Review by C.J. Bunce
Did you ever wonder how some voices get heard and others don’t? One of the crazy finds of a new book on Wes Anderson is that his early entry onto the international stage was part luck and part being in the right place at the right time. For Anderson, it’s connecting with the Francis Ford Coppola family, via writer Roman Coppola, daughter and filmmaker Sofia Coppola, and Coppola cousin actor Jason Schwartzman. That and being pals with the boyish charisma and creativity of some friends: brothers Andrew, Luke, and Owen Wilson. So many auteurs seem to be singular in their studio castles, but Anderson, despite being by all accounts a director who knows his vision and sticks with it, creates movies that are the sum of many necessary contributors. Next month Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers are releasing Wes Anderson: All the Films—The Story Behind Every Movie, Episode, and Short (available for pre-order now here at Amazon), written by French journalist Christophe Narbonne. It would make a perfect text book for a college film studies course, and it’s completely accessible, a concise but well-researched look at Anderson’s projects and what makes him unique as a filmmaker.
Wes Anderson: All the Films is the latest book to chronicle the writer/director’s life and career via interviews with cast and colleagues, all to provide some insight into his ideas, process, and influences. It’s also the only book that’s caught up with Anderson’s works up to this year, covering the short and full-length movies Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the short Hotel Chevalier, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, the short Castello Cavalcanti, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City, and the Roald Dahl collection of films. Anderson is a busy guy with no sign of stopping, so this year’s The Phoenician Scheme didn’t make it into the book. So it’s not quite “all” the films, which will always be a kind of ambitious title in part because of the lengthy book production process.
This book has the movie posters, behind the scenes photographs (some two-page spreads), select film images, and even a look at Anderson’s hand-scrawled thumbnail storyboards. Unlike Anderson’s famous contemporary, director Quentin Tarantino, Anderson’s work is unveiled as an extension of the director as artist, an extension of the Andy Warhols and Jeff Koons of the trendy-quirky art scene. But like what we learned about George Lucas in the book Star Wars: Frames (discussed here), it is the art that defines everything for his movies.
Although writer Narbonne has sections on frequent collaborators Bill Murray and composer Alexandre Desplat, Anderson is skilled at drawing big names to all his projects, beginning with James Caan, Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, and Meryl Streep, with Tom Hanks as his most recent Oscar winning co-star. Motifs in the spotlight include the frequent use of visibly battered characters, dysfunctional family relationships, an obsession with symmetry, leaning on the vintage and the nostalgic, and deadpan humor, among other things. Readers will find sidebars filled with movie Easter eggs, many consisting of names with some personal Anderson connection. You’ll even find a section on Anderson-made TV commercials.
Of course no book on Anderson would be complete without all the name drops. At some point Anderson has replaced Woody Allen as the director to flock to for actors’ resumes. So you’ll see contributions in photos and otherwise from the Wilsons, Schwartzman, Murray, Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bryan Cranston, Rupert Friend, Benicio Del Toro, Jeffrey Wright, Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, Bob Balaban, Adrian Brody, Tony Revolori, and Hope Davis. The relationship between Anderson and the Coppola family is something else–Andeson is like the real-life family Tom Hagen. It makes you wonder why Nicolas Cage hasn’t made a movie with him yet.
I can never get enough of modern stop motion animation, found in The Life Aquatic, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs, and to a lesser extent Asteroid City. But there is never enough in these books. The author interviewed former Aardman creators including Fantastic Mr. Fox head of puppet fabrication Andy Gent, who indicated Anderson wasn’t present or hands on for the creation of much of the work for the film (another Jeff Koons parallel). An entire book by or about Gent–and mini-costume designer Maggie Haden–would be a great thing. It is bizarre to me that every reference and book, including this one, spends more time on the casting of voice actors–altogether a brief part of the film process on movies like this–than the painstaking creation of the puppets and animatics that take thousands of hours to build and perfect.
Every director, writer, and creator should have a book like this that digs into their thoughts and influences. Although the author didn’t get direct contributions from Anderson himself, he made good use of previous interviews to tell his story.
If you’re a fan of Wes Anderson or moviemaking in general, this is for you. Those YouTube videos that use AI to create alternate history movie trailers all look like Wes Anderson movies for a reason: the look and style of his films are an instnatly recognizable cultural artifact of our time. Recommended for film students, too, Christophe Narbonne’s Wes Anderson: All the Films—The Story Behind Every Movie, Episode, and Short is available now in a 288-page hardcover for pre-order here at Amazon. It arrives in bookshops September 9, 2025.
