Wes Anderson and the cast reveal the sources of inspiration of the new movie that arrives in theaters in Italy on September 28, 2023
Asteroid City is released in Italian cinemas after the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this past May 23. The direction is by Wes Anderson, writer of the screenplay with frequent collaborator Roman Coppola. The protagonist is Jason Schwartzman, favorite actor of the helmer who had directed him in seven previous movies starting with Rushmore (1998). Jason is Roman’s cousin as the son of Talia Shire, sister of Francis Coppola.
Wes Anderson © Roger Do Minh-Focus Feature
Set in 1955, the movie starts in Black & White with a television presenter (Bryan Cranston) who recounts the staging of a play at New York’s Tarkington theater, that inspires an imaginary movie in vivid color set in the desert of New Mexico. The name of the small prefabricated village comes from the fact that it had been built around the crater of a meteorite landed in the year 3007 before Christ, while on the horizon we notice the mushroom clouds of the atomic bomb explosions, that continue to be secretly tested in the nearby military base of Los Alamos, where the atom bomb was invented in 1945.
Not dramatic like Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan, but comedic like Don’t Worry Darling by Olivia Wilde, Asteroid City has the typical style and precision of details of the other movies by the auteur director.
Wes Anderson says: “The 1950s represent the golden age of Broadway theaters and of the Actors Studio, I was thinking of actors like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, of playwrights like Sam Shepard and Arthur Miller, while the desert reminds us of western movies in Cinemascope.”
Adrien Brody, who plays the director of the play, explains: “The beauty of the movie lies in the nostalgia for this period of America history, when directors like Elia Kazan and actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean changed the style of acting in the theatre as well as in the movies.”
Anderson as well mentions as his inspiration Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and Elia Kazan, director of the play by Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire (1947-1949) and of the 1951 movie version, both with Marlon Brando as the protagonist. Kazan had founded the Actors Studio in 1947, directed by Lee Strasberg starting from 1951.
Scarlett Johansson, who plays a movie star, confesses that she based her performance on Bette Davis, a theater actress enlisted by Hollywood in 1930, when the movies, after the transition from the silent era to sound, needed actors who knew how to modulate their voice, because of their theater experience.
Anderson adds that he was also thinking of Marilyn Monroe, who had attended the Actors Studio, and of her last movie, The Misfits (1961), a neo-western shot in Nevada, directed by John Huston, screenplay by Arthur Miller, her third husband.
Bryan Cranston claims to have been inspired by Rod Serling, creator of the science fiction television series Twilight Zone (1959).
The obsession with UFOs and extraterrestrials typical of the 1950s is the central theme of Asteroid City, set in a village where young astronomers (Junior Stargazers) gather to receive an annual award, accompanied by their parents. Among them is Jason Schwartzman, a bearded war photographer with four children, recently widowed, and a grandfather (Tom Hanks), father of the deceased wife (Margot Robbie), who therefore is not seen in the hypothetical movie in color, but appears in one of the Black & White scenes set in New York.
Asteroid City is put under quarantine, as it happened all over the world after the arrival of COVID-19 in March 2020, by an Army general (Jeffrey Wright) to avoid the spreading of the news of the landing of a spaceship from which a planetary visitor descended. Intended are the references to the movie by Steven Spielberg Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
The shooting of Asteroid City took place in the fall of 2021 during the pandemic, not in the American SouthWest, but in Spain, around Chinchón, near Madrid.