November 2009 | blackfilm.com | Fantastic Mr. Fox | Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman Take a “Fantastic” Voyage

November 2009

Fantastic Mr. Fox | Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman Take a “Fantastic” Voyage

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Fantastic Mr. Fox
Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman Take a “Fantastic” Voyage

by Max Evry

November 15, 2009

“Is this Wes’s water? That’s how well I know him, I know his water.”

At age 17 Jason Schwartzman became something of an icon to a generation when he portrayed the industrious anti-slacker Max Fisher in the comedy “Rushmore”. Ten years later he’s still playing maverick, precocious youth for writer/director Wes Anderson, only this time in an animated adventure that melds Anderson’s visually exacting, deadpan humor with the anarchic spirit of children’s author Roald Dahl in an adaptation of “Fantastic Mr. Fox”. Though less well known than previous Dahl books brought to life on the screen, which include “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “The Witches”, “Fox” is a fitting story for the “Royal Tenenbaums” helmer since it deals with his favorite subject: the dysfunctional family of outsiders. However, the actor insists that this stop-motion animated tale was far from “business as usual” for Anderson.

“Each time we go to work together the situation is so different that it’s a real tool to have that kind of a history and shorthand with someone,” says Schwartzman, who also co-wrote and co-starred in the filmmakers 2007 film “The Darjeeling Limited”. “But it doesn’t make the work any easier because the work is always new and different. It’s like a science experiment. The variable is always the movie, the location, where we are. We’re the constant. The one thing that’s the same about Wes is you know it’s going to be an adventure, and you know it’s going to be unorthodox.”

This adventure began not long after “Rushmore” was released, when Anderson acquired the rights to “Mr. Fox” from Dahl’s widow Felicity, who’s goes by the name of “Liccy”, and ventured to the Gipsy House estate in Buckinghamshire, England where the author wrote all his celebrated books.

“This was a long time ago, maybe 9 or 10 years ago,” said the director. “I had met Liccy Dahl in New York and she’d invited me to go to Gipsy House when I was in England. So a few months later I was there. In one of the pieces in “Henry Sugar” Dahl had a story about writing where he describes his writing hut and his house. When I went there I had known about it as a kid. It was just an unusual thing to know the writer that well as a child. It was very emotional for me, and very inspiring. He not only wrote the book there but it’s set there, and that’s how we ended up writing there, because it was so inspiring. You can really feel his personality in the place.”

At that point Anderson roped in his friend writer Noah Baumbach (“Squid and the Whale”) to collaborate on the screenplay as they had done for his other picture, “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou”. The two men proceeded to build around the book’s simple narrative of an intrepid Fox who outwits three nasty farmers named Boggis, Bunce, and Bean by stealing their chickens and evading their bulldozers.

Anderson explained, “We had discussed it a bit in America, and then we met over at Gypsy House and started working. I knew we were going to add a section to the front of it. We quickly realized that where the book ends it was going to need to keep going after that, and we were going to have to expand the cast.”

This “expansion” included a new subplot that reduces Mr. Fox’s four children down to one, an eccentric loner named Ash, and a visiting cousin named Kristofferson. Perturbed by this visitor, Ash begins a bitter rivalry with his yoga practicing, karate expert cousin that includes competing for a fellow schoolgirl’s attention. Schwartzman voices Ash, and was able to look past the creature’s furry exterior to find the soul of the character.

Said Schwartzman, “When I read this character I didn’t think, ‘Okay, twelve-year-old fox with some troubles.’ I thought ‘twelve-year-old’. A kid who feels little, wants to be a better athlete, really likes a girl who doesn’t like him back… not only doesn’t like him back but she likes someone very close to him that he in fact lives with. His dad is an incredible figure. Ash is different. He wears a cape. He’s grumpy, he spits. He’s a misfit.”

Once the script was complete, Anderson found that his initial conception of how he would make his animated opus had changed radically.

“I thought I would make the script, cast and record the actors, draw the shots,” he said, “then I’d work with a production designer building puppets, get everything all sorted out then hand it over to a team of animators to animate it. I thought during that period when they were animating I might be able to direct another film, and when they finished it I would get the stuff back, say ‘great’, put it together, work with a composer and finish it. It wasn’t like that. It’s much more time consuming than a live-action movie in every way. For two years that was every second of my life.”

The unorthodox nature of the production extended to recording the voice tracks, which besides Schwartzman also included George Clooney as the eponymous Fox, Bill Murray as Badger, and Meryl Streep as Fox’s wife, Felicity.

“With this movie there were no cameras,” said Schwartzman. “It was just the actors, Wes, and a sound guy named Stuart. Instead of the more traditional style of getting a cast assembled and having them recording their voices all separately, he wanted to do this one all on location with the actors playing it live like a radio play.”

Added Anderson, “We went to a farm in Connecticut to record the actors. If there was some boss around they would have said, ‘Hmm, not so sure this is the way to do it,’ but there wasn’t. We just did that, and it was actually very fun. The important thing we got out of it was everyone being together. It was a good way to launch it.”

“I still feel like I haven’t done ‘animated’,” Schwartzman continued, “because that’s more like the guy in the recording booth. This was all these actors together running around on a farm, digging in the ground, pretending to be foxes and howling with a sound guy running after us with a microphone! This was like a one-off, unique/ beautiful experience.”

The look of the stop-motion puppets would also depart from the look of other recent, slicker forays into the medium such as “Coraline” that used a good deal of digital enhancements to streamline the process. Anderson insisted on doing everything “in camera”, and using real fur on his characters that would ruffle as they were animated.

“I wanted that real tactile kind of feeling,” he said. “A movie like ‘Corpse Bride’, for instance, every frame is animated. Our style is more like the Aardman films where, generally, two frames are the same. They say ‘on-twos’. It doesn’t move every frame, unless something needs to go faster. If you’re doing it on-twos it’s already rougher, and if you add to that fur and those kind of textures it makes it more noticeably stop-motion. The magic and the charm of it for me is in sensing that somebody’s hands are doing something, that it’s handmade. The illusion is intact but you have a sort-of awareness of how the illusion is being created. That’s what interested me in stop-motion in the first place.

“It’s fun to me,” Anderson continued. “In a movie like this everything is in miniature, so you’re not going to find a location or props. You’ve got to build them, but that means every single thing that you make is an opportunity to add something to the movie. I just don’t concern myself with whether it’s too much or overkill, I would rather just put everything I can think of that I feel makes it better.

One of the more hilarious additions Anderson and Baumbach made was to have their characters use the word “cuss” in place of an actual curse word. For example, at one point Mr. Fox says to his badger lawyer, “Are you cussing with me?” In another scene, some graffiti tagged on a brick wall in the background simply reads “CUSS”.

Said Anderson, “That is a case where I felt it was overkill at a certain point. At one moment we probably had three-times as many ‘cusses’ in the movie, and still there are plenty of them there now. I started the movie as a children’s film. It’s based on a children’s book and there’s talking animals. When we were writing it we NEVER paid any attention to that fact, however. We just wrote what we thought was funny. ‘Cuss’ was something we thought of early on and we were enjoying it. We knew it was a way of keeping it ‘PG’… I guess that’s pretty obvious. In England I don’t even know if they have the word ‘cuss’ in the dictionary, so it may be more for Americans.”

The film involved painstaking labor as 30 separate units of animators working at a studio in London were overseen remotely by Anderson in Paris for nearly two years. There was a recent controversy as the film’s Director of Photography Tristan Oliver made some disparaging comments in the Los Angeles Times regarding the director’s absence from the physical set and the demands he put on the crew. Luckily, the film itself is garnering the best reviews the director has had in years and audiences are responding to its old fashioned techniques combined with Anderson’s singular voice.

“A group of people work on the movie with so much expertise,” explained Anderson, “and without that you just couldn’t do it. Without all these craftspeople and artists who are so skilled you couldn’t do it. At the same time every day is a testing/experimentation phase and we just never know what the results are going to be anyways.”

Schwartzman calls Anderson his “best friend” and is clearly fond of the man who launched his career over a decade ago. We can only imagine what they will concoct next.

“He loves movies,” the actor concludes. “He loves making movies. If that was your entire life you would make every movie like everything depended on it. That’s how he makes his movies. It really is a big deal if someone won’t let him make it the way he wants to make it. He would take a bullet for one of his movies. That’s integrity. He’s like Spartacus.”

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