Sill Life is Still Life: Asteroid City, with Wes Anderson Q&A at BFI Southbank.

by Isabel Hodges

*Be aware of SPOILERS*

INT. BFI SOUTHBANK CINEMA- EVENING
WES ANDERSON and JARVIS COCKER.
Wednesday the 21st of June.
6:10pm.
25°C

A black screen. Silence. We first see The Host (Bryan Cranston) who introduces us to our story...

In black and white, shot in Academy-ratio, here is our guide, the fatherly Edward R Murrow-esque TV host dressed in a manicured suit, a man straight out of The Twilight Zone. He explains, as a set of painted and flashing skyscrapers appear besides him on a stage, that this is the story of Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023) . Under harsh spotlight sits our playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) lonesomely typing away at his typewriter as streams of smoke escape his cigarette. What we are about to see is not real. It is a film, within a play where a character is reading lines from another fictional play that they are apart of, within a TV show. This is an “apocryphal fabrication” with its own acts, even with an “optional” intermission. These characters are not real, they're actors playing actors who are playing characters. The stentorian Host eases us into the experience, the camera switching back and forth from filming him for the high-culture television show, to then cutting to the set he's occupying behind the scenes. For Anderson's Asteroid City there is a focus on artifice, the buildings behind him are not real, what we're about to witness is not real. So that leaves us with the questions:

What really is real?
What really is fake?

“remember me as a blur in the rear view mirror.”
Image from Astroid City Trailer, Universal Pictures, 2023.

Soon this black and white is replaced as Anderson switches the tone to a pastel Kodak technicolour. This is the televised play. Set in the fictional desert town Asteroid City circa 1955, we are introduced to the Americana plastic of the southwest, drawing its characters in towards the popular observatory and meteor crater attraction. Just outside the town is the constant testing of atomic weapons by the military, a freight train passes through every so often, and a high-speed car chase is in pursuit as police fire their guns racing down the only road through the wasteland. Across a vibrant orange landscape, the town consists of a trailer park full of small white houses, a diner, a gas station attached to a repair shop, a ramp that goes to nowhere and the government research facility for the asteroid. Asteroid city is an empty confection of 20th century American realism and postmodernism. Anderson’s version of reality is extremely selective capturing a similar phenomenon of the ‘American Imagination’ much like the American painter Edward Hopper transfers into his own images.

Asteroid City is like alienated poetry, although not one character is unaccompanied by another, the overarching themes of loneliness shine through via fears of the future, hauntings of the past, a doomed younger generation, life and death and nostalgia whilst ‘living’ in an uncertain and disconnected world. The liveliness is replaced by still, geometric, strange, southwestern American solitude capturing the domestic scenes glimpsed through windows and lonely figures lost in the landscape. Anderson’s command of light and space brings absolute clarity to his scenes - thanks to cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman. It is not only Hopper that seems to have had an influence, but I also believe Raphael Soyer’s social realist art of lonely figures may have also had a part to play in inspiring Anderson. Soyer was working around an uncertain time in life as well when society began to crumble due to the war and its repercussions, where life seemed to come to a standstill. Soyer believed that “If art is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate.” There is a serene quality surrounding Soyers work, and even though his characters are seemingly alone they still go on with their lives accepting their solitude as if it is something familiar, these figures aren’t static but rather shown through movement, occupying or distracting themselves from the lonely reality they live in. And although Anderson’s characters may come across as doll-like puppets or machines, their constant curiosity and ability to carry on through loneliness gives this plastic land humanity. Each character is a toy in the universe's vast sand box.

“You really did it, that actually happened?”
Image from Astroid City Trailer, Universal Pictures, 2023.

JARVIS: “The first thing you did was get me to get into the golf buggy and show me the set, you seemed very proud of the set, especially the false perspective aspects of it.”

WES: “Yes its true, well, y’a know, its something about, you write the script and kind of plan the whole thing out, but there’s a moment when you’ve got the cast and you can bring the people to the place where we’re actually gonna make the movie, y’a know the sort of stage where we’re gonna play the whole thing. And, it’s very nice that it isn’t a room full of green screens, y’a know, in our case it was a desert that we’d built, which is a rare thing to build a desert y’a know in the first place, and it was a very big desert as [Jarvis] recall’s, umm with our little town in it. Umm so, yes, I, y’a know, I-I, everybody…first time anybody came out there I was always happy to see them sort of visit this little town like they were visiting a real town, and uhh, get excited about playing their scenes there.”

JARVIS: “The experience as well to kind of drive along the road, I think you would have seen it at the end of the film, when everybody kind of leaves the place, and the road seems to go on forever, but it actually as you go along that road everything gets smaller and smaller, like the telegraph poles go dunk, dunk, dunk, until they’re about that high, so really it was a- it was a interesting in to what was gonna happen.”

WES: “Yeah, it’s what- y’a know- it’s sort of old movie techniques I guess, umm- but I will say it was big for a long long way and then it gets smaller, so it’s not- you gotta go quite a bit of distance before it starts to shrink.”

JARVIS: "And that kind of brings up a question, of why? you know you mentioned green screen, but you obviously want to create a place that then real things happen in it."

WES: "Yes, I guess as you know now from having seen the movie, its a play, y'a know, its supposed to be a play within our story and so, this- there's a kind of theatrical aspect to it, it's all kind of a constructed thing, but to me I would much much prefer to make a movie where we're- even if it's an imaginary sort of world, we make it real. Umm- and the actors are, y'a know, working with something they can see and they can interact with. It's more fun."

Quotes taken from the Wes Anderson Q&A Event at BFI Southbank.

Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a pipe-smoking war photographer adorned in a belted trench coat is accompanied by his four children. Now a widow and a single father, he carries his dead wife’s ashes in Tupperware, unable to tell his children of her death as his confides in his father-in-law Stanley Zak over the phone, “Its never the right time” to which he replies “Its always the wrong time’. Stuck without a working car, and on the phone to a man who disapproves of him, he finally decides to tell his children. Sat in the trailer park he confesses of her death three weeks prior, admitting that the time old tale that “Time heals all wounds” is incorrect but acts rather as “A bandaid”. Love and loneliness are emotions continuously at the fore front of modern life, the familiar feeling where we feel completely connected yet entirely detached from those around us, Anderson’s Asteroid City understands that loneliness is neither necessarily felt by people who are alone, nor alien to people who are always with others. We are also introduced to Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a suicidal Hollywood Elizabeth Taylor-esque sex icon who has travelled in with her daughter to the junior stargazer competition. Living opposite Augie, she practices her lines for another play in the window adjacent to his as she watches him develop his photos in his bathroom-come-dark-room. With multiple generations occupying the town, there seems to be a reliance on the younger generation to “each be a guardian of [their] own safety” as they craft inventions and have a far greater social mobility together than the older generation who are canonically ‘bad’ parents who wish to abandon their children or their lives (through fake overdoses, grease paint bruises, burning their hand on a sandwich machine, or shuttling their children off to their father-in-laws care). For the adults there isn’t such a balance of life and death, life is a commodity, its experiences can be bought and sold like General Grif Gibson’s (Jeffrey Wright) reminiscent “That was life” speech which you could buy a copy of after the Space Cadet convention, or the photos Augie has taken of Midge, the atomic mushroom clouds, his dead wife (Margot Robbie), and the alien. Through photography Augie captures life and keeps it still within the frame, Midge is still standing in the bathroom, the atomic cloud is still in the sky, his dead wife is still alive lounging in a paddling pool, and the alien is still standing in the creator stealing the meteorite. There is a yearning from these adult characters for the past or maybe even to just experience the present fully, there is a looming fear of change that hangs around them in a facade of pastels and fractured light like stars dotted on them like the night sky.

JARVIS: "That was the thing, erhm, I remember people talking about that- the general, I've forgotten the name of the actor again-"

WES: "Jeffrey, Jeffrey Wright."

JARVIS: "Yes, Jeffrey Wright. So, that was a big speech that he did, you know when he says "Now I'm gonna do my speech, and its going to be available for you to take home afterwards" and all that kind of thing, and then theres this kind of three act speech or whatever, and erhm, I remember everybody coming back from the set that day really impressed- like they'd seen something really- a proper bit of acting."

WES: "Well yes it was a proper bit of acting, and umm, he's a very good actor, the part- thats the second time I've had Jeffrey in a movie. I saw him years before- y'a know I'd seen him on the stage, I'd seen him in- oh I'd seen him in Top Dog Under Dog a play that he did at the public theatre in New York and then I'd seen him in a John Guare play also- umm that he was very good in- umm and I'd seen him in movies. I've worked with him for years, he's in the French Dispatch, we wrote a part for him in that one and we wrote this part for him too, umm Roman Coppola and I and umm- and he said yes- but you know what happened was it's a kind of a hard scene to play, I mean its written- it's, you've gotta be kind of good to do this scene properly- umm, and that was kind of the idea- umm and he knew it has to be done, it's almost like, you know, you start the scene and as you're running downhill- it's got momentum and it's a lot of words- it happens very quickly and you just have to go and it has to happen right. And he- we had to squeeze it into his schedule when he arrived, and the next day he was supposed to shoot the scene, and we did something like fifty five takes of this whole speech.

And it was good, but it wasn't what he can do, but we sort of figured out- we did a couple little things to it- and then we went home and I was like "Alright, I think so", and then the next morning I called him, I said "You know, we should do it again shouldn't we?" and he said "Yes, thank you so much, and can we do it Saturday?" umm and "yes, we'll wait, you just rest"- and we went Saturday morning and what's in the movie is take one of Saturday, he did it absolutely perfectly on Saturday, the first thing he did was come in get it exactly right and then everybody applauded and then we went home and that was the end of the shooting day. And we wrapped for the day, that was all we did, "We don't need to shoot on Saturday, why don't we just relax?"

"We are two catastrophically wounded people who don't express the depths of our pain because...we don't want to."
Image from Astroid City Trailer, Universal Pictures, 2023.

There are the stars in the sky, and the star on the ground, Midge, a mirroring of connections as the children play a memory game naming only celebrities and famous people like "Cleopatra", again emphasising the connection between stardom and the stars in the sky, through death there is still life. This also seems to happen to the polka dotted light, like stars across their clothes, this image reminds me of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party or even Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It is not only the light that is fracturing, but also our characters relationships and dispersed family structures, each a single parent accompanying their child, a single school teacher (Maya Hawke) on a field trip of with a hoard of children, and the group of quiet banjo playing cowboys, as Wes Anderson reveals when picking out the group he thought:

“Jarvis would be good, but y’a know he’s from Sheffield, umm- but we’d like to have him there and then I had- we cast Rupert Friend whose also from Oxford- umm and then we have our French banjo player- and umm Seu Jorge from Brazil, so it was a really unusual group of cowboys. No Americans, no Americans, and Perry, whose Spanish.”

This fracturing of identity and relationship, as well as split spatially, echoes not only the quarantine that happens after the world-changing event, but also the real life quarantine experienced from 2020-2021 due to Covid-19. Although this is a thoroughly alienating time, when connected with a tight knit community of far away travellers and locals our characters try their hardest to come together. I find Asteroid City to almost be Bressonian, as Anderson offers a similar profound exploration into the psychology of his characters whilst engaging with the issues of morality and suffering. Through deadpan melancholia, believing in god's death, which Woodrow Steenbeck (Jake Ryan) later announces after witnessing the alien, mechanical acting, a restrictive camera and long shots of silence Anderson portrays what Bresson might have looked like in 1950s pastel western Americana comic-sketch style film. What can language convey that an action or expression cannot already do?

JARVIS: “Now did chronology have something to do with this? ‘cause you’ve got the stuff with quarantine so, that feels a lot like ermh, you know the pandemic and the lockdown and everything we went through, but I’m assuming you had finished writing this before covid happened?”

WES: “No, it’s no, it does come, y’a know when we started working on it but- umm, and we started y’a know the idea at the beginning was- uhh, Roman is Jason Schwartzsman’s cousin umm, so and I’ve known Jason since uhh Jason was seventeen, Jason who plays Augie in the movie, and umm, so we had this idea we wanna write a movie for Jason ,uhh, that was the beginning of it, umm, and y’a know I knew I wanted to do something that was a backstage story and I felt maybe there would be a play that might be something like, I don’t know exactly, I was thinking like William Inge like Picnic, but I was thinking a play that’s in the West, umm-and umm, and we started working- but I think y’a know people sometimes ask me if we do- if people improvise during the movies, or how free is it? or something-

its kind of planned out but I think the writing of a movie is sort of an improvisational kind of experience, to me it is anyway, it’s usually- we were talking and y’a know I write the stuff after we kind of talk it out and you never like know when the scene or if the scene or if the ideas are gonna happen, it has to be spontaneous and whatever’s happening in your life, even if you’re drawing on things from your family history or from friends, uhh, or from something you read, still whatever is going on in your life somehow goes into the thing when you don’t expect it and as it happens we were in a lockdown, and writing there in quarantine, umm and y’a know we didn’t even question it, it just- it was part- it seemed natural to it.”

JARVIS: "Yeah and well- 'cause when I arrived on the set it still was lockdown, so it was quite a strange- you'd decided to shoot it in Spain- erhm, and it was a place a little bit south of Madrid, erhm and I think you had- you had to discuss things with local farmers didn't you? To get the permission to-"

WES: "Well, you know what we did- during the lockdown time I found the place to shoot on Google Maps- I just started- I mean if you want a flat place in Europe you pretty quickly find your way to Spain- umm and I started looking for yellow on the satellite images and four star hotel, you know five star hotels are too expensive and you don't want to buy it up, uhh production cost- but four star probably good and that's the way we found the place- I- It turned out- I started going on the things and saying there's a big big- uhh- what I thought was a big field- it turned out to be two hundred fields with two hundred farmers, umm- each- each who have a lease that we had to buy- and then you're dealing with like crops cycles and harvesting time and planting time- and if somebodies growing watermelons and somebody else is growing 'squash' and there's different schedules- and so its complicated- but we got them all to give us their land for a season, the thing we didn't really- and then we built- I'd seen the Terry Gilliam documentary where Terry Gilliam has had troubles in Spain, y'a know, with filmmaking and he's had weather issues and things and sets destroyed, so on, and I- and we built- we have a- our production designer Adam Stockhausen, we built things strong, to withstand anything that would come, and it did.

The only thing we didn't think about, it's y'a know, usually its good if you- if you were making the movie a second time, you would really know what to do. And, yes and in this case the thing we didn't know was that- was how umm- vulnerable sand can be. Because when the storm came in, and we just saw the entire desert that we'd been trucking in just go into the sky- and it was an amazing thing to see. But the sand was not a part of the earth there, you know it was sitting on kind of-some kind of organic netting that we created to protect the soil for planting after we were wrapped- umm- but um, y'a know we got more sand and we carried on."

It’s not only the quarantine that traps our characters but also Asteroid City itself, a metaphor for our physical trappings in lockdown, everything accessibly in one place or space. The city is like a set, a play is like a virus shutting its characters into one space to deal with not only the battles happening outside but also within.

“Tell them it didn’t happen.”
Image from Astroid City Trailer, Universal Pictures, 2023.

The climax comes at the arrival of the alien. A figure that has been looming in the background of conversations and in the beeps of Dr. Hickenlooper’s (Tilda Swinton) devices. On the night of the space ellipsis, an astronomical event much like an eclipse where three orange dots enter the sky, the group adorn their homemade contraptions to watch on underneath the junior stargazer banner painted with the line: “For a powerful America.” The arrival of the unknown happens in pure saturated and vibrant neon green. Reminiscent of the stereotypical iconography of the green alien, the use of one colour across the frame showcases the stop-motion interloper as all consuming, but also that the use of a highly artificial shade of green once again emphasises the synthetic nature of the film. This is echoed later in a scene between Schubert and Polly, holding a model of the alien aircraft, he switches on the green light disrupting their perpetual black and white, to which Polly remarks that it's "Not like before." The alien almost like a pink panther-esque mime, a silent bandit graces the cast with his presence only to disappear off into the night sky again never to be heard, but to be seen, and captured by Augie's camera.

WES: “I thought you wanted to ask about the alien.”

JARVIS: “Oh yes, sorry.”

WES: “He said earlier he was gonna ask me about the alien.”

JARVIS: “I did want to know a bit more about the alien, so can you shed a little bit of light on the alien in this film please?”

WES: “Well I like- when you mentioned it before I thought it was good to ask me, only because- I-because I liked the alien in our movie- I think that my answer that I was gonna say-mentioned earlier was, umm- much of what is- what I like about our alien is that it’s Jeff Goldbloom, and even there are some places where you might know that Jeff Goldbloom is not inside physically that alien, the person who animated it, physically animated stop motion, Kim Keukeleire is her name is one of the great stop motion animators in the world, I think she’s in the top two people I would say, and umm- but even she was thinking of Jeff Goldbloom, he's inhabited, umm-and umm, and I love him, he's- I've known him for many many years, twenty years, and I've had him in many movies, and umm- he umm- interesting thing happened during the movie which is at the dinner, the dinner table that we had, I could hear, my balcony remember was over the little terrace there? and umm I could hear a group of the actors, tell me if you were down there, talking about "What is the movie about?" umm and there was some confusion.

Yep, and umm- and there was some debate, and I was listening not eavesdropping but I could just hear, and then one of them said umm- "Well ask Jeff because he understands the movie", umm and then I could hear piano playing off, and the piano stopped, and then there were some footsteps- and then Jeff came out, I could hear Jeff out there, and they said "Can you explain the movie?" and Jeff went "You're not a- you're in the tv broadcast- you're not the actor, you're an actor playing the actor in a television-" and he explained the whole movie to the group exactly right. And umm- and I just like that the person who really understands the movie is the alien. "

Soon after our characters are quarantined in a military lockdown with the president instructing the scientists to lie and gaslight the citizen's into believing that the alien landing did not happen. This could be commentary on the vagueness of Covid's origin as well as shining light on corrupt government figures and officials as well as the growing conspiracies and cover stories about the virus, much like the alien. Although the adults submit to the isolation, their children rebel, crafting a machine connected to a local phone box to spread the story of the Alien to the media. It doesn't take long for capitalism to get involved as a fun fair rolls into town selling commemorative toys of the alien. Ahh good old capitalism, making a profit off of others suffering. "America remains at peace." Soon Augie and Midge strike up relationship imbued in pathos and grief in which she asks after the alien encounter, "You feel different?" to which he replies " I don't feel anything." Again the alien reappears to return the meteorite, the cancellation of the quarantine is called off and a rebellion of chaos ensues. When faced with an unwanted reality one must walk backstage to ask the director if they're doing it right.

And then we’re thrown back into black and white. New York City. Through twisting Dutch angles we watch an acting class run by acting coach Saltzburg Keitel (Willem Dafoe) accompanied by the playwright Conrad Earp and play director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody). An improvisational class on sleep, as "sleep is not death" but rather an emotional dimension. We cut back again to the behind the scenes of the play as Jones Hall struggles to understand the motives of the character Augie that he's playing. He tells Schubert "I need a breath of fresh air" to which he replies "You wont find one." As he emerges onto the metal fire exit of the New York building he's faced with Margot Robbie dressed as Queen Elizabeth I, harking back to her past role in Mary Queen of Scots (2018). Again the symmetry of their conversation is reminiscent of Augie and Midges conversations through the window. Anderson works tirelessly to emphasise the importance of the past and the artifice of the present. The fire escape is another set, the fresh air isn't fresh, a flashing marquee reads "The death of a narcissist" and the woman he's talking to is dressed in character playing a different role. There are memories of what could of been, of her scene being cut and her heartfelt monologue. A question of what if? Then the host reveals that Conrad died at 50, was this the death of the so called narcissist? is it God? is America dead? In a Lynchian sequence we cut back to the acting students chanting a mantra "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep."

Life is cyclical and we must carry on.

Asteroid City is a dark humoured semi-relatable sci-fi-western-hybrid-comedy about persevering through grief, it's a film for the lost souls looking for their place in the universe. It's a story about unrest and discontent, the curiosity of adolescence, the decay of the American dream through the idea that you can buy land through a vending machine.

by Isabel Hodges, June 2023.