Adrien Brody Didn’t Base His ‘Asteroid City’ Director Character on Wes Anderson, but He Sure Loves His Process
The Wes Anderson aesthetic, tone, and style are unmistakable. When this particular writer commented that you can recognize an Anderson film “within 10 seconds,” the subject of this interview interjected, “even less!” — and he’s not wrong. But there’s also the inherent charm of his often recurring cast of stars. Now appearing in his fifth Anderson feature, no one is a bigger fan of Anderson’s work and process than Oscar winner Adrien Brody.
So once you hear that Brody, who talks with obvious joy and understanding about everything from Anderson’s ability to cast incredible young talent and the way he uses animatics to plot his films, is playing a director in “Asteroid City” — a theatrical director, but a director nonetheless — the question seems obvious: is he playing Anderson?
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No. Not really. OK, maybe a little, but certainly not more than his primary inspiration: Elia Kazan.
“I’ve spent a lifetime with filmmakers,” Brody told IndieWire. “I’ve lost count how many movies I’ve made, but I’ve been working professionally since I was 12, and I’ve probably spent more time on a film set than many of the people I’ve worked with. I’ve learned a lot through the years, and everyone is so unique and obviously that informs some of my work in portraying this man.” (To wit: he’s Schubert Green, the director of the play version of what’s being made into a movie, which is what “Asteroid City” is about and what we promise makes much more sense on the screen in yet another Anderson gem.)
Brody started acting when he was just a kid, notching both an Off-Broadway appearance and a PBS television film before he was 13. By age 16, he had his first film credit (the anthology feature “New York Stories,” appearing in Francis Ford Coppola’s short “Life Without Zo?”). He’s still the youngest person to win the Oscar for Best Actor (for Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist”). Over the course of his decades in Hollywood, he’s been directed by Spike Lee, Terrence Malick, Rian Johnson, Peter Jackson, and M. Night Shyamalan.
“I referenced Kazan in a lot of ways, and Marlon Brando as well, but mostly Kazan just at that era,” Brody said. “It’s funny because, in ‘Blonde,’ I got to play Arthur Miller, and to some extent, these guys were pals. But Kazan really changed a lot of our expectation of what filmmaking and performance is, the expectations of that performance. And actors like Brando obviously kind of set the bar for actors of future generations to honor a more realistic emotive form of expression than what was the norm of the time. So I like those aspects of the film and Wes honoring that, and it’s also playful within that.”
OK, so maybe there’s a bit of Anderson in there, if only because he’s so present in all of his work. “Even as an actor, when I am fortunate to play the protagonist in a film, [there’s] usually an element of the filmmaker [in there], if the filmmaker’s a writer on that,” Brody said. “There are a lot of qualities that, if you look, are present in that individual or relatable to that individual, so it’s there for the taking if you’re present.”
When Anderson cast Brody in 2007’s “The Darjeeling Limited,” the actor, best known for heavy features like “The Pianist,” “The Thin Red Line,” and “Summer of Sam” was hardly an obvious pick for the lighter touch of an Anderson film. But it worked, and the pair have remained close, with Brody going on to also star in Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and “The French Dispatch.”
“I’m incredibly honored and feel really privileged to have had such a long friendship and professional relationship with Wes,” Brody said. “He’s single-handedly influenced my life in many positive ways, from our time traversing India together and all these interesting towns throughout the world, G?rlitz in Germany and Chinchón here in Spain. They’re kind of magical experiences where he pulls together so many interesting people, several of which have remained close friends. … I love the guy and we’re friends. He and my mother are friends! My mom’s been on every set, and it’s a family. It’s very unusual.”
Asked if Anderson has ever told Brody why the filmmaker thought of him for more comedic features after the Oscar winner had spent so much time in darker projects, Brody paused. “He hasn’t told me that,” the actor said. “I think he’s seen within me the capacity for that work. … In my case, at that point in my career, I’d done some comedic work, but the films that I was known for were very dramatic roles. It’s my responsibility to represent those films and the subject matter, and there’s not really room for that levity. But the whole beauty of being an actor is to be diverse in the characters that you portray and the style in which you portray characters. And Wes has been very helpful in expanding that for me. And I’ve done a number of much more overtly comedic work since then.”
So, what’s it like when Anderson lets Brody know he’s got something for him? Well, first there needs to be a script. “Wes will envision people perhaps as he’s writing, but he comes to you when he has something to share,” Brody said. And when he does? “There’s a musicality in the writing and a pace and an intrinsically sharp, ironic text. I feel like filmmakers try to duplicate that, and Wes does it so well because it comes from a real place. He feels it and sees it and finds humor in all that peculiarity.”
He also loves the team around Anderson, including key grip Sanjay Sami (who has been with the pair since “The Darjeeling Limited” and is, as Brody tells it, “essential”) to frequent Anderson cinematographer Robert Yeoman. “For the timing to work for certain shots, so much is dependent on this one individual’s expertise and understanding of Wes’ specificity,” he added.
For Brody, that specificity allows him to tap into both comedy and drama, a marriage of tones that he revels in. “There’s comedy and tragedy in real life,” Brody said. “And there’s a need to not play comedy overtly in comedy, unless you’re doing something that’s very superficially funny and which is also fun to do, but the key is to be well in on that joke and play it very straight and oblivious to the joke. That’s what kills, right?”
“Tone is so important and being on the same page tonally with the people you’re working with, and sometimes you’re not all on the same page,” he said. “Sometimes the producer has a very different idea of what he would like of your portrayal than the director, and sometimes the other actor is doing something that is not necessarily in the same space that you feel you should be, so it’s a matter of aligning everyone’s vision to someplace that gels and then being present enough in that moment to hear it and modulate your reactions within the context of that.”
Aligning shared visions? That’s not a problem on an Anderson set, Brody said, pointing to the filmmaker’s use of animatics (essentially, moving storyboards) as a visual reference and a tool for everyone to get a sense of the overall vision of the film.
“It’s a wonderful tool for the actors to know the kind of tone of the film,” he said. “Wes will actually recite all the characters, interpret all those things, not that he’s asking you to do that exactly, but it’s a very meaningful guideline to help you get a sense of pace. And Wes’ pace is quite hitched up and demanding, so there’s no room for a thought or a pause that isn’t intentional. You have to be able to do all the physicality and deliver every line with some subtlety, but never skipping a beat and keeping it well within the time constraints that he sees it to be. And it’s very exciting. It’s very exciting.”
Focus Features releases “Asteroid City” in select theaters on Friday, June 16, with expansion to follow on Friday, June 23.
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