How Wes Anderson Shoots A Film At 3 Budget Levels

INTRO

Unlike some of the directors who I’ve covered in this series that have undergone large changes in their shooting budgets, Wes Anderson is a director who has seen more minor, incremental changes in his film around the medium budget range.

Like the incremental changes in budget, his directing style has also changed incrementally over his filmography. However it has been bound since day one by common stylistic traits which make all of Anderson’s films easily identifiable.

His movies are fast-paced comedies, punctuated by melancholic moments, deadpan performances, symmetrical compositions, a limited colour palette, with themes of family dysfunction, unlikely friendships, parental abandonment and loss of innocence, which unfold in their own uniquely contained world - almost like a fable.

In this episode I’ll dive into three films by Wes Anderson - Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Grand Budapest Hotel - which he shot at three increasing budget levels - to uncover the similarities between them and how his career and style as an auteur has progressed over time.

BOTTLE ROCKET

“It’s odd in that it’s a movie where some people really do like it quite a lot and so many others really hate it. But I do find that I manage to keep a consistent run of just that kind of response.” 

After graduating in 1990, Anderson and Owen Wilson decided to write and shoot their own black and white short film called Bottle Rocket. They convinced indie producer Cynthia Hargrave to fund their $4,000 short. Due to their inexperience in producing they ran out of money after shooting 8 minutes worth of footage. However those 8 minutes were enough to secure the additional funding to finish the 13 minute short. The final film managed to get into Sundance film festival in 1994, where Anderson and Wilson also attended their lab.

A family friend of the Wilson family, whose three brothers starred in the short, managed to get a copy of the film as well as the script for the feature length version to producer Polly Platt.Platt organised for James L. Brooks, an executive producer with his company Gracie Films, to visit Anderson and the Wilson brothers. At the time they were all living together.  

“Jim Brooks is coming here. We were living in Dallas. And I said, ‘So, we’re gonna go get him at the airport?’ And they said, ‘No, he’s coming here to where we lived.’ We lived in, this place was a hovel, it was a really squalid place. In fact I got double pink eye one time during the winter staying with Owen and Luke and I think Wes might have been staying in one of the rooms or it might even have been in the same room with us. We were all sleeping in the same room for warmth.”

Like their living situation, the film was the product of a close knit group of family and friends. At the time, Brooks had a deal with Columbia Pictures to finance a low-budget film of his choice and, after reading their script, he liked it so much he decided that that low-budget film should be Bottle Rocket.

Like with all his films, Anderson had a unique vision for how it should be made and sought to clarify his vision in pre-production. He got a pin board and created a huge collage of images which represented the colour palette of the film sets.

Going in he knew how he wanted to frame the movie, but didn’t know how it should be lit. To execute his film visually and light it he turned to cinematographer Robert Yeoman. Anderson tracked down Yeoman’s address and sent a personal letter along with the enclosed script which he loved. When they met in person they immediately creatively clicked.

They hired a small cast and crew and tried to create a family atmosphere during production. He carried this style of working over onto his subsequent movies.

Although he had a clear vision for the film Anderson and the Wilson’s had to come to grips with the technical process along the way.

“When we started the movie Owen and I didn’t know what a focus puller was. So you know there was a camera and the camera operator and then Wes and the sound guy. Then there was this guy John Boccaccio who had the focus right here and he sat right beside the camera and just had this kind of poker face. After about the second day Owen and I were like ‘This guy hates us!’”

Yeoman photographed the film in 35mm colour on a Panavision camera with spherical Primo lenses. They decided to shoot the whole film on a 27mm lens. When the producers caught wind of that they tried to put a stop to it. So, Yeoman got his AC to change up the lenses on the camera report which they handed in to production - a 15mm here, a 100mm there - even though they actually used the 27mm for the whole movie.

Once completed, to their dismay, Sundance rejected the film. It was a commercial failure and struggled to find an audience. However, it received critical acclaim from reviewers and over the years attained a cult status.

Anderson used the low $5 million budget to create Bottle Rocket using 35mm colour film, a small cast and crew and a contained story which featured early signs that hinted at the emergence of his trademark style.

RUSHMORE

Years before Bottle Rocket was made Anderson and Wilson had already started writing Rushmore based on their own school experiences: with Wilson being expelled from an elite prep school and Anderson sharing the lead character’s motivation, lack of academic interest and a crush on an older woman.

After initial talks to produce the film with New Line Cinema fell through due to a disagreement on budget, Anderson, Wilson and producer Barry Mendel held an auction for the film rights in mid-1997 and struck a deal with Joe Roth, of Walt Disney Studios.

They came up with a budget of $10 million, a step up from his initial film into the medium budget range.

Anderson wrote the role of Mr. Blume specifically for Bill Murray but doubted they would be able to get him on board. However, Murray’s agent had seen and enjoyed Bottle Rocket and got Murray to read the script for Rushmore. After reading and connecting with the script Murray agreed to come on and even to work for scale, which is the minimum wage that actors need to be paid - stipulated by the screen actors guild. The total cost of his rate was around $9,000, a tiny fraction of what he would usually be paid for such a role.

With one month to go before production began they were still without their lead actor for Max. On the last day of casting they found Jason Schwartzman who had been introduced to the casting director at a party, as a cousin of filmmaker Sophia Coppola.

Anderson was then faced with the task of finding the main school location.

“We searched all over the place and did the same thing that we did for Max. We look at schools all over the country, all over Canada and all over England. Then my mother sent me pictures of my school and I realised that’s what I was trying to find in all of those places. I was trying to find one like that.”

To prepare for the film Anderson drew basic storyboards by hand. Some storyboards were almost a shot for shot identical match with the final cut, whereas other storyboard frames changed on set during shooting as the location and actors blocking sparked new ideas.

He again teamed up with Yeoman to photograph Rushmore. This time they had more money, a larger canvas, Bill Murray and Anderson had more experience in film production.

He built on the visual style of Bottle Rocket by including symmetrical frames, a contained colour palette, top down close ups, hand-made production design and flat space camera moves. This is where the camera moves directly forwards, backwards, up or down as opposed to the more standard method of moving the camera across at an angle. 

They also incorporated new camera techniques such as zooms and whip pans. To execute these moves Yeoman used a dolly for most of the film with a fluid head that allowed him to move the camera with enough speed to do the whip pans.

For vertical up-down movement he also used a crane.

These custom shots and intricate moves were often more challenging and difficult to shoot than just relying on regular coverage but they built in a visual language which supported the whimsical, fable-like world of the story.

This time Yeoman shot with anamorphic glass. Again, with his preferred Panavision setup. He used the Panavision Primo anamorphic lenses on the Platinum. Like on Bottle Rocket they maintained a wide field of view by sticking to the 40mm anamorphic lens for around 95% of the shoot. A 40mm anamorphic lens is very wide and has a field of view somewhere close to a 20mm spherical lens in Super 35.

Another creative flourish Anderson employed was creating the month name titles to structure the film on curtains by using a slide projector with a xenon bulb. Using curtains to bookend scenes also added to the theatrical nature of the film.

Yeoman mainly lit the film using Kino Flos, HMIs and lots of light modification using flags, diffusion, negative fill and nets to shape the light.

For a shot where Murray jumps into the pool, Yeoman opted to shoot it at night using strong light sources. Underwater shots require lots of strong, directional lighting in order to get a clear image. If using natural light and the sky is overcast it may look murky underwater. So they cut from shooting the above the water scene in daylight to shooting the underwater shot night for day.

Anderson truly found himself as a director on Rushmore and used the larger $10 million budget to create a more expansive cinematic world, with more expensive locations and production design, a popular music soundtrack, a moderate scope story, using more elaborate technical gear and a star. 

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

After a string of successful and original films which continued to build on Anderon’s unique style, he embarked on making The Grand Budapest Hotel. The initial idea for the film was conceived in 2006 when Anderson and Hugo Guinness wrote an 18 page story draft.

Anderson became fascinated with the work of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, especially his pre- World War Two novels such as Beware of Pity and The World of Yesterday. He used this as inspiration for creating a historical pastiche which took a more disillusioned approach to pre-World War Two European history.

With a larger estimated budget of $25 million Anderson was able to cast a troupe of well known actors, many of whom he’d worked with previously. Once again, he paired up with Yeoman for their 7th feature length film together.

The pair scouted possible shooting locations across Europe before eventually deciding on eastern Germany, due to its combination of easy logistics and ideal locations. 

The production design team were tasked with transforming a former department store into the main hotel lobby location.

While scouting they would sometimes bring along a camera to work out scenes, with crew members tasked to stand in for actors. Since locations feed so heavily into Anderon’s films, he and Yeoman used these scouts to work out the scenes as much as possible.

Like on his prior films, storyboards were created which were then edited into an animatic. Visually they drew on a bunch of references: from films to books to old colourised photos.

To delineate the three different time periods Anderson used different aspect ratios that were the popular photographic formats for each period of time. The squarer Academy 1.37 for the 1930s scenes, widescreen 2.40 anamorphic for the 60s and 1.85 for the 1980s.

This time Yeoman shot in the Arri system with a single Arricam ST paired with spherical Cooke S4s and an Angenieux Optimo 24-290mm zoom for the 30s and 80s, and Technovision-Cooke anamorphics for the vintage 1960s look. Again he used mainly wider focal lengths which distorted more around the edges, such as the 40mm Technovision anamorphic.

Along with the aspect ratios, Yeoman also used light to differentiate the time periods. For the 1930s scenes in the hotel lobby, he bounced 20 4K HMIs off frames on top of the roof through the skylight window. This produced a soft, gentle ambience. The lobby was then punctuated with tungsten practicals which gave the 1930s space a warm, inviting feeling. Then for the 1960s scenes which take place after the eastern bloc communist era takeover, his production designer created a fake ceiling which could be lowered to block out all the soft, ambient light from the skylight. Then, as was common in post communism 60s Europe he lit the space to invoke the feeling of fluorescent overhead fixtures.

To do this his team rigged 24 12 light maxi brutes shining through a layer of 216 diffusion which covered the ceiling. This light feels subtly harsher and more oppressive than the gentle, warm ambience of the 1930s when the hotel was in its prime.

All the lights were put on dimmers. He usually lit to a T/3.5 stop but for zoom shots on the older Techno-Cooke anamorphic 40-200mm he lit to T/8 because the lens looks soft if it's not shot at a deeper stop.

Yeoman also referenced the dramatic lighting changes that Vittorio Storaro used in One From The Heart. To emphasise and punctuate certain emotional moments he would use the dimmers to fade the lights up or down during the take.

As always Anderson and Yeoman shot on film, this time Kodak Vision3 200T without using an 85 colour balance filter for exteriors and got the lab to do the basic colour balance in post instead.

The larger budget of The Grand Budapest Hotel accommodated a range of well known actors, in a more expansive story with more complex sequences, larger production design builds and big lighting setups.

CONCLUSION

As he matured as a director, Wes Anderson carried certain trademark features across his films and built his style into one which is easily identifiable at a glance.With each film he made his style became more and more pronounced.

By crafting his stories piece by piece with individual storyboarded shots, rather than through conventional coverage, Anderson builds up a visual world for his stories which sucks in the audience.

Whether you like or dislike his films, one thing that can’t be denied is that he is a wholly original and unique voice in the world of cinema.