No Rules to His Game

On a recent visit to his family home in Houston, Wes Anderson discovered a play he had written in grade school sitting in a pile of childhood drawings. Titled “The Initial Bullet,” it was a stockpile of whodunit cliches featuring rival investigators who bore not-so-mysterious resemblances to Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. When the killer was unmasked at the end, it was revealed that he used bullets engraved with his initials to commit the murders.

Hard as he may have tried, the movies that Wes Anderson has subsequently devised have failed to surpass “The Initial Bullet” for sheer narrative purity and brevity. At some point between puberty and a deal with Touchstone Pictures, Anderson lost his creative naivete forever, along with a slippery felon’s knack for lifting well-worn devices from other material. If anything childlike informs his first two films, “Bottle Rocket” (1996) and “Rushmore” (1998), it is in a young neophyte’s implicit belief that rules exist to be ignored.

Be that as it may, Anderson’s adult output is riddled with initialed bullets that tip us off to themovies’ perpetrator time and again. Telltale evidence includes the presence of precocious kidswho write and stage elaborate plays, a rebel’s admiration for authority figures of dubious authority, an eclectic assortment of pop songs from the Beatles to “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and a fondness for characters whose failures are on a par with their grandiose aspirations. This latter theme is at the jaundiced heart of Anderson’s much-anticipated third film, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” scheduled to open Dec.14.

Anderson acolytes would not be surprised to hear that it is the most inventive and accomplished American comedy since, well, “Rushmore.” Boasting a career-topping performance by Gene Hackman as the recalcitrant father of a brood of former child geniuses, the multi-character “Royal Tenenbaums” encapsulates and expands on Anderson’s interests with the sort of erudition and cocky auteur’s confidence one associates with Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder and Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

Scarfing down a late lunch at Bar Pitti in Manhattan’s West Village, Anderson nods at the mention of those masters of American screen comedy, then demurs with slight embarrassment. “I respond to all of those guys, but I tend not to think in terms of comedy,” he says, pondering heaping plates of rigatoni and frisee salad. “The stuff that I think of I am reluctant to mention, ‘cause it sounds ridiculous. Like French movies. My three favorite French filmmakers are probably [Francois] Truffaut, [Jean] Renoir and Louis Malle. One of the main influences in ‘Tenenbaums’ was Renoir’s ‘Rules of the Game,’ in which there are all these relationships between a group of people who come to a country house. I’ve always loved that feeling of everybody arriving at this place and the air of possibilities of what’s going to happen among them.”

Anderson proceeds to launch into a movie nerd’s discourse on “The Fire Within,” Malle’s seminal 1963 film in which Maurice Ronet plays an alcoholic who is released from a sanitarium and confronts the people and social pressures that put him there. Ronet’s character seeps into the Tenenbaum scion played by Luke Wilson, a once-promising tennis star who has sunk into depression and aimlessness. “The Fire Within” is also satirized at the beginning of “Bottle Rocket,” in which Wilson stages a dramatic breakout from a mental institution that would be happy to have him walk out the front door.

The creative fire that lurks within Anderson is palpable, but hard to grasp on a first encounter. Unlike the Tenenbaum brats, he seems to possess more determination than genius, even as he brandishes the milk-white spectacles, the thick, electrified head of brown hair, the foursquare tan suit and the earnest manner of a surviving child prodigy. At 32, Anderson is over the wunderkind hill, yet his fawn-like manner makes one wonder how he elicited such finished work from an ensemble of heavy-hitters that also includes Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Danny Glover, Ben Stiller, Bill Murray and Luke Wilson’s brother Owen.

Anderson’s scattershot interview manner is also at odds with the precision of his work: He fields questions with just the sort of half-finished thoughts and jumbled sentences that would prompt skeptical looks from Ivy League admissions officers. Indeed, Anderson readily admits to having been rejected from his only three choices, Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth. (“None of which I had the slightest glimmer of possibility of getting into.”) He settled on the University of Texas at Austin, where “you just have to have a pretty decent SAT and be a Texan.” In characteristically independent fashion, Anderson ignored the university’s vaunted film program altogether, opting instead for a philosophy major. While there, he befriended fellow movie freak Owen Wilson. Together, they would cobble together a 14-minute heist picture called “Bottle Rocket” that made its way, in turn, to producers L.M. Kit Carson, Polly Platt and James L. Brooks. Thanks to Brooks’ mentoring, the then-24 Anderson secured $5 million to expand “Bottle Rocket” into a feature film.

Anderson credits Brooks and this side-door approach to the business with his affection for mentor figures who buck the system, a collection of middle-aged mavericks represented by James Caan’s larcenous Mr. Henry in “Bottle Rocket,” Bill Murray’s iconoclastic millionaire in “Rushmore” and Hackman’s flamboyantly dishonest patriarch Royal Tenenbaum. “My theory about this,” Anderson begins in mock pedagogic tones, “is if you want to make a movie, you can go to film school, take a job in the mailroom of an agency or studio, work your way through, or you can write a script, try to borrow money, get somebody to loan you a piece of equipment and make the thing. And all the time you don’t have any money and your parents are trying to get you to get a job. Which is how ‘Bottle Rocket’ happened.”

As with all of Anderson’s films, “Bottle Rocket” is just as remarkable for what it avoids as for what it achieves. Featuring comically assured performances from Anderson pals Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson and Robert Musgrave as a hapless trio of aspiring thieves who knock over a book store disguised with masking tape on their noses, it is a gang-who-can’t-shoot-straight comedy sans Tarantino violence or explicit sex. Emphasizing character idiosyncrasy over plot, it roams its unconventional way with the unpredictability and visionary willfulness of a Ouija board pointer, a tendency summed up by an exchange between Luke Wilson’s character Anthony and his younger sister Grace:

Grace: You’re really complicated, aren’t you?

Anthony: I try not to be.

“Yeah, that’s Wes, that’s me,” says Wilson, speaking by phone from the Vancouver, Canada, set of “I Spy.” “This girl from the cast was having dinner with me last night and told me I was a bit crazy. And I said, ‘I try not to be.’ We try not to be complicated. I don’t know how it ends up that way. Something is always slightly askew.”

Attempting to articulate the tilted sensibility of Anderson and Owen Wilson, Luke recounts a now-legendary incident in the friends’ postgraduate annals. “Wes and Owen had a neglectful landlord in Austin named Carl Hendler. In order to get his attention to get their security deposit back, they staged a break-in. Hendler took one look at the broken windows and said, ‘It looks like an inside job.’ They loved that so much that they became instant friends with him. Wes filmed the entire thing and made a documentary about it.”

Making peace with the adversary is a prototypical Anderson ploy. In “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Royal’s real-estate prodigy son (played by Stiller) effects an 11th-hour rapprochement with his father after a contentious history fraught with larceny and lawsuits. In “Bottle Rocket,” jailbird Owen Wilson signals forgiveness to the thugs who put him there by giving them belt buckles he made in prison shop. And in “Rushmore,” the prep-school flunky played by Jason Schwartzman appeases the school bully by casting him in one of his plays.

The self-referential nature of Schwartzman’s Max Fisher (“Rushmore” was shot at St. John’s, Anderson’s Texas prep school) goes even deeper with the Tenenbaum family. “This movie ended up being a lot more personal than I thought it was going to be,” Anderson says. “Once it started to be written, someone would go, ‘Well, I can see where you got this,’ and I would say, ‘You’re right, I didn’t realize that.”’

Echoing the long-estranged Royal and Etheline Tenenbaum (played by Huston), the director’s parents divorced when he was 8. Anderson and his two brothers (Wes is the middle one) subsequently grew up with their mother, Texas, a would-be painter who became an archeologist after the divorce and now sells real estate. She was very forthcoming in contributing props and information for Etheline, who is also an archeologist.

Anderson describes his parents as politically right of center. “Which is odd,” he reflects. “A Republican archeologist? [My mother] was also very unusual, when you consider the image of an archeologist in a pit. She was eight or 10 years older than most of the archeologists, she’d already had a family when she got into it. She didn’t really dress the way they do.”

Unlike the paternally delinquent Royal, who demeans the novice playwriting efforts of his adopted daughter (played as a vacant, chain-smoking adult by Paltrow), ad executive Mel Anderson was always enthusiastically supportive of his son’s grade-school dramaturgy. “He was a journalist for a time, but that was 30, 40 years ago. He wrote some short stories but ended up doing publicity stuff. I think what he really wanted to be was a writer.”

The divorce took its toll on Anderson and his brothers. “It was a real drag, a huge thing,” he says tersely. Defining his role among his siblings, Anderson claims to have been “the most difficult. I was trouble. I was angry for years and years. I was just spoiled, I guess. But not any more than my brothers.”

The fallout from the divorce also may have contributed to the primacy of secondary family both in Anderson’s movies and his social life. After graduating from college, the fledgling director shared a house in Houston and then in Los Angeles with the Wilson brothers, a long-running fraternal alliance that has expanded to include “Bottle Rocket” co-star Musgrave, the Wilsons’ brother Andrew and Anderson’s brother Eric. “The Royal Tenenbaums” takes its name from another close friend in the Anderson-Wilson fraternity, Brian Tenenbaum.

“He has three sisters and areally strong family, and there are a lot of them in New York City,” Anderson said. “None of [my characters] are based on them, but their strength appealed to me. And I just like the name.”

Although Anderson is unswervingly loyal to his team, he bagged Los Angeles two years ago in favor of Manhattan, a move that seemed more temperamentally compatible with his peculiar brand of urbanity.

The depth of his identification with New York was felt with unexpected force on Sept. 11, when Anderson observed cataclysmic events in lower Manhattan from a television set in Los Angeles. “I really wanted to be here,” he says with a certain sadness. “I felt like I wanted to be around for it. And L.A. was weird. Within 48 hours L.A. was in full patriotic craziness. These people would gather on this corner of Sunset Boulevard across from the Virgin Megastore, which was where my hotel was, and they would hold their candles and wave their flags and scream. And people would honk their horn. It felt like a reaction after we’d won a great big football game or something. It didn’t feel like some people had just destroyed two buildings and killed all these people. I felt really alienated.”

Buildings and parks in and around the World Trade Center were part of the 100-plus New York locations used in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” The production’s alternately cartoony and nondescript locales embrace places from Harlem to the Waldorf-Astoria lobby to create a stylized idea of New York. This disorienting blend of faded elegance and boarded-up decay suggests some pre-apocalyptic ruckus Manhattan, crawling with battered gypsy cabs and thoroughbred mice.

“Wes wanted it to be Nowheresville New York, a kind of New York but not New York,” said David Wasco, Anderson’s production designer since “Bottle Rocket.” “He’s become smitten with the city, and it does come off as a kind of valentine to New York, even though that was not intentional. We went to the trouble to redesign the license plates and the street signs, which are a variation of the old yellow street signs with the camel bump on them. He’s really specific about wanting those things.”

“These characters are living in a kind of exaggerated world,” explains Anderson, whose controlling hand extends to the film’s eclectic melange of vintage pop tunes and original themes by composer and Devo lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh.

“He listens to a lot of music, and he doesn’t draw from mainstream sources,” says Mothersbaugh, who composed an opening theme from a piece Anderson sent him by Romanian composer Georges Enescu. “We’d visit a record store and he would choose things at random. Before he returned to New York, he said to me, ‘I’ve got 700 CDs to listen to.”’

“I like songs in movies,” says Anderson, whose ambitious deployment of everything from the Beatles to Paul Simon in “The Royal Tenenbaums” created a challenging legal snafu for Touchstone. “It comes from [Martin] Scorsese as much as anybody, and Woody Allen in almost every movie he’s ever done. The whole thing was kind of conceived with ‘Hey Jude’ playing under it. I love the Beatles. I always wanted to have a Beatles song in the beginning and a Beatles song at the end.”

Anderson also manages to finagle the bluesy themes from the Charlie Brown Christmas special into “Tenenbaums,” even though it’s the only one of his films that doesn’t have a Christmas moment. “I like the music that gets associated with Christmas, the sleigh-bell-chimey kind of stuff. I like that season, the feeling of anticipation that surrounds it.”

It is also a season that connotes family and friends. One senses a ruefulness in Anderson’s voice as he contemplates the bygone simplicity of his communal days with the Wilson brothers, battling truculent landlords and collaring the attention of the Hollywood establishment.

“After ‘Rushmore,’ Owen [his co-writer on all three films] began to work more and more as an actor, until ‘Tenenbaums,’ when he was working as an actor all the time. And I feel like that’s not the best way for us to work together. But it’s very difficult because he’s basically become a movie star. ‘Tenenbaums’ is my whole life. I don’t work on anything else, whereas he has like five different things going at any one time. That’s just one of the ways things have kind of changed.”

How else have things changed for Wes Anderson?

Finishing his frisee salad, the gangly Ivy League reject from Houston strolls a few feet down 6th Avenue and disappears by himself into a glistening black limo idling by the curb. It’s not a beat-up gypsy cab, but he has learned to make do.