Wes Anderson is admitting that his directorial debut flop “Bottle Rocket” forever “changed” him.
The Oscar-nominated auteur, who recently helmed short film “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” told audiences at the Lumière Film Festival (via Variety) that his 1996 debut was a “disaster” that he probably would not have made had he known just how much audiences would have despised it at the time. More than 25 years since its release, the Sony film has garnered a cult following.
“I had an idea of what I wanted to do, and no one could convince me that we shouldn’t do it, my confidence was the highest, then,” Anderson said. “When we finally made it and showed it to an audience, they hated it. I was so shocked, it was a disaster.”
He continued, “But that changed me: Had I known that before, I probably wouldn’t have made that movie, and I’m glad of that, because the blind confidence you have when you’re young, you need it!”
Anderson recently addressed how he first “blamed the audience” for the poor critical reception to the film. The “Rushmore” director said during the 2023 Venice Film Festival that “when we screened the movie publicly, we didn’t screen it in an encouraging environment. We blamed the audience.”
He continued, “The confidence I had was too much, and it was quite shaken by this experience. It was a terrible way to first screen a movie. We had 86 people in the audience, I think, and by halfway through about 20 were left, and I watched them leave. You watch somebody get up and you say, ‘Maybe this one’s just going to the bathroom. But they’re taking all their bags with them…’”
The experience still sticks with Anderson today: “From now, any time I’m screening a movie, it’s terrifying. You can screen a movie in a film festival environment. When you screen a movie at a film festival, and it’s the benefactors of the festival and the officials and the delegates of something, that’s one experience, and the other one is the young people who really want to see the movie, and that’s the room that’s more fun to be in if you made the movie because you can feel it.”
“Bottle Rocket” was co-written by Anderson and Owen Wilson. The feature cost $5 million but grossed $500,000 at the U.S. box office when released in theaters.
“When we were making ‘Bottle Rocket,’ I felt like I really knew what I wanted it to be. And it helped that I had a partner, I had Owen Wilson,” Anderson said at Venice. “We’d written it together, the two of us were a team, so that goes a long way in that situation.”
