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.
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 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.
DP Robert Yeoman ASC used KODAK 35mm color/B&W film to deliver a striking result on Wes Anderson's 'Asteroid City' (L to R) Steve Carell and Liev Schreiber in writer/director Wes Anderson's ASTEROID CITY, a Focus Features release.
The Making of Desert Town, Asteroid City - Shot On KODAK 35mm Film
Is Asteroid City filmed in 4:3?
The film is interspersed with 4:3 monochrome television aspect ratio snippets, wherein Cranston's host dryly explains the making of the play we are viewing, regarding the writer, director, and cast, and their various behind-the-scenes dramas.
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.
Box office. Asteroid City grossed $28.2 million in the United States and Canada, and $25.8 million in other territories, for a worldwide gross of $54 million. In its limited opening weekend, it made $853,382 from six theaters, finishing in tenth.
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.
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.
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.
Yeoman shot Asteroid City using an ARRICAM ST 35mm film camera, variously framing the action in 1.37:1 aspect ratio using Cooke S4 lenses and 2.40:1 with ARRI Master Anamorphics.
“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.
Nominated for Nothing: The Academy didn't wake up to Asteroid City because it couldn't fall asleep. Wes Anderson's latest feature deserved more consideration from the Oscars.
In a similar vein, Asteroid City was not filmed in and around Arizona, California, or anywhere else in the American Southwest. Instead, it was filmed just outside the Spanish towns of Chinchón and Colmenar de Oreja, and the town of Asteroid City was a set constructed on site.
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 ...
A look into how directors like Wes Anderson have made use of miniatures throughout film history. Without getting into a long (and heated, on my end) debate about the merits of Wes Anderson's signature style, the one thing we can all agree on is making films with miniatures instead of CGI is neat.
Asteroid City was one of the more “obscure” Wes Anderson films I have ever seen. While the actors, filmography, and scenery is all great, I think the movie is bland in story and composition. The storyline isn't great and for me, doesn't really match much with the story I was expecting.
Many characters carry guns in their waistbands, though it seems more to indicate the era and their characters' attitudes than to be used to hurt or threaten. Military personnel hold guns and, in one heated moment, point them at a person with a threat.
Murray was set to play the film-within-a-play-within-a-film's motel manager, but had to drop out. “Normally, I don't think it's such a nice idea to tell everyone the person who didn't end up in the movie,” Anderson told The New Yorker.
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.
Content Guide Nudity: Brief but graphic nudity. Scarlett Johansson's character asks the protagonist if he wants to see her "do a nude scene" before dropping the towel covering her and briefly baring her whole front, as seen through a mirror's reflection. Smoking: Characters smoke cigarettes and pipes.
