There's nothing accidental about the fantastic Mr Anderson

Film can be difficult to curate as not much material tends to survive once production has wrapped. Not so with the director Wes Anderson who has kept a meticulous archive of objects from all his movies ever since he came to reshoot some of the scenes for his first feature film, Bottle Rocket, in 1996 and found the props he had created had been sold. From that moment on, Anderson stipulated in his contracts that he would be the one “who looks after things”, as he put it.

- Anny Shaw is a contributing editor at The Art Newspaper

The mind-boggling extent of his universe-building, and the control he exercises over it, is at the heart of the filmmaker's first retrospective, which opens at the Design Museum this week — a scrupulously curated, visual feast of more than 700 objects from the past three decades, many of them well-known to Anderson devotees.

There's the school badge worn by Max Fischer in Rushmore, charmingly paired with the homemade patch actor Jason Schwartzman stitched for his audition. Then there are the library books pilfered by Suzy Bishop in Moonrise Kingdom, hand-painted train signs from The Darjeeling Limited and wonderfully detailed stop-motion puppets from Fantastic Mr Fox. Polaroids from the set of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou also make an appearance — a half-naked Bill Murray attempting a muscleman pose. Another standout is the three-metre-wide buttercream pink model crafted for the external shots of The Grand Budapest Hotel, an elaborate confection built only after Anderson conceded that no real-life building could possibly live up to his vision.

A genius of minutiae