An afternoon with the Asteroid City director in an apartment he describes as “not very well maintained” and “a bit abandoned.”
Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
Wes Anderson doesn’t want to talk about Asteroid City. It’s a weekday afternoon. We’re in the New York office of his production company, American Empirical Pictures, in the East Village. He’s been wearing a pinstripe seersucker suit since morning. He wore a tux to the Cannes premiere and a black suit to the New York premiere at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center. There will be more events and interviews over the next several days, and he’s talked about the film with a lot of people, including me. He worries that he’s covered everything. “Maybe we can talk about something else?” he asks.
That’s okay by me. I’ve known Wes for 30 years. We met when he was a recent graduate of UT Austin who had made one short film and I was a journalist writing for a Dallas alternative weekly. Today, Wes offers me bottled water from the refrigerator and pours it into a glass with ice. He asks if I’ve ever been in this space before. I have not. “Why don’t I just select things and talk about them, and you can take a picture if it’s of interest?” he says. And off we go.
Photo: Matt Zoller Seitz
The place is actually an apartment. Wes bought it in 2002 from the estate of the artist Larry Rivers after the release of The Royal Tenenbaums. Rivers purchased the building in the mid-1960s and welcomed his artist friends, including Claes and Patty Oldenburg, Yayoi Kusama, On Kawara, John Chamberlain, Herb Aach, and the husband-and-wife artist duo of Tom Burckhardt and Kathy Butterfly. Allen Ginsberg lived in the unit below until his death in 1997.
Self-portrait of the artist Larry Rivers, with reference photo included.
Photo: Matt Zoller Seitz
Posters, photos, knickknacks, and letters are everywhere. Built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves occupy most of the side walls. Anderson’s books are old and new, pristine and beat up. A dedicated section of shelves holds leather-bound volumes of back issues of The New Yorker, which he has subscribed to since high school. There’s also a set of the Encyclopædia Brittanica “from before the internet, which made these sorta irrelevant,” he says.
There is a democratizing sensibility to the way everything has been collected and displayed; items of historic interest sit side by side with personal mementos that are meaningless to anyone but him. I ask if he has ever thrown out or sold a book in order to free up space. He thinks about it, smiles, and says no: “More like I hoard them.”
You can see how this place — which Anderson describes as “not very well maintained” and “a bit abandoned” — would be perfect for a painter. It’s a railroad-style apartment with a flat-white interior, hardwood floors, lots of sunlight, and high ceilings, and though it’s narrow, “it goes from 13th Street to 14th Street,” he says, “which is pretty unusual.”
He shows me a pale-green wooden Ping-Pong table he commissioned and painted “to look like a Cipriani matchbook,” he says. He asked the builder to make its net out of wood too, which turned out to be a mistake: “I just had this idea for the Ping-Pong table, but it turned out to be a terrible Ping-Pong table because you can’t have the net be hard on the top! The ball just rockets right off it.”
Polaroid photo of Anderson with Gene Hackman (getting a back massage) during the production of The Royal Tenenbaums in New York City.
Photo: Matt Zoller Seitz
Anderson points out some small reproductions of the casts of kabuki performances. “These are sort of like lobby cards,” he says. “They show the different characters, and some of them have the actors.” His friend Randall Poster, a music supervisor and collector, introduced him to these. Higher up on the shelf is a blurry Polaroid from the set of The Royal Tenenbaums that shows Gene Hackman getting a back massage while Anderson sits nearby.
He loves photography books and sometimes gets more than one collection of work by photographers he admires. One is Jacques-Henri Lartigue, whose images fed not just certain design principles in Anderson’s films but specific images, such as a photo of Lartigue’s older brother, nicknamed Zissou, on his mangled “bobsled with wheels,” which inspired the shot in Rushmore of Max Fischer in his soapbox racer. Zissou also provided the undersea explorer and filmmaker of The Life Aquatic with his surname. Lartigue was a mentor to Jacques Cousteau, the inspiration for Steve Zissou, and the portrait of Zissou’s mentor, Lord Mandrake, is modeled on a photographe of Lartigue.
Portrait of Orson Welles by filmmaker and photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.
Photo: Matt Zoller Seitz
Another of Anderson’s favorites is documentary filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. He has a collection of his work, and on a nearby wall is a large-format Greenfield-Sanders portrait of Orson Welles. “One day, I was coming into the building after being away and I saw this poster downstairs,” Anderson says. “It was all graffitied over and had been on the wall for some time, but it was of Orson Welles so I called up Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and took a picture of it and sent it over to him, and he sent me over a clean one.”
Handwritten letter from Allen Ginsberg about the virtues of keeping one’s cool even when angry, sent to Anderson by Ginsberg’s estate, which was located directly below the filmmaker’s apartment during the first few years of his residence.
Photo: Matt Zoller Seitz
The Allen Ginsberg estate held on to the space below Anderson’s until 2010, then sold it. Pinned to a corkboard in the office is a photocopy of a handwritten letter from Ginsberg. “One day, I got into a bit of a friction with the roofer,” Wes tells me, “and I received this note from the estate downstairs. I keep it on my wall because it’s a good reminder.”
He reads the text aloud:
At root of intolerance is anger. The medicine for anger is awareness of anger: “Anger doesn’t like to be reminded of fits,” said poet Jack Kerouac. If we make a practice of noticing our thoughts, to “catch yourself thinking” (as the phrase goes in idiomatic Americanese), we have a better chance of making our own irritations + fits of anger more transparent, airing out the “hot air” of emotion — as Tibetan Buddhist Lamas say, that dissolves 80% of the anger.
If all mankind can practice this kind of meditation — sitting, standing or lying down — at least the elite and the “leaders,” premiers, presidents, dictators and senators can do so — I do as best as I can.
As Ever,
Allen Ginsburg
“There really is no point in losing your temper,” Anderson says, “especially with a New York roofer.”
On the same corkboard is a mixed-media piece by the filmmaker and painter Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who is best known for directing the Beatles documentary Let It Be. “Michael is one of my favorite living humans,” Anderson says. “He does these wonderful characters that he invents, one after another. I’ve known him as long as I’ve had this place, probably.”
Mixed-media sketch of an invented character by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a filmmaker and visual artist.
Photo: Matt Zoller Seitz
“This shelf probably has a lot of stuff we’ve talked about,” Wes says, taking me to another area packed with collections of writing from The New Yorker and books about its history. He pulls a paperback edition of Up in the Old Hotel, the anthology of reporting by New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell that became a surprise publishing success in the 1990s. “This wouldn’t have been here if we hadn’t met,” he says. Twenty-six years ago, I recommended the Mitchell book to Anderson; he later told me it stirred his interest in the behind-the-scenes history of the publication, which led, in a circuitous fashion, to The French Dispatch, his anthology film about the life and death of a fictitious New Yorker–style magazine.
A shelving unit containing bound editions of all the New Yorkers Anderson has collected and (in boxes) puppets from his animated films.
Photo: Matt Zoller Seitz
I’ve done several books about Anderson’s filmography since I recommended the Mitchell collection to him, and while he has always been forthcoming about his inspirations and the details of his productions, he has grown guarded when it comes to explaining what you might call his “primal motifs.” Today I try to come back around to Asteroid City, a movie that’s full of them. It’s built around a widowed single father, played by Jason Schwartzman, who rose to fame in Anderson’s Rushmore playing a motherless son raised by a single father.
“You’ve got a lot of widows and widowers in your movies, and orphans,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says, “I probably do.”
“Why?”
Wes grins. “Don’t you remember Roebuck Wright?” he says, invoking the reporter played by Jeffrey Wright in The French Dispatch, who sits for a career-spanning interview with a talk-show host. “‘Never ask a man why.’”
