By Tara Brady
Wes Anderson, the director of The Royal Tenenbaums and Asteroid City, has a celebrated eye for detail – right down to the choice of instruments for each score, according to the composer Alexandre Desplat, his regular collaborator.
The filmmaker selected glockenspiel, triangles and other puppet-sized noisemakers for the percussion for Fantastic Mr Fox, and traditional taiko drums for the Japanese-set animation Isle of Dogs. When he made The Grand Budapest Hotel, he hung pictures of the characters, created by his partner, the costume designer Juman Malouf, around the hotel where the cast and crew were staying.
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But even the best-laid plans can be meaningless when it comes to moviemaking, according to Anderson, who tells a story about The Darjeeling Limited, his Indian odyssey from 2007.
“You try to take control of it, but when you make a movie you’re saying, ‘I’m going to invite chaos into my life.’ When we made The Darjeeling Limited in India, we prepared everything very, very carefully. But it took us to strange places. We visited this little village, and we wanted to do a shot there and we needed a hut. And the elders of the village said, ‘We can build you the hut.’
“So we came back two weeks later and the hut was perfect, and we said, ‘Thank you very much. We’ll see you on Tuesday.’ And when we came back on Tuesday the hut had been decorated with all these flowers and swirls, and they painted it pink and blue. But the scene we wanted to shoot was a funeral.”
Anderson has certainly paid attention to detail today. We are at a hotel on the Venice Lido, during the city’s film festival, to hear about his new movie. When the director arrives he is wearing a tailored shirt the colour of the Adriatic Sea outside. Like the candy-coloured pinstriped suit he wore on the red carpet the day before, it’s a very Andersonian hue.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which stars Ben Kingsley, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes and Dev Patel, is the first instalment of an anthology of Roald Dahl adaptations; three short films based on the short stories Ratcatcher, The Swan and Poison are in various stages of production.
“Henry Sugar is one of the friendlier ones,” Anderson says. “The others are the more familiar darkness of Dahl. Ratcatcher is very strange and a bit disturbing. I think The Swan is one of his best stories, and it’s extremely dark and quite brutal. Poison has an emotional brutality to it that’s pretty striking. It’s very early. We’re adapting stories that are from another time, with dated language. We’ve kept it how it is.” Continue reading