The film that Wes Anderson says inspires all movies: “Irresistible celebration of filmmaking”
Cinema has a long history of directors who, once they find an actor they really enjoy casting, will stick with them year in, year out, movie after movie.
Rather like grabbing a favourite coat before leaving the house, they will repeatedly turn to the same actor they’ve been faithful to in the simple belief that if it works, it just works: so why change it? That’s the case with Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington, Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L Jackson, and it’s certainly the case with Wes Anderson – although he doesn’t just have one favourite coat – he has a cupboard full.
Anderson’s cast of characters for a movie will usually include the following actors: Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, and Anjelica Huston. While Murray is out there on ten films as Anderson’s favourite recurring castmember, another who has been there since the early days of 1996’s Bottle Rocket is Jason Schwartzman.
A then 15-year-old Schwartzman made his debut in the comedy that marked Anderson’s first outing in the director’s chair, a project based on a short film the Texan made four years previously. While the young actor only had a small part in Bottle Rocket, Anderson found an affinity with the teenager that sparked a lasting work relationship.
Anderson himself draws parallels with the famed French auteur François Truffaut, who similarly cast a young actor as the lead role in his classic coming-of-age drama The 400 Blows back in 1959. The boy in question was Jean-Pierre Léaud, then in his teens but with a quality Truffaut admired that was missing in the other 60 or so boys who had applied for the role—true ambition.
Truffaut had advertised for an adolescent to appear in his drama, based on his own experiences as a Parisian boy with rebellious tendencies. Once he had whittled down the applicants to Léaud, a partnership was formed that would last decades and encompass nine films.
Truffaut explained: “Many of the boys had responded to the ad out of simple curiosity, or at the insistence of their parents. Jean-Pierre Léaud was different: he desperately wanted that role, and though he was thoroughly intimidated, he did his best to appear cheerful and relaxed.”
Detailing further, Léaud, for his part, told The New York Times, “I was as scared as the rest, but there are two kinds of fear. One closes you up, the other makes you give, almost with exuberance. Truffaut was as shy as I was but his shyness is more enclosed. I’m shy aggressively.”
Perhaps the pinnacle of their work together was the 1973 Academy Award-winning romantic comedy Day for Night. Now considered one of the finest movies ever made, it tells the story of a film director struggling to finish his project while juggling the real-life issues of his cast and crew, including an alcoholic leading lady and an actor whose girlfriend runs off with a stuntman.
It was something of a personal attempt by Truffaut to show the world not just how much he loved the medium of cinema, but how important cinema can be. He wanted to capture his own obsession with film and to try out some more experimental techniques – even the film’s title is named after a filmmaking process that uses camera filters to give the impression of a scene taking place at night, when in fact it is daytime.
Anderson is a huge fan of the film and of Truffaut in general, stating: “It’s a kind of an irresistible celebration of filmmaking, which is his life, François Truffaut. Truffaut has always, for whatever reasons, been one of my role models. I mean, I’m projecting that on him. He didn’t ask for this, or he didn’t appoint me anything, you know, but somehow, I’ve always felt this, and Jason (Schwartzman) and I, one of the first things we did together, was watch the 400 Blows.”
