Royal Tenenbaums director keeps a light touch on dark matters

By MATTHEW TYNAN

As Wes Anderson talks about The Royal Tenenbaums in a downtown New York restaurant, we are interrupted by a fan.

"I always tell my husband that I hope our son grows up to be like Max Fischer," she says, referring to the inimitable lovestruck hero of Anderson's previous film Rushmore, a master of extra-curricular activities who makes going to school seem like a career choice.

After thanking her politely, Anderson whispers conspiratorially to me, "That sounds like a recipe for disaster".

Other than having written plays as a lad, Anderson denies any further similarities between himself and Fischer. "I was never that cool. I'm too shy," he explains.

Actually, now Anderson is that cool. He and co-writer Owen Wilson, a rising film star whose credits include Shanghai Noon, Zoolander and Behind Enemy Lines, were nominated for a best original screenplay Oscar for Tenenbaums. Rushmore made many critics' favourite lists.

Anderson and Wilson are former class and room-mates at the University of Texas. Their first film was 1996's Bottle Rocket. Anderson attributes the pair's success to a simple formula: "We find the same things funny."

There is, though, some trouble in paradise. "It doesn't work as well as it used to," he confesses.

"When we did Bottle Rocket we worked together on the whole movie, but when we did Rushmore it started to fall to me a little more since he was being cast in all these movies."

When it came to writing The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson did the lion's share of the work. Wilson was too busy.

The Royal Tenenbaums comes with a star-studded cast (including Gene Hackman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover and Ben Stiller) and a budget in excess of US$37 million ($83 million), making it Anderson's biggest film and his biggest gamble.

Hackman plays Royal Tenenbaum, the estranged family patriarch, a charming rapscallion and lovable rogue who abandons and then seeks to reclaim his family of serene wife Etheline and their three gifted but troubled children.

It's the least overtly comic of Anderson's three films. Compared to the "wistful melancholy" of Rushmore, this one can, in Anderson's words, "be a little depressing at times". The film tackles themes that could certainly be deemed "depressing" (divorce, suicide and incest) but the overriding tone is light, candy-coated, insulated and, to use Anderson's phrase, "everything feels slightly off".

Hackman's charismatic performance is the film's driving force, but driving the actor was hard work.

"I was excited by what he was doing in the movie, but he doesn't make it easy. He's very private and one of the ways that manifests itself is that he doesn't like to be directed.

"I didn't know that going in, but I discovered it about halfway through the first day. But I had to direct, I had no choice. We had to find our way with each other."

It was all plain sailing for Anderson with the rest of his cast, including another Wilson - Owen's younger brother Luke, who started a relationship with Paltrow after they met on set.

* The Royal Tenenbaums opens in selected cinemas tomorrow.

- INDEPENDENT