Written Interview: Wes Anderson (“Moonrise Kingdom”)

Vanity Fair Interview with writer-director Wes Anderson about his new movie Moonrise Kingdom. Excerpt:

How is Suzy and Sam’s story similar to your first love?

Well, what I wanted to do was re-create the feeling of that memory. The movie is kind of like a fantasy that I think I would have had at that age. When you’re 11 or 12 years old, you can get so swept up in a book that you start to believe that the fantasy is reality. I think when you have a giant crush when you’re in fifth grade, it becomes your whole world. It’s like being underwater; everything is different.

One detail that I really liked was the Coping with a Troubled Child pamphlet that Kara’s character discovers her parents are using to deal with her. Did that come from your childhood?

[Pause] Yes. It was directly taken from my childhood. It wasn’t anything terrible. It’s just something that at the time, when I found it, I was like [grits teeth], “What is this!” I immediately knew who that troubled child was even though hypothetically it could have been someone else.

Did you ever talk to your parents about it, even after they saw the movie?

No. It was in my father’s house. That’s a conversation I don’t think anyone would care to have. But my father has a Google alert so he sees practically everything written about me. He usually keeps me posted. He hasn’t brought anything up, though, so maybe he’ll just let this be.

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