Wilder's film was largely shot on a single stage set with a gas station in the center of the stage. When you get to the edge of the set, the town is carried on as a painting. Something about that was exciting in terms of the artificiality of the world of Asteroid City.
The set for Wes Anderson's latest film Asteroid City was designed and built as a functioning town complete with underground power and sewers, production designer Adam Stockhausen tells Dezeen in this interview.
Scarlett Johansson in writer/director Wes Anderson's ASTEROID CITY, a Focus Features release. Filming on Asteroid City took place in and around the town of Chinchón, Spain, over the course of 35 shooting days, commencing on August 30, 2021 and completing on October 15.
Asteroid City (or "Asteroid City") is a 2023 American comedy-drama film written, directed, and produced by Wes Anderson, from a story he wrote with Roman Coppola.
The Making of Desert Town, Asteroid City - Shot On KODAK 35mm Film
Was Asteroid City a flop?
Per The Numbers, "Asteroid City" pulled in just shy of $43,000 over Labor Day weekend domestically, which was just enough to put it over the top. It now sits at $28.1 million domestically to go with $22.4 million internationally for a grand total of $50.5 million.
Asteroid City would not work if it was a CGI green-screen situation. It needed to be tangible for such an outlandish script and characters. The grounding of a real place helped that. While the script may seem a bit bloated and convoluted in some places, Anderson uses that to his advantage.
We shot anamorphic color film in the desert. I was a bit concerned at the start because we were shooting in Spain in the middle of summer. The light can be very harsh and unforgiving.
What are the black-and-white scenes in Asteroid City?
These scenes, shot in black-and-white and Academy ratio, are a performance, too — they're presented as dramatizations for the television program that's broadcasting the live production of Asteroid City.
They chose Cooke S4 lenses for the 1.37 black-and-white spherical sequences, having been impressed by how they rendered actors' faces on previous productions. For the 2.40 colour sequences Yeoman worked with ARRI Anamorphic lenses which he and Anderson also used on past films.
Yeoman: Wes originally came to me, and he said his concept was to shoot everything in Asteroid City with natural light—so no movie lights. We constructed these structures with the skylights that we could control a little bit with silks, so that we wouldn't have to use any movie lights.
The film was shot on the Arricam LT and Arricam ST with Cooke S4 and Zeiss Master Anamorphic Lenses. It's a Wes Anderson flick, which means a planimetric composition with room-to-room tracking shots and whip pans that usually provide a comedic reveal or some kind of periscope effect.
The first surprising thing is that he doesn't pay the actors he works with, or if they'll get paid its a minimum fee. They might get a deferred payment from the profit the film will make but that's usually a couple of years down the road.
Anderson's work has been classified as postmodern, on account of his nostalgic attention to detail, his subversion of mainstream conventions of narrative, his references to different genres in the same film, and his love for eccentric characters with complex sexual identities.
Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch. With the exception of Anderson's debut film Bottle Rocket, Bill Murray has appeared in every film Anderson has made to date.
Schwartzman has also worked on the scripts for three of Anderson's films, with a screenplay credit on The Darjeeling Limited (2007), and story credits on Isle of Dogs (2018) and The French Dispatch (2021). Bill Murray has starred in more Wes Anderson films than any other actor, a whopping nine in total.
Wilder's film was largely shot on a single stage set with a gas station in the center of the stage. When you get to the edge of the set, the town is carried on as a painting. Something about that was exciting in terms of the artificiality of the world of Asteroid City.
“We needed good weather and big blue skies because we were going to shoot mainly outdoors. Flat terrain, a clear horizon and a set close to where cast and crew could stay. We also wanted to shoot somewhere with a tax credit.” The production looked at other places in Europe, including Italy, but Spain was the best fit.
The entire film seems intentionally crafted to create a sense of emotional distance, for a few reasons—not least of which is that the film's opening explains that Asteroid City isn't a real place, and the story that takes place in Anderson's pastel diorama is actually a play being staged for a studio audience on a ...
The F-7A and B unit diesels in the movie were kits sourced and built by their effect team. Specific train cars also necessitated some new designs that we didn't have- so it was off to the CAD workstation to design the C40 Caboose and hoppers in the movie from scratch using an O scale brass models and S.P.
Longtime Anderson collaborator Adam Stockhausen (production designing Oscar winner for The Grand Budapest Hotel) created the buildings and interiors including the luncheonette, garage and motel. The mountains, boulders, and rocks were all constructed, too, to such a scale that barely any green screen was used.
Asteroid City encompasses an environmental grief that manifests as a failure to accept an uncontrollable reality. Three elements in the film highlight this best: a burnt hand, lucid dreaming and fumbled lines.
