Everything about my day with Wes Anderson feels like it was directed by Wes Anderson. We meet at the height of the 2023 Festival de Cannes, last minute, in secret. After days of torrential rain, the sun comes out. I am driven to his hotel an hour away from Cannes, a stone’s throw from Monaco, which is where Cannes locals flee to during the festival, and where most people speak Italian. Bene, bene.

French and American accents swirl while I wait on a balcony of this five-star hotel. At one point, I overhear “I’m Roman”. It’s the voice of Anderson’s long-time writing partner and friend, the ing silhouette of the six-foot Coppola a sign of promise in this temporary outpost of Asteroid City. That signals liftoff: it’s time for me to find Wes.

Tomorrow, Asteroid City will have its world premiere in the Grand Théâtre Lumière. On Letterboxd, Jing will say that “Wes Anderson has never been more Wes Anderson in this fever dream of a Wes Anderson film.”

Asteroid City, as described by David Ehrlich, is “a film about a television program about a play within a play ‘about infinity and I don’t know what else’ (as one character describes it)”. A cosmic onion, if you will; layers within layers, made with the director’s self-described “peculiar methods”, which are intrinsic to his meticulous processes (and all new to Tom Hanks, but we’ll get to that). The film is a spiritual sibling to The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited: there is family melancholy, and the kind of winding journey that lost souls take to navigate their grief (a funeral scene in Darjeeling set to ‘Strangers’ by The Kinks remains one of my favorite Anderson creations).

Anderson arrives from the adjacent balcony, pointing to the sky and telling me that Coppola and their third musketeer Jason Schwartzman have their bedrooms in the two windows above our heads. The filmmaker is picture-perfect against the coastal backdrop in his blue-and-green checked shirt, blue pinstripe tros and pink ribbed socks (no shoes). A tiny cup of espresso, blue tinted sunglasses, his singular Southern lilt, and we are ready to roll. It’s a moment you’d imagine as a work of Anderson’s own fiction, but this day is very real.

Asteroid City platforms kid geniuses; junior stargazers and kid witches and aliens. Anderson has never ignored the next generation—The Royal Tenenbaums is about the children left behind; Moonrise Kingdom would be nothing without those running away—but in this one, they lead, and I’m keen to hear how the young ensemble went with the responsibility.

“When you have young people in a movie, because they don’t have as much experience, they sometimes don’t have as much wisdom. Some gain wisdom, but not everyone,” Anderson says, while I worry. But then: “But young people do, I think, possibly, technically, have better brains.”

The filmmaker recalls an incident with Grace Edwards, an Anderson newcomer playing Junior Stargazer Dinah Campbell, daughter to Scarlett Johansson’s Midge Campbell, as a moment of reflection that made him wonder how he really directs anyone. “I was caught off guard, because Grace was fifteen and she would be very quick to say, ‘Are you sure about that?’ about something I would say,” Anderson recalls. “But I began to realize that when she said that, it was because I was contradicting something she’d already been told was the plan, which came from me.”

He adds of his young stars: “When everybody is given a script, the young people will know it utterly. When something’s going on on the set, whether it involves them or not, they seem to know the movie the best, and can always guide us. Young people tend to be the most prepared, and they know what the important points are. I love working with young people.”

Another young person of note, top of my list since Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade and deep in Anderson’s heart since the actor was a six-year-old boy in Moonrise Kingdom, is Jake Ryan. The director pauses our conversation mid-sentence—he needs to show me something that’s in the next room over. He returns with the cutest thing I have ever seen: a thick white photo frame, holding a collage of three photos of Jake Ryan and Wes Anderson together, arm in arm and smiling, from the three times the pair have worked together: Moonrise Kingdom, Isle of Dogs, and Asteroid City.

And then there is Tom Hanks as Augie’s reluctant father-in-law, Stanley Zak. Asking somebody what it’s like to work with Tom Hanks is like asking someone what they thought of Star Wars (we’ll get to that, too), yet Anderson saves me from asking, his answer coming without a prompt. Hanks, he shares, illuminated insights into his own limitations as a director.

First, there’s what Hanks signed up for: “We have some peculiar methods of how we do the movies,” Anderson says. “We don’t have trailers, we bring the costumes to the people’s rooms where they sleep, we all live in one place together. They come to the set already ready, and there’s nobody else there. There isn’t any kind of rehearsal period before the cameras are in place, they arrive, and we start doing the movie. It’s a great thing, when someone who has done every version of making a movie, says, ‘I’m totally open. I’m on board for everything you’re doing, and I’m happy.’ That’s what we had with Tom Hanks.”

And then there’s what you get when you sign Hanks: “Sometimes the best direction I can give is to just not say anything, because so many times I’m watching the dailies, and I can hear me give the direction that ruins it,” says the director, laughing at the way he knows his hyper-controlled sets sound anything but left to chance. Still: “Every take after I’ve interfered, I’ve messed up somebody who was on a path and they’re now trying to do what I want, but it doesn’t suit them.” But Hanks? He belongs to the category of actors that Anderson—who at this point has dealt with almost every category of actor, including “actors playing actors”—likes best.

“Some actors, you can’t hurt them,” Anderson says. “You can say what you want, and they can use it. He’s somebody who, whatever you say, he says”—Anderson imitates Hanks’ thumbs-up—“‘Got it, I should have thought of that.’ It is fun to work with actors who want to be directed where it helps them, and it’s not always the case. I’ve had great actors where I know that the best thing I can do is the least.”

Finally, there’s “possibly the greatest ‘freaky little guy’ in cinema history” (according to Letterboxd member Reece). There isn’t much in the way of spoilers in Asteroid City, as every scene goes further into itself and its greatest pleasures come from the unfolding of conversations within. So, yes, there is a visitor from outer-space.

You could imagine that poem being read aloud by Goldblum, who is credited as The Alien in Asteroid City, despite the scenes featuring the alien in fact starring animator Kim Keukeleire. She has worked on Anderson’s Isle Of Dogs and Fantastic Mr. Fox, as well as Claude Barras’ lovely My Life As A Zucchini and Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning Pinocchio.

Anderson explains Keukeleire was playing the puppet as Goldblum: “Not imitating a performance he’d given, even though we did film him doing all sorts of things. The movie has so much to do with actors, performing, the emotions of just playing on the stage and so on, that I liked that our alien is an alien. But he’s also Jeff Goldblum.”

Space travel (going there but also those from out there coming to us) might have seemed like the final frontier for Anderson—you could call this one his version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind—but he’s been thinking about his place in the universe for decades. And somebody special just reminded him of it recently.

He brings this up when I ask Anderson about his deepest hidden influences and cinematic loves, going right back to when he first started watching movies. “It’s the least-hidden movie of all time, but it’s relevant to my life right now,” he begins. “My daughter is seven and she’d heard about Star Wars and kept asking me about it. So I said, well, we have Disney+ and we don’t use it, but it’s there.”

Anderson wasn’t best pleased about this. Naturally, he wants to share the greatest films of all time with his daughter, but he its: “I like to show her a Blu-ray of a movie. I tend to push things like that.” One of Freya’s favorite films is Meet Me in St. Louis—her dad is pleased with this, of course. “I like that she likes Meet Me in St. Louis. But when I was her age, the most important movie of all time was Star Wars.” (Anderson was the perfect Star Wars age—eight—when the first film came out.)

Today, Anderson’s name is very much cinema shorthand for a certain kind of singular aesthetic; for many cinephiles who have grown up with his work, he was there first. But Wes is all too aware of the history that precedes him and the generations looking up to him; as such, he readily and happily owes much to the 20th-century Indian filmmaker, illustrator, composer and lyricist Satyajit Ray, a longtime inspiration.

“When you make a movie, people think, ‘Oh, you pay homage to this,’ but I am never deliberately paying homage,” he says. “I’m always stealing from a movie to try to make my movie better. But I like it when I can then tell people what I stole from. And they say, ‘Well, I’m gonna look at that.’”

I need to know which of his beloved Ray’s films the director looted for Asteroid City. Anderson credits a specific moment: A memory game at the heart of the film sees the Junior Stargazers showing off just how many names they can , speaking to their stubborn charm and desire to connect in the only way they know how. “We stole that absolutely wholesale from Satyajit Ray, from Days And Nights in the Forest. It’s a great movie,” he says. “If that movie had a genre, it would be whatever genre The Darjeeling Limited is in. These guys get in a car and go off somewhere together, and they discover things.”

Anderson himself is almost ready to go off somewhere: a Cannes photo call with his film family, where he’ll add a matching pinstripe jacket to his outfit. But first, he politely sits for my tiny photo-call-of-one. The filmmaker blinks as the Polaroid flashes. I count him down for another. We’ve got it.