Wes Anderson’s Secret Weapon: The Camera Moves of Sanjay Sami

Wes Anderson’s intricate films are known for their jewel box sets, vibrant costumes and starry ensemble casts. But there’s another element that gives his movies their distinctive look and feel, and it comes in the form of a 52-year-old grip.

Sanjay Sami, a native of Mumbai, India, got his start on Bollywood movies and has been working with Anderson since 2006, mostly as a dolly grip. It’s a rough job, pushing and pulling a camera mounted on a dolly — a setup weighing up to 900 pounds — along hundreds of feet of track built for a scene, and Sami has engineered, invented and refined it into an art form.

On a typical movie, a dolly might move the camera left to right or back and forth. In the Wesiverse, it goes in all those directions — and sometimes up and down, too — in a single tracking shot, allowing, Anderson said, for unbroken expression. “It means the actors can stay in real time, and you can create something that really exists, in front of the camera.”

Equal parts ingenious designer, D.I.Y. repair guru, rail engineer, cineaste and athlete, Sami is, according to many cast and crew members, Anderson’s secret weapon.

“He can masterfully execute the most intricate camera moves I’ve ever seen,” said Adrien Brody, a frequent Anderson star, who called Sami “exacting and relentless and extremely devoted.”

Last year, on “The French Dispatch,” Sami executed the most complicated shot of his career, a 70-second walk-and-talk through an unusually active police station, performed as a monologue by Jeffrey Wright, with the dolly speeding up and slowing down to keep pace with his clipped delivery.

This year, Sami topped that with a scene in “Asteroid City,” Anderson’s latest, in which Brody moves through a long theater space in an exquisitely detailed choreography of sets, props, walls, actors, dialogue and camera, which “has to come off of a set of tracks and then be loaded seamlessly onto another set of tracks and hit numerous precise marks at very specific timings,” Brody noted.

Another complex moment came early on in “Asteroid City,” filmed in Spain and set in an eerie, midcentury Southwestern landscape. Wright, playing a general, gives a speech to a young group of astronomers and junior scientists, as the camera moves back and forth and side to side (almost a star pattern) on a triple-layered track, setting the scene and building a sense of Wright’s character.

“There’s a lot of responsibility, because we are the viewer’s eyes,” Sami said, in a video interview from his home in Mumbai. “We’re moving the emotion and the story, more than just moving the camera.”

Anderson sends Sami scripts early on in his projects, and then the animatics — rough animations that convey the long tracking shots the filmmaker likes. “He’s the one who points out, ‘This is tricky,’” Anderson said. “He’ll express the physics of it to me.”

And then Sami bends the usual laws of cinema, inventing a new rig or ordering an unheard-of amount of track, where other filmmakers might resort to green screens or other visual effects. “The thing I love is, with Sanjay, we essentially are using the same equipment that we might have used on a movie 75 years ago,” Anderson said, “but we’re arranging it in a way that it hasn’t been arranged before.”

In a scene in “The French Dispatch,” for example, Owen Wilson’s character arrives riding a bicycle, and the camera tracking him has to quickly start and stop at the same rate that he does — one of Anderson’s visual signatures. “But we’re accelerating a huge amount of weight from a standstill on one grip’s power, as opposed to a light bicycle that he’s already at speed with,” Sami said. So he concocted a system involving a bungee cord anchored to a truck that could spring the camera up to the right velocity instantly.

“I think what he likes about working with me is that I hate saying no to anything,” said Sami, who has also worked with Christopher Nolan. “No matter how crazy the demand is, I always want to find a solution. Maybe a crazy solution. That’s part of what makes my job really interesting.”

“Sometimes the crazier the method, the happier he is,” he added of Anderson.

Sami has worked on Anderson’s commercial projects and every live action film since “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007), when he impressed the filmmaker by devising a way to fit a dolly into the narrow old rail cars they used as a set: he mounted a hidden track on the train’s ceiling.

To achieve Anderson’s vision, Sami must often run at full speed, weighted down with gear — a Steadicam, which he also operates, is over 60 pounds — spin around and come to an abrupt, dizzying halt. “It’s 10 or 12 hours of very, very physical work,” he said. “It’s not just endurance — you need a huge amount of strength to be able to stop and start those moves, or you’re going to hurt yourself.”

So he has an exercise regimen of daily resistance training specifically for an Anderson flick. “I used to play rugby, and a lot of the rugby training crosses over,” he said.

Before he got into movies, Sami was an industrial diver and underwater welder, working on oil rigs. He got his start in the film industry during a marine contractor strike, when a friend invited him onto a set. “I saw this traveling circus full of crazy people who come together briefly, make a movie. And then it’s another movie — same circus, different clowns,” he said. “I loved it.” (He also has a degree in political science — a fanciful enough background that he himself could be a Wes Anderson character: the Life Aquatic, and on the Rails, with Sanjay Sami.)

Collaborating with Adam Stockhausen, Anderson’s production designer, and Robert Yeoman, the cinematographer, Sami — whose official title is key grip, the head of his department — has an unusual amount of input. “He’s sort of a producer for us,” Anderson said. “He helps us figure out how we’re going to get things done. And he’s a good manager of people. So his voice comes into the discussion in ways that have nothing to do with pushing a dolly.”

Sometimes the simplest-seeming shots are also the most difficult to create. For a carousel scene in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” using a real ride wouldn’t match Anderson’s slightly surreal concept. Instead, they built a circular track with a pie-shaped platform atop it, and more track atop that. It was capped by a skateboard-style dolly, for the carousel horse. Once it rolled into the frame and the actress Saoirse Ronan hopped on, two off-camera grips clamped it down. “And then we start pushing the whole pie-shaped wooden piece on the circular track,” Sami said. The moment lasts barely 40 seconds, but it “always stands out to me, because it was the beginning of some of the more complex things that we started doing.”

Beyond the dense, staccato paragraphs and action Anderson’s scripts require of the big stars, a battalion of extras — not always trained actors; he likes to hire locals on location — must nail every tiny detail, like smoothing a mustache or blowing a smoke ring, at the exact right moment, in the right sequence, to cue each other and the camera. There are verbal, visual and motion cues, all marks to hit with strict precision. “Two inches is a mile to Wes,” Sami said. “He’ll notice if you’re off by three millimeters.” (Sami uses lasers to guide his positioning.)

And they don’t just run these scenes a handful of times. “Sometimes, by the time everyone’s got their part of the choreography together, we’re on Take 25 or 27,” he said. “And when you start getting into those numbers, if the actors all get it right and you get it wrong, no one’s going to remember anything except the fact that you blew that good take.”

Anderson swore he didn’t intentionally challenge his grip to new heights with every project; it just happens. “But I do like to feel free to do whatever we might picture, and to know that Sanjay will find a way,” he said. On a forthcoming Netflix short, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” based on a Roald Dahl tale, Sami literally sent the camera soaring. “He built a track going up into the sky at an angle,” Anderson said. It leans like a ladder in midair, “and the camera is on another track with a jib arm and a dolly attached to the top of the jib.”

For Sami, all the sweat, effort and dizzy spells are worth it when he sees the finished product onscreen. “I’ve done more than 80 feature films, and the ones I’m most proud of are the ones that we do with Wes,” he said, “because it’s just work that, for me, from a grip point of view, doesn’t exist outside of this world.”