Wes Anderson - Isle of Dogs: The Screenplay

The following took place in London during the post-production of Isle of Dogs. The conversation included Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman, Roman Coppola, Kunichi Nomura, and Fabers editor, Walter Donohue

WALTER How do four people write a script?

WES We learned from our colleague Lauren that in his writers room Kurosawa had one special collaborator named Oguni who was called what was the name of it?

ROMAN The Command Tower.

WES Kurosawa and his co-writer or team of co-writers worked together to form the initial ideas and scenes of the films but, as they progressed, they would periodically show them to the Command Tower, Mr Oguni. He would then tell them what was good, what was bad basically critique their work and steer them back on track when they were off the rails. And thats how they shaped the scripts. Its quite a common thing in Italian cinema as well writers working in teams. I think more or less all the Fellini movies and the Rossellini and the DeSica and the Pietro Germi: you even see their names on each others movies. I think maybe even Pasolini worked on Nights of Cabiria. Anyway, obviously, it can be a good system! Weve worked together on several scripts. Kun, of course, is the only one among us who is actually Japanese. Half the movie is in Japanese, and its set there, and Kun is the only one who actually knows what anyone is saying. He translated most of it and helped us try to always look to Japan as the inspiration for our little reality.

WALTER Was it all four of you at the same time or just three of you working up the story?

ROMAN Well, even going way back to our earlier collaborations on The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom, so much of it seems to start with life stories. We start with memories and people and so on. Things that seem relevant bubble to the top, and you grab on to them. Its never been a one-step-after-the-next format for us.

WES Its more like an ongoing conversation. The conversation, in this case, began on a boat.

WALTER A boat at sea?

WES A boat at sea. We were afforded the opportunity to go on a wonderful ocean liner to show some of our movies and do talks about them, which we all did together.

WALTER Where was this? The Mediterranean?

WES No, it was transatlantic.

KUN I was in New York and you wrote me and said, Were taking the Queen Mary, want to come? But I couldnt make it.

WALTER It takes a week, doesnt it?

WES Eight days. So thats where we started, though we had done a bit before.

JASON In a way, it was a metaphor for the creative process: out at sea, no land, will we get there? Who knows.

ROMAN I can remember there were lots of conversations before that, too. I was on the phone with you from Palm Springs, and I remember we were talking about fleas and rats. I was on the phone with you from a balcony in Brooklyn, and we talked about Chief nearly biting off the hand of the child of the family that had adopted him.

WES We wrote that part over the speakerphone.

ROMAN There was also the train ride where we watched the Studio Ghibli animated film, the one with the small princess.

KUN Arrietty.

WALTER In French cinema theres a tradition of having two writers on a film. One works out the structure and plot and the other does the dialogues. Do you three divide up the writing like that?

ROMAN No, we talk around it. Maybe, Jason will say something thatll spark off an idea, or a piece of dialogue. Wes is pretty meticulous about taking notes. He writes it all out. And then, sometimes, well assume the roles of the characters. We did this a lot on Darjeeling because there were three main characters, and three of us.

JASON When we were writing it, I expected to play one character, and I ended up playing another! Often Wes might have a notion or an idea about what the movie is something very basic, a feeling for what its about. So our process is to figure this out. Thats what is interesting to me: trying to understand what this feeling is about. What he thinks hes looking for.

WALTER Did the project start with dogs? Or Samurai dogs?

WES It started with dogs before it moved to Japan.

ROMAN It was always about dogs who were decrepit and abandoned and wasted.

WES Yes, and a pack of dogs who all saw themselves as the alpha.

ROMAN And there was always a boy.

JASON And a garbage dump. With fleas and rats.

ROMAN The setting was always a blighted, urban, garbage dump. And the dogs sent away from their masters. That was there from the beginning.

WALTER So when did it become Japanese dogs?

WES Kun, when did we first talk about this?

KUN From time to time I suddenly get a very short email from you, and its the start of something big. When the email is short, I know its a bad sign. You said you were thinking of an animated movie taking place in Japan, and you needed my help. Just a two-line email. Three years later, its not over yet.

WES Its not over yet, but it will end. One day.

kun You wanted me to help work on the script and the story. Also, someone else was working on the translation, but we knew I had to make it sound like you.

WES Yes, the translations needed to have the voice of the movie.

KUN You have your own voice, so the translating was really hard. Then you asked me to record some of the characters to see what they sounded like. Kobayashi, the Professor, some of the women.

WES We had characters speaking Japanese, so we needed to start recording voices so we could do the animatics of our storyboard version of the movie. One of the voices Kun did was Mayor Kobayashi, and we ended up keeping Kuns voice, because he has such a low, powerful voice. Nobody sounded as formidable as Kun. Although Kun is much younger than the character.

JASON His voice records even lower and more powerful than his normal voice.

KUN I have my own radio show, which I do every week. Wes asked if I could record the voices properly. So when I was recording the show, I asked the technicians if they could stay half an hour more so I could record the characters voices. They were really curious because I was in the studio alone, yelling, Banish all dogs! And they asked me, Whats it all about?

WES And then I asked you to help me direct all these performances!

WALTER Do you remember when you made the decision that it should take place in Japan? What was there in the story that would make it work better if it was located in Japan?

ROMAN Something about the sci-fi genres of Japan. Its funny, when we started it wasnt necessarily a feature film. It was just a story, a part of a bigger piece.

WES Originally, it was a short story that was part of a little collection of movie short stories. But maybe the Japanese setting was more to do with being inspired by Japanese movies a whole world of cinema that is so interesting and vast and complex. Kurosawa, in particular, is the biggest influence on this movie. Its really as simple as: we love these movies, and wouldnt it be nice to make our version of being in the Kurosawa world. When youre doing a stop-motion movie, you can say a character should be played by someone like Toshiro Mifune, and you can make your own Toshiro Mifune. More or less.

WALTER Whenever theres a novel or film set in the future, you take something that people are especially used to now and say: what if we no longer have it? Or what if we have something else instead?