The 1980 movie Owen Wilson introduced to Wes Anderson: “He’d never seen it”
As most film fans know (and you’re certainly a film fan, there’s no doubt about it), Wes Anderson has a phalanx of acting talent that he likes to cast regularly in his films, one of whom was there right from the start, that being Owen Wilson.
In fact, it was so early on that the pair met that they hadn’t even made a film of any description. They were, in fact, classmates on the same playwriting course at the University of Texas in the late 1980s and then roommates who bonded over a love of cinema. They decided to try to write screenplays together, and some years later, that led to Anderson’s first film as a director, 1996’s Bottle Rocket.
It was the crime caper that starred both Owen and Luke Wilson as desperate brothers trying to organise a heist, and it caused waves throughout Hollywood… Owen Wilson and Anderson wrote the screenplay, and despite losing some $4.5million on its release, it was lauded by critics, and even Martin Scorsese described it as one of his favourite films of the decade.
It was the next film that Anderson and Wilson wrote together that changed everything, though. 1998’s Rushmore was an astounding piece of cinema, one of the finest films in history and a new lease of acting life for Bill Murray, who picked up a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in the film. Although Wilson didn’t appear in the movie, he and Anderson were now hot property in the industry, and their next writing project brought them the awards and acclaim they’d been waiting for.
2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums built on Anderson’s directorial recipe he’d established with Rushmore, adding more talent in the form of Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller and Gwyneth Paltrow. The veteran Hackman picked up a Golden Globe for the film, while Anderson and Wilson collected Oscar nominations for ‘Best Screenplay’.
While they didn’t win the award, which went to Gosford Park, it was the culmination of what the two men had been working towards for 12 years, and it proved to be the last time they worked on a script together. Wilson began to get very famous of his own accord due to acting roles in mainstream movies like Zoolander and Behind Enemy Lines, while Anderson was forging a reputation as one of the most accomplished directors in modern film.
Wilson still harks back to their time growing up as University students, though, and in picking out his favourite films of all time, he mentioned one that reminds him of his former screenwriting partner.
He told Rotten Tomatoes, “I’ll say Breaker Morant. That’s an Australian movie. That’s a movie that I went to as a kid with my parents. And then I remember when I roomed with Wes in college, he’d never seen it. I think he really liked the movie, and there’s some great lines in it and great performances.”
A war drama made in Australia in 1980, Breaker Morant was the biographical tale of Lt Harry Harbord ‘Breaker’ Morant, a military officer from England who was tried and executed for the murder of nine prisoners of war in 1901 during the Second Boer War. Starring British actor Edward Woodward of The Wicker Man fame, it was a big hit down under and also picked up an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’.
