Inside the world of Wes Anderson |
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’s one of those buildings that is far more inspiring on the inside than its rather Stalinist exterior would have you imagine.
No, the biggest surprise is that our national temple to design has decided to dedicate its ground floor to Wes Anderson, the American filmmaker (‘auteur’ 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, among many others.
Anderson, 56, is one of those rarified creatures – a filmmaker’s filmmaker – whose inventive movies are among the most self-consciously stylised being made today, certainly by a mainstream director. Yet somehow, they’re still highly watchable.
And so it is that until 26 July the Design Museum is giving us Wes Anderson: The Archives, a series of rooms each dedicated to assorted artefacts from his dozen or so films. It begins with 1996’s 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........