Biography of Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson is a modern auteur: a film director, a producer, and a screenwriter. His films have a distinctive style all their own and are noted for their unique visual elements, their quirky humor, and their use of symmetry, unusual composition, and baroque details.

Raised in Houston, Texas, Anderson was interested in film from an early age, and he started making Super 8 films with his siblings in childhood. After college at the University of Texas at Austin, he made his first film, Bottle Rocket, in 1996 with Luke and Owen Wilson. He followed that up in 1998 with Rushmore, starring Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, and Olivia Williams, about an unusual high schooler who falls in love with an elementary school teacher. Next was The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001, an ensemble film about a wealthy artistic family in New York, written by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson. The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.

In 2004, Anderson made The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and in 2004, The Darjeeling Limited. In 2009 he made the stop-animation film Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Moonrise Kingdom was released in 2012 and earned Wes Anderson another Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. In 2014, The Grand Budapest Hotel earned him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director. In total, it won 4 Academy Awards. Anderson's most recent film was Isle of Dogs, another stop-motion animation film.

Anderson is known for his blend of melancholy, humor, suspense, and family drama in many of his films. The visual aspects of his films often feature a limited color palette, handmade props and set pieces, snap-zooms, and flat space camera moves.


Study Guides on Works by Wes Anderson

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a 2014 film created by idiosyncratic director Wes Anderson. The film is loosely inspired by the literature of early 20th century Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Director and co-writer Anderson had never even heard of...

The Royal Tenenbaums was written by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson and released in 2001 to great acclaim. His third film, The Royal Tenenbaums, follows the development of the three gifted but troubled Tenenbaum children, and their reunion with their...