Wes Anderson Quotes

“I don't know what is in store for the movie business any better than anybody else does, but it does seem like my kind of movies are a little trickier than it used to be - or maybe a lot trickier.”

— Wes Anderson

I've never had a movie that got great reviews. I've had movies that got different levels of good and bad reviews, but you can more or less count on plenty of bad reviews.

— Wes Anderson

“Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I've never been down before is like going to a movie or something. Just wandering the city is entertainment.”

— Wes Anderson

“There's no story if there isn't some conflict. The memorable things are usually not how pulled together everybody is. I think everybody feels lonely and trapped sometimes. I would think it's more or less the norm.”

— Wes Anderson

“That's the kind of movie that I like to make, where there is an invented reality and the audience is going to go someplace where hopefully they've never been before. The details, that's what the world is made of.”

— Wes Anderson

“When you're 11 or 12 years old, you can get so swept up in a book that you start to believe that the fantasy is reality. I think when you have a giant crush when you're in fifth grade, it becomes your whole world. It's like being underwater; everything is different.”

— Wes Anderson

“On Fantastic Mr. Fox, I got used to working with animated storyboards as a way of planning for the shoot. We did a lot of sequences that way with this movie. Partly as a result of that, I decided to build more sets in order to do certain shots.”

— Wes Anderson

One of the things I enjoyed the most is just working as an actor.

— Wes Anderson

I guess when I think about it, one of the things I like to dramatise, and what is sometimes funny, is someone coming unglued. I don't consider myself someone who is making the argument that I support these choices. I just think it can be funny.

— Wes Anderson

I have always wanted to work in the theater. I've always felt the glamour of being backstage and that excitement, but I've never actually done it - not since I was in 5th grade, really. But I've had many plays in my films. I feel like maybe theater is a part of my movie work.

— Wes Anderson

“When I see the first dailies on any movie, I usually feel that I had no idea how this combination of ingredients was going to mix together, what it was going to produce.”

— Wes Anderson

“I will say that Edward Norton, who plays the scout master, would be a first-rate Eagle Scout. He's got all those techniques. If your plane crashes into the jungle somewhere, he would be the guy you would want to have with you.”

— Wes Anderson

“I wouldn't say that I'm particularly bothered or obsessed with detail.”

— Wes Anderson

“The subject of an outsider who becomes obsessed.”

— Wes Anderson

Kids are always open to anything. It's very rare that a kid isn't extremely eager to make you happy.

— Wes Anderson

“And Hackman had really choked up when he was telling it. It was very moving.”

— Wes Anderson

“I'd never heard anything about this at all.”

— Wes Anderson

“Anytime I make a movie, I really have absolutely no idea how it's going to go over. I've had the whole range of different kinds of reactions.”

— Wes Anderson

“Any romantic feelings for a 12-year-old are like entering into a fantasy world.”

— Wes Anderson

Sometimes when you're editing a movie, you have the thing that you don't expect - which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.

— Wes Anderson

“Every time you do a take on a movie, you're not sure if it's going to succeed. Even if you have a great cast, like we had, every scene you're kind of waiting for the release. 'Oh, yes; it happened. We got it!' There's always the possibility that it's just not going to work.”

— Wes Anderson

“I usually set aside a lot of time in advance of a movie with important roles for kids to search, but when you have great ones, they can be a real ace in the hole.”

— Wes Anderson

“My experience with casting children is that ... the whole movie is going to rest on their shoulders, so you have to set aside time and wait for the perfect people to appear.”

— Wes Anderson

“I love working with actors. That's what the set really is, for me. It's my time with the actors.”

— Wes Anderson

“With each movie I have a different set of inspirations.”

— Wes Anderson

“The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.”

— Wes Anderson

I don't really wanna think about themes. I wanna just think about the experience of the movie. I feel like, as soon as I reduce it to a theme, once I write that sentence, it won't be that great. I feel like there's more potential for it to mean something interesting if I'm not forcing it to mean something I've already decided.

— Wes Anderson

“You don't do background music the way a lot of more conventional films do. The music is often kind of a character in your films to the extent that sometimes you stop and watch someone perform a song.”

— Wes Anderson

“If I have ideas, I want to put them in the movie. It's not a minimalist approach at all but I feel like it's for the audience. It's about seeing how much texture we can give it and seeing how many things are there for people to latch on to ... I just want to do it the way I want and I feel like it won't be helpful for me if I start worrying about that. I just have to follow my instincts. Everyone is going to respond differently to it and everybody's right - that's their point of view. That's how the story intersects with their lives.”

— Wes Anderson

“A lot of people have said my movies are all the same. But I don't actually make an effort to have a style. I'm usually just thinking of what can we do to make it funnier or more interesting or just kind of refine it and it ends up like that.”

— Wes Anderson

“I want to try not to repeat myself. But then I seem to do it continuously in my films. It's not something I make any effort to do. I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience. I feel I get criticized for style over substance, and for details that get in the way of the characters. But every decision I make is how to bring those characters forward.”

— Wes Anderson

“Sometimes if the people are up for trying something that I'm interested in, it can be a great experience.”

— Wes Anderson

“What happened to your hand? It got hit by a mirror. How'd that happen? I lost my temper at myself.”

— Wes Anderson

“I don't think any of us are normal people.”

— Wes Anderson

I would like to do a movie in space, but I think it would be difficult to do it on location.

— Wes Anderson

“I don't really look for challenges as much as I like adventures. Other than that I'm just trying to find stories I want to tell.”

— Wes Anderson

“If somebody asks me about the themes of something I'm working on, I never have any idea what the themes are ... Somebody tells me the themes later. I sort of try to avoid developing themes. I want to just keep it a little bit more abstract. But then, what ends up happening is, they say, 'Well, I see a lot here that you did before, and it's connected to this other movie you did,' and ... that almost seems like something I don't quite choose. It chooses me.”

— Wes Anderson

“Working with kids is usually very fun. They get so into movie and they're up for anything. Usually they're having such an exciting experience, everybody feels that.”

— Wes Anderson

“I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience.”

— Wes Anderson

“The thing with animation is that you record the actors like a radio show and then the animators become actors in their own way because it's their job to take this puppets and make them seem alive. They bring their own personalities to the way they move these puppets.”

— Wes Anderson

The animators bring their own spontaneity to it as well, because when they do a take of a shot it really is like just one continuous activity for them. They launch into it and do it, and they're not even quite sure how it's going to turn out when they're doing it. They're sort-of sculpting their way through a scene and trying to make this inanimate object alive.

— Wes Anderson

“I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.”

— Wes Anderson

“When you're doing a live-action movie, you have your day set up and you're going to do this shot and this shot, and eventually the sun is going to go down. It's a sequential race to whatever is going to end the day.”

— Wes Anderson

“A prototype is always more expensive than anything.”

— Wes Anderson

“The kids are the ones that have a clarity about what they want. They don't have any wisdom, but they do have a clear understanding about what they want to have happen.”

— Wes Anderson

And I wanted to do a movie [Moonrise Kingdom] about a childhood romance - a very powerful experience of childhood romance. About what it's like to just be blindsided, when you're in fifth grade or sixth grade, by these kinds of feelings. Along the way, I sort of mixed in some interest in "young adult fantasy" writing.

— Wes Anderson

“Some of the ideas are kind of inspired by the songs, and I always want to use music to tell the story and give the movie a certain kind of mood. That's always essential to me.”

— Wes Anderson

“When you finish work, practically everybody in that place is going to watch a movie at night anyway. They're tired. They have dinner. They go up to their room. They're watching TV.”

— Wes Anderson

“The one thing I've observed over the years is the best way to get an actor to not want to play a certain role is to offer it to them. That makes them say, "Well, maybe it's not that good. These guys don't want me to do this ... "”

— Wes Anderson

“Do you know how writers often say the characters take over ... But that is more or less what it always feels like to me, too. Even though that's just a way of describing how your brain is working, it's still what you tend to feel.”

— Wes Anderson