Life Aquatic 2004

About Wes Anderson:

After studying at the St. John's High School in Houston, the young Wes Anderson obtained a degree in philosophy from the University of Texas. Crazy about cinema, he made several short movies, filming with his Super 8 camera, which left him with an early learning of film editing.

After being denied entry to Columbia University to study film, he begins to write and make a small film of less than a quarter of an hour that will later become a feature film, that’s how Bottle Rocket (1996) is born, his first feature film, with Luke and Owen Wilson with whom Anderson is going to have an enduring relationship (Luke has acted in all his films, while Owen has also been his co-writer).

In 1998, his second film, Rushmore, co-written by Anderson and Owen, was well received by critics and its director was seen as one of the new hopes of American independent cinema. Starring Bill Murray, this film marks the debut of indie star Jason Schwartzman.

In 2001, Anderson made his third film, The Royal Tenenbaums, with a luxury casting made up of Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller and Gwyneth Paltrow.

In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, 2004, he returns with his fetish actor, Bill Murray, turned into a sailor obsessed with capturing and killing a jaguar shark.

In his films, Anderson has established a point of view full of humor and at the same time deeply human about modern life and relationships. Each of his widely popular comedies has undertaken the recurring themes of aspirations, misfits, family, love and fatality. His fourth film takes these same themes to a whole new territory when Anderson simultaneously embarks on a marine adventure with abundant chases, shootings, lurking sharks and underwater wonders.

Anderson's scripts always arise from an intimate personal experience and in the center of Aquatic Life there is another character very dear to Anderson: Steve Zissou, a world famous oceanographer who is both comically familiar and totally unique.

For a long time fascinated by aquatic films and underwater life in general, Anderson had always wanted to make a film staged on a ship in the world of film adventures. "This is a movie I've been thinking about for fourteen years," he says. "I was always fascinated by this strange and amazing character that creates a kind of eccentric family in the middle of the sea"

Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is an oceanographer and documentary filmmaker whose films about the aquatic world had some success in the past, but have now lost popularity, plunging Sizzou into a serious depression. However, the death of a close friend between the jaws of the mythical "Jaguar Shark", gives new strength to Sizzou, who decides to mount a final expedition to locate and destroy the jaguar shark, and in this way avenging the death of his friend. And so, aboard the ship "Belafonte", he embarks on the adventure along with his strange crew, which includes Jane (Cate Blanchett), a bitter reporter, and Ned (Owen Wilson), who could be Zissou's son. On the way, of course, strange adventures await them, ranging from a pirate attack to the rescue of an eternal rival and perhaps a confrontation with the fierce jaguar shark.

Wes Anderson is such a rare guy - as well as his cinema - that he really requires a certain and positive mood. In this particular film I understood once and for all his sense of humor. That inhuman coldness with which his characters face the majority of the absurd situations of the plot, something that brutally enhances those very few moments in which the shell is removed and reveals their emotions. I have laughed openly with Bill Murray facing shots with the most bungling pirates that I remember seeing on the screen with the diver's helmet and built-in music. I love the wonderful character of Willem Dafoe with some simply different and hilarious gags ("the scientific motive to kill the animal?"; "... revenge").

Bill Murray is perfect in his role. Again, it's Bill Murray. Only he can do this. The ensemble cast is, in addition to varied, very rich: the confident and imposing Anjelica Houston, that dawned Jeff Goldblum, the sporadic but priceless Michael Gambon or a Cate Blanchett that transmits all the nervous fragility of her character in a very precise way. It is also one of the few characters that never hide their emotions, and this brings the audience closer.

Visually I love the look Anderson gets; from their usual camera sweeps, fast and accurate, to their arrogant colors, going through those sea creatures as artificial as they are delicious, who find their climax in the beautiful final sequence, with the commented jaguar shark.

Everything is happening along the way, including the death of Wilson's character, filmed in a way as different and surprising as effective. It is, first and foremost, something new, such a different way of explaining what is happening through images.

Finally, Anderson has conquered me. I already liked The Tenenbaums, although I was not as excited. But Life aquatic goes further; It is freer, has more flight, and is totally irreverent.

Note: One of my favorite moments of the film is when Zissou ask his intern:

Zissou: Intern give me a Campari.

Intern: On the rocks?

Zissou makes the hand gesture you see on the image above.

About the Production

In the script by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, Steve Zissou's ship, the Belafonte, essentially becomes another character in the film. From its colorful laboratory and equipped kitchen, to its research library, edition room and dream “observation bubble”, the ship seems to reflect the original spirit of the whole day. Production began looking for a boat with an original shape and style. "It was almost like a cast selection," says production designer Mark Friedberg. “The search for the ship was an adventure. Wes was very specific about the type of ship he wanted — it had to be from the time of World War II, it had to be a minesweeper, it had to be 50 meters long, and to some extent, it had to remind us of Cousteau's “Calypso."

After months of tracking the seas, the production found a 50-year-old minesweeper in South Africa, which with lots of difficulty took the production from Capetown to Rome. That ship remained intact for many of the outdoor sequences but was equipped to turn it into an oceanographic research ship, complete with towers, an observation deck and a very bright paint. Meanwhile, a very similar second ship was acquired to be dismantled and used to dress the stage.

"As for the interior of the ship, we wanted it to reflect Zissou, an insecure man about the direction of his life at this time, so that everything in this world is built and merged," says Friedberg. “When we started, we were wondering, if this story is about a real man facing his son or is it a fable, a cheerful comedy — and the answer was that it is all this, and it had to be reflected in the design.

From the beginning, Anderson knew that he wanted the public to see the Belafonte for the first time with the view of a cross section of a model, open to reveal all its program inside. So the design team built half a ship longitudinally so that the camera and the technical team could move in a straight line from room to room.

"Since the real ship is built of metal, we couldn't move walls easily, so we rebuilt what we saw inside the ship on stage," Friedberg explains. “Wes wanted to film the ship in its entirety simply by moving a crane around the first room for the first scene the ship is introduced. He wanted to use only real stages and very little of digital compounds or effects. There is a great sense of humor and fluidity, and Wes had everything planned with great precision.”

“Filming the scene was a lot of fun,” says Anderson. “We had all the actors walking around like a colony of ants and the lights are changing and the cameras are moving, and it was very exciting because none of us had done something similar. The stage was more like a museum piece than a recording stage— people continually went to see it. ”

The stage in the middle of the Belafonte, three stories high, it was built, like most stages, on the lot of the legendary Cinecitta Studios in Italy, with its famous artists and craftsmen. “We chose Italy because it had everything we were looking for — it is on the water, it has Cinecitta where all the Fellini films have been made, and it is the Mediterranean, so it has that island sensibility,” says Friedberg.

Barry Mendel adds: "Filming in Italy has a very specific flavor, and I think that some of that European sensitivity of handmade crafts has become part of the unique structure of the film."

The stages were one thing, but the cast and the technical team took a lot of getting used to the real ship used as the Belafonte. For many, the day of its presentation came on a one-day visit in which Wes Anderson hoped to film some scenes from the Team Zissou documentary. “We went to this small volcanic island, and the sea was very rough and almost everyone got dizzy - and we still had a great time,” he recalls. “We had the opportunity to meet each other, and when you are on a ship like that, it becomes very intimate. There are no barriers anymore. And what I find very interesting is that people become very emotional about the Belafonte, they feel a great loyalty. ”

The production designer also created Zissou's house on Pescespada Island in Italy, complete with a 12th-century castle, a pool with a killer whale (the whale is added through a rear projection), a landing platform for the seaplane and a very important ping pong table. "The theme for the Zissou enclosure was that we should have a feeling of 'I don't want to grow up,'" says Friedberg. “Pescespada Island was an extraordinary setting, very different from everything I've ever seen,” summarizes Mendel.

Meanwhile, in contrast to the Belafonte is Hennessey's ship, the super rival of Steve Zissou, forged as one of the most modern research ships in the world, in which no expense has been repaired. For this ship, the production used a NATO research ship, The Elite, which proved to be the antithesis of the Belafonte. “It was totally the opposite of what we created for Steve Zissou — extremely clean, very structured and high-tech,” says Mark Friedberg. "It was a totally different world."

Another key element of the Belafonte is the concept of submersible Deep Search — previously having received the name of one of Steve Zissou's former loves — in which the team finally heads to the depths of the sea in search of the jaguar shark. The mini submarine was built of iron and fiberglass by an Italian team, with propellers and lights that actually worked.

“The taking of the submarine was really an incredible scene of filming because we had the entire cast, with the exception of Owen, locked in the back of this tiny stage. It was designed so that they could enter quickly and could not leave, which really sets the mood for the scene, says Anderson. "There was a terrifying feeling of going into the unknown."