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

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      Sami brings ingenious design, a D.I.Y. spirit and pure athletic ability to the job of key grip — pushing and pulling heavy camera rigs with exacting precision.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.Sami moving the camera so it follows, from left, Jason Schwartzman, Jake Ryan and Tom Hanks for an “Asteroid City” shot.via Focus FeaturesThis 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.The director Wes Anderson narrates a sequence from his film, featuring Jeffrey Wright.Focus Features“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.”Sami, Yeoman and Anderson on the set. “There’s a lot of responsibility, because we are the viewer’s eyes,” Sami said. “We’re moving the emotion and the story, more than just moving the camera.”via Focus FeaturesAnderson 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.” More

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      Wes Anderson’s Best Needle Drops

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      Hear songs that memorably accompanied scenes in “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and more.Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tenenbaum in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” She’s always late, but worth waiting for.Touchstone PicturesDear listeners,One day when I was 14, I stayed home sick from school and watched a weird little movie called “Rushmore” on Comedy Central. When it was over, I thought to myself, “Oh, so that’s what a director does.”I had never before encountered a movie that so distinctly seemed to come from a single person’s perspective. The filmmaker Wes Anderson had created his own alternate reality, with its own color scheme, its own vernacular, and — perhaps most crucially — its own killer music. I wanted to live inside of that world. I bought the soundtrack as soon as I could.For aspiring aesthetes, Anderson’s movies can be gateway drugs. Eager to catch all of his cinematic references and influences, his films led me to the work of directors like François Truffaut, Yasujiro Ozu and Satyajit Ray. But the songs in his films are vehicles of discovery, too. I’d never heard the Creation’s “Making Time,” that garage-rock classic with guitars that rev like a souped-up engine, or the Who’s gloriously bombastic rock opera “A Quick One, While He’s Away” until I saw “Rushmore.” I learned about Nico from “The Royal Tenenbaums” and Seu Jorge from “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.” Anderson’s carefully curated soundtracks felt, to me, like eclectic, handmade mixtapes.As I got deeper into movies, I realized that even the most personal-seeming film is the result of collaboration with countless others: cinematographers, production designers, wardrobe stylists, and, of course, music supervisors. The needle drops in most of Anderson’s films are the result of his longtime working relationship with the music supervisor Randall Poster. In more recent movies, like the Oscar-winning “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and the underrated “The French Dispatch,” he’s also worked with repeatedly with the composer Alexandre Desplat, who has composed intricate and appropriately quirky scores that help bring Anderson’s worlds to life.In honor of Anderson’s new movie, “Asteroid City,” which I am very excited to see when it comes out this weekend, I put together a playlist of some of the most iconic and unexpected songs featured in his films. Quite a few have become inextricably tied to Anderson scenes. Never again will I hear “These Days” without picturing Margot Tenenbaum walking off a Green Line bus in slow-motion, or “A Quick One, While He’s Away” without imagining Herman Blume destroying poor Max Fischer’s bicycle. Sic transit gloria, indeed.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. The Creation: “Making Time”The tracks used in Anderson’s movies often serve as unofficial theme songs for characters, reflecting the way they see themselves — the song playing in their own heads as they walk down the street. Fischer, the scheming protagonist of “Rushmore,” is too square to truly embody the bratty, take-no-prisoners attitude of this jangly 1966 rocker from the British band the Creation; for him, it’s more of an aspirational soundtrack. (Listen on YouTube)2. The Ramones: “Judy Is a Punk”Anderson is a master of the montage, and many of his most memorable ones rely on a great, propulsive song to give its disparate shots a unified mood. One of my favorites compiles footage of a private detective’s dossier on Margot Tenenbaum’s secret life in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” The sonic jump-cut from silence to the Ramones’ explosive “Judy Is a Punk” sets the moment apart from the rest of the film, and makes all of Margot’s exploits seem that much cooler. (Listen on YouTube)3. Paul Simon: “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”Or maybe this is my favorite montage in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” When the disreputable patriarch Royal, played indelibly by Gene Hackman, wants to bond with his precocious, track-suited grandsons Ari and Uzi, he takes them out for some light mayhem: go-karting, water-balloon-throwing and petty larceny — all to the tune of Paul Simon. It’s against the law! (Listen on YouTube)4. Seu Jorge: “Life on Mars?”Anderson’s 2004 feature “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” featured the Brazilian musician Seu Jorge as a kind of one-man Greek chorus, singing acoustic covers of David Bowie songs in Portuguese. The melodies are so universally recognizable that you don’t need to understand the language to at least hum along to Jorge’s tender, sweetly crooned renditions of classics like “Rebel Rebel,” “Starman,” and of course, “Life on Mars?” (Listen on YouTube)5. Nico: “These Days”It’s the scene that launched a million Halloween costumes: Richie Tenenbaum waits for his escort from his days on the circuit, his sister, Margot. As usual, she’s late — but well worth the delay as she gets off the bus in her ever-present fur coat and raccoon-rimmed eyes, to the heart-stopping musical cue of Nico’s “These Days.” (Listen on YouTube)6. The Beach Boys: “Old Folks at Home/Old Man River”Several Beach Boys songs are used to great effect in “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” but none as stirringly as “Old Man River,” which soundtracks a heavenly moment at the end of the film when the animals find themselves in a supermarket. “Get enough to share with everybody,” Mr. Fox instructs, “and remember, the rabbits are vegetarians and badgers supposedly can’t eat walnuts.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Françoise Hardy, “Le temps de l’amour”In “Moonrise Kingdom,” from 2012 and set in 1964, young Sam and Suzy run away together and attempt to live out their own feral version of adulthood on an island. Among their possessions is a portable record player for 45 RPM singles, meaning they can soundtrack their own lives. Just before the awkward beachside dance that results in their first kiss, Suzy puts on Françoise Hardy’s 1962 single “Le temps de l’amour,” an achingly perfect choice for a 12-year-old trying on an air of sophistication like a pair of too-big high heels. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Rolling Stones: “Ruby Tuesday”As it’s used in a crucial scene in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” this early Stones classic casts such a rosy, romantic glow that you almost forget that you’re rooting for Richie Tenenbaum to end up with his adopted sister. (Listen on YouTube)9. The Kinks: “This Time Tomorrow”Like the Beach Boys in “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” sometimes an Anderson film will feature several songs from a single artist. Anderson’s fifth feature, “The Darjeeling Limited,” conjures its Indian setting by using instrumentals from the films of Satyajit Ray, though its placement of several songs from the Kinks’ 1970 album “Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One” — including the sweetly bleary “This Time Tomorrow” — serve as reminders that the film is filtered through a Westerner’s sensibility. (Listen on YouTube)10. The Who: “A Quick One, While He’s Away”Yet another top-tier Anderson montage, from “Rushmore”: a battle of petty acts of revenge between Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) and Blume (Bill Murray), given an anarchic grandeur thanks to this nearly nine-minute epic by the Who. Fun fact: While the version that appears on Rushmore’s official soundtrack is from the Who’s unrivaled 1970 concert album “Live at Leeds,” the version used in the film comes from the storied 1968 BBC special and eventual live record “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.” (Listen on YouTube)11. Van Morrison, “Everyone”Anderson has a knack for ending his movies with a bittersweet, emotionally resonant song that lingers in the air long after the credits roll. One of my favorites is “Everyone,” the clavinet-kissed Van Morrison track that rings out at the end of “The Royal Tenenbaums.” At once melancholy and hopeful, it’s the perfect way to conclude a movie that pierces your heart even as it’s making you laugh. And I think it’s a pretty good ending for this playlist, too. (Listen on YouTube)The Amplifier was written in a kind of obsolete vernacular,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Wes Anderson’s Best Needle Drops” track listTrack 1: The Creation, “Making Time”Track 2: The Ramones, “Judy Is a Punk”Track 3: Paul Simon, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”Track 4: Seu Jorge, “Life on Mars?”Track 5: Nico, “These Days”Track 6: The Beach Boys, “Old Folks at Home/Old Man River”Track 7: Françoise Hardy, “Le temps de l’amour”Track 8: The Rolling Stones, “Ruby Tuesday”Track 9: The Kinks, “This Time Tomorrow”Track 10: The Who, “A Quick One, While He’s Away”Track 11: Van Morrison, “Everyone”Bonus TracksSeriously, behold that performance by the Who in “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus,” and bow down to Keith Moon in all his glory. Some people believe that the reason the Stones shelved the TV special and did not officially release it until 1996 was that they thought the Who upstaged them. I’ll let you be the judge: Watch this performance and ask yourself if it’s an act you’d want to follow.If you’re looking for new music, too, this week’s Playlist has fresh tunes from Meshell Ndegeocello, Doja Cat, Peggy Gou and more. More

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      Watch Jeffrey Wright Give a Rousing Speech in ‘Asteroid City’

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      Wes Anderson narrates a scene from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.On the page, the speech a military general delivers in the film “Asteroid City” might look a little loopy. On the screen, delivered with verve by the actor Jeffrey Wright, it reaches even greater heights of both oddity and emotion.“I wanted to write something that, in a way, only Jeffrey could do,” said Wes Anderson, the film’s director and screenwriter, during an interview in New York. He wanted to tell a story of the generations of this character’s family.“Jeffrey turns it into more like a poem,” he said. “But it’s a poem that is delivered with a sort of ferocity.”The speech is executed in one take, with the camera dollying side to side as well as forward and backward, to capture all of Wright’s beats. Anderson said it was achieved with a complicated setup using “a crazy set of dolly tracks, sideways dolly tracks with a with a section of track that glides on the top of the three tracks,” a rig conceived by Anderson’s key grip, Sanjay Sami.Read the “Asteroid City” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Wes Anderson’s ‘Asteroid City’ Premieres in Cannes

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      At the film’s Cannes premiere, the director’s customary cast, themes and even camera moves were all on display — well, except one.Wes Anderson’s directorial style is so distinctive and particular — so Wessy — that it’s spawned no end of recent A.I. parodies. But how do those imitations compare with the real thing?Many of Anderson’s signature obsessions are on display in his new movie, “Asteroid City,” a ’50s-set comedy about different sets of parents accompanying their space-obsessed kids to a convention in the desert, where they all must quarantine together after receiving an unexpected visitor from the skies. (Strained family dynamics, nerdy children and whimsical settings … check, check, check!)Critics appeared split on the movie after its Cannes Film Festival premiere on Tuesday: though “Asteroid City” got glowing notices in The Telegraph and IndieWire, Variety deemed it “for Anderson die-hards only.” That suggests this is his Wessiest movie yet, a case that could certainly be made when you consider the following:It’s filled with his favorite actors.The expansive cast includes several Anderson regulars, including Jason Schwartzman as a war photographer and Tilda Swinton as a kooky astronomer, plus Jeffrey Wright, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber and Tony Revolori. Scarlett Johansson, previously called on to do a voice in Anderson’s stop-motion “Isle of Dogs,” gets her first live-action role for the director as a self-absorbed actress who finds herself quarantined next door to Schwartzman. Only two Anderson veterans are missing: Bill Murray, who was originally cast in “Asteroid City” but reportedly had to drop out because of Covid-19, and Owen Wilson.There are big stars in small roles.Actors clamor to star in Anderson’s films, and he takes full advantage: Even the tiniest supporting roles are typically filled with heavy hitters (as in “The French Dispatch,” where Emmy winner Elisabeth Moss is essentially a featured extra). “Asteroid City” welcomes A-lister Tom Hanks into the fold as Schwartzman’s father-in-law, though he’s not as significant a presence as you might expect. Still, at least he’s got more to do than “Barbie” star Margot Robbie and recent Oscar nominee Hong Chau, who each pop in for the briefest of cameos. In future Anderson films, maybe they’ll be upgraded to the main ensemble.It’s got a complicated framing device.Anderson’s films often call attention to their own storytelling by nesting the narrative within another narrative: Perhaps it’s all taking place in a book, or the vignettes are stories in a magazine. In “Asteroid City,” the director indulges in his most complicated construction yet: We’re meant to be watching a TV broadcast (hosted by Bryan Cranston) that dramatizes the story of a playwright (Norton) who wrote an unproduced stage production called “Asteroid City.” Those framing segments are shot in black and white. It’s only when we leap into the idea of his play that Anderson transports us to the gorgeous teals and burnt oranges of the desert, where most of this story within a story (within a story!) unfolds.It all takes place on rigid lines.Though Anderson has become less fixated on placing his actors in the smack-dab middle of the frame, he still blocks his camera movements and choreography in “Asteroid City” so that everything and everybody moves on an x or y axis at all times. (If you want to sneak up on someone in a Wes Anderson movie, do it diagonally. They’d never think to look!)There are deadpan expressions of grief.Schwartzman’s war photographer has something he’s meaning to tell his children: Their mother has died. Or, more specifically, their mother died three weeks ago and he just hasn’t found the right moment to bring it up. The situation is outrageous, but Schwartzman’s performance is classic Wes deadpan, and though most of the cast members give the same steady line readings, that house style is at its best when you can sense real, troubled currents underneath a placid exterior.But it could have been even Wessier …If, after reading all this, you think “Asteroid City” couldn’t get more Wessy … well, it could! At the film’s Cannes news conference on Wednesday, the actor Steve Park said that before shooting began, Anderson created a feature-length, animated storyboard, or animatic, in which he did all the voices himself. “Release the animatics,” Jeffrey Wright intoned solemnly.… especially if it used slow-motion.Later in the news conference, a reporter confronted Anderson about one trademark that’s disappeared: Though he used to use slow-motion sequences fairly often — think Gwyneth Paltrow dramatically exiting her bus in “The Royal Tenenbaums” — recent films like “Asteroid City” have all but dropped the device. “I have a series of ways I like to stage things and I don’t know if I’m in command of them — it’s part of my personality,” Anderson said, before growing concerned. “That’s one of the tools that I’ve used often, and I should look for some spots for that,” he promised the reporter. “I’ll take the note. And I’ll do it!” More

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      Cannes 2023: The Films We’ve Excited About Seeing

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      Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese and Todd Haynes have works premiering this year at the festival on the French Riviera.Wes Anderson’s films have premiered at a wide variety of festivals, but after “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012), “The French Dispatch” (2021) and his upcoming ensemble comedy “Asteroid City,” Cannes is the fest he keeps coming back to. Last week, I asked Anderson what he finds so compelling about a debut on the Croisette.“The reason to go to Cannes, I think, is because they said yes,” he deadpanned. “After that, there isn’t really much to contemplate.”Well, there’s a little more to it than that, Anderson admitted: For cinema lovers, there is no holier pilgrimage to make than to the Cannes Film Festival, where movies are treated with the utmost reverence and routinely given marathon standing ovations.It is a place where great auteurs have been canonized, like Martin Scorsese, who won the Palme d’Or in 1976 for “Taxi Driver” and will return this year with his new feature “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and Quentin Tarantino, a Palme winner (for “Pulp Fiction” in 1994) and Cannes habitué who’ll be back at the fest this year for a wide-ranging conversation that may touch on his upcoming final film.“I look at Cannes in relation to the other movies I know showed there, and I feel lucky enough to be included in the program that debuted those films,” Anderson said. “For me, it’s a chance to be involved in this movie history, which I love.”A scene from “Elemental.”Disney/PixarHarrison Ford in a scene from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”Jonathan Olley/Lucasfilm Ltd.A Cannes launch can be awfully expensive for a studio to bankroll, since the airfare, star entourages and five-star hotels alone all add up. Still, the return on investment can be major. Last year, “Top Gun: Maverick” launched with a fawning Tom Cruise summit and sent fighter jets flying over the south of France, while Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” threw a rock concert on the beach where drones traced Elvis Presley’s silhouette in the sky. Both films leveraged their splashy debuts to become some of the best-performing global hits of the year, and were nominated for the best-picture Oscar, to boot.This year, several star-driven films will attempt to capitalize on a Cannes bow, including “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” which is being billed as Harrison Ford’s final appearance in his most iconic role. Can it overcome the tepid response to the last sequel, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” and the substitution of James Mangold (“Ford v Ferrari”) for Steven Spielberg as director of the series? At least the addition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, in her most high-profile role since “Fleabag,” will add a welcome jolt to the franchise.The director Todd Haynes, who premiered “Carol” at Cannes, returns to the festival with another female-driven two-hander: “May December,” which stars Julianne Moore as a teacher whose scandalous relationship with a former student is scrutinized by a movie star (Natalie Portman) preparing to play the teacher in a film. Other star-heavy films include “The New Boy,” featuring Cate Blanchett as a nun in her first role since “Tár,” and “Firebrand,” with Jude Law as Henry VIII and Alicia Vikander as his last wife, Katherine Parr.And then there are “Asteroid City” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the fest’s two most anticipated premieres. The former takes place at a 1950s retreat for space-obsessed youngsters and stars Anderson staples like Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson and Tilda Swinton, as well as new recruit Tom Hanks, about whom Anderson said, “I couldn’t have had a better time working with anybody.” Scorsese’s Apple-backed film charts the mysterious murders of the Osage tribe in the 1920s and will bring stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro to the red carpet.Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from “Killers of the Flower Moon.”Apple TV+Natalie Portman in a scene from “May December.”via Cannes Film Festival(Still, weep for what might have been: Greta Gerwig’s candy-colored July release “Barbie” will skip an early premiere at Cannes, depriving us of a red-carpet fantasy to trump all others.)In recent years, the winner of the prestigious Palme d’Or award has often gone to a film with breakout-hit potential, like “Parasite” and “Triangle of Sadness.” The director of the latter film, Ruben Ostlund, will preside over this year’s competition jury, a group that includes Brie Larson and Paul Dano, and they’ll be picking their favorite from an auteur-heavy lineup that includes several former Palme winners.Among them are Wim Wenders, who took the Palme for “Paris, Texas” and returns with “Perfect Days,” about a Tokyo toilet cleaner, and Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose new film “Monster” is the first film he has shot in Japan since his Palme winner “Shoplifters.” No director has ever taken the Palme three times, though Ken Loach could this year, if his new working-class drama “The Old Oak” proves as acclaimed as “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” and “I, Daniel Blake.”This year’s Cannes has its fair share of long films — “Occupied City,” Steve McQueen’s documentary about Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, runs four hours and six minutes — but not every buzzy premiere will be feature-length. The fest will also premiere shorts directed by Pedro Almodóvar (“A Strange Way of Life”) and the late Jean-Luc Godard (“Phony Wars”), while launching “The Idol,” an already-controversial HBO series from the “Euphoria” mastermind Sam Levinson starring Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye.Eita Nagayama, right, in a scene from “Monster.”via Cannes Film FestivalA scene from “The Zone of Interest.”A24And though the festival will offer G-rated pleasures in the form of Pixar’s new film “Elemental,” it wouldn’t be Cannes without a few envelope-pushers. Keep an eye on Catherine Breillat, whose sexually explicit filmography (“Fat Girl,” “Romance”) gets a new entry with “Last Summer,” about a lawyer who falls for her teenage stepson.Then there’s the film I’m most curious about: “The Zone of Interest,” an Auschwitz-set drama from the director Jonathan Glazer. Rumor has it that Cannes passed on Glazer’s audacious “Under the Skin” back in 2013 and was eager to make up for that mistake. Since Glazer’s films (“Birth” and “Sexy Beast”) are infrequent but stunning, a new project from the director is reason enough to say yes to Cannes — and after that, there isn’t really much to contemplate. More

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      Cannes Cameraman Explains How He Shoots Standing Ovations

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      Jean-Baptiste Cortet explains what he focuses on and why (partly to goad the audience) when he’s filming those premiere close-ups.CANNES, France — Imagine a cameraman pointing his camera directly at you.Now imagine it moving closer to your face. No, even closer than that. So close you could almost forget that this moment is shared not just between you and the cameraman, but 2,300 other people who surround you, applaud you and are hanging on your every gesture.That’s what it feels like when you’re caught in one of the Cannes Film Festival’s infamously elongated standing ovations, in which each twitch of your face — whether from pride, embarrassment or boredom — is captured by the cameraman and broadcast to the Grand Théâtre Lumière’s movie screen, where your supersized reactions play instead of the closing credits.Even for celebrities, the scrutiny of the Cannes cameraman can be a lot to withstand. This week, Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba teared up in front of the camera after the premiere of “Three Thousand Years of Longing”; last year, long into a sustained ovation for “Annette,” the cameraman panned to a cast member, a bored Adam Driver, as he lit a cigarette. In 2019, as the applause for “Parasite” refused to die down after several minutes, director Bong Joon Ho was even caught on camera leaning over to his lead actor and complaining, “I’m hungry.”We are on Minute 5 of the ANNETTE standing ovation and Adam Driver has begun smoking a cigarette pic.twitter.com/F56r0W0nGL— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) July 6, 2021
      The mechanics of the Cannes standing ovation have long fascinated civilians, but as more clips from those moments go viral on social media, it’s the sustained close-ups that have begun to spur the most debate. “The Cannes standing ovation camera is simply too much to watch,” said one Twitter user, evidently suffering from secondhand embarrassment. “I would honestly just melt if it was on me.”According to Jean-Baptiste Cortet, it isn’t easy to be the one wielding the camera, either. “I can see how uncomfortable they are, and I feel it,” Cortet said. “I would not want to be in their spot in this moment!”Cortet, an excitable, apple-cheeked Parisian who met me on a Cannes terrace wearing a Jeff Koons T-shirt and cuffed bluejeans, has spent three decades working for Cannes and began filming the festival’s standing ovations seven years ago. And yes, he knows what people think. “I saw on the internet that people were making fun of it!” he said, ready to clear the air: He isn’t nearly as close to those celebrities as it looks.By way of demonstrating, Cortet positioned me against the terrace railing and backed a few paces away while brandishing an imaginary camera. “I make sure that I’m as far away as I can, and I zoom in to do the close-up,” he told me, speaking through a translator. He said he would never dare put his camera lens just inches from someone’s face: “Comedians hate that. Especially actresses!”In many ways, Cortet is the standing ovation’s secret weapon. The audience does not simply clap into a vacuum for several minutes: They are guided and goaded by Cortet, who continually searches for new things to shoot and broadcasts those close-ups onto the big screen behind him.“The cameraman has the responsibility to carry the emotion of the room,” Cortet said. And those emotions can run very high at Cannes, especially when the film ends and the lights first go up. “This is the time when I’m able to catch an embrace, a discussion between two people — I can navigate through these different moments,” Cortet said. “I like it more when it’s messy.”A few minutes into those candid moments, Cortet locks into a routine: He will go down the row of actors, filming each one for a surprisingly sustained amount of time, a phase he calls “the eye line.” This is the bit that often extends the standing ovation to record-breaking levels, especially if there’s a large ensemble cast and a famous director present. Then, once everyone has had a solo moment in front of Cortet’s camera, they can pair off in new combinations, a phase that pads the ovation stopwatch even more.And just over Cortet’s shoulder at most of the premieres is the festival director, Thierry Frémaux, who pushes the cameraman even closer to the stars while exclaiming, “Close-up! Close-up!” Shooting the eye line is “a mix of me feeling the emotion and knowing how to film it, and Thierry knowing who to aim at,” Cortet said, adding with a laugh, “I prefer when I’m alone.”Some Cannes regulars, like Spike Lee and David Lynch, are now familiar with Cortet and wink or nod when he goes in for the shot. “These directors, who are usually on the other side of the camera, they recognize the difficulty,” he said. “It’s a pleasure for me to see they have empathy for the situation.”But not every director can stand it. During the ovation for “The French Dispatch,” Cantet moved into the aisle to block Wes Anderson when he noticed the auteur eyeing the exits.“I have to refrain the directors from leaving!” he said. “They want to trespass past me.”Cortet doesn’t usually enter the theater until 10 minutes from the ending, so it’s sometimes difficult for him to pick up on how well the film has gone over until the crowd leaps from their seats. “I don’t feel the same emotions as the people in the room,” he said. “I don’t understand the why’s of this raw moment.”Still, he’s a quick learner. At the premiere of “Armageddon Time,” when the director James Gray burst into tears, Cortet got a little misty, too.“It happens many times: I feel such a strength of emotion carry to me that tears fall from my eyes,” he said. “And then I can’t see anything because it’s too blurry! More

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      ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ at 20: When Wes Anderson Imagined New York

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      The film’s vision of the city is at once entirely made up and very real seeming, both dated and contemporary. But the movie couldn’t outrun current events.Wes Anderson’s sprawling comedy-drama “The Royal Tenenbaums,” released 20 years ago this month, tells the story of a family of famed child geniuses, the disappointments and neuroses that define their lives as adults and the estranged father whose (feigned) illness brings them back together, under one roof in Upper Manhattan. It’s Anderson’s only film to date shot entirely in and around New York City, his sole entry in the canon of Gotham cinema, which was so formative to his youth in the Southwest.“I wanted to live in New York when I was young,” Anderson, a Houston native, confessed to The New York Daily News in 2012. “So many books and plays and movies that I love were set in New York. It really gave me an idea of the city before I had even moved here.”But that wording — “an idea of the city” — is telling. Anderson wasn’t seeking the authenticity and verisimilitude of a native New Yorker (a Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese, for example); in fact, though “The Royal Tenenbaums” was shot on location, its settings are unrecognizable, and the places it name-checks leave Gothamites scratching their heads. The bulk of the action takes place in the shambling Tenenbaum home on “Archer Avenue,” though daughter Margot has “a private studio in Mockingbird Heights” and patriarch Royal has spent the past several decades at the “Lindbergh Palace Hotel.” A secondary character teaches at “Brooks College”; others travel via the “Green Line Bus” or the “22nd Avenue Express” train; mention is made of the “City Public Archives,” “Maddox Hill Cemetery,” “Little Tokyo,” “Kobe General Hospital,” “the Valenzuela Bridge” and, in a true feat of city-stretching ingenuity, “the 375th St. Y.”The result is a New York that blurs fact and fiction, a fantasy vision of the city, less reflective of the realities of urban life than the fanciful notions of them ingrained in Anderson’s sensibility. Many an observer has noted the resemblances between the Tenenbaum brood and the Glass family of J.D. Salinger’s short fiction — much of which initially appeared in The New Yorker, a publication whose wry, busy, detailed covers seem no small influence on Anderson’s idiosyncratic visual style. (His most recent film, “The French Dispatch,” takes the influence even further, unspooling like an issue of a New Yorker-style magazine.) Other literary influences from the city abound as well, including the colorful personalities of A.J. Liebling’s profiles, the strained family dynamics of John Cheever’s short stories, and the hotel life of Kay Thompson’s “Eloise” books. In a way, “The Royal Tenenbaums” is the inverse of many New York movies of the 1930s and 1940s — when on-location photography was so rare, and film production so centralized in Hollywood, that ex-New Yorker writers and designers recreated an idealized, fantasy vision of Gotham on backlots and soundstages clear across the country.Anderson was far from a tourist when he made “The Royal Tenenbaums”: after a bumpy migration from Texas to Los Angeles, he moved to Manhattan in 1999 and found it a better fit. (He currently lives in Paris.) Yet he maintained that apotheosized idea of the city, born from those formative years of consuming “Talk of the Town” items and witticisms from Algonquin alumni. “It’s an alternate universe,” the historian Mark Asch writes in his book “New York Movies,” explaining that it’s “familiar yet out of reach, like all the tattered books written by the Tenenbaums and dusty magazines featuring them on the cover.”The picture’s vague sense of geography extends to its historical timeliness. There are no contemporary references of note, and the costumes and cars are not of any specific era. The hotel where Royal first lives and then works feels transplanted from the 1940s (complete with multiple elevator operators), and the neighborhoods seem closer to the city of the ’70s than the 2000s — a bit trashy, decorated by graffiti, prowled by rusted-out gypsy cabs and thoroughbred mice. “Wes wanted it to be Nowheresville, New York, a kind of New York but not New York,” the production designer David Wasco explained to Newsday. He added that while the movie comes off as a valentine to New York, “that was not intentional. We went to the trouble to redesign the license plates and the street signs, which are variations on the old yellow street signs with the camel bump on them. He’s really specific about wanting those things.”The family home was a real residence on Convent Avenue in Hamilton Heights.CompassThe Tenenbaum house on Archer Avenue seems a bit otherworldly as well. Anderson spent months searching for the right location. “It needed to be a New York house that wasn’t stereotypical, and where you’d have a real strong sense of family history,” he told The New York Observer. Obviously, finding the kind of big, shambling, multilevel home he was looking for on the island of Manhattan was a big ask, but they finally found it in Hamilton Heights, specifically at 144th Street and Convent Avenue. Anderson was so in love with the house that he rewrote his script to better accommodate it, though contacting its owner for permission to shoot was, at first, difficult. The feat was ultimately accomplished by leaving a note on the door; the owners had been elusive because they had just purchased the vacant home, and had not yet begun their planned, and extensive, renovations. By the time Anderson and company rented it for six months of prep and shooting — performing many of the structural repairs themselves — the house had paid for itself.Yet for all of Anderson’s effort to place his film in a New York free of modern markers, one pang of recognition was unintended but unavoidable. Son Chas (Ben Stiller) is in the midst of a nervous breakdown following the death of his wife in a plane crash; he’s in a perpetual state of fear and paranoia, particularly about the safety of his sons. “It’s been a rough year, Dad,” he tells his father near the end of the film, following a particularly, terrifyingly close call.For audiences at the New York Film Festival, where “The Royal Tenenbaums” first unspooled in October 2001, Chas’s state of mind seemed undeniably, unnervingly contemporary.Jason Bailey is the author of the new book “Fun City Cinema: New York and the Movies That Made It,” a history of the city and movies about it. More