Wes Anderson life and biography

Wesley "Wes" Wales Anderson was born on May 1, 1969 in Houston, Texas. His father, Melver Anderson, ran an advertising and public relations company, and his mother, Texas Anne Burroughs, worked in both real estate and archaeology. Anderson grew up with his two brothers, Eric and Mel, but their parents divorced when Anderson was only eight. Anderson would later describe the divorce as "the most crucial event of my brothers and my growing up." While trying to cope with the disintegration of his parent's marriage, Anderson often misbehaved at school.

In time, Anderson turned his energies from mischief making to artistic endeavors. The young Anderson directed movies starring himself and his brothers, filming them with a Super 8mm camera. He read avidly, saying later that "especially when you are younger, you get totally swept into the world of a novel. You walk around in a cloud and almost all you want to do is read it." Anderson attended St. John's School in Houston, a prep school that believes in "exacting standards" and follows the motto "to whom much is given much is expected." At the school, Anderson became known for his large and complex play productions. Often these productions were based on well-known stories, films, and even TV shows: one work was a sock puppet version of the 1980s show The Gambler, which starred Kenny Rogers.

After graduating from St. John's in the late 1980s, Wes Anderson enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. There he met Owen Wilson, who has been a writing partner or cast member in almost every film Anderson has made since. Anderson was a philosophy major and Wilson was studying English, but they had interests in common. Anderson describes that the two first encountered each other while "doing a playwriting class together: this thing where everybody, about nine of us, sat around a table and discussed plays. And I always sat in one corner, not really at the table, and Owen always sat in another corner, not really at the table, and we never spoke the whole semester." After this class, Anderson recalls running into Wilson, and the two "started talking about writers, but we also talked about movies right off the bat. I knew I wanted to do something with movies. I don't know if he had realized yet that it was an option." The two eventually became roommates, and worked on a script for a full-length movie they called Bottle Rocket. Anderson earned his B.A. in philosophy in 1991.

The resulting short impressed a filmmaker named Kit Carson, and he showed it to producer Polly Pratt. Carson also pushed Anderson to enter the film in the Sundance Film Festival. It was met there with enthusiasm and came to the attention of director James L. Brooks, a partner of Pratt's. Through his connections at Columbia Pictures, Brooks got the film a larger budget, which eventually reached a respectable five million dollars. The feature-length film did not achieve box office success, but was generally praised by critics. Anderson won Best New Filmmaker at the MTV Movie Awards in 1996. Like most subsequent Anderson films, Bottle Rocket featured a soundtrack composed by Mark Mothersbaugh, founder of the band Devo. When the film came out on video, its audience grew.

After Bottle Rocket, Anderson and Owen Wilson went to work a second film, Rushmore. The story revolves around a teenager named Max Fischer, who suffers academically but thrives on extracurricular activities. Max, played by then-unknown Jason Schwartzman, attends a preparatory school much like the St. John's of Anderson's high school years. In another connection to Anderson's life, Max, like Anderson, creates elaborate plays that are performed at the school.

Disney chairman Joe Roth agreed to fund the Rushmore project, and the final version of the film generated far more pre-release buzz than had Bottle Rocket. The Critics Associations of both New York and Los Angeles declared Bill Murray best supporting actor of the year for his role as a wistful businessman who strikes up an unlikely friendship with Max. The film received rave critical reviews and was the subject of a wide publicity campaign. Still, the movie failed to gain a large audience, and though it was nominated for and received numerous critical awards (13 nominations and 11 wins), the Academy did not nominate the film in any Oscar category.

Mainstream success, though, was not far away. With the release of his third full-length film, The Royal Tenenbaums (again written with Owen Wilson), Anderson gained the combination of critical, box office, and Academy notice that had so far eluded him.

Because of the success of The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson was able to gain a much larger budget for his next film, a total of $50 million. The filmmaker felt that this meant the movie "need[ed] to be broader." Due to the rising demand of Owen Wilson as an actor, Anderson partnered with Noah Baumbach to write what became The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The story is about an oceanographer and wildlife documentarian of dwindling renown named Steve Zissou who is chasing the elusive—and possibly imaginary—jaguar shark. Though the film is live-action, many of the sea creatures in the film are animated, marking the first use of animation in any Anderson film. Anderson again hired Bill Murray, whom he has called "[some]one that I'm most likely to describe as a genius," to act in the film, but this time as the lead. The Life Aquatic posed the biggest filming challenge Anderson had faced: "You'd get all these pirates on one ship, and then get the main actors in place, and a boat positioned behind them so the viewer could get some perspective on the scale we were working with, and the boats are heaving back and forth, and by the time you get everything all set up, the sun is gone." At its 2004 release, the movie met with mixed critical reviews and even received some criticism from the core group of fans Anderson had garnered since the release of Bottle Rocket.

Also at the time of The Life Aquatic's release, many critics began noting the importance of father figures in Anderson's movies. Rushmore had shown a young Max Fischer attempting to identify himself with a successful businessman, The Royal Tenenbaums had revolved around a once-famous lawyer patriarch who had been uninvolved in his family for decades, and a huge point of The Life Aquatic's storyline dealt with a character named Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson) trying to determine whether Zissou is his long-lost father. In response, Anderson mused: "I finally realized it's just the opposite of what I really grew up with, and for me there's something exotic about it…I'm drawn to those father-figure characters that are larger-than-life people, and I've sought out mentors who are like that, so I relate to them. But they're not my father."

Anderson soon began work on yet another film. Fellow director and fan Martin Scorsese, who once referred to Anderson as "the next Martin Scorsese" in an interview with Esquire and has named Bottle Rocket one of the best films of the 1990s, encouraged his friend to explore India in his next film.

For his next film, Anderson returned to his childhood tendency of making his favorite stories come alive. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) is a stop-action animated feature based on Roald Dahl's book of the same name. It stars the usual ensemble of Anderson actors, including Murray, Owen Wilson, Schwartzman, as well as George Clooney and Meryl Streep, who voice various woodland animals coming together to fight against an evil farmer. This film was met with much wider critical acclaim than The Darjeeling Limited, and joined The Royal Tenenbaums as the only other Oscar-nominated film in Anderson's filmography.

Currently shooting his newest endeavor, titled Moonrise Kingdom, critics and Anderson's fan base alike eagerly anticipate the fruits of his efforts. Though Anderson's films tend to include characters whom, he admits, "could walk into another one of my movies and it would make sense," his brand of awkward, and sometimes sad, comedy remains remarkably unique. Anderson has flourished as a filmmaker who has been able to create independent-feeling movies under the eye of big studios for the last fourteen years.

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