Q: I would imagine that you wrote 2 of the characters for Owen and for Jason, I’m not sure if that’s true…

Wes Anderson: …and Adrien.

Q: And Adrien?  Oh, okay.  I was wondering where he fit into the mix? 

Wes Anderson: Yeah, no we wrote that for him.  I had been a fan of his for a long time and that was yeah in fact long before I ever met Adrien I had their names written on a piece of paper. It’s one of the very first ideas.  We had an inspiration in the movie Husband’s and we had this cast in mind and we knew we were going to go on a train to India and that was sort of like the 1st page of the notebook of you know, what are we going to do next?

Q: I wanted to know if you could tell us where you are right now with The Fantastic Mr. Fox?

Wes Anderson: Yes, well Noah Baumbach and I made a script for it and George Clooney is going to play Mr. Fox and we’re working in England.  We have a team there and we’re building the puppets and designing the sets and it’s in its earliest stages of production.

Q: And have you…so the scripts all done and this is definitely the next project?

Wes Anderson: Oh yeah, we’ve already started, so yes.  The script’s done and we’re in full swing over there.

Q: How long will it take you to shoot?  What’s the estimate?

Wes Anderson: Two years from now is the schedule.  It’s supposed to come out in November of 2009, I believe if I have that right.

Q: So you recently made some AT&T commercials.  What attracted you to that project?  How did that all come together?

Wes Anderson: Oh, I don’t know.  That’s not really a project. That’s a commercial.  They just hire you to do a commercial and you try to do your best.

Q: I mean it’s clearly your work and it’s very well done.

Wes Anderson: Well that’s nice of you to say that.  I don’t feel that it’s my work though.  I feel like it’s their…you know I mean…I know that when you think somebody else would have done it differently and I can definitely recognize that but it not my…it’s not expressing anything.  There’s nothing that I’m dying to say.  But we had fun doing those commercials.  We had a great time.  I liked the people we worked with, but I kind of feel like commercials you know, you’re supposed to be kind of anonymous when you do a commercial and then I feel funny like should I be out there talking about the commercial?  The commercial is just supposed to be…I don’t exist in that.

Q: That Oasis song in the AT&T commercials—it’s driving me crazy.

Wes Anderson: I don’t know that. What is that?

Q: All around the world, you know?

Q: The American Express commercial is a little more personal though because it was you know?

Wes Anderson: That’s different.  Basically these people came to me and said write what you want to write.  Here’s a space for you to work in.  I worked with my own collaborators in every way and I wrote the thing, I didn’t write these other things, I kind of adapted them into something but they had a thing to sell… phones I guess?  Like Roman’s in the AT&T commercial.  Jason’s in it. 

Q: The AmEx commercial.

Q: Is there any moment or some joke or humor or some line from your actual experience?

Wes Anderson: Almost everything comes one way or another from our experience.  Pick a part and I’ll tell you if it has a real thing.  Say one.  Just pick something in the movie and I’ll tell you if it came from real life.

Q: The snake?

Wes Anderson: The snake.  Where did we get the snake?

Q: Because I didn’t understand why he took that snake.  I didn’t understand why…?

Wes Anderson: Why he bought it?

Q: Yes, because it doesn’t seem a part of his personality to me.

Wes Anderson: Hmmm.  Well, that’s interesting.  You’re reaction…whatever your reaction is right. It’s how it felt to you.

Q: So did you do that anyway—we were asking what…

Wes Anderson: That was you know…I mean…the I think that was…

Roman Coppola: That was a scorpion originally.

Wes Anderson: That was a scorpion originally and it’s about its a little kind of like childish thing.  I don’t want to name any names but you know a person might travel to a foreign country and want to buy an exotic animal.  It’s not…it’s more expressing more recklessness than interest in this culture or anything else.

Q: So that was nothing that you 3 did which goes back to her question about was there anything….?

Wes Anderson: We didn’t do that, somebody else did.  But it wasn’t me.

Q: You’ve directed and worked with a lot of really cool bands in the past like Phoenix.  Do you have any new discoveries and who are you directing?

Roman Coppola: Bands wise? 

Q: Yeah.

Roman Coppola: I’ve been a little out of the loop of working with bands right now.  I think Coconut Records is an exciting band.  Do you know about them?

Q: A little bit.  Our music editor—I write for a college publication—so our music editor says you have to listen to this.

Roman Coppola: See, you have to listen to Coconut Records.  I might…I just spoke with one of the guys from The Artic Monkeys today.  That’s a possibility, but I’m not so in tune with music videos right now just because we’ve been working on this film for so long.

Q: Can you guys talk about writing in cafes of Paris at night and what that experience was like? 

Wes Anderson: Well, it ends up sounding like a kind of a …like what it wasn’t.  I mean, we ended up…we started writing in Paris because we all happened to be there together and we all like Paris and feel kind of inspired in Paris but most of the time when we worked in Paris we worked in my apartment.  Roman likes to sit on the floor and Jason sits on the sofa and I pace around a lot. Then sometimes we would go— we gotta get out of the house to reset a little bit and get some air, and then we had one café where we’d go if we were going to talk about what are we trying to figure out about our story and our characters.  We had a different café we would go if we wanted to talk about how many days do we want to shoot and who do we want to hire to work in this technical capacity—the business of making the movie.  That way we kept different energies in the different cafes.

Q: I’m going to bring up the 800 pound gorilla in the room. 

Wes Anderson: Don’t.

Q: No, I just wanted to ask about his look in the film and coming up with the look and if you could say anything about how he’s doing?

Wes Anderson: Well, I mean the thing is I don’t like to talk about how he’s doing because I’ve answered that question 2 billion times and the real story is when Owen speaks for himself.  All I can do is repeat myself.  The look for the movie, that’s a part of the …that’s just something we had to imagine and invent for this character that’s been in this accident. For me it’s fun to kind of create something like that.  We had Frances Hannon our make up artist who helped me to design that and it was partly inspired by a guy that I saw in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome about 3 years ago who’d clearly been in a bad motorcycle accident and my feeling was this guy had come straight from the hospital to this church…this sort of spectacular church in Rome. And that was the look he had.  He was on the verge of tears as he darted around the place and listened to a priest over here and prayed over there and lit a candle over in another place and I was very caught off-guard by him and I imagined what could have happened to this guy and it seemed like he’d obviously been in a near-death experience and then also I got the feeling that maybe there was somebody else involved and so that was just part of the inspiration for this character was just our kind of imagination of what might be behind somebody like that.