2004 Movie Titles
|
 |
movies central
|
2004 Movie Titles
|
|
movies central
|
 |
 Browse More Movies
|
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Starring: Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston, Willem Dafoe
Directed by: Wes Anderson
Screenplay by: Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach
Release Date: December 25, 2004
MPAA Rating: R for language, some drug use, violence and partial nudity.
Box Office: $24,020,403 (US total)
Studio: Touchstone Pictures
|
 |
|
“We're all a pack of strays - don't you get it?” - Steve Zissou
In his fourth and most ambitious film to date, director Wes Anderson sets out on a high-seas adventure comedy, spinning the tale of a washed-up oceanographer (Academy Awardnominee Bill Murray) in search of love, revenge and a drop of redemption in his ultimate aquatic quest. Plying the waters as only Anderson could, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou embarks on a journey into a realm of pirates, islands and deadly jaguar sharks-and into a maelstrom of human yearning set adrift.
Meet Steve Zissou: legendary underwater explorer, notorious blow-hard, and a man known around the globe for his documentaries about the teeming life beneath the deep blue sea. These days, however, life on land isn't going so smoothly for Zissou. His best friend and long-time partner, Esteban, was recently consumed by a ravenous jaguar shark.
Rumors are starting to spread that he's losing his touch. And now, out of the blue, comes a genuine Southern gentleman and Air Kentucky co-pilot named Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson) who claims he might, or might not, be the long-lost son Steve never got to know.
Imperious, egotistical and endearingly off-course, Steve Zissou is now ready to make his most epic film to date-the one in which he will wage vengeance on the jaguar shark, become the father he never thought he could be, and regain some fleeting sense of his own nobility.
Wes Anderson Tackles Adventure: About the Screenplay
“You're supposed to be my son, right?”
“I don't know, but I did want to meet you, just in case.”
With just three films-“Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums”-Wes Anderson has established a comically charged yet deeply human view of modern life and relationships. Each of his broadly appealing comedies has tackled recurring themes of aspiration, misfits, family, love and the fall from grace. His fourth film takes these same themes into wholly new territory as Anderson simultaneously tackles an ocean-going adventure rife with chases, shoot-outs, preying sharks and underwater wonders.
In a sense, The Life Aquatic became Anderson's own expedition into the unknown. Barry Mendel explains: “Wes took some wild risks in making this movie. He essentially threw out the `Wes Anderson book' and reinvented himself. Far from the very precise chamber pieces of `Rushmore' or `The Royal Tenenbaums,' he's thrown himself into a chaotic, exterior, fantastical genre film.”
Anderson's novel-like screenplays always emerge from intimate personal experience and at the center of The Life Aquatic is another character close to Anderson's heart: Steve Zissou, a world-famous oceanographer who is both comically familiar and entirely unique. Long fascinated by aquatic films and undersea life in general, Anderson had always wanted to make a movie set on a boat in the world of adventure filmmaking. “This is a movie I've been thinking about for fourteen years,” he comments. “I've always been fascinated by this strange and amazing character who creates a kind of eccentric family at sea.”
As early as his college years, Anderson penned a short story about an oceanographer that introduced Steve Zissou, his boat The Belafonte and the wife who turns out to be the real brains behind his operation. From there, the character continued to evolve over the years, as Anderson continued to ponder the personality and plight of Steve Zissou and at last began to collaborate on a screenplay with his long-time friend Noah Baumbach, a writer and director (“Kicking and Screaming”) who also writes comic pieces for The New Yorker. Meeting at the same New York restaurant day after day, Anderson and Baumbach fleshed out the story not only of Zissou, but also of his crew of fellow dreamers who set out to sea with him. As they wrote the action-packed story of Team Zissou, their explorations of the characters brought the story's undercurrents to the surface.
“Steve Zissou is someone whose entire modus operandi in life is to create a team, to always be surrounded by a group of people who will go with him on his adventures,” explains Anderson. “But now he's reached a point in his life where he's already done a lot of his work, where he's been married a couple of times, and suddenly, it all seems to be slipping away.”
“So the story is about Steve Zissou, this band of adventurers that he brings together and the mission that they go on in search of a creature that may or may not exist. And, at the same time, it's about a guy who is at a low point in his career and is trying to reach for something greater than he's ever done before-to reaffirm himself. And when he meets somebody who might be his son, that suddenly brings him back in touch with some things he's lost contact with, as well as questions he hasn't asked himself in a long time, and changes the whole journey.”
The screenplay went beyond anything Anderson had previously done in terms of inventing an entire world that follows its own slightly off-kilter rules of reality. When producer Barry Mendel read an early draft of The Life Aquatic, he was quickly drawn into the totally enveloping fictional world Anderson and Baumbach had created.
“The level of detail and the amount of emotional layers and the sophistication of the dialogue in that first draft was terrific,” says Mendel. “Wes's verbal dexterity and ability to shift cadences and ideas in a heartbeat is something that doesn't really exist outside of his movies. It's something that I think people almost take for granted in a Wes Anderson movie-that the dialogue will be brilliant-but he takes it to the next level in this film with lines that are constantly funny, revealing and memorable.”
Continues Mendel, “The screenplay really reflects the amount of fun that Wes and Noah had writing it. It takes you into a completely rambunctious, alive and energetic world filled with wonderful characters.”
The script ultimately brought to life not only Steve Zissou's subtle personal transformation as he approaches fatherhood and posterity but an imaginative, whimsical undersea world even more eccentric, mercurial and magical than the real thing. “In the film, we wanted to show the way Steve Zissou sees this underwater world that he loves, that has so much magic and surprise to him, that draws him into a whole other reality,” explains Anderson.
“I mean, we're now all so used to seeing amazing underwater photography from flipping through the cable channels and we knew we couldn't compete with that. So we went the opposite route, trying to rely almost entirely on our imaginations. So as Noah and I were writing, we would be thinking about what creatures the team would come across, and we might start with just a stingray, but then we would say, how about a stingray with constellations on it that are glowing-and it developed from there.”
From the beginning, Wes Anderson decided that rather than create this world with lavish, high-tech digital technology, he'd go back in time instead, to some of filmmaking's oldest and most classic techniques of forging creatures, emphasizing the pure pleasures of stop-motion animation.
“I wanted a handmade look to the film,” he says. “There's a real personality to these old techniques and there's a feeling of craft that's very different from what you get when you do things digitally. I've always admired Henry Selick's work and I knew he would bring a great deal of artistry to the film. It just has the right quality for this story. I couldn't imagine going too high-tech to tell the story of Team Zissou and their adventures on The Belafonte.”
Barry Mendel comments, “It was a completely bold concept to make a movie about an oceanographer with completely fake fish. We knew nothing like it had ever been done. But I think Wes was also very savvy in immediately recognizing that the undersea world has been captured so magnificently by filmmakers already that he needed to come up with a completely different idea. He creates a unique undersea world in the same way he created a unique New York-ish city for `The Royal Tenenbaums.' It's fun to realize that all of the creatures and coral reefs in the film are entirely invented for the film and brought to life with the help of great designers, construction people, painters and a whole stop-motion animation unit that has put together something that is from the human imagination.”
Anderson's risk-taking continued in the film's casting as he looked for actors willing to break entirely away from any preconceived molds-casting Bill Murray in his most wide-ranging and emotionally vulnerable role yet; asking Owen Wilson to make a 180-turn from his laid-back, irony-driven characters to take a completely opposite role; having the typically intense Willem Dafoe try a pure comedic role; plucking world-class actor Michael Gambon from the stage to play fading impresario Oseary Drakoulias; and allowing Brazilian actor Seu Jorge (“City of God”) to blossom in unforeseen directions in the musical role of Pele Dos Santos.
Meet Team Zissou
“We're being led on a suicide mission by a selfish maniac.” - Anne-Marie Sakowitz
At the heart of any Wes Anderson movie are the characters and-even with the emphasis on fast-moving adventure and comedy in The Life Aquatic-the characters remain the engine that drives the film. Starting with Steve Zissou-who wears his own oversized ego like a crown yet faces moments where he pleads to his crew, “Don't you guys like me anymore?”-and continuing down through his entire ragtag crew and assorted enemies, each person has his or her own human complexities that emerge when the going gets tough. The characters include:
Steve Zissou
From the very start of writing The Life Aquatic, Wes Anderson knew that Academy Award nominee Bill Murray would be Steve Zissou. “Not only is Bill one of my favorite actors, but I know from experience he is someone who allows you to do things differently,” explains Anderson. “He's somebody who has the advantage of being totally uninhibited and at the same time can get everybody around him caught up in his mood. I knew it would be really interesting to see Bill throw himself into playing somebody who is not only energetic and funny but also tormented, angry and very agitated.”
Producer Barry Mendel adds, “Having worked with Bill in `Rushmore' and `The Royal Tenenbaums,' I think it was always Wes's hope to write a movie for Bill that would really showcase a lot of what he believes Bill can do-and I think they both became very excited about the role of Steve Zissou for exactly that reason. Bill has always had a natural affinity for Wes's dialogue, but here he gives such a naturalistic and honest performance that he provides the audience with the illusion that it comes easily.”
Coming off the acclaim and Best Actor Oscar nomination he received for “Lost in Translation,” Murray was drawn in by taking on a very different kind of leading role than anything he had ever done-a literal “man of action,” a bold adventurer, filmmaker and hero, albeit one forced to come face-to-face with his own growing powerlessness. In playing Steve Zissou, Murray knew he would have to approach an oceanic force of a man-with emotions that swing from the ecstatically funny to the profoundly sad, but also linger in the vast zone in between. Murray was further intrigued by the screenplay's wide-ranging ambitions.
“This thing really screams,” sums up Murray about the screenplay. “There's just an enormous amount of material in The Life Aquatic-dialogue, action, visuals, humor and emotion that all come at you in quick bursts. It's also the biggest movie I've ever done in terms of production scope, much bigger than `Ghostbusters,' even. And it really creates its own view of a world at sea.”
Adding to the comedy-inflected pathos of Murray's performance as Steve Zissou was the fact that in order to play the role, Murray had to spend months in Italy for the shoot, away from his family. “For me, that was a big part of the journey-I was like this lonely sailor at sea,” he notes, “and it fit with the mood of the story.”
Murray felt there was no way to play Steve Zissou but as honestly as possible, flaws forward. “Steve is obviously deeply flawed, a guy driven by his desires, continually blind to people around him, almost infantile in a sense,” he says. “But more than that, Steve is someone who doesn't put on a mask to disguise who he is. He simply lets fly. And you come to realize that there is also something else about him that allows him to be leading this odyssey, to have held this crew together in the middle of chaos. He has a real strong feeling of mission, and kind of childish sense of wonder that has never gone away. At the same time, he's also the most vulnerable guy in the world, because he's driven by these feelings that he's incapable of really expressing to anyone.”
Murray continues, “Right now, as the film begins, Steve is in the darkest hours before the dawn. He's sort of sliding off the continental shelf, into the depths. Unfortunately, he's never been very good at self-examination, so it's really unknown territory.”
Riding Zissou's wild emotional waves was a large part of Murray's challenge. “He has major mood swings-sometimes within a single paragraph,” the actor observes. “He goes this way and then that way and the idea was that these emotions come up in him for fleeting moments but he just keeps barreling along. He makes a fool of himself all the time, but he doesn't stop and react to it. The beauty of Steve Zissou is that he doesn't ever lose his momentum.”
“For me, this was a very different kind of performance,” summarizes Murray, “because you're not stopping and selling every moment as you would in an ordinary comedy. It's more about showing up in the moment. Zissou is like a guy who's fighting the waves, and yet, no matter what, he keeps going full speed ahead. He knows he's going to get knocked around, that it's going to be tough, but he's convinced he's going to get somewhere.”
Another unique aspect of playing Steve Zissou was exploring a most unusual father-son relationship with Owen Wilson, playing Ned Plimpton, who may - or may not - be Steve's son. For Murray, a key turning point in their relationship comes when Steve brings Ned to the beach in his pajamas to witness a multi-chromatic flood of electric jellyfish. “That's the moment when Steve sees something in Ned,” he points out. “When Ned sees the jellyfish, he starts to realize that maybe there's more to this guy than he ever imagined, and of course, there turns out to be much more than almost anyone could imagine. What he and Steve hope is going to be an amazing adventure also turns out to be an emotional adventure for them.”
Yet Murray believes that Zissou does have a family, even before Ned shows up, if an alternative one, in the rough-and-tumble crew of misfits he has gathered around him. On the set, Murray found that this makeshift family gelled for him in unexpected ways. “One of the things that was so beautiful about this film is all the love that went into it, from Wes, and also from all the actors on the boat,” he says. “I think the audience will also really feel it because when this group was together, when the team was all together working, the connection was so…I don't want to say warm because it's different than that. There was something like a heat, a connection that was like blood between us, almost.”
Ned Plimpton (AKA Kingsley Zissou)
Owen Wilson, a regular collaborator with Wes Anderson, makes a distinct departure in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with the role of Ned, an earnest Southern gentleman and member of The Zissou Society who has reason to believe he might-or might not-be Steve Zissou's son. As he embarks on the adventure of a lifetime with Zissou, he also finds that he and his would-be father are falling for the same beautiful, yet pregnant, reporter.
Unlike most of the characters Owen Wilson has played, Ned lacks all manner of hipness or worldliness and exists in a kind of genteel, naive world of his making. To prepare for the role, Wilson rehearsed his scenes, without any of the other actors, alone with his long-lived friend Anderson. “Owen came to visit me in Rome a couple of months before filming started, and we would rehearse the scenes on the roof of the Hotel Eden,” recalls Anderson. “During that period, we also developed his accent and a strong idea of who this character Ned is and where he's coming from.”
The extracurricular work paid off for Anderson. “Ultimately, I feel Owen ended up doing something quite different from anything I've seen him do before,” says the director. “He has developed such a strong persona in his movies, but this role is quite a departure from that person and I was very, very happy with his work.”
Like Ned, Owen Wilson can remember being fascinated by documentaries about exploration as a kid, which helped inspire his characterization of Ned. “I think every kid wants to be an explorer off on an expedition at some point,” he comments. “There's kind of a romantic notion to that. And since Ned has been watching Steve Zissou ever since he was a kid, and dreaming about his wild life, when he finally meets him, he's very much in awe of him. It's not something that is going to be taken away from him easily.”
Another key to the character for Owen Wilson was to immerse himself in a kind of old-fashioned, nearly mythical gentility. “I wanted to be the kind of Southerner who comes out of that courtly tradition, who is more than polite and is really a genuinely good person,” he says. “The accent we developed is sort of like I imagine people in the Civil War talking, you know, almost `Gone With the Wind.' It's not meant to be Meryl Streep doing a pitch-perfect accent, but it's meant to be right for the character in a different way. It all fits into the world of the film, which is slightly artificial, almost surreal, while the emotions and feelings are very real.”
Jane Winslett Richardson
Entering the scene like a Madonna on an island beach is Cate Blanchett playing the pregnant journalist, Jane. In one of those rare life-following-fiction moments, Wes Anderson had decided to cast Cate Blanchett well before the actress herself became pregnant. The production had gone so far as to develop a prosthetic belly for Blanchett when kismet struck.
“When we found out Cate was really pregnant, at first we worried that she wouldn't be able to do the film anymore, because of all the traveling and difficult work involving boats and cold weather and other hardships,” recalls Barry Mendel. “But she remained totally gung ho and became even more excited, saying it would only help her play the part.”
“It was a complete coincidence,” explains Blanchett, “and yet it was so lovely, it sort of seemed fated.”
Blanchett was initially drawn to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou because of Wes Anderson's original perspective on adventure comedy. “I loved Wes's view of an action film, which is sort of a mixture of being very tongue-in-cheek while taking it all very seriously. He brings a very sophisticated humor to the story, and yet there's a melancholy at the core of all these funny situations,” she notes. “Wes has such enormous compassion towards all his characters, and he excavates them in a way that they all kind of have a moment where you see inside them. I think he manages to make them really live and breathe by creating this very unusual and particular universe around them, which, even though it's very odd and funny, is somehow also very real.”
Later, Blanchett became more entranced by her character and the predicament she finds herself in: trapped at sea while trying to figure out her future. “The thing I like most about Jane is that she is a very blunt and direct person, but right now, she is going through these hormonal lows and highs that make her far more sensitive than she normally would be,” says the actress. “I also like that she enters this trip not even knowing whether or not she wants to be pregnant but then some very magical and wonderful things happen on board that change everything for her.”
Also enjoyable for Blanchett was being fought over by Owen Wilson and Bill Murray in their roles as Ned and Steve Zissou. “Ned is unlike anyone Jane has ever known. She's coming out of this sort of corrupt relationship, and here's this man who seems almost impossibly innocent,” she observes. “Meanwhile, she finds Steve's arrogance, insensitivity and his desperation quite repugnant. He was her childhood hero-The Great Zissou-but now she sort of wishes she hadn't met him because something, some ideal picture, has been robbed from her.”
She continues, “Owen really captured the heartwarming innocence in Ned, which I think is very hard for a modern man to embrace but he's done it. Bill, of course, is hilarious- everyone expects that-but he's also a heartbreaker, and you really see that quality as well in this role.”
For Wes Anderson, Blanchett and Murray made for an intriguing pair. “Cate is someone who made Bill even better because she challenged him to be more prepared, and Bill brought something to Cate by challenging her to be even more in the moment. There is something very kinetic that happened between the two of them in these roles,” he says.
Eleanor Zissou
The role of Steve Zissou's aristocratic wife, Eleanor, belongs to Academy Award® winner Anjelica Huston. “I wrote this part for her because there's nobody better to have on a set than Anjelica,” comments Wes Anderson. “She brings the perfect attitude in that she's very excited about everything yet she also can't be perturbed. She's totally cool. She's also a very smart woman and a truly beautiful person, and there's something that just emanates from her that is entirely unique and right for Eleanor Zissou. In a sense, she holds the movie together.”
Having starred as a very different matriarchal figure in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Huston had a chance here to switch gears. “It was wonderful to see Anjelica play such a different kind of woman with Eleanor, who is such an independent spirit, not really tied to anyone or any thing,” says producer Mendel. “She captures Eleanor's freedom, and I love the way she looks in the movie, and her heroics at the end.”
Huston was thrilled to be part of a true adventure film. “I love adventures and I love the sea,” she says-and especially one that emerged from the mind of Wes Anderson. “The film really is an action-adventure movie, which might not be something you would have thought Wes could make, but I think he really disproved that from the first day on the set,” she says. “Part of what made it so fun is that it was a really liberating film for Wes.”
Huston also perceives The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as an offbeat love story about people who don't connect in obvious ways. “To me, what attracts Eleanor to Steve is that he's such a loose cannon, which, ironically, is also one of the things that has led to problems in their relationship,” she explains. “Whether or not they are suited for one another, the reality is that Eleanor's heart belongs to Steve.” Huston also enjoyed working with Bill Murray in the unexpected role of an adventure hero. “Obviously, Bill has an amazing sense of humor, but I also discovered that he can be very intrepid in his own way,” she says.
Helping Huston to create her inimitable character was two-time Oscar winner and multiple Academy Award nominee costume designer Milena Canonero, who came up with Eleanor's offbeat elegant outfits and the blue streaks that run through her long, black hair. “The look Milena created really ties into this idea that Eleanor is a bit of a self-made mermaid,” observes Huston. “Eleanor reveals part of what I love about Wes's characters: they always kind of bridge fantasy and reality, which makes them very unpredictable.”
Klaus Daimler
In the role of Steve Zissou's loyal-to-a-fault engineer, Willem Dafoe takes a rare comic turn, creating a character driven by a ceaseless desire to please and a Freudian jealousy streak. Dafoe was drawn to the unexpected part on the basis of the film's script, which he found defied categorization.
“I found it very funny, but there's also a darkness to it, a poignancy,” he says. “It's not just a comic adventure, because Wes always brings with him a dark shadow and a certain weight that comes out of his own life experience. He creates a very specific world out of fantasies, desires, frustrations and all the things that interest him, and that world is so complete that it can have its own rules. His form of comedy isn't glib or safe. It's very sophisticated-and he also brought together a cast that has the capacity to understand this vision.”
Dafoe was also intrigued by his character and, especially, the relationship between Klaus, who has been serving with Steve Zissou for decades, and Ned, who comes along out of the blue and wins Zissou's affection. “It's about sibling rivalry, but what puts a unique spin on it is that you've got these two very unlikely siblings,” he notes. “They're siblings by circumstance, and sometimes it seems that it's circumstance that makes us who we are.”
As for Klaus himself, Dafoe thinks the character's appeal may lie not so much in his outrageousness as in the part of him we all recognize. “For me, the fun part about Klaus is that he's a guy who pretends to be capable, yet he doesn't have a clue, and I think there's something rather charming about that kind of personality-'cause we all have a little of him in us,” he summarizes.
Ironically, Wes Anderson originally thought he would cast a bona fide European in the role, prior to meeting Willem Dafoe and deciding he was right for the part. “Willem came into this supporting role and, basically, stole the show,” says Anderson.
Barry Mendel adds, “To have this great dramatic actor who has starred in films like `The Last Temptation of Christ' and `Platoon' give such a wonderful comedic performance was really thrilling for us. I certainly don't think anyone has seen Willem give a performance this funny before, and I'm excited that people will have a chance to enjoy him doing a completely different kind of thing.”
Alistair Hennessey
Outside of the jaguar shark that took the life of his beloved partner Esteban, Steve Zissou has only one true nemesis in life: Alistair Hennessey, an oceanographer who is better-funded, has a bigger boat and is quickly eclipsing Zissou's star. To make matters worse, Hennessey was formerly married to Eleanor Zissou, creating a complicated triangle of jealousies. For Wes Anderson, Jeff Goldblum had the perfect combination of “eccentricity and brilliance” to play the semi-villainous Hennessey. “He's an actor who is very devoted and always has a lot of ideas,” notes Anderson. “I think he brings a wonderful amount of punch to the film.”
“I see Hennessey as someone who is very passionate about the ocean, loves the science of it, and has made himself into a huge success,” says Goldblum. “He enjoys the adventure, but he's not such a rough and tough guy, and he'd rather have fancy living quarters and the very finest of equipment. I think you could probably say he unhealthily identifies himself with all of his material stuff, so when everything he has is stolen from him, it's a huge loss.”
While Steve Zissou might feel threatened by Alistair Hennessey, Goldblum believes Hennessey doesn't really mind having Zissou around. “You know when everything is said and done, Zissou is a lovable guy, and I don't think Hennessey feels competitive with him. I think Hennessey's doing so well, that's not really an issue for him. He's rooting for Zissou, really, rooting for his relationship with Eleanor as well,” says Goldblum. “It might sound strange, but these are sophisticated and complex relationships.”
For Goldblum, the relationships form the heart of the film. “There's a lot of loss in this movie, really,” Goldblum observes. “It starts with Steve's friend Esteban dying, and along the way, people lose their careers, their stuff, their sense of self. But in the end, we all find ourselves huddled together in this little bubble deep in the ocean, in these uncharted seas, and in the depths of ourselves, perhaps. That's a magical moment.”
Bill Ubell
The one true outsider on The Belafonte is Bill Ubell, the so-called bond company “stooge,” who is given the impossible job of making sure Steve Zissou doesn't go over budget. Yet, when push comes to shove, Bill is ready to put his life on the line for the team.
To play this comical hero, Wes Anderson cast an actor who has long been an audience favorite: Bud Cort, who first came to notice in the influential classic comedy “Harold and Maude” and has gone on to a diverse career. “It was great fun having Bud on this movie, because he is a total character. He's a great actor and completely original, and he threw himself into the role of the bond company stooge with every last bit of drama he could muster,” says Anderson.
Cort enjoyed the chance to show the evolution of a most unusual character, the type not usually seen triumphing in adventure films. “Bill is an uptight, anal, hard-working guy who unwittingly has a blast on The Belafonte,” explains Cort. “When he is waylaid and kidnapped, it becomes this incredible adventure for him. He starts to really loosen up. The tie comes a little undone, the shirt opens and he even calms down a little bit.”
Throwing himself into the role, Cort even spent weeks learning the Tagalog language so he could converse with the Filipino actors kidnapping him. “It's a beautiful tongue,” he notes. “It involves using muscles in your mouth and throat that you would never think of using.”
Along the way, working with Wes Anderson reminded Cort of another director from earlier in his career. “He reminds me of Hal Ashby,” Cort says. “He's one of those filmmakers who is taking film into new territory, and thank God for that. Wes is really on his own planet, yet he's absolutely fastidious and totally in command.”
Another thrill for Cort was the chance to work on screen with Bill Murray, who he had worked with years before in a workshop in Chicago's Second City. “The minute I read the script for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, I knew this was going to be a huge role for Bill,” he says. “It was the perfect wedding between script and actor. It felt heaven-sent for him, for me, and for all of us in the cast. The story is so loaded with human drama, spiritual drama, environmental drama. It's a deep story, really, deep like the ocean, and it's been as amazing an adventure making the movie as the one Team Zissou goes on.”
A Tour of the Belafonte
“Let me tell you about my boat . . .” - Steve Zissou
In Wes Anderson's and Noah Baumbach's screenplay for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Steve Zissou's boat, The Belafonte, becomes essentially another character in the film. From its colorful laboratory and decked-out kitchen to its research library, editing room and dreamlike “observation bubble,” the boat seems to reflect the offbeat spirit of the entire journey.
The production began by searching for a ship with a unique shape and style. “It was almost like casting,” says production designer Mark Friedberg. “The search for the boat itself was quite a ride. Wes was very particular about what type of boat he wanted-that it needed to be of World War II vintage, that it needed to be a minesweeper, that it had to be about 50 meters and, to some degree, that it would be reminiscent of Cousteau's Calypso.”
After months of scouring the seas, the production turned up a 50-year-old minesweeper in South Africa, which they limped from Capetown to Rome for the production. That ship was kept intact for many of the outdoor sequences but re-outfitted to become a oceanographic research ship, complete with towers, an observation deck and brightly colored paint. Meanwhile, a second, similar ship was purchased in order to be dismantled for set dressing.
“When it came to the interior of the boat, we wanted it to reflect Zissou, a man unsure of where he is going in life right now, so everything in this world is sort of jerry-rigged, pieced together,” says Friedberg. “As we began, the question was, is this story about a real man facing his son or is it a fable or is it a tongue-in-cheek comedy-and the answer was that it's all of these, and that had to be reflected in the design. We wanted an intimacy but also a breadth.”
From the beginning, Anderson knew that he wanted audiences to see The Belafonte for the first time in a kind of cross-sectional, model view, cut open to reveal the entire inner workings. So the design team built a half-boat lengthwise so that the camera and crew could move in a linear line from room to room.
“Being as the actual ship is made of aluminum, we couldn't easily move walls, so we pretty much rebuilt what we saw inside the boat on a stage,” explains Friedberg. “Wes wanted to be able to shoot the entire boat just by moving a crane around the room for that first scene that introduces the boat. He wanted to use only practical sets and very little in the way of digital compositing or effects. There's a great comic sense and fluidity to it, and Wes had it all planned out very precisely.”
“Shooting that scene was a lot of fun,” says Anderson. “We had all the actors kind of walking around in this ant colony and the lights are changing and the cameras moving, and it was really exciting because none of us had ever done anything like this before. The set itself was more like a museum piece than a movie set-people kept coming by to see it.”
That half-Belafonte set-some three stories tall-was built, like most of the sets, on the backlot at Italy's legendary Cinecitta Studios, with its famed craftsmen and artisans. “We chose Italy because it had everything we were looking for-it's on the water, it has Cinecitta where all the Fellini films were made, and it's the Mediterranean, so it has some of that island sensibility,” says Friedberg.
Adds Barry Mendel: “There's a very specific flavor to shooting Italy, and I think some of that European sensibility of handmade craftsmanship has really become a part of the unique fabric of the film.”
The sets were one thing, but the actual boat used as The Belafonte took a lot of getting used to for cast and crew. For many, their introduction came on a day trip during which Wes Anderson hoped to shoot some of Team Zissou's documentary footage. “We set out for this little volcanic island, and it was very rough seas and nearly everybody got seasick-and yet we had an amazing time,” he recalls. “We all got to know each other, and when you're on a boat like that, it becomes a very intimate thing. There's no more barriers. And what's interesting is that people become very emotional about The Belafonte, very loyal to it.”
The production designer also created Steve Zissou's Pescespada Island compound in Italy, replete with a 12th-century castle, a pool with a killer whale (the whale is added through rear projection), a seaplane landing pad, and an all-important Ping-Pong table. “The theme for Zissou's compound was that there should be an I-won't-grow-up quality to it,” notes Friedberg. “Pescespada Island was an extraordinary set, pretty much unlike anything I've ever seen before,” sums up Mendel.
Meanwhile, contrasting with The Belafonte is Steve Zissou's arch rival Hennessey's ship, forged as one of the most up-to-date survey ships in the world, on which no expense has been spared. For this ship, the production used a NATO research ship-The Elite-which proved to be The Belafonte's antithesis. “It was so much the opposite of what we created for Steve Zissou-ultra-clean, very structured and very high-tech,” notes Mark Friedberg. “It's a whole different world.”
Another key part of The Belafonte is the Deep Search submersible-previously named after one of Steve Zissou's old flames-in which the team ultimately journeys deep into the sea in search of the jaguar shark. The mini-sub was built by an Italian crew out of steel and fiberglass, with working propellers and lights.
“The submarine was a really crazy scene to shoot because we had the entire cast, except for Owen, all sealed in the back of this very tiny set. It was designed so that they essentially bolted in and couldn't get out, which really set the mood for the scene,” says Anderson. “There was the scary feeling of going into the unknown.”
The Undersea World of Steve Zissou
“How are things going with your-what are you calling it? Leopard fish?” - Hennessey
Though The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is an underwater adventure, the underwater world it creates is unlike any others that audiences have seen before. That's because the aquatic realm visited by Team Zissou sprang not so much from real oceanography and biology as from the imaginations of Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach and animator Henry Selick. Teeming with glowing, multicolored creatures out of a dream-from candy-colored Sugar Crabs to the star-encrusted Constellation Ray and from the two-inch Crayon Pony Fish to the 80-foot spotted behemoth known as the Jaguar Shark-the oceanic home of Steve Zissou is amply filled with the magic and awe he finds has gone missing from the rest of his life.
As soon as Anderson and Baumbach began writing about imaginary sea creatures in their screenplay, Anderson's thoughts turned to how he was going to bring these storybook animals to life. That's when he decided to contact Henry Selick, the modern-day master of the “old-school” animation style known as “stop-motion,” which Selick brought to the fore in his acclaimed debut feature film, “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” One of the most ancient forms of film animation, stop-motion, to this day, has a visceral, textured quality that sets it apart from digital creations. Looking for that kind of more vibrant effect for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou menagerie, Anderson called Selick long in advance of the start of production to see if he would be interested in applying his art to a seriocomic adventure film.
“Wes said he was looking for somebody who could create the kind of sea creatures that would make for a fable-like atmosphere,” recalls Selick. “Right away, he had very simple, clear, and endlessly creative, ideas about design and color, which I found very refreshing. As I became more involved, I began to realize that the animation in the film, unusual as it might be, is just one of the many spices in Wes's stew. It's a subtle but important part of telling the incredible story of Steve Zissou.”
Selick soon found that for each of the world's individual creatures-which also include Day-Glo lizards, paisley octopi and iridescent mini-frogs-Anderson had very specific portraits in mind. “For example, for the Sugar Crabs, he literally wanted confectionary colors,” explains Selick, “so I brought him lots of entire catalogs of candies, and he chose the colors and patterns he liked from that collection for us to replicate.”
Selick continues: “Some of the creatures are total fabrications while others are subtle yet fun shifts on real sea animals. The Golden Barracuda, for example, we took from actual barracuda images and created a new interpretation of that familiar fish. But the Rat Tail Envelope Fish, which turns itself inside out, is totally imaginary. We created about 40 or 50 completely different designs for Wes to look at, and he was having so much fun with each of them that he wouldn't let us stop! Finally, he picked the one he thought was the wildest vision.”
Later, Selick joined cast and crew in Italy to oversee the sculpting of the miniature models and puppets that form the heart of stop-motion animation, which only intensified the creative process. “Every time I showed Wes an idea, he saw it as an opportunity to improve on it,” he recalls. “It was quite an intense period.”
Indeed, of all the underwater fish, reptiles and mammals featured in The Life Aquatic, the only real animals seen that actually exist are Zissou's whale (inserted using old-fashioned rear-projection); and the research dolphins-the bane of Zissou's existence-which were created by using animatronic, remote-controlled robots.
Finally, it came time to create the film's pie`ce de résistance and the ultimate object of Steve Zissou's vengeance: the legendary jaguar shark. “The jaguar shark is sort of the great white whale of `Moby Dick' in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” observes Selick. “It's a mythical creature that no one except Steve Zissou really believes in-so it needed to be something quite spectacular. Every week, the length seemed to grow as Wes wanted it to be even larger and more imposing. We ended up with 150 pounds of puppet, which might be the largest stop-motion puppet ever created.”
While stop-motion animation is typically low-tech-involving only lights, cameras and animators to slowly move the models frame-by-frame-for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Selick went further, using computer technology to amp up the process. “We used computer model movers to simulate the jaguar shark's basic swimming motion while an animator hand created the mouth movements, the pectoral fins and all the extra things,” he explains.
Selick also used a new-generation silicone known as “Dragon Skin” for the creatures. “One of the things that is always hardest in animation is skin,” notes Selick. “This stuff has a translucency that helps all of the film's creatures seem more lifelike. Basically, we were mixing the newest materials and technology with the most ancient filmmaking techniques. In many ways, these creatures go beyond anything we've done before.”
Working closely with Selick was Visual Effects Supervisor Jeremy Dawson, who became enchanted by Selick's designs. “I love that while the creatures in the film aren't real, they feel almost like they could be,” he says. “Wes stays right on that edge of believability, but he never falls off completely into the cartoonish, and that's a fun place to be.”
Dawson's role on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou turned out to be quite different from any other film on which he's worked. “The unique thing about this project is that it didn't really have anything to do with contemporary effects-instead, we had to find ways to create a whole undersea world with mostly practical solutions,” he says. Dawson's favorite scene was the one in which thousands of electric jellyfish wash up on the shore of Zissou's Pescepada Island. “We had all these men-o'-war that were built by the special-effects guys at Cinecitta,” he recalls, “and they were made out of resin and silicone with lights inside and then all strung together and buried into the sand. The effect was so cool. It was exciting to actually be able to walk among the creatures, instead of creating something digitally that you could never touch. There was a beauty to it you couldn't get any other way.”
For the film's underwater diving sequences, the production team utilized Cinecitta's massive watertanks and highly skilled divers. “Wes wanted the water itself to be very stylized, to have a sparkling, opalescent feeling,” explains Dawson, “so we experimented with different shots and solutions and even putting glitter in the water to get a look that has a magical element to it. The whole world is meant to be something that's not `Titanic'-realistic but something a little more fantastic.”
Adding to the challenges of shooting underwater was the reality that only Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe had ever done any scuba diving at all-everyone else was completely new to being underwater. “At least we had two actors with some experience. Of the entire production crew, there was no one who had any diving experience at all,” notes Wes Anderson. “But we were fortunate that the Italians working on the film were able to help because they'd all spent a lot of time on the sea. We were learning how to do it as we went along.” For some scenes, Anderson also utilized “dry-for-wet” techniques, in which a stage filled with smoke and specific types of lighting created the aura of being submerged deep in the sea.
Among the most spectacular of the underwater sequences in the film is the subaquatic forest, which was created with life-size trees and beds of seaweed by the art team and then submerged in a giant tank at Cinecitta.
Steve Zissou's world also comes to the fore in the sequences revealing footage from his famously campy nature films. To shoot these scenes, Wes Anderson wanted a different look from the rest of the film, collaborating with cinematographer Robert Yeoman to forge a slightly off-the-wall documentary style. Yeoman used Ektachrome film stocks to give the documentary sequences a retro nature-film feel that stands in contrast to the rest of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. “I wanted it to feel like a documentary but, at the same time, it can never really quite be a documentary when you have people wearing aquamarine polyester and red caps,” comments Anderson. “The challenge was to fit these different ideas together.”
Early on, Anderson and producer Barry Mendel immersed themselves in nature films. “We were watching all the famous naturalists,” says Mendel. “And, from this, Wes found clothing ideas, shot ideas and little tools that he saw them using in their jobs that he thought might be adapted for our film.”
Throughout the film, Anderson encouraged cinematographer Yeoman to use a far more free-wheeling style than any of Anderson's previous films. “This movie has a lot more handheld stuff and is a lot looser and freer,” says Anderson.
The cinematographer remembers the moment when his vision for the film coalesced. “Weeks before principal photography, we set up a hair, makeup and wardrobe test for Owen Wilson at Cinecitta,” he recalls. “When Owen ambled in, wearing his red stocking cap and bright blue Team Zissou suit, I couldn't contain my laughter. The film's entire aesthetic was suddenly, at that moment, completely apparent to me.”
The costumes that evoked such a definitive response were created by two-time Academy Award® winner Milena Canonero, who worked closely with Wes Anderson in forging an entire wardrobe of iconic Team Zissou outfits. From winter coats and turtleneck sweaters to wet suits and Speedos-and even the infamous Zissou sneakers-each is emblazoned with the inimitable Team Zissou logo. For Canonero, this was an entirely different challenge from the period epics such as “Barry Lyndon” and “Out of Africa” for which she has gained renown-this time, her focus was on weaving her work into the comically stylized universe of Steve Zissou.
For the all-important Team Zissou wet suits, Canonero had her team hand-dye each of the suits to create their unique shimmery blue color. “We wanted the effect of sardines glistening under water, so we airbrushed each wet suit and painted them with iridescent blue paint, all by hand,” she explains. “To our amazement, the dyed wet suits survived the torrential downpours, stunt explosions and submersions in the sea that the cast and characters go through.”
“A lot of the costumes, like the Speedos and red caps, were described in the screenplay by Wes and Noah,” says Barry Mendel, “but the work Milena did to realize them and make them so evocative of Wes's world was exceptional. Wes always uses costumes to reveal character and to help build the world-but Milena's costumes went a step further to become part of the storytelling.”
Music Aquatic: About the Score
“Quiet out there tonight. Can you hear the jack whales singing?” - Steve Zissou
As with all of Wes Anderson's films to date, music also plays a key role in the storytelling of The Life Aquatic-but similar to the other elements of the film, Anderson took an unusual approach to the score. “For this film, I wanted to do something quite different musically,” says Anderson. “There's a wide-ranging mix of elements-from broad, adventure pieces, to the themes associated with the characters, to the music for the Zissou films that also becomes part of the overall score-that all had to come together.”
Anderson began talking about the film's music with composer Mark Mothersbaugh-Anderson's long-time collaborator-very early in the process. “I can remember working on the music in my studio while Wes was sitting behind me, still writing the script,” notes Mothersbaugh. “And the one thing that was clear right away is that this film was going to be a very adventurous movie for Wes-bigger in every dimension than anything he'd done before, including the music.”
Mothersbaugh started his work by considering what kind of music Team Zissou's composer (and physicist) Vladimir Wolodarsky would have written. “I knew it had to be cheap synth sounds,” explains Mothersbaugh, “so that was the starting point for our film, and already it was unusual because this is the first time there have ever been any electronic instruments on a Wes Anderson score. Everything else we've done previously was all acoustic.”
Fortunately, Mothersbaugh was able to tap into his own ample collection of analog synthesizers from the 1970s to achieve that distinctively amusing sound. Later, the simple themes of Wolodarsky's compositions are vastly expanded into rich orchestral pieces for a 50-piece orchestra. “We start musically very much in Wolodarsky's world with this very simple, cheesy synthesizer, and then the music just gets bigger and bigger and expands into the rest of the world of the film. Of course, one of the interesting things was going to all these very accomplished wind and string players and saying, `I want you to sound like Casio instruments!”
Another interesting compositional moment came when Mothersbaugh took an instrumental piece he had composed for “The Royal Tenenbaums”-“Scrapping and Yelling”-and played the entire piece backwards to use for the music that accompanies the scene in which Steve Zissou introduces The Belafonte. “The melody was completely unexpected yet had that same happy, optimistic feeling. It was a good match for the scene, because that's when you first realize beyond any doubt that this isn't going to be your average movie,” observes the composer.
For Mothersbaugh, being on the set and watching Wes Anderson work became a large part of his musical inspiration. “Wes is so much more hands-on than any other director I've known,” he says. “In a way, it reminds me of the old days with my band Devo, because we always did everything ourselves, from the costumes to the choreography, and that's how Wes is. He's there doing drawings and working on the fabric for the costumes at the same time as he is telling me his ideas for the music. It's really nice to work for someone who sees everything in such an integrated, creative way.”
Finally, adding an ineffable charm and mystery to The Life Aquatic is the musical performance of Brazilian actor Seu Jorge in the role of guitar-strumming Pele. When Anderson asked Jorge-an actor best known in the U.S. for his role in the acclaimed “City of God” but also a pop star in Brazil-if he could play a few Bowie songs, he had no idea what to expect. But when Jorge translated the songs into Portuguese and presented them in a folksy, impassioned bossa nova style, both cast and crew were floored. Even David Bowie responded to them. “Bowie licensed the songs to us, and as we went along, we sent the recordings to him and he seemed to really like Jorge's versions,” comments Anderson. “He's just a great performer.”
Perhaps what most impressed Anderson is how Jorge's renditions of the Bowie songs seemed to reflect both the high humor and the oceanic depths of the film's emotions. “I never was certain if they were completely accurate translations,” he admits, “but I became convinced that Pele's words-and, unquestionably, his beautiful performance-captured the spirit of Bowie and of the film.”
|
||||
Sitemaps, RSS Feeds & Social Networks
|
|||||||
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
||
Add this page to social networks
BlinkList
| del.icio.us
| Digg it
| Furl
| ma.gnolia
| Netvouz
| Simpy
| Spurl
| Netscape
| StumbleUpon
|
|||||||
Cate Blanchett as Jane Winslett Richardson and Bill Murray as Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.