You know a Wes Anderson movie when you see it — but you also know it when you hear it. While the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic and singular style has evolved over the years, one enduring element of that style has been the rhythm and pace of his dialogue. It’s an approach more than one cast member from his new film Asteroid City compared to a different art form when talking to Consequence: “The way he writes is a little like music,” says Maya Hawke. “And I’m such a fan of Wes’s music.”
Asteroid City exists within different layers of reality, as we see both a 1950s-era television play about a strange extraterrestrial event as well as some of its behind-the-scenes drama, and the tone shifts accordingly from layer to layer. What remains constant, though, is Anderson’s specificity when it comes to what’s happening in every given scene.
“You have the dialogue and it’s sort of set in stone, which is great, because it’s really pretty good, Not much to do there,” laughs Scarlett Johansson, who plays movie star Midge Campbell in the film. “And then you get to fill in all the blanks. It’s like you have the restriction of the dialogue and then sometimes the setting that you’re in, and then the interpretation of it is really up to you. You can really take it wherever you want to go, and Wes is excited to do that with you.”
This is why, Johansson says, “you work the scene so much, because it changes. There’s so much in there, and things that you throw away are also very meaningful things. It’s fun to play within those limitations.”
Knowing what Anderson specifically wants isn’t too tough, because as cast member Hope Davis explains, “he makes an animated film of the movie and he does all of the character’s voices in every scene. You’ve already heard what he wants the scene to sound like, the pace that he wants it to go at, where the joke’s gonna land. And for those of us who are huge fans, you want to just kind of hit those notes.”
Davis plays the parent of a gifted child attending a science convention in the titular town, and describes Anderson’s style like so: “It’s at once both very conversational and very easy to kind of learn and say, but there’s something elevated about it. There’s a level of wit about it that just elevates it from everyday conversations. Reading through the script, I just chuckled on every page — he’s an incredible writer.”
Asteroid City (Focus Features)
Stephen Park, who plays another parent in the film, agrees, adding that “I love how he likes to overlap dialogue, and make it very conversational. And sometimes he likes mumbling little things under your breath, so maybe you’re not meant to catch everything. It’s like a beautiful song that he’s creating through dialogue.”
As a self-described fan, Davis says it’s not hard to slip into that rhythm, and “you do a lot of takes, so if he was trying to nudge something in a direction, he does it really effortlessly.”
It even helps “just being with him,” Park says, because “you kind of fall into his vibe. A lot of it, I think, is unconscious. It just starts to happen naturally. It just gets into your system.”
Rupert Friend, the play-within-a-play’s singing cowboy, notes that “Wes writes very specific, deliberate, beautiful dialogue. So it’s like a recipe for a very, very incredible cake. You don’t want to be throwing in handfuls of this or that — you do want to follow it, because it’s perfect the way it is. So there’s no need to embellish or add in some ums and errs or whatever you might have to do.”
As a young schoolteacher who has a flirtation with Friend’s cowboy, Hawke didn’t struggle to find her character’s voice, because she says it was all on the page for her. “[His scripts] are heavily specifically punctuated; they oftentimes give you advice as an actor to remove all the punctuation from your dialogue and just write it out plainly,” she says. “But in Wes’ case, I believe that the punctuation is there very specifically, like rests and holds on a piece of music, and you really want to pay attention. Even a question mark at the end of a phrase is a melodic cue in a lot of ways.”
As Friend notes, on other productions, when an actor is given “terrible dialogue,” it changes the process, because “you have to kind of sugar coat it. With Wes, you just let the words do the work, and if you do that and you trust them and you trust him, the scenes carry themselves, I find.”
Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman, and Tom Hanks behind the scenes of Asteroid City, courtesy of Focus Features
It’s a process that takes work, of course, no matter how much you’ve worked with Anderson before. Jason Schwartzman’s relationship with Anderson is different from that of his fellow cast members, since he’s worked with him the longest — their first film together was 1998’s Rushmore.
In the 25 years since then, Schwartzman says that “every time I’ve tried to do what I think Wes wants it to be or hears it like, or imagines it, it’s not right. [Because] I’ve always found that there’s been like this desire to go more… I think that’s just because we’ve known each other for so long, it’s a weird thing to say, but there’s, like, no pillow tuck. If I say something and I’m not being totally honest, he’s like, [skeptical ‘mm-hmm’]. When someone knows you that well, it’s like a sibling… It’s awesome because there’s a shorthand, but… he knows when I’m not being the best I can be.”
But once it’s working, it really works. As Hawke says, “all the information is really there [in the script], but that doesn’t mean that you’re stuck inside of it. It just means that you need to learn the music in order to interpret it properly.”
She then paraphrased Friend: “Rupert has been talking about this a lot, about classical musicians — that a great melody is always the same thing, but it doesn’t mean it’s oppressive to play it. You get to still express yourself through that. And that’s in fact a privilege.”
Asteroid City is in limited release now, and will be in theaters nationwide beginning June 23rd. Video edited by Maura Fallon.
