Wes Anderson names his favourite sci-fi movies
Wes Anderson’s signature style can be described in various ways depending on how you feel about it. “Whimsical” is a fairly neutral and accurate descriptor. “Symmetrical” is literal. And “affected” might ring true if you aren’t a huge fan of all the deadpan acting and pastel hues. With meticulously staged, colour-coded production design and intentionally wooden performances, Anderson is one of the most distinctive auteurs working today, with films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel becoming instant classics.
If you were to speculate about what Anderson might be inspired by outside of filmmaking, there are many things that could come to mind. You might think about the decorative world of French pâtisserie, the contents of Marie Antoinette’s closet, or the Japanese art of Ikebana. But it turns out that when the director isn’t spending time readjusting the angle of a chaise lounge or instructing Bill Murray to look ever so slightly more depressed, he’s watching or reading science fiction.
In an interview with Little White Lies in 2023 for the release of his film Asteroid City, the director talked about his favourite examples of the genre and how they informed his new movie.
“Movies like… oh, I don’t know, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and maybe a bit of both versions of… The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” he mused. “Probably more Close Encounters…. But that’s not the centre of [Asteroid City] to me. The centre of the movie was two things. One, a story about people who work in the theatre and what those people are like and what they want. Their whole lives become this make-believe that connects to life in a period of the theatre in America. Then, about people from the West, or people who live in the West or things that happen in the West.”
Asteroid City is a star-studded comedy-drama set in the American desert with a few too many framing devices up its sleeve. There is a play about a junior stargazing convention and a documentary about the making of the play. The cast includes Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Steve Carrell, Tilda Swinton, and almost everyone else worth knowing in Hollywood. There are also the sci-fi tropes of aliens and UFOs, which makes sense in the context of Anderson’s comments about his favourite science-fiction films.
All three movies he cited depict some version of extraterrestrial life making contact with Earth. The original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still came out in 1951 and features the kind of geometry that Anderson can get behind. In 2008, it was remade with Keanu Reeves and was decidedly less groundbreaking.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been made twice as well, with the 1978 Donald Sutherland version being the most well-known. Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind is yet another story of extraterrestrial contact with Earth, though Richard Dreyfuss’s character becomes obsessed with rather than terrified of the visitors. It also takes place largely in the American West, just like Anderson’s film.
Aside from Asteroid City, however, the director’s love of science fiction is not evident in his filmography. Despite their mannered acting and colourful composition, his movies tend to centre on the human world, with the main exceptions being Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs, which still focus on earthly matters. Given his love of the genre, it seems like there is a masterpiece still waiting to be made that combines his love of sci-fi and his stylistic auteurism. Maybe he could even set it on a fictional planet and cast Bill Murray as the main alien. Even Wes Anderson sceptics would have to get behind that.
