Wes Anderson's world

Exhibition shows how small decisions add up to make the director's signature style

- ALEX MARSHALL

"When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut Bottle Rocket, the rookie 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), Anderson decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into an SUV 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 2.5 years, curators at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled Anderson's storage facility in Kent, England-which contains thousands of items from his movies - to compile a museum retrospective of the director's work.

The show opened at the Cinémathèque Française earlier this month, where it runs until July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in the 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, several sardine-blue explorer outfits from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, and a luxurious fur coat worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums.

Items like these are key to Anderson's signature style heavy on retro fashion, symmetry and pastel colours as popularised by Instagram and TikTok accounts and documented in books and magazine spreads. But Johanna Agerman Ross, a curator at the Design Museum, said it was a "misunderstanding" to think of Anderson as a director defined by a few stylistic tropes.