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Wes Andersondoesnt want to talk aboutAsteroid City.
Its a weekday afternoon.
Were in the New York office of his production company, American Empirical Pictures, in the East Village.
Hes been wearing a seersucker suit since morning.
He worries that hes covered everything.
Maybe we can talk about something else?
Thats okay by me.
Ive known Wes for 30 years.
Today, Wes offers me bottled water from the refrigerator and pours it into a glass with ice.
He asks if Ive ever been in this space before.
And off we go.
.An Irrelevant Set of theEncyclopdia Britannica
.
Allen Ginsberg lived in one of the units below until his death in 1997.
Posters, photos, knickknacks, and letters are everywhere.
Built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves occupy most of the side walls.
Andersons books are old and new, pristine and beat up.
Theres also a set of theEncyclopdia Britannicafrom before the internet, which made these sorta irrelevant, he says.
I ask if he has ever thrown out or sold a book for free up space.
He thinks about it, smiles, and says no: More like I hoard them.
The ball just rockets right off it.
These are sort of like lobby cards, he says.
They show the different characters, and some of them have the actors.
His friend Randall Poster, a music supervisor and collector, introduced him to these.
He loves photography books and sometimes gets more than one collection of work by photographers he admires.
Zissou also provided the undersea explorer and filmmaker ofThe Life Aquaticwith his surname.
The portrait of Steve Zissous mentor, Lord Mandrake, is modeled on a photograph of Lartigue.
Another of Andersons favorites is documentary filmmakerTimothy Greenfield-Sanders.
Pinned to a corkboard in the office is a photocopy of a handwritten letter from Ginsberg.
I keep it on my wall because its a good reminder.
He reads the text aloud:
At root of intolerance is anger.
Michael is one of my favorite living humans, Anderson says.
He does these wonderful characters that he invents, one after another.
Ive known him as long as Ive had this place, probably.
This wouldnt have been here if we hadnt met, he says.
Today I attempt to come back around toAsteroid City,a movie thats full of them.
Youve got a lot of widows and widowers in your movies, and orphans, I say.
Yeah, he says, I probably do.
Dont you remember Roebuck Wright?
Never ask a man why.
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