From the Archive: Asteroid City

she's played by an actress from back East named Mercedes Ford. So, as Anderson himself has explained, you're ultimately seeing an actress

playing an actress playing an actress. Now that we've got that all cleared up, truthfully, I've almost surely oversold how confusing the mid fifties set Asteroid City is while totally underselling just how dense it is post war America and the fractured men who return from battle, the mythic West, the space Race, Broadway, and the actor's studio and Playhouse ninety, not to mention direct references to the Cinema of Steven Spielberg.

It's as if Anderson created Asteroid City the movie and the place to intermingle all of his greatest inspirations and influences. Anderson said, when I started wanting to make movies, this period was the center of everything. We were watching The Godfather and Taxi Driver and Brian de Palma, but maybe even more Marlon Brando and James Dean, Montgomery Cliff and Elia Kazan the emotion of this period of movies and

their relationship to the stage. I want to get to a question for you, Josh that may seem a little silly, as I've just put forth why the play within a play approach was always at the core of this project. And this certainly isn't new territory, as we could run through a litany of similar framing devices and meta layers in Anderson's films. But I hope that it will provoke us to really consider what the director is up to

here and how successfully he achieves it. Imagine that the whole movie Asteroid City is comprised only of the events that we see take place within Asteroid City, events that already comprise the majority of the movie's runtime, Johansson's Midge and her flirtations and existential musings, with Jason Schwartzman's Augie Steinbeck, a war photographer now widower struggling to break the news of his wife's death to his four children, Steve Carell's

industrious motel manager, Tilda Swinton's astronomer doctor Hickenlooper, Jeffrey writes, General Griff, etc. Instead of these characters stemming from the mind of Edward Norton's playwright Conrad Irp, they come only

from the mind of Anderson. No TV sound stages with Brian Kranston playing the host, no black and white acting class interactions, just all of these a little bit lost souls coming together in the desert, forced to stay together a little longer than planned following a close encounter of the third kind. And I don't mean here imagine an alternative version of the film Asteroid City. I'm saying this

is the only version we'd ever be aware of. I think there's a pretty good chance that the two of us and many other Anderson appreciators would have been satisfied with that hermetically sealed off presentation of Asteroid City. What will we have lost?

I'll be honest, We're four or five days from seeing Asteroid City. That's the one I'm still immersed in. I'm immersed in that eighty percent screen time set in the title town story, the characters there, what happens there, what that might mean. I'm going to need another viewing, or at least a couple more days until I start digging deeper than that. I think that's partly because to your point,

I was satisfied with what I got there. I have as much as I've loved his more recent films that have added on the layers to the cake, so that these are layer cake movies, which really started I think in Earnest with Grand Budapest those again, have loved them all, huge fan, but I connect more strongly with the more straightforward narratives that he did previously, and so that's how I've responded to this one as well. I'm not trying to ignore those other layers. I'm going to have to

get to them a little later. And my reasoning is I don't want to rush through it. I want to enjoy what is taking place in Asteroid City, because, again, as you said, that could be a movie of its own. What movie do I think that is. We'll get to that, but I want to hear your response to that question

before we get there. I would say that, and you've hinted at this, this could very much be a movie entirely about the acting experience, what it means to be an actor, the art of acting, how audiences receive acting. That may be enough for what Asteroid City is about. I think it's in that next layer that I've yet to really dig into. But I think that's why it's there. It sounds to me I'm unfamiliar with a lot of

the background information you shared. Maybe that was the genesis of this project many years ago, perhaps, and I think there's a lot of richness there. There are some fantastic performances here, performances within performances within performances, as you said, but just on the surface of a single character performance. I think Schwartzman and Johansson are excellent in particular. That may be all this movie needs to be about. That's the layer I've yet to get to. But how are

you feeling? Is that the layer this movie needed for you to like it as much as I'm hoping you did.

get better with repeat viewings. Definitely the case with Anderson's films, which are very rich. Asteroids City, though, is one that almost demands I think that you go back and unpack all of its references and all the ways it kind of folds in on itself, and not just to get the references, though I would like to do that. I mean, we can get as minute even as the fact that that character I mentioned, Scarlett Johansson, one of her characters

in this film is named Mercedes Ford. You know, it's as if is if this woman has probably taken a stage name where she's grabbed like this more exotic foreign car and they've merged it with the basic American car. For it's playing with all these myths and ideas everything, even Hickenlooper is a reference. Of course, I don't think there's anything in this film. Of course there's nothing by accident, but it's one of those films where it really does

feel as if every detail matters. And watching it again or multiple times after that isn't just to sort of pick up on the trivia of it to get all those references, but to really see how all of those references contribute to the narrative and the ideas and yes, the emotions that Anderson I think is exploring here. And there were really two moments then locked it for me, and we were talking about this a little bit afterwards.

I think even the next day you said that there were some lines that you really wish maybe you had taken better notes on, or that you could reference. I'd like to see if we have any overlap here. Two that unlocked it for me. One is a moment I think it's Maya Hawk is a teacher who's got a group of young students I don't know, maybe eight, nine, ten years old on a field trip. They've come to Astoid City to learn about space, and this is one of her scenes where she's trying to teach them the

morning after this alien sighting. Now, I hadn't actually watched the trailer for Asteroid City before seeing the movie, so I kind of thought. I kind of thought, you know, even though it's not like it feels like a gigantic spoiler, I wouldn't have expected that that was something they revealed in the trailer. But it's right there. So it's not

like the whole movie hinges. It does kind of thematically, but it's not as if the movie, in terms of the plot hinges on this moment, not giving anything away. They have an alien sighting. It is completely by surprise. They have no expectation of this before this moment. They believe they're alone in the universe, and you can see how sort of upset she is. Not upset like angry, more just she's clearly been rocked. Her world has been rocked by this, and now she's trying to she's trying to teach.

you really do you sense? I love the performance. You sense her hesitancy and the doubt that's creeping in as she's saying those words, Like the way she says, as far as we know, as far as we know, there's still nine planets in the Solar System. And it just raises for me this idea that I think this movie is really exploring, among so many other ideas and questions, which is what do we cling to as truths, universal foundational truths. How do we navigate this experience, this experience

of life with out a set of rules? Twelve hours ago, they thought they understood the rules, They thought they understood what kind of universe they lived in. Now they realize they don't. Everything is up for grabs, and that chaos, that uncertainty is disconcerting. And I think that even ties back Josh to the central storyline of this film, which is surrounding grief. These Steamback kids. There's a life with a mother, and there's a life now without. They're just

now coming to terms with it. They just discover it. It just gets thrown thrust onto them, and they have to reckon with it. So there's life before and after, just like there's before and after life with the alien? What do you what are you going to be tethered to? Which then gets to the second moment and I can't remember the line. Maybe you do, but I know a character says it. I don't remember the exact context, Steve,

and I wish I had better notes here. Someone says something to the effect that you just have to keep telling the story. And for all of these artists, including Anderson himself. The sense for me is that the only way you can deal with all that chaos and uncertainty is to just keep telling the story. Are you ever going to find the meaning of it all? Are you going to find the answers?

And what happens? This is in the TV documentary you mentioned, which is chronicling the production of the play that is the story proper and Schwartzman, who is the actor at this point, not the father in Asteroid City, but the actor playing him, asks Adrian Brody, as the play's director, doesn't even ask him, he just kind of says, an exasperation, I still don't understand the play, and it just hit me because I was right there with him. It was

like exactly where I was. And then Brody's director is the one who says, you had it, just keep telling the story. That was his direction. I love your reading. I love this idea of you know, being disconcerted by events and wondering what truths can we cling to. I think that absolutely fits. I had a little different response to the alien encounter, I think, and then a reading

that worked backwards for the film. I almost found that for the characters to be it's the end epiphany, right, And we've gotten these in almost every one of his movies where a character suddenly it's Max Fisher flying the kite, it's Steve Zizou underwater encountering the jaguar shark. I think I'm gonna lose my cred if I got that wrong. You know, these epiphanies, they often come in the you know, the final twenty minutes of his films. What's so interesting here?

And why you're right that it's not necessarily a spoiler though I did not know it going in. As well, the alien appearance, it's about the midway point. It feels like and so it is an epiphany that turns a little differently than previous ones for me. And I'm going to back all the way up and then say that I found asteroid City. My takeaway was this is maybe his darkest film, maybe his bleakest film, And I think it's capturing a feeling right now that for me at least,

is very appropriate this movie, Adam. I think maybe because of the atomic setting, it had me thinking about the doomsday clock. And this is not something I really think about very much, but I actually thought, I'm gonna go see what's the doomsday clock saying right now? And this is that, you know, it's kind of a pseudoscientific thing that's supposed to measure how close we are to destroy ourselves. Right It's at its worst right now. And I thought

that fits. That makes sense to me, just how kind of I've been feeling when you talk to like younger people, how they talk about their future. It's like, yeah, this tracks that the doomsday clock is saying things are pretty dire. And then I'm thinking about this movie, which is set decades later but sort of a similar time. Right, we've had a pandemic, We've had American insurrection. Those are unique,

but Russian aggression environmental degradation that we have now. But you think also about the atomic testing element and what that meant when it was first dawning upon humanity's consciousness in the fifties. The extreme existential angst of nineteen fifty five, I have to imagine, was similar to what we are

experiencing now, as the doomsday clock attests. And so I think this movie is wrestling with all of that and making it personal to your point, not only in the Schwartzman character's family wrestling with the mother and wife's death, but Midge's character is performing. She's rehearsing this suicidal scene in her next movie, and she is giving it such pathos that you really worry for her as a character, not as an actress playing that part, but as a character.

This is also a common theme in Anderson's films, considering suicide, and it's darker for me because it just feels both personal and bigger. It really does feel as if the world is on the verge of crumbling. There's another line that I wrote down, We're doomed or something like that, and someone says in a response, maybe we are wondering it feels like we're doomed? Is something like that, Maybe we are? And I think there's stylistic touches that support

this reading. Think about that highway ramp in the middle of town that goes to nowhere. It's just like, very funny but also kind of an unsettling joke. The atomic testing constantly going on in the background. How about the police chase that interrupts every favorite guest. It's so funny in the film, right, It's like police car chasing a hot rod down main street, screaming. They're shooting at each other.

It's funny, it's another one of the Roadrunner cartoon elements, but it's also deeply distressing in a way, like your life is going to be interrupted by this any moment. There's nothing you can do. You're in the gunfire. Why do so many characters carry guns with no explanation in this movie? Adam Tom Hanks's father in law, he doesn't need a gun, Steve Carrell's hotel keeper, he doesn't need a gun. And they're just kind of in their holes

in their belts. This is a movie that's deeply disquieting to me, constantly reminding of me of that, and then the Alien comes, and for me, it was almost as if it opened things up for these characters. You know

what I thought about. We've talked many times about how Tarkowsky's Mirror has affected our viewing of every movie since The Alien for me was a little bit like the wind in Mirror, where inexplainable, disturbing in a way, unsettling, yet somehow also maybe a little bit comforting that, Okay, things feel out of our control, but maybe that's because we're not in control and there's something else out there

we don't understand, and there's something comforting about that. And the reason I turned to that is because there are very subtle changes for some of these characters after that point that I won't get into now because I've talked long enough, but did find the movie for me moving a little bit away from that despair and unease that it otherwise was really steeped in for me, almost more than any of his other films.

most hopeful in some ways. And just to mention about Hank's real quick I like that character touch because it seemed to me one where because of the way he carried himself, and he has a very kind of stern demeanor, and that gun obviously was an indicator as well. It made me think this guy has to be a military guy. He's someone who probably comes from that world, the military world. Now he's trying to domesticate back into regular life, and that's one of those barriers that he can't quite break.

That's just now who he is. And I think this movie is filled with those kinds of dichotomies, including the types of dichotomies that surround what you're expressing or this conflict of the film, the hopefulness versus the bleakness, the

sort of fatalism of it, it's all there. I think that is what he's really exploring, and it does feel to me that that time You're right that time in the fifties that he's tapping into it must have felt like that every day for people, for a lot of Americans, but especially people maybe living in some of these these towns around places like the you know, real asteroid cities

where bombs are being tested. But even then on the East Coast, that's another dichotomy at play here, the East Coast and the actors and it's all very cerebral and they're trying to get inside these characters and understand them. But then we've got the West, and everything about the mythicness of that is in opposition to what we think of as the East. This movie is those things, and then we get the dichotomies in terms of the color and black and white, yep, the aspect ratios that switch

here in this film. And I'll come back to that a little bit more, but that, for me is really why you can't separate or I don't think you get a quote unquote better film if you separated out all the asteroid city story stuff, because it's so tied to all the other stories that we get and all the other storytellers we see. Without the dichotomies of the movie

simply isn't as rich. So that actor's studio stuff. For example, I really feel like, Josh, if you if you know anything about that group at all and what some of those actors, and that includes people like Marilyn Monroe even right, it's part of the actor's studio, lots of other famous people whose films that Anderson grew up on and that

you know, we're all familiar with. There was a sense by doing this work, the work of being an actor, and this is just my sense of it too from what I've gleaned from movies and reading, is that they were they were unlocking the mysteries of the universe too.

They were, or at least the mysteries of humanity, trying to deeply understand what makes us all tick and then translate that to the screen, to put that in a box and make people see themselves reflected in that and better understand where they stand in the universe by living through it through these characters. Now we can sit here and say, well, that's maybe way too grandiose a notion, but that's what those students were in those classrooms hoping

to learn. They were trying to unlock those things. And I imagine that someone from the outside, someone in Middle America hearing about the actors and the actor's studio and picking up these little things. They even had a sense that I don't understand what's going on in those classrooms. Sure, I don't know what they think they're doing, but that's not that different than the astronomers trying to make sense of the universe. Like there was this time where all

of these things were converging. You're starting to be able to access the universe through technology and actually going out into space. That's making you think about your world differently. And now people are taking things like acting and they're exploring the mind in a way that is ostensibly deeper than what had ever been done before. Again, it comes

back to this idea of mysteries too. And so when you look at Asteroid City, when you think about all that, and then you look at Asteroid City the movie, but also the place, just the place itself within the movie, it it for me takes on another layer of poignancy. And I'm going to use a word here in a moment that you already said, and you don't just appreciate the visual aesthetics of it, which I'm with you, I could have just watched I could have just watched people move about.

The outside world always encroaches. And the difference here, I think, or one difference I thought of, is that Asteroid City is what it is only because of the outside world encroaching. Like it's not actually really a town undo itself. Almost nobody actually lives there. The only people we meet, for the most part, we meet all the people who who come there for some other reason. And every edifice we

see in Asteroid City is artifice. The whole thing is and I know this again will sound a little silly, but this is where the movie folds in on itself. The whole thing is like a movie set. Yeah, not one piece of construction or writing on the walls or on a sign or a set of stairs or whatever. Not one of those things wasn't something that was created by a maker, created by Wes Anderson.

over it and reassert ourselves. And so this movie is it's not just about that push pull like it embodies it. It embodies it literally in every frame where we have a filmmaker. They always say that about Anderson. His detractors say it to a fault, that it's all too controlled,

it's all too intricately manicured. Whatever. This is one of those films where it both seems to me he's taken it to yet another level of being that orchestrated and designed, because as I said, there literally isn't a thing you see that not only do you know Wes Anderson, imagine, I almost figure he's the one who wrote those things. He probably got out the paintbrush and actually wrote the things like oil change and you know, pancakes whatever for

for a dollar, whatever it is. That's the sense you get watching it. It's as if he himself, like the characters are trying to exert that that control have have complete dominance and dominion over this space.

It's just wonderful. I love what you said about the actors studio and the seriousness of the project at work there in terms of trying to wrestle with this anxiety and angst and unease and using it not just to put on a performance, but to understand more about the human psyche. I think that's absolutely right. It helps me to connect it with the you know, the story proper that we see, and it's also gives us a chance to talk more about these performances, which everyone here is wonderful.

I think every small bit part is absolutely precisely doing what it needs to be using that particular actor's persona and talents. But I really think Schwartzman and Johansson are holding this thing together on an emotional level. Hers is almost a supporting turn. I don't even know if you would consider his a lead turn, but she definitely gets less screen time, but I think she's kind of the central focus. And the way she that vacant stare she holds,

which suggests someone very lost. And this is whether she's looking at a character or looking directly at the camera, someone who's incredibly lost in the ways we've described, possibly despair, but also it just pierces right through you.

I love that different side of him. And he's also good as the insecure actor Plane Augie as well, as we've already touched on, gets another one in great lines in that part. So they're both they're both just, you know, top of their games here.

Johansson just exhibits something with that character. For all the ways they're very similar, there is something, to use your word, more more piercing, a little bit more haunting for sure, a bit more mysterious. There's there is a a well of mystery to her character that Schwartzman's character doesn't quite put off. And I don't know if that's because of

the way they're written. I don't know if it's because of the direction and what Anderson wanted, or it's something that's lacking in Schwartzman's performance, or it's just something that's so there in Johanson's performance, because I think she's incredible.

wants to see it. But we also get these frames in a lot of different ways. It's not just the frame of the camera, and that frame is sometimes the personium of a stage or a television, or it's the movie the widescreen that we're seeing all of those things there.

But Josh even the way he shoots Scarlett Johanson and Jason Schwartzman as they spend a good chunk of the movie talking to each other from their little bungalows, Yeah, a window, and they have some space in between them, and when you look directly at them, when the camera shows them head on, it's like they're within another frame of course they are a window, and that window is

almost like the aspect ratio. It's the squarer right, classic style aspect ratio which we sometimes get in other universes within this movie. But then when Anderson shoots the desert space between them so that you see them on each side of the frame, it creates a new wide screen frame like their faces and their windows create yet another screen within the screen. I started to almost feel like, am I going crazy? I'm seeing I'm seeing rectangles and

squares everywhere I look. But that's that's to me to the film's credit. Yes, that that I started to experience all that.

way showing how wide it is. And there's also I think and Anderson formal first I would have to go again frame by frame through all his films to make sure I think we get at a swishpan within a split frame. So it's when two characters are ones on each side right of the screen, separated, they're not just standing next to each other. And then that police chase goes by, and I forget which character, and one of them turns to look at the police car, and the

camera pans quickly with them. I mean, he's gonna drive himself insane at some point if he keeps layering things like this. I just hope, I just hope I can keep up with them.

itself that he's on, we've got the studio glass. But it made me think immediately of the submarine shot from Steve Zizou that that even that shot, Josh, when you think about it, the way he frames that, that moment with the jaguar shark, that group of people sitting in those seats in the submarine looking out through that wide screen, it's like they're at a movie theater. It's like they're it's like they're watching this this all unfold in front

of them. And it works for me on the level that it's almost as if Anderson can only see the world through through frames, through these types of boxes, and so so he layers his film with his characters doing the same.