{"id":262370,"date":"2026-02-01T10:55:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T10:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/262370\/"},"modified":"2026-02-01T10:55:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T10:55:08","slug":"inside-the-world-of-wes-anderson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/262370\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the world of Wes Anderson"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you make your way to the Design Museum, which occupies the horned modernist structure that was once home to the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, you are in for a surprise. And not just because it\u2019s one of those buildings that is far more inspiring on the inside than its rather Stalinist exterior would have you imagine.<\/p>\n

No, the biggest surprise is that our national temple to design has decided to dedicate its ground floor to Wes Anderson, the American filmmaker (\u2018auteur\u2019 is the word film types like to whisper) behind such idiosyncratic gems as The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) or, probably his biggest hit, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), which starred Ralph Fiennes, Adrian Brody, Saoirse Ronan and Willem Dafoe,\u00a0among many others.<\/p>\n

Anderson, 56, is one of those rarified creatures \u2013 a filmmaker\u2019s filmmaker \u2013 whose inventive movies are among the most self-consciously stylised being made today, certainly by a mainstream director. Yet somehow, they\u2019re still highly watchable.<\/p>\n

And so it is that until 26 July the Design Museum is giving us Wes Anderson: The Archives<\/a>, a series of rooms each dedicated to assorted artefacts from his dozen or so films. It begins with 1996\u2019s Bottle Rocket, which he co-wrote with his university pal, Owen Wilson, who also starred in it with his brother, Luke. You can see scripts, notebooks and storyboards, props and Polaroids and professional photography. And from his second film onwards, the cult classic Rushmore (1998) starring David Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Olivia Williams, many of the most distinctive costumes are also on display. <\/p>\n

Exhibits include the Fendi mink coat worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums and the red Nike tracksuits worn by Ben Stiller and his sons in the film. There are also the costumes from The Grand Budapest Hotel, as well as a three-metre long model of the exterior of the hotel. Then there is the shark and model submersible used in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), and a detailed drawing of the railway carriages as well as a model of the train, the costumes and luggage from 2007\u2019s The Darjeeling Limited. Turn each corner and you are confronted by another space containing the costumes, props or models that define the films.<\/p>\n

For me, the unexpected stars of the show are the stop-motion puppets, made in Manchester, for Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), based on the Roald Dahl story. They are surprisingly beautiful \u2013 more sculptures than puppets, in a way \u2013 and astonishingly lifelike: glance at the belligerent-looking badger and you hear Bill Murray; catch sight of Mr Fox and it\u2019s impossible not have a mental voice bubble from George Clooney.<\/p>\n

\"\"[Luke Hayes]<\/p>\n

Anderson fans will love all the details, such as the actual letter from Dirk Calloway to Max in Rushmore (if you know the film, you\u2019ll remember it when you see it), or the display of the fictional books written by his films\u2019 many authors (Old Custer by Eli Cash and Dudley\u2019s World by Raleigh St Clair, both in The Royal Tenenbaums). Other highlights include 27 elegantly crafted back-issue covers for the magazine in The French Dispatch (2021), as well as Bill Murray\u2019s Andretti typewriter from that film.<\/p>\n

The costumes on the spotlit mannequins are beautifully preserved. Not for nothing was one of Grand Budapest\u2019s four Oscars for costume design. It\u2019s all there: Monsieur Gustave\u2019s brilliant purple concierge tailcoat with the grey waistcoat and trousers that Ralph Fiennes wore; Willem Dafoe\u2019s leather trenchcoat and rings; and Edward Norton\u2019s grey policeman\u2019s uniform, which with its stand-up collar is more Mitteleuropa than a Tintin convention in Prague.<\/p>\n

\"\"[Luke Hayes]<\/p>\n

What all this brings home is the unflinching depth and the breadth of creativity underpinning Anderson\u2019s filmmaking, from the smallest detail up. The lengths that have been gone to, and the quality and authenticity of each item, are much greater than you might have imagined and therefore much of the pleasure is in gaining a glimpse of that endeavour, as well as seeing items you recognise in the flesh. You may already have thought that Anderson\u2019s films fetishised design; now you know it\u2019s much more extreme than that. The dense hyper-materialism of the movies is the product of a huge, astonishingly deliberate effort.<\/p>\n

With exhibits from his more recent films to bring it all up to date \u2013 including items from The Phoenician Scheme, which was out last year, starring Benicio del Toro and Kate Winslet\u2019s daughter Mia Threapleton \u2013 the exhibition concludes with four shorts from Anderson\u2019s career, including the original 15-minute 1993 version of Bottle Rocket. There\u2019s also Hotel Chevalier (2007), a two hander between Anderson-regular David Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, which is a prologue, it is said, to The Darjeeling Limited. Set in Paris, where Anglophile Anderson keeps a home, a rather dark story unfolds in the privileged world of monogrammed luggage, hotel gowns and room-service \u2013 an elite, very Anderson setting where the world is seen through an ex-patriot, American gaze.<\/p>\n

Is it a good exhibition? Absolutely, if you\u2019re a Wes Anderson aficionado. And if you\u2019re not? Well, I could think of no better introduction \u2013 aside from watching one of his films, of course. Either way, there are many worse ways to spend \u00a320 in High Street Kensington and, as you can imagine, the exhibition merchandise is on another level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you make your way to the Design Museum, which occupies the horned modernist structure that was once…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":262371,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,55061,156,593,111,139,69,75252],"class_list":{"0":"post-262370","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-design-museum","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-film","16":"tag-new-zealand","17":"tag-newzealand","18":"tag-nz","19":"tag-wes-anderson"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/262371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}