While Wes Anderson‘s hopes of a theme park were a bit of a surprise, don’t worry too much that he’s left the realm of cinema. The director is coming off the most successful film of his career with "The Grand Budapest Hotel," and now may be using that cachet to try something ambitious for his next movie.
Speaking this weekend at the Lisbon And Estoril Film Festival (via c7nema), Anderson revealed during a Q&A that he may return to the world of stop-motion for his next picture. Even more, he said that the story would be divided into episodes, not unlike Vittorio De Sica‘s "The Gold Of Naples." That film presents six vignettes, with the only connecting thread that they’re all tales set in Naples (you can see two un-embeddable excerpts here). The prospect of Anderson borrowing that structure, but applying stop-motion animation to it, is certainly interesting.
When we spoke to Anderson this past spring, he revealed he was co-writing an undisclosed project with his "The Darjeeling Limited‘ and “Moonrise Kingdom” collaborator Roman Coppola. "… it’s a little bit vaguely avant-garde in its concept and I’m just not sure if it’s going to quite gel,” he said at the time.
“I’m trying to think of a good tease,” Anderson added. “I think the thing is well, it’s a thing where maybe there’s ‘many things happening at once.’ That could be my tease.”
So, could this De Sica-influenced project be the same one he was talking about earlier? Perhaps. But as Anderson showed with "Fantastic Mr. Fox," stop-motion allows him to expand his creative palette, so we’re curious to see how this one shakes out.