"Asteroid City" Is a Midcentury Western With a Wes Anderson Twist

Is there a signature "Wes Anderson style"? An Instagram account turned best-selling book and a recent trend of viral TikToks and AI-generated parodies would say yes, but in reality, the answer is more complicated. While the cult-favorite filmmaker certainly has a visual aesthetic that may seem easy to define, with its midcentury motifs, funky framing, and exhaustively detailed sans serif design, each of Anderson’s cinematic settings have actually been uniquely specific, meaning that while Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The French Dispatch, for instance, might share some of their players and quirks, the universes they occupy are pretty singular.

Anderson is a bit old Hollywood in that way, crafting a complete body of work rather than simply embracing the life of a journeyman filmmaker. He’s got more in common with Vincente Minnelli and John Ford than he does with James Cameron and the Russo Brothers, and that’s fine with him. He recently told The Daily Beast: "I wish there were more people who were just as strange in their approach, and that were doing completely different things than me, and also developed their approach like a painter who might have a very recognizable path—this period he’s working in this way, and maybe it shifts a bit, and then maybe it goes elsewhere—but it isn’t like, each step of the way there are things going in all different directions." While some critics, even fans, call Anderson’s work "relentlessly stylized," the filmmaker just says he has "a recognizable handwriting."

Production designer Adam Stockhausen, who worked with Anderson on Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, and most recently, Asteroid City (released widely on June 23), says that to truly appreciate the filmmaker, you have to not only enjoy his style, but also his storytelling. "Certainly Wes has a strong visual style that’s all his own, but it’s all just about trying to serve the story needs. It’s also completely different from film to film, because each story is different," says Stockhausen.

For Asteroid City, a meta sci-fi comedy-drama set in a 1950s American desert town famous for its meteor crater, that meant a color story that leans much more heavily on a new-West palette of sandy beige and crisp white than more European, weathered-looking pinks and yellows. In turn, the soundtrack is also a hint more honky-tonk forward than it is full of plucky piano. "Working on Asteroid City," Stockhausen says, "was about answering a completely different set of questions and led to a different set of answers than, say, building a summer camp full of khaki scouts on an island off the East Coast [for Moonrise Kingdom]."

In the movie, audiences are seeing what amounts to a staged production of a play called Asteroid City by Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). The action weaves between the fictional city and Earp’s world, so while the drama in the desert outpost might be about UFOs, a science camp, and a family learning to thrive again after the loss of a parent, it’s really all just a creation of Earp and the actors in his production. In practice, the story within a story makes for a multilayered spectacle that’s interesting from just about every angle.

Stockhausen started answering Asteroid City’s big questions in the summer of 2020, when Anderson brought him the idea for the movie. At that point, the writer-director was pretty deep into penning the script and wanted to get Stockhausen thinking about how to make the titular town a reality. "Our first conversations were really about, ‘How are we going to make this place?’" Stockhausen says. "At its core, it’s not a real town on the map. It’s a set somewhere in the fictionalized American Southwest, and that’s a much different thing. Our first conversations were about saying, ‘Do we build the whole town? Do we build pieces of the town? Do we place it into a real landscape somewhere? In Death Valley? Maybe the deserts of Spain? Or do we consider shooting it on a backlot set where we’re building the landscape as well?’"