‘Asteroid City’: How Covid Quarantine Inspired Wes Anderson’s Latest About People Stuck In The 1950s Desert – Cannes

Anthony D'Alessandro
·3 min read
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Wes Anderson’s latest absurdist comedy is about many things, part homage to Playhouse 90, part play-within-a play, but at the core of it is a bunch of travelers marooned in the desert western town of Asteroid City.

Of the many stuck, err, visiting in a funk are Scarlett Johansson’s movie star character Midge Campbell with her science-obsessed teenage daughter, and Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenback who hasn’t told his three young daughters that their mother has passed. Amid it all, there’s a young adult stargazers science contest filled with various innovative experiments and scholarship money to boot for the participants which the military out in the desert is sponsoring.

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This gaggle of folks — are they in some sort of purgatory? Or is the movie some sort of self-reflection on behalf of Anderson during Covid when he was developing the script? The latter question was asked at this afternoon’s Cannes press conference for the film.

Said Anderson, “During the intense part of the Covid period, we were writing the script. I don’t think there would be a quarantine in the story if we weren’t experiencing it. It wasn’t deliberate,” he said.

“Writing is the most improvisational part of the whole process. It relies on having nothing,” said Anderson relishing the scripted part of his cinema process.

What filmmaker or crew hasn’t cried about all the agita that’s gone into making a movie during Covid with sundry protocols?

For Anderson, it wasn’t so bad. “The making of the movie during Covid protocols, it really suited us. It worked for us. I loved that we formed a troupe and stayed together and sat at a long table and had dinner.”

In regard to the whole nod to the Broadway world in the pic, “was it to reconstruct our broken world?” one journalist asked.

“I would say ‘yes’,” answered Anderson, “It’s like that quote in the Red Shoes, ‘Why do you dance? He says ‘Why do you live?’ Don’t know if there’s an answer other than that.”

Anderson confessed, “I haven’t done a play,” but finds the process a bit daunting in its live performance aspect, for “I like to go back to the cutting room and play with it a bit.”

Bryan Cranston, who plays the Playhouse 90-like narrator in Asteroid City, likened Anderson to an orchestra conductor and the actors his “particular instruments.”

“Without exactly knowing,” Cranston says, “He conducts it.”

“He makes the adjustments as he goes. Like the dialogue in the film. There’s a part where Augie goes in talks to the director. Augie says, ‘I don’t understand the play.’ He says ‘you don’t have to. Just keep telling the story.’ That’s what the film meant to me: We go through life, and we don’t know how long our lives will be,” said Cranston.

Last night in its world premiere at Cannes, Asteroid City received a six-and-a-half minute standing ovation.

Asteroid City hits theaters on June 16 from Focus Features.

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