Wes Anderson
The director sits down to talk about Roald Dahl, Stop-Motion and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Highly acclaimed for an impressive filmography that includes The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, director Wes Anderson is widely considered as a modern day auteur. His most challenging project to date opened the London Film Festival this month and early reaction is positive. He sat down after the festival screening to talk about Roald Dahl, stop-motion and, that film, Fantastic Mr Fox.

Pure Movies: Wes, what first drew you to this project? I know you’re a big Roald Dahl fan, why did you particularly like this book?

Wes Anderson: Well this was actually the first book I ever owned, officially my copy, and it’s a book I loved as a child, and also it’s a book that introduced me to Roald Dahl’s work in general, so yeah it made a really big impression on me. About ten years ago I spoke to Felicity Dahl, Roald’s wife, and asked her permission to begin with the process of producing a film. I always intended on doing it as a stop-motion movie, with animals with fur; I love the way that looks, it’s kind of magical.

With regard to stop-motion and your choice to use that, were you intentionally evoking the cultural history of that form – specifically Hungarian stop-motion animation – and were you at all alluding to any of the anarchic spirit of those films?

WA: That type of Eastern European animation was one of the inspirations for me, I mean it’s one of the most esoteric filmic forms, and I hadn’t thought of the political ramifications, but Dahl, for me has always been a little anarchic, even a little communist. There’s another animated film – a French one – it’s called Le Roman de Renard, and that was a great influence on us. Like that film, we also used multiple scales, so different sized puppets for different sequences. So we used some ideas from that movie that we thought were quite charming in ours.

So how did you end up casting George Clooney as Mr.Fox?

WA: I would say that sometimes when I’m writing a script, I write with a specific actor in mind, in this case, we were just thinking of animals. So as soon as we were finished I thought, who’s going to be a good Mr Fox? and I thought, well, Carey Grant would be good…and, well, within twenty seconds of thinking of Carey Grant we thought of George Clooney.I would say that one thing I’ve learned over the course of the film is just how much the voices of the actors – how much they give to the animators. Obviously they spend a lot of time doing it but they really draw their inspiration from them.

Roald Dahl evidently enjoyed scaring children, Wes did you enjoy scaring children in the film?

WA: I remember being scared by Roald Dahl, and I loved that. I don’t think we made it any darker, but we tried to keep it as dark. When we were writing the script, our goal was to try and imagine how Roald would have expanded the book into a movie. This is a movie where the characters aren’t in danger of being perturbed, they’re in danger of being killed, and that’s the way it is in the book. When Mr Fox has his tail shot off it doesn’t grow back, it’s off.