The Wonderful World of Wes Anderson

Part One: The Grand Berlin Hotel

The second month of the Year of our Lord, 2018. The eve of the Year of the Dog, Chinese zodiac. Given the meticulousness of Isle of Dogs' Divine Creator, Wes Anderson, could it really be by chance that the dawning of annum canis coincides with the film's premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival?

The stop-motion film's stars have come from Japan and Los Angeles and Scotland and New York to be at the five-star hotel in which presidents (Clinton, B.; Obama, B.; and Bush, G.H.W. and G.W.) have slept and Blanket Jackson was dangled off a balcony by Michael. These celebrities came by air and by train, past doormen wearing top hats and lobby boys wearing embroidered fezzes. They walked under the runaway Happy Birthday balloon bumping against the 50-foot stained-glass ceiling, past a miniature kumquat tree and topiary bushes and Grecian statues with marble cloths covering marble genitalia and chairs upholstered in what seems to be an oversize version of the corduroy famously worn by Anderson himself.

Tilda Swinton in Chanel, Jeff Goldblum in a fedora, Bill Murray in flared floral golf pants of his own design. Bob Balaban, Greta Gerwig, 11-year-old Koyu Rankin, who plays Isle of Dogs' hero—a boy who takes down a corrupt government to save his pup. Anderson's creative partners Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, Kunichi Nomura. Bryan Cranston. Liev Schreiber. The puppet-maker who knows precisely where every one of the 321 freckles on each version of Gerwig's puppet need to be hand-painted…

Almost all have worked with Anderson before. The swarm is a tiny fraction of the more than 600 people it took to make his newest—and possibly greatest—movie. And they're all here to pay tribute to Isle of Dogs and the majesty of Wes Anderson. Who, oh dear, is just realizing that he made off with the GQ-supplied tie that was knotted around his neck by Murray. Anderson had just liked the look of it, but now it occurs to him: Has his singular, lifelong curation of aesthetic pleasure caused bother?

"I don't mean to walk off with somebody's necktie," he frets, fingering the orange Tom Ford knit. "If they say, 'We have others,' then I'm happy to wear it. I met Tom Ford a few times. He's very nice. He's from Texas. I'm from Texas."

If Anderson is this worried about inconveniencing anyone with one little tie, you wonder how he'd react if he really thought about the fact that the people in this hotel have collectively spent dozens of years and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles in service of his art. GQ was in the room to talk to all those people about why they go to the ends of the earth to work with Anderson.

Part Two: The Pack Assembles

Tilda Swinton (Moonrise Kingdom, Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs): Suffice it to say, membership of this magnificent and joyful circus band is one of the great joys of my life.

Jeff Goldblum (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs): He gets the best people around him because he's such a genius.

F. Murray Abraham (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs): When you meet him, you want to be around him—you want to be part of his society.

Wes Anderson: We never go through the agent.

Kunichi Nomura (actor, writer, and casting director, Isle of Dogs): Agents are going to charge a lot. It's like, fuck that.

Harvey Keitel (Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs): [Wes and I] first met at the Café Einstein in Berlin. The music of the crowd stirring their coffee cups, sipping their wine, chatter. Candlelight reflecting shadows that danced. We got married and had a baby.

Courtney B. Vance (narrator, Isle of Dogs): My experience with him started at Sundance—30 years ago? I believe there was a project that was happening and an actor—I forget his name—John? He got sick and had to leave the [Sundance Film] Institute, and Wes needed somebody to step in. John later got the Oscar, I think. For Chicago. [John C. Reilly was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in 2002 for his role in 'Chicago,' but lost to Jim Broadbent.]

Sundance Film Institute: We can confirm that Wes Anderson was present at the 1993 summer labs working on Bottle Rocket and that Courtney B. Vance was there that same year. We can also confirm that John C. Reilly was there that year for another project.

Wes Anderson: I just loved Courtney, but he didn't know who we were. We had been waiting to be put to work on Bottle Rocket, and the day we arrived they said, "The day after tomorrow Jim [Bottle Rocket executive producer James L. Brooks] wants you to do a reading." Because we had done a terrible reading of it in Texas. It was like four hours long. Poor Jim.

But anyway, Courtney Vance. I have always wanted to have him in something. And in Isle of Dogs, it was like we needed a voice of the whole movie.

Bob Balaban (Moonrise Kingdom, Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs): With Wes in charge, it's like if you get a group of unruly lions and there's a really smart lion tamer, immediately the lions just go, "Oh, I see. We have a leader here. We don't have to lead." You just want to do anything that Wes is doing. I think Bill Murray's been in all 900 movies. Sometimes he's the star of it, and sometimes he just comes and says a few things, because you're just very happy to be there.

Bill Murray (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs): Wes must have known someone [who was cuckolded] that he loved very much. Cuckolding is always sort of a sympathetic situation. Rarely is a cuckold a hated person—usually sort of a victim. You feel sorry for him, you know? You feel: "Why? He was a good one." Maybe it's sort of an armoring against it ever happening to himself. I think that's what it is.

Wes Anderson: I guess [Bill gets cuckolded] in Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom? And Rushmore. And maybe Life Aquatic. [Anjelica Huston] seems to have something going on with Jeff Goldblum. It never even occurred to me that we see that. Sometimes there's something that you can link from movie to movie that the biographer would say, "Ah, yes, we're following this." In this case, it might just be random coincidence.

The main thing is, I first wanted to work with Bill when we did Rushmore together.… Well, actually, we tried to get Bill to be in the first movie, Bottle Rocket. We couldn't even reach him. Owen [Wilson] and I loved him in his dramatic roles as much as his comedy roles—and in those days there weren't many dramatic roles. We really love this guy. I mean, he's a big part of our movie lives and our life lives. And also, if you happen to need a guru today, we do have one of the best.

Jeff Goldblum: People around Wes are particularly generous. He makes people put their best feet forward.

Liev Schreiber (Isle of Dogs): He's just such a kind person. I think that was part of what inspired my [Isle of Dogs] character, Spots. He's genuinely benevolent and a decent dog. Loyal and true.

F. Murray Abraham: Wes has this wonderful exuberance and innocence. I've been working in this business so long that when you find someone with that kind of talent who is not jaded… He's like the Little Prince all grown up, innocent and brilliant. It's almost as if he's determined not to be depressed. Not to give in to the ills of the world.

Bryan Cranston (Isle of Dogs): Wes is very erudite and fashionable and soft in his features, soft in his manner, in his kindness and his generosity and his openness. He is the most un-Texas-like Texan I've ever met. I've come to know his partner and his daughter—I went out to their home outside of London and stayed with them overnight, and we all pitched in on setting the table and preparing the food. That kind of community feeling is not just in his movies but in his life.

Part Three: The Community Chest

Roman Coppola (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, Isle of Dogs): There's a—I don't want to say instinct, but a pleasure taken in having a group. [Wes is] a pack animal.

Jeff Goldblum: The communal enjoyment of all these actors and artisans getting together is an art piece in itself. In Görlitz, Germany [where we shot The Grand Budapest Hotel], we took over this whole hotel. It was a kind of winter wonderland.

F. Murray Abraham: Some of the biggest stars in the world were coming out to do a day's work for Wes.

Bob Balaban: Bill and I were doing Monuments Men in Berlin, and Berlin to Görlitz is—I don't know—about a three-and-a-half-hour drive on the Autobahn, as long as you drive 180 MPH.

Jeff Goldblum: We'd all go down to dinner, and Wes had brought in a chef who made us different meals every night. I loved talking to Ralph Fiennes. And Tilda Swinton—life is immediately elevated into some kind of unforgettable art-project moment.

Tilda Swinton: We stay together under one roof, we eat together as a family, we travel together as the members of an explorers' club. Our journeys together become the films, and vice versa. The feeling is of shared playtime—serious playtime, but always with a twinkle in its eye and towards a bright horizon.

Jeff Goldblum: That's what it was like! One snowy evening, Wes and I and Ed Norton and a few people go to walk across the bridge from Görlitz to Poland—they didn't require a passport checkpoint. And because Wes seeks out the most amazing places on earth, we ate in this indigenous sort of basement Polish place. Jason Schwartzman! He is particularly enjoyable.

Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs): I've never done a scene with Jeff Goldblum, but I know him pretty well now.

Wes Anderson: Well, first we went to the Charlie Kaufman premiere together. Me and Jason and Jeff went to go see Adaptation—that's Spike [Jonze]'s movie.

Jason Schwartzman: I was working in Görlitz and Jeff was working in Görlitz, but we weren't working on the same days. We had a whole day together in this snow-covered town in Germany. I asked him a lot of questions, and we walked around a lot, and we talked about music and acting.

Wes Anderson: Did you shop?

Jason Schwartzman: No, we didn't shop. Nothing was really open.

Wes Anderson: Did you go to the sausage place? Obviously you don't eat sausage, but—

Jason Schwartzman: We really didn't leave the hotel. I'm very happy to just wear pajamas or a robe, as Wes is sometimes known to rock....at least in the company of his homies.

Jeff Goldblum: Everything is very particular with Wes—I think he has a tailor where he designs his own things. Living all together, you would see people just having awakened.

Tilda Swinton: We were all kind of on holiday in Venice, and while we were together, Wes said, "Shall we record your character [Oracle, for Isle of Dogs]?" And it just so happened there were a bunch of noisy people downstairs. Wes dressed in a pale pink dressing gown and calling down the stairs to our reveling house party below to be quieter while we roll is a pretty perfect image of him at work.

Bob Balaban: I did a project about Georgia O'Keeffe at one point and learned that her early art teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago said to her, "Everything you do is your art. Even the way you line your shoes up in the morning in your closet." And I went to see Georgia O'Keeffe's house, evidently left exactly as it had been, and it was the most beautiful closet I had ever seen.

Probably Wes doesn't do it consciously or on purpose, but I would say he lives in a certain kind of zone—he seems to be very much the same when he's directing as when he's having dinner.

Wes Anderson: Yeah, that's good. We should see that house. Somehow that sounds very appealing to me, that Georgia O'Keeffe house.

Part Four: The Dollhouse

Bob Balaban: Wes is kind of an incredibly kind, patient slave driver.

F. Murray Abraham: He's unquestionably a genius.

Tilda Swinton: It's an inspired molecular universe created by an immensely visionary and technologically crack team.

Wes Anderson: [Trash Island in Isle of Dogs] is rather orderly, that's true. Part of it was we were trying to figure out how you have 25 scenes on a garbage dump. And then I just decided: All garbage is super organized. And in one place there's one kind, and in one place there's another. Like there was the soap-and-washing-machines area.

Kunichi Nomura: In Japan, garbagemen separate the PET bottles, or the plastics.

Wes Anderson: We learned from Kun that there's no place that has more strict and well-followed rules about trash and recycling than Japan, because it's a densely populated and confined space. It's an island nation. And because it's a clean place, it's an orderly place.

Jason Schwartzman: Is how you dispose of your trash an obligation of the thrower of trash?

Kunichi Nomura: People follow the rules.

Jeremy Dawson (visual effects artist/producer, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs): Wes will be sitting there with a world-famous composer—you know, [Academy Award–winning Grand Budapest Hotel, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, and Isle of Dogs scorer] Alexandre Desplat is a genius. But Wes will be, like, humming out rhythms for him. Like, "Can we try 'bum BUH-buh bum'?" He's that specific.

Alexandre Desplat (genius): Yes, absolutely. He's really, really hands on. And [consequently] none of his films look like somebody else's films. It's Wes's world, and he keeps exploring and expanding that world. That's what I call genius.

Bob Balaban: He called and asked if I would be the narrator in Moonrise Kingdom, and I spent about a week with Wes before anyone else got there. The first thing he did was show me some pictures of these locations I'd be going to. And he had put himself as the narrator into all of the shots, just so I could get an idea of what it would look like and what it would feel like. I was in a trance of Wes.

F. Murray Abraham: I arrived [to the set of Grand Budapest Hotel], and the Italian costumers were there. They put on my body what they had made, and he glanced at it and immediately said, "The pocket has to be bigger. The trousers have to be a little shorter. Take off the cuffs." It was instant. It didn't take a looking or gazing or deciding.

Koyu Rankin (Isle of Dogs): He just helps you out. It feels like it's so easy after he tells you to, like, be softer.

Greta Gerwig (Isle of Dogs): Wes always knows exactly how he wants the lines said, even down to the rhythms and the intonations. It is wonderfully freeing, and you know it when you've got it.

Tilda Swinton: Making Wes laugh is always a major indication that one is unpeeling things in a positive direction. I always pined after a cloud of pugs around the ankles of Madame D., the character I played in The Grand Budapest Hotel. And as a consolation, perhaps, Wes asked me if I would—in Isle of Dogs—be "a small she-pug called Oracle" possessed of clairvoyant capacities, ever vigilant of television weather and news and somewhat short on small talk.

Yojiro Noda (Isle of Dogs): Wes's movies always make me want to go on a trip.

Akira Takayama (Isle of Dogs): At times, his characters look like they have been painted into the scenes.

Bill Murray: Wes is a draftsman in a certain way—he draws the story in a way, almost like a fresco. You go, "Okay, so-and-so's going to be there, so-and-so's going to be there, and I'm there." That's your spot, you know? He draws the story and you get to jump into it as a living character.

Jeff Goldblum: For Grand Budapest Hotel, we were all in that hotel. Wes said, "Go to this room where all our research books that have led us to the production design are." There were all these books about old hotels and a stack of about 20 DVDs. It was a lending library. I'd never seen To Be or Not to Be, the original one with Jack Benny. I've never seen Grand Hotel. Bergman's The Silence? The whole thing is a kind of course that I love taking.

Jeremy Dawson: There's a sequence in Isle of Dogs inspired by the Japanese artist and printmaker Hokusai's prints of Mount Fuji. Wes organized that we could go one day up to the Metropolitan Museum, and they took us in the back and we got to go through their Hokusai collection. Could we have gotten a lot of those images just from what we already knew, from books and the Internet? Sure. But we got to do this amazing thing and be as exploratory as kids.

Wes Anderson: When I was a kid, the thing I remember is pretending to be someone who I wasn't. I remember saying, "Well, my dad could technically have a Rolls-Royce, but he chooses not to," which I don't think was a very accurate thing. And we kind of used that in Rushmore because he pretends his father is a neurosurgeon.

Jason Schwartzman: When I was 8, I made up a lie to these people that I was trying to be in a band with that I had a drum set but it was too big to take out of the garage: "I'll just play some of your pillows and pots and pans. It's much easier for me." But you're playing with identity, trying to figure it out.

Wes Anderson: I like that as the finish. That is what it is.

This story originally appeared in the April 2018 issue with the title "Wes World."