Schwartzman raves about Anderson’s knack for assembling casts. “I think Wes sees things in people that maybe they don’t even recognise in themselves,” he says. “He’s like a music arranger who realises the guitar line might work better on the bass instead. He has an ear for orchestration, but with people.”
Schwartzman has recently been part of another formidable ensemble: the cast of his uncle Francis’s sci-fi epic Megalopolis, which after decades of false starts was shot earlier this year. In January, reports of on-set havoc emerged, just like the Apocalypse Now days: crew members resigned, the budget allegedly ballooned, and there were mutterings of an “unstable filming environment”.
Schwartzman, who plays the PR chief to Forest Whitaker’s New York mayor, found it thrilling. “If you look at the trajectory of my uncle’s work there has always been an element of experimentation,” he explains. “And on this he was experimenting every day.” After one scene, shot in a manner Schwartzman will only describe as “really wild”, the actor asked his uncle: “How long had you been thinking about doing it like that?”
“He told me, ‘I just thought of it then because I didn’t know how else to do it.’ And that’s exactly what he’s like,” he adds. “He’s the sort of man who could live in the same town his whole life and every day would find a new way to walk home.”
It’s a lovely turn of phrase – and, given the enjoyment he takes in rustling up such similes for their own sake, one that might apply in time to Schwartzman too. For now though, I can’t help but picture him following along on a scooter, sometimes whizzing on ahead or off on tangents, just happy to be on the move.
Asteroid City is in cinemas now