“Asteroid City” Is a Midcentury Western With a Wes Anderson Twist

Is there a signature "Wes Anderson style"? An Instagram account turned best-selling book and a recent trend of viral TikToks and AI-generated parodies would say yes, but in reality, the answer is more complicated. While the cult-favorite filmmaker certainly has a visual aesthetic that may seem easy to define, with its midcentury motifs, funky framing, and exhaustively detailed sans serif design, each of Anderson’s cinematic settings have actually been uniquely specific, meaning that while Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The French Dispatch, for instance, might share some of their players and quirks, the universes they occupy are pretty singular.

Anderson is a bit old Hollywood in that way, crafting a complete body of work rather than simply embracing the life of a journeyman filmmaker. He’s got more in common with Vincente Minnelli and John Ford than he does with James Cameron and the Russo Brothers, and that’s fine with him. He recently told The Daily Beast: "I wish there were more people who were just as strange in their approach, and that were doing completely different things than me, and also developed their approach like a painter who might have a very recognizable path—this period he’s working in this way, and maybe it shifts a bit, and then maybe it goes elsewhere—but it isn’t like, each step of the way there are things going in all different directions." While some critics, even fans, call Anderson’s work "relentlessly stylized," the filmmaker just says he has "a recognizable handwriting."

Production designer Adam Stockhausen, who worked with Anderson on Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, and most recently, Asteroid City (released widely on June 23), says that to truly appreciate the filmmaker, you have to not only enjoy his style, but also his storytelling. "Certainly Wes has a strong visual style that’s all his own, but it’s all just about trying to serve the story needs. It’s also completely different from film to film, because each story is different," says Stockhausen.

For Asteroid City, a meta sci-fi comedy-drama set in a 1950s American desert town famous for its meteor crater, that meant a color story that leans much more heavily on a new-West palette of sandy beige and crisp white than more European, weathered-looking pinks and yellows. In turn, the soundtrack is also a hint more honky-tonk forward than it is full of plucky piano. "Working on Asteroid City," Stockhausen says, "was about answering a completely different set of questions and led to a different set of answers than, say, building a summer camp full of khaki scouts on an island off the East Coast [for Moonrise Kingdom]."

In the movie, audiences are seeing what amounts to a staged production of a play called Asteroid City by Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). The action weaves between the fictional city and Earp’s world, so while the drama in the desert outpost might be about UFOs, a science camp, and a family learning to thrive again after the loss of a parent, it’s really all just a creation of Earp and the actors in his production. In practice, the story within a story makes for a multilayered spectacle that’s interesting from just about every angle.

Stockhausen started answering Asteroid City’s big questions in the summer of 2020, when Anderson brought him the idea for the movie. At that point, the writer-director was pretty deep into penning the script and wanted to get Stockhausen thinking about how to make the titular town a reality. "Our first conversations were really about, ‘How are we going to make this place?’" Stockhausen says. "At its core, it’s not a real town on the map. It’s a set somewhere in the fictionalized American Southwest, and that’s a much different thing. Our first conversations were about saying, ‘Do we build the whole town? Do we build pieces of the town? Do we place it into a real landscape somewhere? In Death Valley? Maybe the deserts of Spain? Or do we consider shooting it on a backlot set where we’re building the landscape as well?’"

Because Stockhausen, Anderson, and the rest of the world were still in pretty deep Covid lockdown, the team had to scout via location photographs, which the production designer would sketch buildings and set pieces onto. Ultimately, that led them to realize that they’d probably have to build the desert town from scratch, landing on a piece of Spanish desert south of Madrid that not only had what Stockhausen calls perfectly "blinding sun in the summertime," but would also let them pay subtle tribute to Hollywood’s long history of shooting Westerns in Spain.

Shooting the film in central Spain also meant that the Asteroid City actors would be thrust into a bit of a camp-like situation, something that’s worked out well for Anderson’s panoply of players in the past. "That’s a really significant part of making these films together," Stockhausen says. "The whole film happens in this sort of incubator." The Asteroid City cast spent a lot of time in the dust at the desert outpost, but also occasionally filmed at buildings in the nearby town of Chinchón, like a couple small theaters and a garlic drying warehouse in which Stockhausen and his team erected a black-and-gray living room set for Edward Norton’s playwright character.

For the Western town’s crisp, sun-soaked look, Stockhausen and Anderson pulled from a number of cinematic references, from the roadside motel in It Happened One Night to the desert landscape of Bad Day at Black Rock or Ace in the Hole. Stockhausen and his team also scouted real-life roadside cafes and motels in places like Death Valley and Joshua Tree, taking special note of small details they loved, whether it was a bit of woodworking around a door or some classic wallpaper in a roadside eatery. "There are thousands of these individual little details, and you just kind of collect and gather them until it comes together into this new thing," he says.

Plotting Asteroid City itself turned out to be a massive test of Stockhausen’s math and moviemaking skills, as its layout required knowledge of each of Anderson’s proposed shots and how the city would look in the background. Stockhausen says the actual set was several thousand feet long with a huge amount of depth, some of which housed faux mountains and boulders meant to help set the scale. Everything had to be completely practical so that, for instance, if an actor went into the luncheonette, the camera could follow through the window or door, maintaining one continuous shot, sight lines and all. "The position of all the rocks and mountains was carefully planned onto the axis of each shot, and those shots tend to line up, for the most part, in straight lines down the road," says Stockhausen. 

In the movie, the view toward the town’s famed asteroid crater is exactly the same as the view out the luncheonette’s windows. The same goes for the framing from the motel toward the luncheonette. This was the result of a ton of digital modeling and storyboard work by Stockhausen and his crew to make sure everything would line up. "It didn’t have that sort of, ‘Well, we’ll find it when we get there,’ feeling that can happen when you’re in a location and sort of developing the shots for the scene during the rehearsal," says Stockhausen. As with so many of Anderson’s projects, everything needed to be perfectly planned.

That included the 12 or so shed-like cabins that make up Asteroid City’s motel, all of which Stockhausen says were fully built with rustic, finished interiors. Not every interior was given an Anderson-style retro sheen worthy of screen time, but each cabin was at least somewhat functional, whether to be used to hold camera gear or props, as a de facto green room for the cast (complete with air-conditioning!), or as a mid-set bathroom. 

There were just two exceptions. The cabins occupied by Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson’s characters, Augie and Midge, were built in a sort of cutaway diorama style, where the only parts that actually exist are what viewers see on-screen. Given that scenes with those cabins were filmed from the outside looking in through a window, Stockhausen and his team worked to craft the perfect frame behind each one—a process that not only meant figuring what color to paint the walls and where to place pieces of furniture, but how to angle each cabin’s floor so that items that speak to the characters’ stories—like a spilled bottle of Midge’s sleeping pills—would actually read on camera. "For that kind of stuff," Stockhausen says, "We had to sort it out full scale, so we had extra window cutouts made, along with a back wall, and then we’d experiment, saying, ‘Tip the floor a little bit more. How about you try to move the back wall a foot closer?’ It became this full-size mock-up that we were experimenting with behind one of the big rocks behind the motel. You can’t see it on-screen, but that’s where we were practicing everything for upcoming shots."

Even more math and planning went into the cartoonishly perfect crater, as well as the adorable Asteroid Express, the train that brings goods and alien-loving looky-loos to town. Both were built in part in miniature, with Stockhausen saying the full-size crater, where speeches and awards ceremonies take place in the movie, was built on a smaller scale and then digitally composited around the cast in post-production. Scenes where you can only see a part of the crater—like a wall, as a backdrop—were shot on a full-scale studio set in the nearby town. 

There were also two versions of the Asteroid Express—a 1:8 scale miniature by Berlin prop maker Simon Weisse, who Anderson has worked with since The Grand Budapest Hotel, and a larger set of one-sided cars, built in sections, used for shots where we see the aforementioned looky-loos hanging out of the train’s windows. Stockhausen says even the view from the miniature train was planned in advance of shooting, lest one piece of Asteroid City’s rocky landscape look askew. It’s that kind of attention to detail that makes Anderson’s films simultaneously so easy to identify and so hard to artfully recreate. It’s not just the look of a movie (or a restaurant, or a TikTok…) that makes it "Wes Anderson." It’s everything else, as well.

Various props, costumes, and set pieces from the film are currently on display at "Asteroid City" pop-ups in Los Angeles and New York, as well as a more extensive London exhibit, which runs through July 8.

Top Image: Universal Pictures

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