In director Wes Anderson's world, it is all about the details

A museum exhibition shows how thousands of small decisions add up to make his signature style

- Alex Marshall

PARIS — When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut Bottle Rocket, the rookie American writer-director got a shock. Columbia Pictures had sent all the movie's props off to a store, which had then sold them for next to nothing.

So, when he made his next movie Rushmore (1998), he decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into a sport utility vehicle when the shoot was over, then drove the hoard away to look after it himself.

That decision ended up helping not just Anderson. Over the past 2 1/2 years, curators at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled the 55-year-old's storage facility in Kent, England — which contains thousands of items from his movies — to compile a museum retrospective of the filmmaker's work.

The show opened at the Cinematheque Francaise on March 19, where it runs through July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in autumn.

The Paris show includes more than 500 exhibits, many of them well known to Anderson fans, including the candy-pink hotel model that opens The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), several sardine-blue explorer outfits from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004) and a luxurious fur coat worn by American actress Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).