Wes Anderson is famous for his all-star casts. How does he do it?

Welcome back to Wes’ World, a place just behind the cinema screen where people still write letters on manual typewriters, travel with monogrammed leather suitcases and speak in the cadences of 1950s films to the music of the 1980s. For 30 years, Wes Anderson has been making films that hark back to bygone eras, mashed together into a Neverland of his imagination. They exude nostalgia, even if we don’t really know what he’s missing.

“To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he even entered it,” says Zero, once a bellboy, of his mentor, Monsieur Gustave, in Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). “But I must say, he maintained the illusion with grace.” The same is often said of Anderson, with an important rider: he’s also funny.

So here we have the latest Anderson: Asteroid City, the core story of which is set in 1955 in a tiny Nevada town built next to a 3000-year-old meteor crater and adjoining space observatory. It is the kind of place that survives on school trips, which makes it the site of choice for the Junior Stargazers and Space Cadets Convention and annual awards ceremony. Junior stargazers bring their winning projects and proud parents. Apart from the prizes, they are assured a commanding view of nearby bomb tests and the very real hope of spotting an alien spaceship. The science prizes are awarded by a much-decorated general, who reminds these future Oppenheimers of their patriotic duty.

This is hardly an idyllic past. Nobody meeting Anderson, who is 54 but looks like a college tutor in his 30s, would imagine that he is pining for a desert science camp with a military agenda, apart from perhaps its geeky undertow. “One of the sort of subtexts of our movie has something to do with how this placid period of the ’50s is filled with anxiety and these men with post-traumatic stress disorder that’s undiagnosed, that is being dealt with through their families,” Anderson told The New York Times. It is an era surviving on its nerves and a shed load of white bread.

What the invented Asteroid City offers Anderson, clearly, is an arena for imaginative play. The naive optimism of a rising generation longing to be lost in space is poignant, but also fun. The colours of the desert, motel, diner and sky bounce against each other in a golden nuclear glow; the custom-built sets are like mid-century Modernist dolls’ houses; Anderson has even dreamed up his own undulating alien, a Gumby figure voiced by Jeff Goldblum.

All the characters are oddballs, of course, played by Anderson’s regular troupe of friends and professional fans. At the story’s centre is war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman, who has been Anderson’s avatar since he played a lovelorn schoolboy in Rushmore 25 years ago), who cannot bring himself to tell his children that their mother is dead. Tom Hanks plays his irascible father-in-law; Scarlett Johansson is a hard-bitten movie star modelled on Bette Davis, whose daughter is a science genius. Jeffrey Wright plays the unnerving general. Tilda Swinton is there, so is Steve Carell. Then there are the nerdy kids, porting their exploding ray-guns and expertly irradiated vegetables with pride.

One critical analysis of Anderson’s style suggests he tells stories from the perspective of a 12-year-old – more specifically, his own perspective as a 12-year-old boy – which gives them a very particular kind of male gaze. The films are anything but macho – there are no fights and very few vehicles, let alone car chases – but they are all definitely boys’ own stories. “When you’re 11 or 12 years old, you can get so swept up in a book that you start to believe that the fantasy is reality,” Anderson once said. For him, that’s the ideal.

The literary wellspring of those fantasies is emphasised by the films’ frequent framing as novels or retellings, boxes within boxes of stories. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) is introduced as a storybook written by one of the characters; The Grand Budapest Hotel begins with the now elderly bellboy reminiscing to a writer about his youth before returning to the beginning. Asteroid City arrives wrapped in several layers of artifice: it is supposed to be a television program made in the ’50s (and introduced by Bryan Cranston, channelling Ted Koppel) about a theatre company (clearly meant to be the Actors’ Studio) putting on a play that is the Asteroid City story.

Anderson wrote the script with regular writing/directing partner Roman Coppola. “We were interested in the setting of 1950s New York theatre, a Broadway Golden Age-ish kind of thing, in this case the Actors’ Studio variety of it,” he says in group interview with the actors. “Everybody is both an actor and the role they’re playing, but they’re sort of one thing too.”

Adrien Brody, who plays the theatre’s director, sees the framing device as a recognition of the actors’ shared history. “Part of what is so beautiful about the storytelling, for me at least, is that there is a bit of nostalgia for this time and place,” he says. “For ’50s Americana, the West and also a love for theatre and performance, the art of that, which is something we’re all part of.”

Brody is one of a troupe of actors Anderson has built up over the course of his filmmaking career, which includes 11 features along with numerous side-projects and shorts. Bill Murray, Owen and Luke Wilson, Anjelica Huston, Swinton and Schwartzman of course: the list of regulars is long and more are keen to join up if he will have them.

Anderson newcomer Tom Hanks says his inclusion in Asteroid City “came about from a lovely email saying ‘would you like to come and do this?’ I haven’t seen a Wes Anderson movie I didn’t wish I was in, so that was great. I think the reference he used was ‘we’re looking for a retired Ronald Reagan type’ so I was like ‘I’m your man’. But what is odd is that he also sends you a version of the movie that doesn’t really need you.”

That “version of the movie” is a cartoon. Anderson draws every scene in the film and does all the voices himself. “It’s made with a program called Animatic,” explains Steve Park, who played a Korean chef in The French Dispatch and is a police officer in Asteroid City. “It’s like a moving storyboard.” You see where and how you have to stand, he explains; you hear the rhythm of the dialogue and how fast it should be, which is generally very fast indeed. “So you are so prepared by all this research, you’re seeing yourself as part of the frame,” Park concludes.

One of the established truisms in this business is that actors detest directors giving them line readings, but no one seems to mind. Hope Davis, another Anderson newcomer, who plays a scout mistress permanently trussed in the brown uniform that she sees as her identity, did not know what to expect.

“I came into it feeling very nervous – but it was way more fun than I had thought movie-making could be,” she says. She recalls one scene where, in the absence of one of the actors, Anderson joined in. “We were all jumping round the desert with air guns in our hands. You know, movie making can be very slow and dull and this felt so alive and playful, and it reminds you of why you got into this in the first place.”

Anderson’s sets are famously isolated. He says he can’t remember whether they shot Asteroid City under COVID conditions because “we’ve been ‘bubbling’ our movies for 15 or 18 years now, and it wasn’t different from the usual”. Anderson shoots on location. Cast and crew live and eat dinner together in a hotel close by; the choice of location creates the bubble. The Grand Budapest Hotel was shot in Gorlitz, on the border of Germany and Poland. The French Dispatch was shot in Angouleme, France. Asteroid City was shot near Chinchon in Spain, 60 kilometres from Madrid, in a field that had previously been planted with watermelons.

People come to say a few lines and stay for weeks. There is always a table of Anderson’s recommended DVDs available to watch; Davis remembers inhaling Twelve Angry Men and Bus Stop in the evenings after group dinners. When actors aren’t needed, Anderson will suggest they go for a hike or a bicycle ride with their scene partners.

“So often, you’re on hold in a movie, so you’re brought in, sit in your trailer and wait,” says Maya Hawke, another newcomer to Wes’ World, who plays a prim schoolmistress in Asteroid City. “Wes has fixed that by seeing that you’re on hold a hundred per cent of the time, but you don’t feel like you are.”

Notwithstanding the enthusiasm of these happy campers – and that of legions of Anderson fans, who wait eagerly for each new film and find even the less successful ones touching and magical – Wes’ World has plenty of haters. Those who detest his films for his affectations – for the shots composed to be symmetrical, for his extreme close-ups, for the contrived, artificial dialogue, for the films’ extravagant colours, for the sheer accumulation of visual detail that plenty of viewers find just infuriatingly fussy – dismiss them as mere whimsy. “Style over substance” is the usual sneer. Worse: style as substance. Quantities of objects replace recognisable character development, they say. What some see as elegance, others see as emptiness.

Anderson says he has found this puzzling: all those details, in his view, contribute to the construction of character. More crucially, Anderson’s comedies have played out against what we see in their shadows: madness, family estrangements, and – most of all – death and bereavement.

In Rushmore, young Max’s mother’s death is mentioned only twice, but it hangs over this strangest of school stories like a cloud. The surreal eccentricity of The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) is effectively brought to an end with a gory scene of suicide. The Life Aquatic (2004) begins with Steve Zissou’s vow to avenge a death – a typical blurt of bravado – but ends with another loss that is truly harrowing.

In Asteroid City, Augie Steenbeck simply cannot deal with his wife’s death, so he pretends it hasn’t happened. Into this vacuum comes Johansson’s Midge Campbell, the film star who is dealing with her own loss but has simply decided not to experience the feeling. “That is so convenient for an actor,” says Johansson. “That’s the world she’s living in.”

Augie also has a trio of feral little girls who, once they know their mother isn’t coming home from hospital, start squabbling over where to bury her ashes. They want to dig a hole behind their motel. The truth is that nobody knows what to do.

That uncertainty – and a compassion for uncertainty – permeates all of Anderson’s films, even if it often seems to have been buried in knick-knacks and extravagant wigs: the “too-muchness” that his detractors cannot bear. As critics have observed, there are very few villains to be found in his work; the farmers in Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and the Fascists in The Grand Budapest Hotel are outliers. Martin Scorsese, commenting on Anderson’s first film Bottle Rocket (1996), wrote that it was “a movie without a trace of cynicism, that obviously grew out of its director’s affection for his characters and for people in general. A rarity.”

In Asteroid City, people worn down by life are surprised to find common ground. Socially awkward kids make amazing contraptions. People do their best. The kitschy retro props of Wes’ World are really just a bonus.

Asteroid City opens in cinemas on August 10. Interviews for this story were conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike.