Save the Date: Wes Anderson Exhibition at the Cinémathèque

Wes Anderson is one of those film directors who has such a personal style that you can instantly recognise one of his films, whether it's live action or animation. An exhibition at the Cinémathèque from March will recreate the singular vision of the director of Moonrise Kingdom, Fantastic Mr Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Wes Anderson was born in Texas in 1969 and started making Super 8 films when he was a teenager. He met actor Owen Wilson while he was at college and together they made a short film, Bottle Rocket, that was a success at the Sundance festival and they made into a feature film.

Anderson co-wrote his next couple of films with Wilson, Rushmore (1998) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). The themes of eccentric teenagers and dysfunctional families recur in The Darjeeling Limited (2004), The Life Aquatic (2007) and Moonrise Kingdom (2012).

Meantime, Anderson turned to stop-motion animation with his adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's book Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) (image at the top of the page). His love affair with Dahl would bring him his first personal Oscar after many nominations, in 2024 for The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, the first of his short-to-medium film adaptations of Dahl's short stories for adults for Netflix. He would return to stop-motion with Isle of Dogs (2018).

2014's The Grand Budapest Hotel is probably Anderson's best-known film, and it garnered him three more Oscar nominations as well as 4 wins in different categories. Anderson credits Austrian novelist Stephan Zweig for inspiring the film, set in a a fictional Eastern European city. The miscellaneous staff and guests of a luxury hotel face a time of conflict and tyranny with humour and resilience. The film stars Ralph Fiennes and Saoirse Ronan as well as Anderson regulars Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe and Tilda Swinton.

Anderson continued his love for visiting a perhaps more stylish past with The French Dispatch (2021), set in 1960s France, and Asteroid City, and the height of Hollywood glamour with Asteroid City (2023),  complete with a Marilyn-Monroe starlet played by Scarlett Johansson.

Look out later in the year for Anderson's latest film, a spy thriller called The Phoenician Scheme starring many of the stable of actors who recur in his films, such as Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Wes Anderson
Cinémathèque Paris
19 March-27 July 2025
The exhibition will then move to London's Design Museum before going on a world tour.

It will be possible to book guided visits for classes 4e level and up (in French). They will last 90 minutes and cost 145 € per class, up to 30 pupils et 6.50 € for each extra pupil up to a maximum of 34). Check out the teachers' page for contact details.