocker. Internationally recognized frontman of the British rock band Pulp, Cocker is a long-time friend and collaborator of Anderson. He portrays one of the music-playing cowboys in Asteroid City and has two songs on the film’s official soundtrack. The conversation between Anderson and Cocker was littered with personal anecdotes and humor. With Cocker routinely forgetting what he was going to ask and pulling out his phone to look at his notes, Anderson took the lead and opened up the floor to fans in the audience. Cocker admitted he was fascinated by the fact that he, by his own recognition, appeared sunburnt on screen, to which Anderson surmised it may well have been due to the film’s particular color palette. “You probably didn’t look that pink on the set,” he assured. During another exchange, Cocker amusingly noted that an iPad featuring storyboard animatics was passed around by the cast on set “almost like a joint,” earning chuckles from the director and audience.
Below, in my edited and condensed highlights from the evening, Anderson gives us a unique entry point into his world, starting with Asteroid City and venturing far beyond. He discusses the intricacies of writing and directing his latest film, the communal experience he created for his cast, the crisis of confidence he experiences before every take and more.
On the parallels between the real-life COVID-19 lockdown and the quarantine in Asteroid City:
The writing of a movie is an improvisational experience. To me, anyway. Usually, we [my story co-writer Roman Coppola and I] work by talking. I write the stuff after we talk it out. You never quite know when or if the scene is going to happen. It has to be spontaneous. Whatever’s happening in your life—even if you’re drawing on things from your family history or something you’ve read—it somehow goes into the thing [writing] when you don’t expect it. And as it happens, we were in a lockdown and suddenly we started writing that they [the characters] were in quarantine. We didn’t even question it, it just seemed natural.
On creating the optimum film-writing environment before embarking on a project:
A quiet, comfortable room, maybe something good to eat, a sense of a bottle of wine off-screen… something like that. That’s the atmosphere I look for. To me, the key thing is I want to have someone who’s going to help me. It’s crucial for me. The actual writing of scripts, I do on my own, but figuring out the story, even if I have some of it beforehand, there are a few people who help me do it. When we’re in a room together, Roman and I, we always walk out with some material.
On the big piece of advice iconic film director Peter Bogdanovich shared with him and how he still suffers a crisis of confidence before every shot:
Peter and I spoke on the phone when I was about to start shooting my first movie, Bottle Rocket. He told me something that didn’t sound like a necessary thing to say, but it was. He said that Howard Hawks or John Ford had told him to “take it one shot at a time.” [And I thought] “Well, how else are you going to do it, really?” But when you’re on the set of a movie, and I was 24 or 25 years old, you’re supposed to make it all work. You’re trying to hold the whole thing in your mind at once and you can’t necessarily. You can plan it all out, but then you’ve got to go just one shot at a time.
The other side of that, though, is for me, every time I start a shot, I think, “Well maybe this is just never going to work. If we don’t get this shot, what are we going to do?” Virtually every shot of the movie, I have this feeling. So every shot, when we get it, I feel relief and excitement. But Peter wasn’t like that. He had broad confidence.
On how he decided to shoot Asteroid City in Chinchón, a small town south of Madrid, and the difficulties that arose:
If you want a flat place in Europe, you pretty quickly find your way to Spain. On Google Maps, I started looking for yellow on the satellite images and a four-star hotel. Five-star hotels are too expensive, but with four stars, you’re probably good. What I thought was a big, big field turned out to be 200 fields with 200 farmers, each of whom had a lease that we had to buy. Then you’re dealing with crop cycles, harvesting and planting times. It was complicated, but we got them all to give us their land for a season.
On the vital role storyboard animatics play in his filmmaking process:
I’ve started doing a thing now where I make a storyboard version of the movie. I do it more carefully than I ever did and start when I have 10 pages. Jay Clarke [a storyboard artist] draws the pictures and Edward Bursch edits them. It comes from animation. I’ve done two animated films, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs. I learnt about how they do these cartoons—well, animatics—and it’s partly how they make the script. When I did it, I realized there were mistakes I had made that I wouldn’t have if I’d had one of these. I think it’s great because I don’t feel it’s locking you into something. Instead, it’s letting you try whatever you want when you have the most freedom. I find a lot of the actors like them [the animatics], as it helps them know just what we’re gonna do.
On the unique stylized production of Asteroid City and how it came to be:
We had an unusual look that we ended up with for the movie. It’s sort of pastel. At the beginning, we were thinking more technicolor, but it didn’t feel right. We went more toward something without contrast, something that sort of washes by. Even though they’re soft colors, they’re probably a bit more forceful. It’s a bit more saturated than life.
On the importance of creating a community, which transcends the set, for the cast
Everyone stays in a hotel together and we have dinner together. It’s very efficient, but another thing that happens when you go to dinner together is that everybody wants to talk about the work: who’s arriving, what’s happening tomorrow and how it went. Especially how it went. Everybody wants to know what got shot and how it went over. I like that. It’s not even quite like socializing, it’s more of a working dinner, but there’s excitement. This cast was such a great group of actors, but also nice people, so it was fun.
On why Jeff Goldblum, who portrays the Earth-visiting alien, was the MVP of the cast:
Much of what I like about the alien in our movie is that it’s Jeff Goldblum. Even though there are some places where you might know that Jeff is not physically inside the alien, he [still] inhabits it. I love Jeff. I’ve known him for 20 years and have had him in many movies.
My balcony was over the terrace and I could hear a group of the actors [during dinner one night] saying, “What is the movie about?” There was some confusion and debate. I was listening, not eavesdropping. [Laughs] Then one of them said, “Well, ask Jeff, because he understands the movie.” I could hear a piano playing and that stopped, then I could hear Jeff. They asked him to explain and he went: “You’re not the actor. You’re an actor playing an actor on television…” He explained the whole movie to the group, exactly right. I just like that the person who really understands the movie is the alien.