Bill Murray went ahead and dropped the title of Wes Anderson’s next movie, Asteroid City
Anderson’s latest, the long-delayed The French Dispatch, hits theaters on October 21
Wes Anderson has been playing coy with the title of his next, star-studded picture. Luckily, he’s got well-known stinker Bill Murray to spill the beans. Asteroid City is apparently the title, and it will see some new, big names joining the Anderson fold.
Production on Asteroid City is already underway in Spain, where Anderson has assembled his massive cast. Margot Robbie, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Rupert Friend, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Jason Schwartzman, and Tony Revolori are all, reportedly, meeting up in Asteroid City.
“It’s the usual cast of characters,” Murray said at the London Film Festival premiere of The French Dispatch. “We’re shooting it in Spain, about 45 minutes from Madrid. It’s fun out there, we’re having a nice time.”
“That’s what we do in showbusiness – we just say the name and people will clap. It has no meaning whatsoever. I flew in from Spain. I want to get my money’s worth.”
Anderson is one of the few directors whose phone calls Murray will return. The pair worked together on nearly all of Anderson’s projects, including Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, with Murray popping up in cameos in Darjeeling Limited and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Their latest collaboration is The French Dispatch, which will finally see release this month, following a year of COVID-related delays. The film is already garnering raves from critics. In a dispatch for The A.V. Club from the New York Film Festival, Vikram Murthi wrote:
Anderson’s films are all comedies on some level, but The French Dispatch takes a MAD magazine approach, stuffing each shot with enough sight gags and visual puns that you could potentially perform a frame-by-frame analysis and still not catch all of them. There’s a general silliness at play here that takes some of the starch out of the film’s premise, like how the student revolutionaries use chessboards as one of many battlefields on which to wage their war, or how the obligatory third-act chase adopts the visual styling of a New Yorker cartoon. Thankfully, it never veers into full wackiness. Nevertheless, Anderson employs a light touch with serious topics, if only to create fluid transitions between scenes and locations, and to not get too bogged down in the melancholic muck.
The French Dispatch opens on October 21.
[via Screen Daily]