Introduction
Asteroid City takes place in a fictional American desert town circa 1955 wherein the itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events.
Script
Wes Anderson, Film Writer and Director: Here we go and…action! Asteroid City – we wanted a slightly exaggerated desert, desert to set a play. I had a thought that we might find a place that was very, very flat and open and build our rocks and build our town. The place where we filmed, Chinchon, about an hour from Madrid, well, if you want flat land and you decide you want to shoot in Europe, I think you’ll soon find yourself in Spain. Quite a perfect spot for us to do this and with the right amount of room. Another 10 Paces forward Sandy!
Steve Carell’s Character (The Motel Manager): You see that wonderful, crackly patch right out there between the dead cactuses and the dried up riverbed?
Liev Schreiber’s character (J.J. Kellogg, WWII Veteran and father of a Junior Stargazer awardee): I think so.
Carell: That’s your parcel.
Anderson: We laid it out and we made miniature rocks and we figured it out for the location. We had originally looked at locations…ultimately the more time we spent looking at images of different places, the more I started to feel like I wanted a bit of each. Rather than building it in a real landscape, to instead create a bit of the landscape as part of the play. Lunch time! Line up single file.
Maya Hawke’s character (June Douglas, Grade School Teacher: Lunch time! Line up single file. Lunch time! Line up single file.
Scarlet Johansson’s Character (Midge Campbell – Film Starlet: My word! It’s hot.
Anderson: Asteroid City, the town itself, slowly, in the course of time, Adam Stockhausen and I working together on this. I guess the thing was to try to make buildings that were as evocative of the time as we possibly could and as interesting as they could be. The place always needed to have a certain mystery, you know. There’s a freeway on-ramp there that goes to nowhere. There’s a crater on the edge of the town and an observatory and the various things we needed for our story. We built it all and the great thing was that it was a place where we could work with a very small group.
Grace Edwards’ Character (Dinah Campbell): Which way did he go?
Tilda Swinton’s Character (Dr. Hikenlooper): hmm, well…
Anderson: Once it was built we could be a tiny group in this…what seemed like an abandoned town. We could golf cart ourselves to the set every day and back home and work just the way I like to work, which is the actors come to the set ready to shoot, already in costume and there’s no trailers and there’s no trucks anywhere that you can see them and we can be a bit like a student film. So we were a student film on an enormous, giant set in the middle of Spain.
Quiz
1. For Asteroid City we wanted a slightly exaggerated desert to set _________. Discussion
Do you enjoy smaller-budget, independent films?
Are you familiar with any of Wes Anderson’s filmography?
What are some recent films that stand out in your memory?
Resources
Video script and vocabulary