The cult classic movie Wes Anderson was urged to disown: “We had to distance ourselves”
There’s an understandable polarisation about Wes Anderson movies, but those who feel like his films are over-stylised or somehow pretentious are probably missing out on an early gem that has few of the hallmarks of his more famous efforts, but all of the humour.
In fact, it’s the very first film he made, before he got into the ‘actor stares silently straight down the camera’ shots or the chapter names in between parts of the story, a low-ish budget comedy heist film that has aged surprisingly well in the 30 years since it was produced from a short 14-minute film Anderson had put together as a 22-year-old in 1992.
The movie is Bottle Rocket, and it very nearly began and ended Anderson’s old University buddy Owen Wilson’s career at the first time of asking, when it did so badly on a $5million budget on release that he considered simply giving up acting altogether and joining the navy instead. But the box office returns of just over $500k don’t tell the true story of how good the film is, or how accomplished Anderson was as a director at just 26.
Regardless, it was a complete disaster of a release for the studio, the film received the worst feedback of any Columbia Pictures test preview in history, and Anderson recalled the experience with his lead actor to The Guardian, saying, “Owen thought we were all washed up. He thought it was over. I remember him saying that we had to quickly look for work in advertising, which I really did not want to do.
Anderson added, “He also kept saying that we needed to distance ourselves from the movie. And I’m like, ‘How are we going to do that? We’ve both written it, I’ve directed it, and you’re in pretty much every scene. That seems a pretty tall order.’ But no, he was insistent. We had to distance ourselves.”
Fortunately, critics didn’t agree with the initial audience turnout and gave the movie excellent reviews, plus Martin Scorsese championed the film, saying it was one of his favourites of the 1990s. It lent him enough pull within the industry to make the astoundingly good Rushmore in 1998, one of the finest films of all time and the first film he worked on with Bill Murray.
Looking back, Bottle Rocket is both strangely timeless and also very much immediately identifiable as a mid-1990s movie. Both Wilson brothers, Luke and Owen, are excellent in the two main roles as dropouts trying to hit a big payday by organising robberies and, like Rushmore, there are several laugh-out-loud moments and a chaotic feeling throughout that these are inherently selfish people who have no control over their lives whatsoever, yet you pull for them anyway.
Wilson stuck with Anderson in the end, and his career benefited from it hugely. He was in Rushmore as well, plus 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums and 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, by which point he was one of Hollywood’s leading comedy stars, making movies with the likes of Jackie Chan and Gene Hackman.
His biggest hit came a year later when he teamed up with Vince Vaughn for Wedding Crashers, before he suffered severe personal issues and a suicide attempt in 2007, something he credits his brothers for helping him recover from.
