The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

[tpfkabi]

(So far the only person Anderson's been turned down by was Yoko Ono, who wouldn't allow him to use the Beatles' "Hey Jude" and "I'm Looking Through You" in "The Royal Tenenbaums.")

Sorry to get off topic, but I always wondered why he was denied to license Beatles' songs, but he was able to license John Lennon Songs in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums.

it's very very rare that an actual Beatles' recording gets used in a film. maybe they figured that their music would be used so much people would get tired of it. it's also frustrating that Wes uses great Rolling Stones' songs and never gets them on the soundtrack. in a way i guess that's smart on the RS's part because i've bought every album of theirs that has a song from his movies.

[modage]

(So far the only person Anderson's been turned down by was Yoko Ono, who wouldn't allow him to use the Beatles' "Hey Jude" and "I'm Looking Through You" in "The Royal Tenenbaums.")

Sorry to get off topic, but I always wondered why he was denied to license Beatles' songs, but he was able to license John Lennon Songs in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums.

you have to get permission from all beatles (or estates) and he wasnt able to get those two because george harrison was dying at the time.

[pete]

just as I don't understand how people could love AI, I don't understand how people could not like this movie.  what's not to like?  even if you weren't moved you oughta at least laugh out loud a lot.  man, I was just in tears all the time, like when watching Almost Famous (or any in-flight movie).  Though I dunno, I think Last Life in the Universe might be my favorite movie of the year...
This movie did not disappoint me at all.  I loved it.

[tpfkabi]

(So far the only person Anderson's been turned down by was Yoko Ono, who wouldn't allow him to use the Beatles' "Hey Jude" and "I'm Looking Through You" in "The Royal Tenenbaums.")

Sorry to get off topic, but I always wondered why he was denied to license Beatles' songs, but he was able to license John Lennon Songs in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums.

you have to get permission from all beatles (or estates) and he wasnt able to get those two because george harrison was dying at the time.

this is a guess, or you have read this? i'm not doubting you, it's just that it is very very rare to see an actual Beatles recording in a film. why weren't they able to use Beatles songs (the original recordings) in American Beauty and I Am Sam? my only explanation to fit in with what you said is that they ask for a very very high price.

[pete]

out of curiosity -- for those who saw zissou; how was the quality of the film print? mine was very washed out and desaturated -- i think it's a result of what I think is a very flawed post technique, digital intermediate. D.I. looks great on dvd and digitally projected but on print it looks muddy and flat. did anyone see a print that had the usual vibrant color pallette that his previous films established. the shitty print really detracted from the film -- curious to see how this looks on dvd. this whole D.I. process is a real problem, that will most likely only be solved once the exhibitors switch to digital projection -- which is far from ideal, but unfortunately the most commmon outcome. i feel if one is going to a projectedd film print, avoid D.I. at all costs -- however one must take into consideration their final dvd image which will benefit form teh D.I process -- its a long winded subject -- any opinions?

but like 90% of all films from the past three, four years were done on DI.  I don't think Bottle Rocket and Rushmore were ever that vibrant.  Rushmore was particularly flat.  DI also has created some vibrant looking pictures, like O Brother Where Art Thou.  The Green scenes in Hero were processed with DI.  Films have lost their integrity through all sorts of chemical processes and transfers, super 35 and anamorphic included, it's a generational thing, I don't really think you can blame DI.  I think most of Wes's films are desaturated and I think that's an aesthetic choice.

[tpfkabi]

apparently this isn't opening too wide...........it looks like it's not showing around here
=(

[ono]

Look for the 25th, not the 24th.  It doesn't start Friday like most movies do.  That's what had me confused at first.

[tpfkabi]

yeah, i did. what pisses me off is that the paper's online entertainment section has a review of the movie. i'm guessing they just get it from a national news service since i believe I Heart Huckabees was reviewed and it never came here.

[modage]

The Life Aquatic: Out to Sea With Team Zissou
Source: Coming Soon.net December 22, 2004

For The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson's fourth film, the director crafted a high seas adventure starring Bill Murray as an acclaimed oceanographer hunting the legendary "jaguar shark" that killed his friend. Along for this quest is his newly discovered son Ned Plimpton, played by Owen Wilson, an actor whose career has been linked to Anderson's both as writing partner and actor, since his first movie Bottle Rocket. (Murray has also worked extensively with the director, appearing in his last two films.) This film had a few new variables, such as actors Willem Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum, but for the first time, Anderson collaborated with two other filmmakers, writing it with indie director Noah Baumbach and using the stop motion animation of Henry Selick to bring the sea creatures to life.

ComingSoon.net talked to Anderson and his collaborators both old and new about every aspect of this very unique movie. (Look for our exclusive interview with Selick sometime in the next week.)

How They Came Up With The Idea
Wes Anderson: The germ of the idea was the Cousteau stuff from TV that I watched growing up. Jane Goodall, National Geographic specials, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and all those hero scientists we don't have too many of any more. The name Zissou comes from this French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, one of my favorite photographers. His brother was nicknamed "Zissou," and he was this amazing inventor around the turn of the century who built airplanes and little cars that would go downhill and things for going under water. [Lartigue] took some of his most beautiful photographs of him with his crazy inventions that worked or didn't work. I just liked the spirit of that character.
Noah Baumbach: When we first started talking, he kept referring to a short story he had written, and I didn't know what was he talking about. I think it was basically a paragraph. From what I remember, it was the idea of an oceanographer who had a show called "The Life Aquatic With Steve Cocteau." He was showing me his notebook and it had things like "birds fly around house" and the cross-section of the boat. He always had that idea, which I loved. We had already been working together because I had written a script based on my childhood, and he really liked the script and came on as a producer for that. I was going to direct, so he was helping me cut it down and focus it.


Steve Zissou And Ned Plimpton
Bill Murray: [Wes's characters] don't have any controls on them, especially this fellow I play. He doesn't have any censors that say the next thing you're going to say might be bad behavior, so you might want to hold that back. He just sort of lets go, and all the emotions are expressed. That's kind of fun to play. You don't get to do that in life that often, since you're supposed to obey some rules of politeness or respect. We don't have time for that in the movies. People try to make characters like this all the time and they usually fail. I'm just surprised to hear that it's based on me. Some of the lines in the script I've actually said, but (Zissou) has some good qualities.
Baumbach: I think we always knew that we could push the character really far in terms of we didn't have to worry in a lot of cases about him being likeable. I think what was a real pleasure knowing that Bill Murray was going to do it, was that you can push a lot of things, because I think he's so innately sympathetic as an actor. That was the main thing.
Owen Wilson: When I got the script, I didn't really see myself as this character, because he seemed sort of like a straight man and very sort of sincere and kind of innocent. When I went to meet with Wes in Rome and started working on it. We came up with making him more of a Southern gentleman, so then he became more fun for me to play.

Anderson's New Writing Partner
Baumbach: I didn't think about it beforehand, just because Wes and I have been friends, and the collaboration came out of our getting to know each other and our dinners together. I think that's probably why we wrote the movie in an Italian restaurant, because it was a way to fool ourselves into working, because we were used to meeting there anyway to hang out. I knew Owen a little bit through Wes, but it sort of felt like a whole other thing. I never felt like I was replacing anybody.
Anderson: To me the tone is pretty similar to the other movies that Owen and I did together, but I think the fact that it's an adventure, and there's a pirate attack and bigger things, that sort of makes a shift. But I still feel like the characters in this movie could walk into one of the other movies that I've done or vice versa in a way that they wouldn't be very comfortable walking into somebody else's movie.
Wilson: It's hard for me to see a huge difference, maybe because I'm too close to it. So I read the script and I didn't miss my voice in it. It seemed like he didn't miss a beat with Noah, and I thought they did a good job.
Baumbach: The way Wes and I wrote, we came up with everything together right in front of each other. We didn't write separately and bring it together like how I hear other people collaborate. So by the time it was finished, it really felt like a crushed version of both of us. To me, when I saw the movie, it felt very much like what we wrote, but it also felt like a Wes Anderson movie to me.
Anderson: In a way, because we always had Owen in mind because we were writing for him. We had a character, and we knew he was going to play a big role, so I was always conscious of him being involved.
Baumbach: I always knew that Wes was going to make the movie, so I went into it with the idea to contribute to what was going to be very much his world. The concept of using an oceanographer was his. It was a movie that I was never going to come up with myself, so it was great to be able to participate that way. We're both very polite, so it was always very passive/aggressive but in the end, we lived with it so long, we both had a pretty good idea what we thought should be in there.

Writing In An Italian Restaurant
Anderson: It's our neighborhood place, and they don't mind us taking over the back table and staying there all day long, so they let us have it as an office, rent-free.
Baumbach: We used the restaurant as much as possible, but I guess we did keep office hours. A lot of the fish are named after items in the menu, and there was a photo of Florence, which we'd stare at.

Improvisation
Baumbach: What is really great with what Wes does is that he casts a lot of actors who, in a lot of cases, improvise in other movies and have this chaotic spirit as actors, but when they're in his movies, they really stick to the material. There's something in that sort of conflict that really works great.
Anderson: One thing that came from Bill was where he points a gun at the pregnant reporter. That wasn't in the script. In fact, he did it when he was off screen, and I just saw something coming from the bottom of the frame on the monitor, a little black thing, and I didn't know what it was but then I realized. 'Did you just point that gun at a pregnant woman?'


Shooting Such A Big Movie
Anderson: I never felt daunted by it, because I always felt like it gave me some sense of purpose. I had a lot of things to figure out, and that's like a chance to come up with some new ideas. If I had known what it really was going to be like, I would have been very daunted. Most of the movie is the same as the other movies I've done-- two people talk in one room, and then these two people talk in another room, and then maybe we get three for a scene, and then we're back to two, and then a couple of times in the movie there's a whole bunch of them--they all just have these different conversations. In the case of this movie, every now and then a scene happens under water or they are talking with their helmets on or something like that. The scene we do have with them underwater having a conversation could very easily have happened in some lobby somewhere. It has nothing to do with being underwater. The thing with this one was that I never filmed on a sound stage before. It's about building all of these huge sets. We built this compound next to this castle and we renovated this ship that we bought in South Africa, and they were just huge things to do. The other thing that was new for me was that there was another unit going on in San Francisco doing this animation, and I've never had somebody working somewhere else making part of the movie. Each of those things was just a separate problem to deal with and I learned all kinds of new things but it wasn't ever a change in my approach to how the movie's going to be made. It's just new problems to deal with.
Murray: I knew we were going to Italy-you couldn't make this movie in America at this price-- and I knew it was going to be big. I knew there was going to be a ship involved as well as a set as big as the ship. I knew that was where he was headed, because he had been going this way for some time. All directors, once they have some success, want to spend a whole heck of a lot of money.
Wilson: I don't see a big change, at least in the way Wes directs. I think maybe he gets more confidence and a bigger budget and more time to shoot, so he has more time to get things exactly the way he wants it. The way he directed me in "Bottle Rocket" is not that different from the way he did it in "Life Aquatic". It's always been pretty consistent.
Baumbach: Wes is incredibly precise and specific, and there's this idea that he knows exactly what he wants. He doesn't know it going into it but he knows when he sees it. The writing process, we really built it out of nothing like putting one thing in front of another, we knew sometimes what we were going to get, but even with a precision and specificity in a way knowing somewhere in him what kind of movie he wanted to make. He also had no idea what kind of movie he was going to make and neither did I. I think that's what makes it so unusual, too. What I love about the movie is that it's not like anything. You can't compare it to anything whether you like it or not. I think a lot of that really did come from out of thin air.

The Ensemble Cast
Murray: It was like a family on the set; we were stuck with each other. You really do bond and have to look out for each other, because making movies is far more dangerous than people appreciate, and being at sea on a ship is even more dangerous.
Wilson: We would work out together a lot. (laughs). No, how do you work on your chemistry? I think it was just going along with what the script called for. It wasn't that we did so much bonding outside of work. In fact, we never really hung out that much. [Bill] really had to work a lot because he was in almost every single scene, so there was probably a little resentment that I had left. I saw him not too long ago, and said, "God, don't you miss Rome? I loved it." He was like, "No, I don't." He had to work his ass off there, and I had more time to enjoy it.

Murray's Misery
Murray: I was physically and emotionally drained after it, not just from the work. It was a torturous experience to be away from home for that long, so I hated going to work. Personally, I was so miserable, that it was really a challenge to work every day because I was so lonely and missed my folks so much. It was what like I imagined being in prison is like. And the weather was miserable. You don't think of Italy as anything but sunny, picking a grape and lying on a hillside, but it got bone-cold out on the Mediterranean, shooting at night. You got cold like nobody's business, colder than I've ever been in Chicago.
Anderson: [Bill] has to go through his own process, because I have so much I have to deal with. I just worry about what is going to happen in the scenes, and he's always there in the scenes. He did get cold, and he worked every day of the movie, and it was kind of brutal for him, but also, he loves being in Rome. It's almost a shtick now about how miserable he was in the movie, but I was there and I saw him have some amazing times. He brought that onto the set almost every day of the shoot and there are worse tortures than going to Italy for six months.


Those Portuguese Bowie Songs
Anderson: Well, Bowie's one of my favorites, and I've never used him in a movie, so I just thought I was going to have a bunch of songs that were going to be sung by one of the characters on the deck of the ship. It seemed like Bowie was the best bet.
Baumbach: At one point, the Zissou team was less international, but once we came up with this international flavor and made [the character] be Pele, we said we should keep the Bowie. None of us could have imagined that it would have turned out as well as it did and that he would actually be a pop star in Brazil. I don't think Wes even cast him knowing how well he played guitar at that point, so that worked out great. But that was written into the script as just a line: "Another David Bowie song is played."
Anderson: Bowie's heard them and he said he loved them. I never spoke to him, but a friend of mine heard him on the radio talking about a "top secret project" in which a fellow sings some of his songs in Portuguese and it's "very interesting." That's the only report I've heard.

That Unwieldy Title
Baumbach: That's the name of his show. We called it "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" the whole time and then, I kept seeing it referred to as "The Life Aquatic" and I assumed someone somewhere thought it should be changed. Then I saw it came back, so I was glad, because it seems not like the title of a movie.
Anderson: Somewhere along the way, people got the impression that the title had been changed, but it never was. They were just simplifying it in press releases and stuff, but I never wanted to change the title because it's probably safe to say it's kind of a terrible title in and of itself. Any time anybody asked me what the movie was called, ever since we were first writing it and decided that's what it's called, I was reluctant to say, because people are not sure what to make of it. I do feel like it can be a good title once it's connected to the movie and it's set. It's just a title that's hard. It doesn't serve the purpose of grabbing people when they know nothing about the movie.

[MacGuffin]

Bill Murray Sports Tiny Trunks for Film

Bill Murray's choice of swimwear in his new movie leaves little to the imagination. But the star of "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" says he wasn't embarrassed to be seen in a tiny bathing suit.

"Being in a Speedo with other men in Speedos, you know, is like you're on a swimming team," he told reporters at a recent interview. "It's the other men that are not in Speedos that are the problem because they're kind of going, 'Can you get a load of the guy in the Speedo?'"

The 54-year-old actor said he didn't see his character being physically vain.

"I like to say I made the acting choice to have a little bit of a belly. I could've gotten really in shape, but I didn't think Steve Zissou would be a guy who would be completely buff," he said. "I actually had to get a little out of shape."

[tpfkabi]

hallelujah, this is showing 40 miles away!!

[NEON MERCURY]

i saw this and it was good

[Sleuth]

i saw this and it was good

yeah

[cowboykurtis]

Films have lost their integrity through all sorts of chemical processes and transfers, super 35 and anamorphic included, it's a generational thing, I don't really think you can blame DI.

this statement doesnt make sense to me -- can you explain... how are the anamorphic and super 35 processes lacking integrity? -- also super 35 and anamorphic have nothing to do with chemical processing/transfering.

[The Perineum Falcon]

i saw this and it was good

This has been seconded.

or perhaps thirded since sleuth seconded it firsted.