Wes Anderson at the Design Museum. Photo: Matt Alexander/PA Media
The Design Museum, London W8, until 26 July 2026
Where to start? An awkward teenage schoolboy named Max Fischer, in love with his teacher and hard at work on a stage adaptation of Serpico, among other fabulous projects, all written on the Webster XL-500 typewriter gifted to him by his encouraging mother, Eloise, who died of cancer when the boy was just seven?
Or how about the family of three precocious children (a la JD Salinger’s famous Glass family) – one finance whiz who buys his first real estate before entering high school, one playwright awarded a Pulitzer in the ninth grade, one athlete ranked second on the international tennis circuit by age 17 – who age into unusual adults and are reunited when their dysfunctional absentee father tells them he has six weeks to live?
There’s also a deep-sea-exploring troupe in matching outfits, plumbing the azure depths in a very Beatles-type yellow submarine; a talking fox family with real-estate ambitions; a host of loquacious displaced mutts banned from civilisation due to canine flu and sentenced to live eternally on Trash Island; a trio of brothers hashing out family grievances on a train ride through India; a multi-pronged, many-peopled Stefan Zweig-esque mystery that revolves around a missing Renaissance portrait; two amorous youths on the lam; an expat publication putting together its last issue; an atomic-era UFO drama …
We see the fur coat worn by Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tenenbaum, whose style (Lacoste dress, kohl-rimmed eyes) has spawned many a Halloween costume
This is just scratching the surface – it would take many thousands of words just to get through basic plot descriptions – of the marvellous, funny, touching, distinctive filmic oeuvre of the Houston-born filmmaker Wes Anderson, whose archive – sets, costumes, props, puppets, objects, sketches, notebooks, scripts, storyboards, you-name-its – is currently on display at the Design Museum in Kensington.
Wes Anderson: The Archives opens today and runs through to July, and – whether you have seen, love, hate, or feel ambivalent about his films – is an intensely detailed and beautiful paean to the ways in which a director can time-travel, create whole worlds at once alien and familiar, and, to employ a true cliche, show how movies are magical. Moreover, the show openly displays how that magic is no mere sleight of hand, but a product of extensive collaborative labour.
Costumes and props from Rushmore. Photo: Luke Hayes
Bar a section that groups together Anderson’s two animated films, Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) and Isle of Dogs (2018), the exhibition unfolds chronologically through the director’s 13 films: the first, Bottle Rocket, was made with a small cast of unknowns and a shoestring budget in 1996 when Anderson was just 27, and the most recent, The Phoenician Scheme, with its who’s-who ensemble cast and reportedly rather larger financial backing, came out earlier this year.
From Rushmore (1998) we see Max Fischer’s typewriter with its navy-blue leather zip cover, embossed with a message from his deceased mother in typically pithy Anderson style: “Bravo, Max! Love, Mom.” Around the corner, the fur coat worn by Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tenenbaum, whose style (Lacoste dress, sable pelt, kohl-rimmed eyes) has spawned many a Halloween costume. Around yet another (the display walls go from bright to crimson to blush to ruby to garnet red) you find the marvellous undersea creatures that populate the depths of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), the entire run of the imaginary magazine that gives The French Dispatch (2021) its title, and the asteroid from Asteroid City (2023), as well as its desert motel vending machines (including one for martinis which, one of the show’s curators, Lucia Savi, tells me, actually works).
A model from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Photo: Luke Hayes
In the exhibition, these objects and others (there are more than 700) necessarily take on an auratic quality: up close, you can admire the hand-lettering that gives the textual components of Anderson’s film their charm, see the pastel palette that recurs across the films, marvel at the technical innovation behind the animated works, read about how long it took to find a child with just the right cursive for a letter Suzy writes to Sam in Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and laugh, or be otherwise moved, as each object is somehow animated by the act of looking. Movies are, after all, memory machines, and their stories stay with us long after the curtain falls.
Self-archiving can seem like a funny business, an awareness of the present as both past and future at the same time. In an interview in the catalogue with the actor and frequent Anderson collaborator Jason Schwartzman, another of the show’s curators, Matthieu Orléan, notes that Anderson’s world is extravagant but genuine – on some level, it feels real. “It’s true,” the actor responds, “because in The Grand Budapest Hotel everything was very made-up, but if you’d opened a drawer all of the props inside were real. The lines are blurred. There’s not a daily life and then the movies. When you’re working on them, they become one in a very authentic way.”
The rarity of Anderson’s work, in film and in static exhibition, is that he seems to love the world enough to make it into something so absolutely itself and also not. Each object, each opportunity for design, is a sidestep from realism to maximalism subtle enough to make it feel entirely true, as if one might, too, have dreamed of living at 111 Archer Avenue with the Tenenbaums, hidden away on an island reading (fictional YA novel) The Girl from Jupiter, been a legendary interwar concierge in an upscale mountain hotel, seen an alien return to Earth to collect long-lost space matter. And why not?
