Wes Anderson has opened up about his experience making his first stop-motion film Fantastic Mr. Fox, and the challenges he faced getting his crew on board with his approach to directing.
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Speaking to Variety, Anderson said: “My ideas for how to go about making the movie were probably unconventional in ways I didn’t realize … and so I ended up doing a lot of things that made it a lot more difficult.”
Those “things” included unusual ways of capturing audio as well as redoing takes and lighting.
On his decision to record the voice performances of the cast (including George Clooney and Meryl Streep) from a farm, the director said: “I guess people thought that was a bad idea because we weren’t going to get clean recordings. With stop motion, it’s very much about bringing to life the performance.”
Anderson is renowned for doing a lot of takes on his live-action films, something that’s more difficult and time-consuming in stop-motion animation. Instead, he described how he used a technique called “cutbacks”. He said: “On the days where it starts to go in the wrong direction, you may make a choice to go back to where we were the previous day.
“It’s a tricky thing, because sometimes that is actually interfering with the animator in a way they can’t entirely recover from, which I didn’t know at first. I thought, ‘Let’s just fix that. We were great up to here.’ But sometimes they have to flow through it because they’re not computers, and what they’re making is something organic.”
Most challenging of all was that Anderson directed the film largely remotely. He said: “I think the group was surprised at how little I was there, but how much I wanted to guide it. It’s one thing to not be there and to just check in and say ‘good’ and ‘here’s a few suggestions,’ but it’s another thing to control it all from your e-mail.”
He continued: “It wasn’t my plan. It was just what evolved, and I think it took time for people to trust me.”
It took, according to Anderson, around six months of working on the film. He recalled: “We screened a section of the movie for the team, and there were some people on the team who only then said, ‘Oh, I see what we’re doing.’”
Anderson went on to tackle stop-motion again with 2018’s Isle Of Dogs, which NME called his “best work yet” in a five-star review. The director won his first Oscar at the 2024 ceremony – Best Live Action Short Film for the Benedict Cumberbatch-starring The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar – but was not present to accept the award.