How Bill Murray terrified — then befriended — Wes Anderson

While writing about the life and work of Wes Anderson, | found it all too easy to picture him as one of his characters: cultured and impeccably dressed, with a quiet but mordant wit, living both at the heart of and slightly outside of our world.

- Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent

Even at a young age, Anderson was aware that he didn’t quite fit in, and his work as an artist has always been trimmed with a sense of yearning. For where? Well, that’s the question. It was arguably with his third film, 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums, that the true Anderson brand emerged — at least, that's when critics really started to throw around the term “quirky”. But his second, Rushmore, is the crucial bridge, a film in which many of his stylistic trademarks first appear: the precocious child, the use of wide anamorphic lenses, the literary or theatrical structure.

It was also his first real test as a leader, since his 1996 debut Bottle Rocket was made almost entirely alongside friends and acquaintances. It’s why Anderson, so famously, tends to stick with the same collaborators, in front of the camera and behind it. He has built, kindred spirit by kindred spirit, a family of his own imagination. ‘And it was Rushmore that provided two of its founding members: Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray.