Asteroid City, Wes Anderson and the cast reveal the inspiration behind the new movie hitting theaters

Asteroid city It will be shown in Italian cinemas after its premiere at Cannes on May 23. The trend is by Wes AndersonHe wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Roman Coppola. The main character is Jason SchwartzmanThe director’s favorite actor who directed him in seven previous films, starting with Rushmore (1998). Jason is Roman’s cousin and son Talia Shiresister Francis Coppola.

The film takes place in 1955, and begins in black and white with a television announcer (Bryan Cranston) which recounts the performance of a play at the Tarkington Theater in New York, which inspires a colorful fantasy film set in the New Mexico desert. The name of the prefabricated hamlet comes from the fact that it was built around the crater of a meteorite that fell in 3007 BC, while on the horizon you can see mushroom clouds resulting from nuclear bomb explosions, which are still ongoing. It was secretly tested at the nearby Los Alamos military base, Where the atomic bomb was invented in 1945.

Not as dramatic Oppenheimer to Christopher Nolanbut also a sense of humor do not worry, honey to Olivia Wilde, Asteroid city It has the typical style and precision of detail of the director’s other films. Wes Anderson says:The 1950s represented the golden age of Broadway and the Actors Studio, I was thinking of actors like Paul Newman And Joan Woodwardby playwrights such as Sam Shepard and Arthur Miller, while the desert reminds us of Western films in CinemaScope». Adrien Brodywho plays the play’s director, explains instead: “The beauty of the film lies in the nostalgia for this period in American history, when the directors love it Elia Kazan And actors like Marlon Brando And James Dean They changed the style of acting both in theater and in cinema»

Anderson also cites Brando, James Dean, Montgomery CliftAnd Elia Kazan, director of the comedy film Tennessee Williams Tram called Desiderio (1947-1949) and the 1951 film version both starring Marlon Brando. Kazan founded the Actors Studio in 1947 by directing Lee Strasberg Starting in 1951. Scarlett JohanssonWho plays a movie star, admits she was based on it Bette DavisAn actress recruited by Hollywood in 1930, when cinema, which had moved from silence to sound, needed actors who knew how to modify their voices due to their theatrical experience.

Anderson adds that he also thought about that Marlin Monroewho attended the Actors Studio, and the last film she starred in was The Misfits (1961), a neo-Western film set in Nevada, directed by John Hustonscreenplay by Arthur Miller, her third husband. Bryan Cranston He claims to be inspired by Rod Serling, creator of the sci-fi television series On the edge of reality (Twilight Zone, 1959). The obsession with aliens and UFOs that was prevalent in the 1950s is the main theme of the film. Asteroid cityThe film takes place in a village where young astronomers (Junior Stargazers) gather for an annual prize, accompanied by their parents, including Jason Schwartzman, a bearded war photographer recently widowed with four children, and his grandfather (Tom Hanks), the father of the missing person. wife (Margot Robbie), and thus does not appear in the default color film, but does appear in one of the black-and-white scenes in New York.

Asteroid city He is placed under quarantine, as has happened all over the world After the arrival of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) in March 2020by an army general (Jeffrey Wright) to prevent the spread of news that a spacecraft has landed and that an interplanetary visitor has landed. References were needed for the film Steven Spielberg Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Asteroid City was filmed in the fall of 2021 during the pandemic, not in the American Southwest, but in Spain, around Chinchón, near Madrid.
Anderson concludes that the film is also a reflection of How to deal with the pain caused by the death of loved onesone of “The most important milestones in our lives»

© All rights reserved