Unwilling to relocate to London for the shoot, Anderson and his editor, Andrew Weisblum, devised a system of communicating with the London-based animators via computer. The animators would send short digital film files of what they were working on and in return receive detailed e-mail instructions about what to change. "The e-mails are really thorough and very specific about certain gestures, how he wants a look to happen," said Brad Schiff, one of nearly 30 animators who worked on the movie.
As well, for reference, the director would send short films of himself enacting certain scenes. "It's kind of embarrassing," Anderson said, laughing. "For most of these things, the performance is just a few seconds. Somebody hearing a noise and looking at their watch. The simplest way to relate how to do it is to make these little movies."
Despite a near-total ignorance of stop-motion production design, Anderson instructed Emmy-winning art director Nelson Lowry to steer clear of certain visual tropes that have come to characterize modern animation -- to basically turn his back on modern technology that would have made the animation process easier.
"We avoided wild animated flourishes of fantasy," Lowry said. "Normally, an animated film allows you crazy camera angles shooting through a wild landscape. Instead, this feels like a dry adult drama."
Animation director Gustafson (who has extensive claymation experience, having created the "California Raisins" TV series and served as supervising director for episodes of Eddie Murphy's animated series "The PJs") admitted he found some of Anderson's directive's bewildering. "There's lots of things I lobbied against in this movie," he said.
"He's pushed it further than I would have been comfortable pushing it," Gustafson continued. "He definitely doesn't have some of the reservations that I have from working with this stuff for years. But that's good. I came here to be challenged. And he's certainly challenged me."
Not everyone could muster a magnanimous word for Anderson's M.O. -- especially his on-set absence. "I think he's a little sociopathic," cinematographer Oliver said. "I think he's a little O.C.D. Contact with people disturbs him. This way, he can spend an entire day locked inside an empty room with a computer. He's a bit like the Wizard of Oz. Behind the curtain."
Informed of Oliver's discontent, Anderson said: "I would say that kind of crosses the line for what's appropriate for the director of photography to say behind the director's back while he's working on the movie. So I don't even want to respond to it."
Whatever the hullabaloo, the writer-director voiced no regrets about his process. To Anderson, directing boils down to precisely one thing: what you see on the screen.
"Even when I was there [in London] during shooting, I spent most of the day in my office on the computer," Anderson said. "There are thousands of decisions to be made. Each has to do with a rectangular image. If you can judge it, you can make a decision about what to do.
"That's how I directed the movie," he continued, matter-of-factly. "It's not that complicated to figure out."
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chris.lee@latimes.com
