Wes Anderson has been compared to many great directors from before his time: his early, more humanist work earned him comparisons to 70’s New Romantic Hal Ashby, while 2014’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” saw the Texas auteur paying homage to golden-era greats like Ernst Lubitsch and Max Ophuls.
Stanley Kubrick, however, isn’t a name that appears very frequently on this admittedly short list. It’s hard to think of any Wes Anderson picture that could conceivably be called Kubrickian, though 2004’s “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” with its knowingly antiseptic retro-dioramic sets and high level of artifice, probably comes the closest. And yet, when you examine each director’s body of work side-by-side, there is a certain degree of overlap – mostly in terms of style and approach rather than content, but it’s there nonetheless.
The one thing that both directors clearly exhibit in their work is an unflagging and rigid sense of control over each and every aspect of production. Both Kubrick and Anderson have reputations as control freaks, for want of a better term, and their films can very much be considered formalist affairs. Nowhere is this more apparent than in each director’s respective framing of shots. Indeed, both Kubrick and Anderson frequently employ wide-angled frames – meticulously packed with note-perfect production design and period detail – as well as slow zooms that start on a character and slowly expand to show their environment.
The big difference, I would argue, is that Kubrick is not very much interested in people, whereas I believe that Anderson is. Kubrick’s films mainly focus on abstract concepts like time and memory, (“2001: A Space Odyssey”) cruelty and self-preservation (“Barry Lyndon,” “The Shining,”) and insanity (“A Clockwork Orange”). Anderson, meanwhile, often distills his fetishes and obsessions into grown-up fairy tales about flawed people for whom, I believe, the director cares very much. In both cases, it’s not merely a reductive case of style over substance – if anything, with guys like Kubrick and Anderson, the style and the substance are often one in the same.
Any other Anderson/Kubrick parallels you think the video missed? Shout them out in the comments section below.