Wes Anderson talks about 'Rushmore'

I interviewed Wes Anderson for an article--if memory serves for the San Antonio Express-News. I recorded it and included the full interview in my '90s zine Lost Armadillos in Heat. 

LAIH: You grew up in Houston where "Rushmore" was filmed. And actually shot it in St. John's, your old school. Was that weird?
ANDERSON: People always want to know if it was weird going back to film there. It wasn't because I spent all this time convincing them to let us shoot there. Also we would go there to think about the script and walk around. By the time we filmed there, I'd spent so much time there recently and got re-aquainted with a lot of people there. So it was really a comfortable place to film. We had a screening just for St. John's people. It was odd because people applauded a thing like a house. And they applaud certain extras with real force.
LAIH: How would you describe this film?
ANDERSON: Somebody told me it was a coming of age story, and I guess it is, but I hate to think of it that way. It sounds like a genre. I wanted a school movie. We had this character. Me and my co-writer Owen
Wilson, we wanted to do a character of a kid who loved the school and founded all of these different clubs and societies, but is also a terrible student and is going to get kicked out.
LAIH: Where did that idea come from?
ANDERSON: Putting on the plays is something I did when I was a kid. We went to similar schools. Owen went to St. Marks in Dallas. Both of us had a sort of deluded thing and thought we were going to go to really
good colleges. But we were both bad students and never stood any chance of getting into any of the places we were applying. We did get rejected by all of them. So that sort of figures into it.
LAIH: What did you learn from "Bottle Rocket" that you brought to this film?
ANDERSON: I felt there was stuff I learned on the other one about how to plan a movie and what to expect--how much you have to be totally focused every day. But on the other movie the cast was just a bunch of
friends. This one we had to put together a cast and I didn't really know anybody in the cast. Except for some small supporting roles, all of the main actors we cast like they cast a regular movie.
LAIH: Where did you dig up Jason Schwartzman?
ANDERSON: We did a big casting search all over the place for a year. It was this total hassle. Finally our casting director in San Francisco met this kid and sent him in to me. I felt like within 30 seconds we had something. He was not like anyone else. He was very compelling. And I just liked him a lot personally. I always hoped I'd get to cast someone I'd be friends with.
LAIH: I know he's Talia Shire's son. What is his film background otherwise?
ANDERSON: His background is high school.
LAIH: Who are your filmmaking inspirations?
ANDERSON: A million movies all rolled together. Louis Malle movies. Mike Nichols and Hal Ashby and the 70s guys.
LAIH: Surely "Harold and Maude" was an influence?
ANDERSON: No question. Just the feeling. I used a Cat Stevens song. That's got to be paying respect on some level.
LAIH: What about the music in the film?
ANDERSON: I used British invasion music from the 60s and 70s. I think that's really hard angry rock music, but it's played by English kids in blazers, like school boys. And I think that combo is something like what this kid is. That was my way of analyzing it afterword. At one point I just wanted to use some Kinks.
LAIH: The tone of "Rushmore" is so different. Can you explain what you were trying to do?
ANDERSON: There's a sort of unreality. You don't see a lot of cars from today. There's not any cultural references really. It's just its own little world. So it almost feels like it's not any one particular time. It's a bit of a fable, maybe? The behavior of the characters, the stuff that's happening in the movie is not quite reality. The plays are unrealistically ambitious.
LAIH: What kind of films do you like to watch?
ANDERSON: I like funny movies. "Murmur of the Heart" by Louis Malle is one. "The Rules of the Game" by Jean Renoir. I like movies where there is real affection for the characters. In those movies I feel like there aren't any really bad guys. I think Renoir says something to the effect that everyone has their reasons. You just have to make an effort to understand them. I guess I'm not too into cynical, cool movies right now. I've just seen so many violent, steely or cool movies and I'd rather stay away from that.
LAIH: Talk about your process as a filmmaker.
ANDERSON: It starts with the way you want the movie to feel, the setting, the kind of feeling of the characters and the way they'll interact, and less the story. Once you're making the movie, you're not affected by that anymore. You're just into the world and have to follow your instincts.
LAIH: What about the collaborative writing process?
ANDERSON: We talk for months. While that's going on, one of us will write a scene and hand it to the other, and they'll make marks and hand it back, act out things, add things. As it goes along we write more and
more and we start to figure out if we need a scene. It sort of evolves that way, just the two of us hashing it out.
LAIH: How do you see your style of directing?
ANDERSON: I like on the set for everyone to feel like friends. I like to be very private with the actors. I like for us to rehearse scenes very privately and quietly. That's probably because I feel self-conscious "directing" in front of a group of people. Lots of people who worked on Rushmore worked on "Bottle Rocket," the head of
every department, so there are lots of friends on the set.
LAIH: Do you plan much in advance?
ANDERSON: I like to plan as much as possible. I think the more you can have ideas for things, the more you can really make an effort to find a new way to do a scene. It becomes more dense if you really make an
effort, like you're writing a novel, if you focus on the detail in advance. It's hard to make that stuff happen spontaneously. You've really got to plan it, I think.LAIH: Do you storyboard?
ANDERSON: Yeah, I do it twice, in fact. I storyboard it once and then go back and do it neatly. You find some things you had sketched out when you go back and go, I thought I had this thought out, but it's
sort of half-baked. It's a pain because it takes forever, but you get it all more specific.
LAIH: The narrative arc of "Rushmore" is all over the place, yet that seems to work. How do you explain that?
ANDERSON: The stuff we get excited about are unexpected turns to the story. Also, we'll have ideas and you have to somehow get there.
LAIH: Tell me about Max Fischer. Is he a good guy?
ANDERSON: I think some people feel we made a character who is not always very appealing. But I have just a good feeling about that character. He does some almost unforgivable stuff, but I feel like he's redeemed. I have a personal feeling for the character like it were someone I knew. I hate it when someone says they find him unlikable. We try to push him, but I don't want him to be a bad guy.
LAIH: How did you get Bill Murray interested in the film?
ANDERSON: We just sent him the script. A week later he called and said he wanted to do it. Really all we talked about in your first conversation was this movie "Red Beard" by Kurosawa, that Bill was a big fan of. He had an idea that "Red Beard" had something to do with "Rushmore." I never quite understood what the connection was.
LAIH: What was he like?
ANDERSON: Working with him was really great. He's really funny and he's just such a good guy. He made a real effort to support this movie. It's a small movie. It's the kind of movie, if someone tried to modify it
and make it more palatable or to fit into a certain slot, it would just go to pieces. He was a good defender of the movie. You can settle for things and Murray wasn't interested in us settling for anything. I'm not either and it's good to have somebody like that involved.
LAIH: I love the plays in "Rushmore." Did they pose any problems?
ANDERSON: For the war play, if you don't get it right have to wait an hour and a half while they set up all of these charges again. We had to do the whole scene in one day according to our schedule. There's one shot where this plane flies across the stage bombing it. If we hadn't got that right, it would have been two hours to line up all the charges again. We got lucky and got the shot right. It was a fun day because all of these kids dressed up for Vietnam. It felt like there was a play happening (enthusiasm in voice). When we were filming, It felt like it was an EVENT day.
LAIH: What's next?
ANDERSON: Owen and I are working on this script set in New York. It's about a family there.
LAIH: Tell us again how you got started.
ANDERSON: Owen and I were both at UT. We did a play in a playwriting class that I wrote and that Owen acted in. Before we finished school there we started writing the "Bottle Rocket" script. After that we went to Dallas and made a short version of it. The short was supposed to be a feature but we ran out of money." With "Bottle Rocket," not that many people got to see it in the theater. Most people saw it on video. There wasn't much of an event to the release. I sort of regretted it. So I want to do everything I can to let people know about this movie.