MOONRISE KINGDOM directed by Wes Anderson, written by Anderson and Roman Coppola, with Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton and Bill Murray. An eOne Entertainment release. 94 minutes. Opens Friday (June 1). For venues and times, see Movies.
I’m finding it difficult to frame questions for Wes Anderson. His new film, Moonrise Kingdom, is a delicate, lovely little study of melancholy – more about mood than plot, although there’s plenty of that as well.
And now that I’ve got him on the line (from his Paris apartment, where co-writer Roman Coppola and co-star Jason Schwartzman are sitting around with him), all I can tell him is that I still don’t fully understand why the last shot of his movie moved me to tears.
“I probably don’t either,” says the director, laughing.
Moonrise Kingdom is about the intensity of first love, and that’s so personal a subject that I can’t articulate my own response. But he says he was after that very thing.
“That’s really what the point of departure was – trying to recreate an emotion or sensation related to first love,” says Anderson.
“Having said that, really we just focused on the characters and the story. I think how that comes across is sort of a mystery.”
A lot of it is in the tender performances of Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward as Sam and Suzy, 12-year-olds who run away together on an island off the coast of New England in the relatively innocent mid-1960s.
Anderson’s young lovers share a certain devotion and desperation with the anti-heroes of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and various Jean-Luc Godard pictures.
“It certainly does connect to all kinds of different love-on-the-run-type movies,” he says. “Usually when I’m starting a movie, I kind of have a list of inspirations, and this one I really didn’t. I’m sure I’m stealing from just as many movies as I ever steal from, but I’m not able to quite pin down what I was trying to copy.”
The period in which Anderson’s film is set was important too.
“This is sort of the end of the innocence, the period before the counterculture and that sort of thing,” Anderson says. “The island where we filmed much of the movie, it’s a place that was only accessible by ferry for a hundred years and had a few houses on it – it was kind of a summer colony. In 1962 they started building a bridge, and in 1965 it was connected to Newport. Now the island is [just] a suburb of a big city – it has little shopping areas and many, many houses. It’s completely different from what it was – you know, in 10 years it was completely transformed. So I sort of feel that connects the movie, being set during the time before all that happened.”
Sam and Suzy’s flight sends a ragtag posse of adults (and a troop of boy scouts) in pursuit, but the more time we spend among the grown-ups, the more we realize they’re even more lost than the children for whom they’re searching.
“I think they’re operating on parallel paths with the children,” Anderson says. “But the children actually know what they want those two really have a solution. They’re just not as confused. They have a simpler point of view, I guess.”
normw@nowtoronto.com | twitter.com/nowfilm