Meeting Wes Anderson

In 2009, on the occasion of the release of his Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson answered questions from Didier Péron for the newspaper Libération. A flashback on a questionnaire for a cinephile.

The film that your parents wouldn’t let you see?
Apocalypse Now.

An iconic scene that haunts you?
The end of Amarcord, by Fellini.

If you directed a remake: which one?
Ruggles of Red Gap by Leo McCarey.

The film you have watched the most often?
Taxi Driver.

Who or what makes you laugh?
Bill Murray.

Your life becomes a biopic…
I would rather not think about that.

The ultimate filmmaker?
Jean Renoir.

The film that you are the only one who knows about?
A brilliant film called Girlfriends, Stanley Kubrick talked about it in an interview. Very good, very hard to find.

A quote from a dialogue you know by heart?
I like all the responses by Boris Lermontov in The Red Shoes by Michael Powell..

The actor you would have liked to have been?
Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show by Peter Bogdanovich [he plays Sam the Lion, the barman, editor’s note].

The last film you saw? With whom? How was it?
Broken Embraces, by Pedro Almodóvar. alone, in London.

Who is the best dressed artist (not counting you)?
I like filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s style of dressing [also called Goddard and the auteur in particular of The Object of Beauty and Frankie Starlight, editor’s note].

If someone calls you a cinephile, how do you react?
No one has ever said that to my face.

A book that you love that is impossible to adapt?
A wonderful book called The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte [a manual on the rules for creating all sorts of graphics from quantitative data, editor’s note].

Something that you really can’t stand in a film?
The first time that I left a cinema during a screening, it was The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Even as children, we were aware that this film did not quite work.

Cinema is dying. Do you have an epitaph?
I’d rather not think about that either…