Anderson’s closest collaborator is Owen Wilson. They met at the University of Texas–two intense, off-kilter guys who shared a love of classic literature, pulp westerns, and the Sunday funnies. They also shared a condo in Austin. Once, in order to keep the bigger bedroom, Anderson wrote a paper for Wilson about Edgar Allan Poe. The professor gave the paper an A and called it “magnificent and droll.” Ten years later Wilson and Anderson still delight in calling things “magnificent and droll.”
They were the kind of down-on-their-luck dudes who would stage a break-in just to get their landlord to fix the windows. When the ruse was discovered, they would convince the landlord to let them shoot a documentary about him and his pet snake–at his expense.
After college they made a short film starring Owen and his younger brother, Luke. Bottle Rocket screened at the Sundance Film Festival and eventually caught the eye of Polly Platt, the production designer who had worked with producer-director James L. Brooks on Terms of Endearment and other films. Platt showed the short to Brooks, who convinced Columbia Pictures to finance a feature-length version. Brooks and Platt fought to keep the novice director, the first-time screenwriters, and the no-name cast on board.
When the feature-length Bottle Rocket was released in 1996, few people got it. Mostly that was because Columbia, spooked by negative responses to test screenings, dumped the movie. But it was also because the world that Anderson and Wilson invented was so without precedent that many weren’t sure what to make of it. The film follows three wanna-be criminals on a bungled heist. Owen Wilson plays Dignan, the trio’s aspiring mastermind, who clings to the verbal swagger of a tough guy (“You’re gonna see a side of Dignan that you haven’t seen before. A sick, sadistic side!”) even as he dons a yellow jumpsuit that evokes a trick-or-treater more than a hardened safecracker. Luke Wilson plays the gentle Anthony, a former mental patient who seems saner than anyone else. Bottle Rocket, which cost $ 7 million, tanked. Critics, however, not only raved, they sounded grateful. The Los Angeles Times’s Kenneth Turan applauded the film’s “exact sense of itself.”
Rushmore, which Anderson and Owen Wilson also cowrote, was released by Disney in 1999. Platt recalls that Anderson, still bruised by how his first film was received, asked her, “I don’t have another Bottle Rocket on my hands, do I?” He need not have worried.
Rushmore’s Max Fischer, a 15-year-old prep school student who excels at extracurriculars but is flunking out, is a classic Anderson-Wilson character. He has outsize ambitions that dwarf his ability to fulfill them. He appears to be the only one who sees the world precisely the way he does. The language he uses is elevated–partly borrowed from a bygone era, partly rooted in popular idiom. He is optimistic, even when there is no reason to be. He isn’t cool, but neither is he a quitter. He spends half the movie decked out in a dark green velvet suit that no teenager would be caught dead in. Somehow that makes him more poignant, more heartbreakingly real. The film, which cost about $ 11 million to make, took in $ 17 million and put Anderson on the map.
Platt says Anderson has a rare gift–a visual certainty. He knows how each frame should be com, posed. “Not many men are born with that,” she says. “He’s a natural-born moviemaker.” Brooks agrees: “He’s entirely original. Wes makes futility look good.”
Although Anderson cites many influences, from Roald Dahl to John Cassavetes to the Kinks, his films–unlike so many these days–do not come loaded with a predictable set of cultural reference points. He is difficult to describe in terms of what has come before. A few years ago The Guardian of London praised Anderson for nurturing a humanistic spirit “rather than denoting a lifetime spent watching the complete works of Scorsese.” Yet last year, when Esquire asked Scorsese himself to identify the young filmmaker most likely to become “the next Scorsese,” the master of grittiness chose the ungritty Anderson.
“I love the scene in Bottle Rocket when Owen Wilson’s character, Dignan, says, ‘They’ll never catch me, man, ’cause I’m fuckin’ innocent,” Scorsese wrote. “Then he runs off to save one of his partners in crime and gets captured by the police, over ’2000 Man’ by the Rolling Stones. He–and the music–are proclaiming who he really is: He’s not innocent in the eyes of the law, but he’s truly an innocent. For me, it’s a transcendent moment. And transcendent moments are in short supply these days.”
