How ‘Asteroid City’ Became Wes Anderson’s Most Visually Ambitious Movie Yet (2024)

Wes Anderson and his cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, have been making movies together going back to the former’s directorial debut nearly 30 years ago, 1996’s Bottle Rocket. They’ve established one of the most recognizable, distinctive aesthetics in global cinema, from striking color palettes to symmetrical shooting designs. Lately, they only seem to be pushing themselves further. Enter Asteroid City, one of the pair’s richest visual collaborations to date—and one where the style belies a story of sneaky, poignant feeling.

It’s another nesting-doll structure for Anderson, this time framed around a ’50s broadcast of a documentary exploring the making of a play called Asteroid City. The plot weaves between the doc’s behind-the-scenes action, shot in theatrical black and white, and the play itself, captured with exclusively natural light in a makeshift mystical town in the American West, where families from across the country have congregated for a stargazing convention. This gathering of strangers allows Anderson to explore themes of connection and loneliness as the drama centers on the dynamic between a widower and war photographer named Augie (Jason Schwartzman) and a famous actress (Scarlett Johansson).

“It’s our 10th movie together, I think, that one, so obviously, we have a very—I don’t know what you would say, our way of communicating with each other…it’s built into the whole thing,” Anderson tells Vanity Fair. “I love the way [Bob] worked with the black and white against the color in the movie.”

Below, Anderson and Yeoman examine six frames from the film to explore how they did just that.

The Call

As Augie is on the way to Asteroid City with his children, his car breaks down—and he decides to then call his father-in-law, Stanley, introducing Tom Hanks to the film. It’s a classic split screen setup from Anderson, who employs the format regularly and shoots it accordingly.

Wes Anderson: I always loved split-screen shots. I love how Brian De Palma, for instance, made split screen. He reinvented what you can do with it, or invented, anyway, some of the ideas of how to use split screen. But the idea of using split screen for a telephone call is pretty old-fashioned. I wouldn’t be surprised if we could—in fact, we can find examples of that all the way back to the ’30s, and probably even from silent cinema, but certainly in the late ’50s and the ’60s, it became a routine thing. Then maybe it is dropped because it becomes too familiar, but I like it and I love the fact that you can show both ends of the telephone line and play a long take and you can see the people listening. It appealed to me.

Robert Yeoman: Because we were shooting anamorphic, and I had to operate the Jason shot quite a bit with the cars coming by, to find that frame on a quick pan like that, I just put a piece of tape on the outside of the lens. I could delineate exactly where the frame was because I knew that they would be comped later in post. And that the house where Tom Hanks is standing was actually a structure that we built, because we were shooting in Chinchón, Spain, and we liked to get things as close as possible to where we were staying. They found a little golf course very close to us.

Anderson: Tom Hanks also, yes, he gets an entrance there. We do quite a bit with it. We are swirling around 360 degrees on Jason’s side of the scene with this police chase happening, and Tom Hanks has an entrance from outside on the golf course all the way around and up to the camera.

Yeoman: Wes originally came to me, and he said his concept was to shoot everything in Asteroid City with natural light—so no movie lights. We constructed these structures with the skylights that we could control a little bit with silks, so that we wouldn’t have to use any movie lights. It was a challenge for me.

The News

Stanley tells Augie it’s time he tell his children that their mother has died—which leads to this beautifully funny-sad moment, where Augie breaks the news, awkwardly, in the middle of nowhere.

Yeoman: It’s very difficult to try to blend comedy and grief in the same scene. Jason was able to portray both things within the scene. We shot it during the middle part of the day in a harsh sunlight. Jason’s angle actually is a little bit backlit at that point, but if you look at the other, the shots of the kids from the side, the side angles, they’re very kind of harshly lit, front-lit, a lot of harsh midday sun. In a movie that Wes isn’t directing, I would be inclined to throw a giant silk up and just try to soften the whole thing out. But Wes wanted to have that feeling. Before we started shooting, we looked at movies, The Bad Day at Black Rock and Paris, Texas, and how they use the sun in those movies to become really a character. They weren’t afraid of shooting at midday, and they weren’t afraid of harsh sun, which is typically, for most cinematographers, something you prefer not to do.

In all honesty, I was a little skeptical about that approach at the beginning, but as I saw more and more of our dailies, I grew to really embrace it and realized that we were creating a world. You’re out in the desert in the middle part of the day. During the digital intermediate in post, we took a little contrast out, and it kind of took a little bit of the edge off that hard light, I think. But again, it was all natural light. I would’ve shot it way later in the day if I was scheduling it, but we kind of wanted to embrace that feeling.

Anderson: I don’t think it’s such harsh sunlight, this scene. I don’t love to have everything be backlit with, I guess, what I look for, is some simplicity in it in terms of the lighting. But to me, Jason’s character and role is the center of the whole movie, and this scene is a crucial one, and so for me, it was just, on the set, I’m just an audience member. Jason was so good playing this scene and so surprising. He’s just so interesting, and so for me, this scene is one of the crucial ones along with the other one with him and Margot Robbie. Those two scenes are the tentpoles of the movie.

Yeoman: Wes chose to put it right out there and right in the middle of everything in the town. That was his choice. All the locations where we shoot are basically things that he’s decided. Here, they had just pretty much arrived to the town, and putting it outside, you get a much stronger feeling of the environment. Whereas if you were just inside one of those little motel rooms, it would’ve been a lot more constrictive. But now you really feel that they’re out there alone in the desert. It gives a sense of the openness of the landscape. And where they are, they’re in the middle of nowhere, which you might not have gotten from inside one of the buildings there, I think.

The Children

Anderson has memorably worked with child actors before, most notably in his Oscar-nominated Moonrise Kingdom. Here the director again balances tricky, mannered adult behavior with the wondrous spontaneity of children. Even within that, though, the director noticed nuances between age groups, which informed the story’s portrait of younger kids and teens all thrown together.

Yeoman: This is Wes really wanting just to go with all natural light, and dusk is kind of a magical part of the day. We put a lot of practical lights in the background, and we have that little Coleman lantern there. It’s not actually lighting anything really, but it just gives more of a magical quality to the image. Because you have a very narrow window of time to shoot these scenes, I have to compliment our younger actors: They all knew their lines really well. There was never any moment where I felt like, “Oh, no, the actor’s not going to know his or her stuff.”

Our whole philosophy during our dusk scenes was to shoot it all natural light and then just put as many practicals as seem realistic in the background to help give it a little glow and a little bit of magic to it. Wes likes to work with really small on-set crews, and there’s obviously a lot of people involved in making this film, but when you’re on set shooting, it’s very, very small—less than 10 people, and there’s no video village. He likes to create an environment for the actors to feel safe and to feel that there’s not a lot of gear around them. So it’s generally just a camera and a dolly. And I think it helps them to just not be distracted in any way with all the accoutrements that come with the traditional filmmaking. This was a good example of it.

Anderson: In the case of the kids in this movie…the teenagers, those are young people and you work with them like actors. They know their roles, they bring an approach, they have ideas. On the other hand, working with three little triplets who are six years old, that is totally documentary. They’re not really actors; they’re themselves. They’re just themselves and you guide them the same way you would if you were taking them to a museum or to their playground or the piano lesson or whatever it is. They’re just living their lives, and the truth is they don’t care about what happens. They’re just there to enjoy the day, and they were really funny sisters, these three. They were great to have around because they were completely crazy.

Yeoman: Wes does work differently with the kids. To go back to Moonrise Kingdom, most of those actors in the movie had not been in a movie before. So Wes brought them in early before we had the rest of the cast arrive and worked with them. And I remember we would go out into the woods with the guy and the girl and just shoot things with them, so they got used to us. They kind of knew more of the process and wouldn’t be distracted by the process. I know when Tony Revolori came to Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes worked with him quite a bit; even Jason Schwartzman on Rushmore. He spends a lot of time with them beforehand, so by the time they come to the set, they’re really well prepared, and they know what to expect, and they know what Wes is going for.

The Actors

Anderson: They’re playing a scene that is a theatrical setting. Two stage doors facing each other across an alley in the context of a theatrical presentation, a television broadcast, so it couldn’t be a more theatrical context, but in the end, it’s really—and I guess, the whole design of the set and all that stuff—it’s all inspired by Broadway and the theater and playwrights and the ’50s, which is all stuff I love, but all it’s really about is this making a space for this scene between this man and his wife who he lost.

Yeoman: We made this set in a warehouse in Chinchón. And because it’s black and white, we started shooting black-and-white film. French Dispatch taught me a lot about shooting black-and-white film, and oftentimes harder lights are more effective than just typically with color film. I try to do a lot of soft light and bounce light, and this had the harder lights hitting our actors there, backlighting them. For all of our black-and-white sequences, we brought in a lighting designer from London who does theater, and we first met him on French Dispatch. There’s a sequence there with the cadets in the bunkhouse there, and it is a different way of lighting when you light for theater. And so, on the one hand, we had Asteroid City, which was all natural light; this was much more theatrically lit. The lights are generally hung up high, like in a theater.

Anderson: It’s theatrical, but it’s about something very personal. I love the way Bob lit it because, ultimately, it’s lit like a scene in a play, but it’s about these characters, and the focus of it is these characters and the tension and moment between them. I think that’s part of the whole way it’s lit—it’s built around enhancing that.

The Alien

Back in the play, the convention’s attendees—and really, the movie’s audience—are thrown for a loop when the realist drama of the play suddenly goes surreal, with the arrival of a playfully animated alien. Yeoman didn’t shoot this directly but had an idea of how it would feel and look in the final cut—and idea that was somewhat upended by Anderson’s ultimate vision.

Yeoman: I didn’t shoot this particular scene. The animators did it, and we had Jeff Goldblum playing the alien in the movie. There’s a scene in the theater where he walks toward camera, and he’s on stilts. And Jeff is very talented and incredibly smart, but to do some of these things that this animated character did would probably have been impossible, just because of when he bends down to get the asteroid. I think that Wes felt that by animating it, it would take on a whole different quality. I’ve seen the movie several times in the theater, and whenever this particular sequence is onscreen, the audience is generally laughing, and it has a comical kind of twist to it that I don’t know that we could have gotten if we had shot it with real actors and things. The expressions on the alien’s face, the eyes, the way the alien moves—it could have been a scary moment, it could have been a sad moment, but it becomes very comical.

Anderson: What Bob has done is he’s created an environment that then another team takes over, to do the animation of the alien. So I guess Bob feels it’s taken further because, for him, that’s one little area that he’s not present for. The miniatures are done elsewhere with Tristan Oliver, a different director of photography, with Kim Keukeleire animating, Andy Gent, who makes our puppets. There’s a whole team that works on those and then it comes back, but in fact, Bob has created the setting for all of their work, I don’t know, to shake up the look of the movie. A spaceship has come down from the sky and an alien has entered, so it’s a very different moment from anything else in the movie, so it’s really just what the story is telling us.

Yeoman: Wes has made this choice before. In French Dispatch, they had this car chase through at night. I remember asking him, “How are we going to do that?” And he said, “I’m going to make it a comic book.” And I remember the skiing sequence in Grand Budapest. I said, “Well, are we going to all fly to Switzerland and shoot in the snow?” And he said, “No, I’m going to do it animated.” It adds another element to the film…. Wes does an animatic of the entire movie before, so everybody has studied the animatic, and we get a sense of what’s going to happen. Obviously, in the finished movie, it’s a much more polished frame, and there’s a lot more information than you might get from the animatic. So I had a sense, obviously, of what was going to happen with the alien. But certainly, Wes and the animators took it a little bit further than I had anticipated.

The Window

The conversations across homes between Augie and Midge, as they slowly and cautiously get to know each other, frame the play dramatically as well as visually—emphasizing the sense of loneliness and longing that pervades the remote desert setting.

Anderson: These scenes with Jason and Scarlett are the other tentpole of the movie, in a way, and actually, it’s quite simple. As it happens, we built separate versions of these cabins around the shots. For various reasons, they’re a little more complicated than you might see in the movie, just because, well, they’re deeper than you would think and they’re on two levels and they’re just little adjustments to get in the shot from what you might assume is very straightforward. But on the other hand, it is pretty straightforward. It’s really about getting these two people together, and there’s a real connection. I felt this real connection between Jason and Scarlett. I’d known them both. I think I met them when each was about 17. I’ve known them both for so long. It’s quite a thing to just see how formidable they are as actors. And Scarlett, what I remember thinking of Gena Rowlands, watching her play this scene. It’s totally different—not a part I’ve ever seen Gena Rowlands play, but she made me think of her.

Yeoman: She’s attempting to connect with him on some levels, but that physical space is what keeps them apart. That had something to do with how it was staged. As opposed to them going for a walk down the road, there’s that constrictive barrier between them. That was kind of how I looked at it. Again, no lights used in this. We had the open roofs for both angles, Jason and Scarlett’s, and I just threw a silk over there. And then I put a double net over towards the back of the wall. I was trying to bring the interior of the room down a little bit, in terms of exposure, so it’d feel more natural. And occasionally, we throw white cards in there, in the front, just to fill them in a little bit. But that was how we shot them.

And almost no one was there. When you look at the backgrounds, you get a sense that these are two people in the middle of nowhere, and they’re trying to connect, but maybe they can’t really connect. So it gives this lonely feel—when I look at this image, it has a very lonely feel to it. Everyone was far, far away because they were pretty intimate scenes. It was a nice setup for Wes to do these scenes and get the most out of his actors without any distractions and keep it very minimal. That’s how he likes to work.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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