Anderson is happy making relatively small movies, and he doesn’t want to be a director for hire. So it’s not as if he needs The Royal Tenenbaums to be a blockbuster. But everyone around him is hoping that this movie will reach more people than his previous two. A little advance press could, theoretically, help. I’m ready. I’m waiting. Anderson, however, is very, very busy. I’m told he wants to give me his full attention. Just not yet.
THERE IS A BLACK and, white photograph of Wes Anderson and the Wilson brothers that says who they are–and who they’re not. It was taken while they were making Bottle Rocket. Anderson is typing on a computer, his back to the room. He’s smiling, engaged. Owen Wilson is behind him, relaxing in a chair, mid chuckle. Luke Wilson sits nearby, his handsome face twisted into a goofy grimace. Both hands are clawing the air, as if he’s being buried alive.
The picture, taken by a professional photographer who happens to be the Wilsons’ mother, does not say “movie stars,” though some people predict that’s what the Wilsons are destined to become. The picture does not say “auteur,” though Anderson has since earned that label. The picture is a portrait of three buddies enjoying a funny story.
James Brooks says the funny story is at the heart of the Anderson-Wilson collaboration. Their screenplays, he says, are “casually literary.” If they ever stopped writing them, “nothing at all like those scripts would exist.”
How Anderson and Owen Wilson work, however, is a mystery. Barry Mendel, a producer on Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, says, “Frankly, I have never seen them working together.”
Luke Wilson, who used to live with both of them in a big house in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles, says, “They’re like one of those couples that you wonder, ‘Are they really together?’ It was kind of a closed-door affair sometimes. I get the feeling they both toss out names, ideas, fragments. But I couldn’t tell you. And if I can’t, I think probably nobody can.”
The Wilsons and Anderson now live in different time zones–the director in a Manhattan apartment, the actors in a pretty white house in Santa Monica that Owen just bought.
Owen answers his front door barefoot. He’s 5 foot 11 inches and wiry in khakis and a short-sleeved blue shirt with little red and green flowers on it. The shirt is buttoned up to his neck. One is struck by how many faces he has. Owen’s agent, Jim Berkus, says he’s more Jack Nicholson than Warren Beatty. The 33-year-old actor is not pretty, what with his boxer’s nose and squinting eyes, but still, you can’t take your eyes off him. There’s mischief there, and a little vulnerability. Anderson compares Owen to Robert Redford, and at moments the label fits. Except that he can also look Like a doofus or a stoner, something Redford has never risked his image to perfect.
Once we are settled in his whitewashed living room, Owen says there is no secret to how he and Anderson write. They always start with characters, creating bits of dialogue, passing them back and forth. Over time–a lot of time–a story will emerge. “It’s sort of the cart leading the horse,” Owen says, sinking into a huge armchair. “We don’t know what it’s gonna be. We’re just talking, trying to get each other laughing.”
The Wilsons grew up in Dallas, but that alone doesn’t account for Owen’s distinctive voice, which is nasal with just a hint of twang. He speaks slowly, musingly, placing a lot of emphasis on favored syllables.
“We just hole up together,” he says. “And it always seems to disintegrate into us just going to the places we like to eat and both of us kind of telling stories to each other that we’ve both heard but that we still think are funny. Or getting on somebody we feel has wronged us in the past, like in college, and talking about that person for three days.”
He gets up to show me a framed photo, a gift from Anderson: a heroic portrait of a man who’s about to die. “This is something I could see us making a movie out of,” Owen says. The man’s expression is caught between a scowl and a smirk. “We could spend a week talking about that guy. But the way it eventually would come out from us, the guy wouldn’t be quite so heroic.” He laughs. “Or he’d be heroic in the very end, but he would have a lot of very cowardly things that he had done.”
