Chad Taylor

What sort of bird are you?




Moonrise Kingdom and Prometheus have a lot in common. Both are made by Kubrick fans: Wes Anderson quotes the camera moves from Full Metal Jacket; Ridley Scott quotes the plot of 2001 and Keir Dullea's old-man makeup. Both movies are set in artificial landscapes and populated by name actors: on first viewing, it's a little hard to work out who the story is really about. And both stories turn on the importance of maps and geographic locations. In Prometheus the key action is laid out in a spooky digital graphic of the alien interior; in Moonrise Kingdom the local geography is described by Bob Balaban.

The ubiquitous Bob Balaban talked to the Onion AV Club about working with Wes:
AVC: There's a succession of shots in the film where you're positioned along the bottom edge of the frame, a technique that only works if you're framed exactly the same in every shot.

BB: Wes planned all that and showed me his various visual experiments before we began. It was a great way of him telling me, without ever saying, "Do what I'm doing, because I'm playing the narrator now." All I could think was, "Oh, I see. I'm not supposed to act very much. I'm just supposed to say what's going on." He never had to tell me that; he just showed it to me. I don't think he did it with any grand plan in mind, other than it's nice for an actor to know where he is in the frame, because it informs you to know those things. But I learned a whole lot more from him.
In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Anderson discussed the influence of Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma:
"Brian De Palma is one of my favorite directors ever, and has such the most sophisticated visual style of anybody," he observes. "But Brian De Palma is somebody who can take a giant complicated action sequence and say, I know precisely how to execute this. I'm a completely different kind of moviemaker -- and the basic crucial talents of that are precisely what I lack, probably."
I saw Prometheus in 2D but dear God, if there is one living director I would like to see make a movie in 3D, it's Wes Anderson. It would be like a two and a half-hour Viewmaster reel, or one of those craft dioramas you used to make in a shoebox on a rainy day. Please, Hollywood: make it happen.