Wes Anderson in New York on June 13, 2023. DIA DIPASUPIL/GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP

On a nondescript street in Paris's 6th arrondissement, a building stands out, all symmetrical brickwork, flowery ornamentation and lush vegetation. It's here, not far from his home, that 54-year-old Wes Anderson edited his 11th feature, Asteroid City, and where he welcomed us at the beginning of June. It's a metonymy of the Texan's art, which is so incredibly frictional.

Asteroid City is set in September 1955, in a car-filled desert vision of America. It's also the month in which James Dean died in a car accident in the middle of the desert.

Is that right? Wow, very interesting. For me and my friend Owen Wilson, when we were 19 or something in 1989, James Dean was important to us. Why? My mother loved James Dean 40 years earlier. This method period of Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan spoke to us more than anything else. Those were the movies we were most interested in at that moment in our lives. They were totally direct. And I think we were interested not as just people who want to make movies, but more in the purest way of I want to be like them, sort of idolizing the way movies work that way. They're very different, Brando and James Dean and Montgomery Clift [of the Actors Studio]. But they're grouped together because they do share something that is so evocative. And Brando in some ways is one of the most special, unique artists because the way he starts doing it changes everybody. I've been rehearsing with an actor this week [the lead actor in his next film, Benicio Del Toro] and we were at dinner and having the same conversation. We talked about Marlon Brando for an hour. We were talking about The Godfather (1972). We were talking about Last Tango in Paris (1972). And Matt Dillon has just been in Paris playing Marlon Brando in the Last Tango. With all the strangeness and sadness related to his life and the ways that he [Brando] did not treat his work with respect, or anyone else's, nevertheless, this is such an interesting artist who did really care about every aspect of it, even if he was contemptuous of it as well.

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In Asteroid City, Dillon's character is more reminiscent of James Dean.

We did think about Dean. Our movie is divided between this black-and-white world of the New York theater and color, widescreen, desert Hollywood. There's a kind of cinema that didn't exist before the '50s, which is Cinemascope. And Rebel Without a Cause is an early Cinemascope. And it's Nicholas Ray who's rebelling against something, too. I mean, he's bucking against what's been there before and trying to express emotion that wasn't really allowed. And he's got this actor who can do it in a way that nobody else quite has. A thing about that movie that I feel relates to us is how much it actively mythologizes its characters and the dreaminess of life and its uncertainty and this teenage thing of where there could be endless possibilities in the universe. And there can also be some sort of beautiful, tragic, stylish doom.

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