The Big Picture

Adam Stockhausen has been working with Wes Anderson for over 16 years and has played a crucial role in the distinct look and feel of Anderson’s films. Stockhausen has collaborated with other acclaimed filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Steve McQueen, and Wes Craven, showcasing his versatility and talent. Stockhausen faced unique challenges in designing the sets for “Asteroid City,” including creating an immersive and cohesive environment and incorporating Wes Anderson’s specific vision for the film.

Wes Anderson’s films have a distinct look and feel to them, and a lot of that can be credited to the work of production designer Adam Stockhausen. Stockhausen has worked with Anderson for over 16 years now, having previously served as the art director of The Darjeeling Limited. He would later become the production designer for every single Anderson film since Moonrise Kingdom, which led to him winning his first Oscar in 2015 for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Anderson isn’t the only A-list filmmaker that Stockhausen has worked with, having also teamed with acclaimed auteurs such as Steven Spielberg, Steve McQueen, Noah Baumbach, and the late Wes Craven. It has already been a busy year for Stockhausen, having worked on James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Anderson’s collection of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar short films. He notably finds himself back in the awards conversation for Anderson’s star-studded meta dramedy Asteroid City, which centers around a stage play about a Junior Stargazer convention that is rocked by an alien encounter.

We were lucky enough to sit down and talk with Stockhausen about his background in theater, how working with Wes Anderson compares to other filmmakers, designing the UFO in Asteroid City, and what he plans on doing next.

Asteroid City Following a writer on his world famous fictional play about a grieving father who travels with his tech-obsessed family to small rural Asteroid City to compete in a junior stargazing event, only to have his world view disrupted forever. Release Date June 23, 2023 Rating R Runtime 105 minutes Main Genre Drama

COLLIDER: This is a cool moment for me because my first interview I did this year was with Rick Carter for The Fablemans, and he mentioned you several times.

ADAM STOCKHAUSEN: That’s so sweet!

I’m always interested in talking more about the behind-the-scenes and I know you’ve worked with Wes Anderson in all of his films since The Darjeeling Unlimited. How did you first meet him? How did you guys cross paths?

STOCKHAUSEN: Well, I didn’t design Darjeeling Limited, I was the art director. So, I was introduced to Wes by the designer of the film, Mark Friedberg, who’s a New York-based production designer, and I was his art director for a couple of years. I used to work in theater and opera here in New York, and he brought me across into movies to work on The Producers, which was sort of half-and-half. So, he kind of brought me in on that because I’d been dabbling in movies but then I could also still understand the theater world enough to help bridge the process there for him a little bit. We hit it off, and we spent the next couple of years together, and along the way, one of the films he was doing was Darjeeling Limited, so I met Wes and the whole crew on that one.

It’s funny, I was actually gonna ask if you had a theater background because in Asteroid City, there’s a half of the movie that’s really set in that world. Is Wes familiar a lot with the theater or did you kind of guide him with those kinds of things?

STOCKHAUSEN: No, I didn’t guide him with that stuff. I mean, it was a process of working out the look of it all together. He, I don’t think, has a theatrical background but it’s something that’s definitely interesting to him. You’ll see elements of that throughout his films. If you look at the play within the movie in Rushmore, there’s a play within the movie in The French Dispatch, there are constant plays throughout The Royal Tenenbaums. I don’t want to do too much literary criticism on Wes’s work, but I think this is something that he’s been interested in for a long time, so it’s an ongoing conversation that he’s having.

Designing the UFO in ‘Asteroid City’
Image via Focus Features

It feels so different, still. It has a lot of his trademarks, but the movie as a whole, he’s never done something as far as aliens. My big question when I first saw that trailer was, “How is that UFO going to look?” And I’m curious, what inspired that look?

STOCKHAUSEN: That was a really Wes-intensive process. We have a couple of illustrators that we work with. One of them is Victor Georgiev, who does a lot of the mechanical devices – he did the X-ray scope thing on [The Wonderful Story of] Henry Sugar, he did Atari’s airplane in Isle of Dogs. He does a lot of the mechanical-type illustrations, and he worked directly with Wes. He was working with me on some other stuff early on in the process and then when Wes was ready to go on the alien costume and the spaceship, for which he had really strong ideas, he and Victor worked that one out together. And then Simon Weisse, the model maker who does all the miniatures for Wes, actually built the spaceship and it was a miniature. We made a tiny prop of it for the backstage with Adrien [Brody], but then the real thing was also a miniature, but a much bigger scale one.

I mentioned Rick Carter earlier and that was for The Fabelmans because I’m a big Steven Spielberg obsessee, it’s kind of my thing around Collider. I’m curious, you’ve also worked with Spielberg, you’ve worked with Wes Craven, worked with Steve McQueen and Noah Baumbach, but how does collaborating with Wes Anderson compare to working with those others? Is it different because his movies always have such a distinct look?

STOCKHAUSEN: Yeah, it’s different. I would say, in a funny way — and nobody believes me when I say this — I think the similarities are bigger than the differences because you’re always talking about the story, you’re always starting with the script, and you’re always fundamentally asking the question of, “How do we do this?” On the page, it’s always something that either, if it did exist, it was a long time ago, or it never existed in the case of Ready Player One. But then, the conversation very quickly becomes, “Okay, what’s the best way to do it? What does it look like and how do we make it?” And so you kind of go through that conversation, but now you go through the conversation in different ways, and that’s where the difference starts to come.

With Wes, he plans and storyboards his shots in an incredibly detailed way, so we’re doing this kind of fine-grained analysis, shot by shot, scene by scene, of breaking things apart from the very beginning. Not that the process is more detailed, but it just breaks down into smaller granules quicker, you know? Whereas, you’ll do kind of a bigger sweeping conversation about where in the world do we want to shoot these different pieces of, let’s say, Bridge of Spies? Those initial conversations were about how do we recreate Berlin of the post-war Berlin Wall period, and can we do it in New York? Can we do it in Berlin itself? Do we have to go somewhere else even beyond that to find that look? And you start really exploring, and you build up from these big pieces, and eventually get to the fine-grain stuff. With Wes, we kind of slice earlier on.

I know this movie was shot primarily in Spain, and it has a very almost Americana feel to it with it taking place in the Southwest. I was curious, did you have a specific location that inspired the look?

STOCKHAUSEN: Not exactly. I mean, the look is definitely inspired by the American Southwest and the kind of American Southwest that you see in beautiful photographs of Monument Valley at magic hour or Looney Tunes. [Laughs] So, it’s not so much as saying, “Well, it’s this spot in Utah looking in this direction. This is our set, copy it,” right? It’s much more about the kind of feeling of that place and then trying to bring that across into what we did, which is kind of like the stage set version of that, but really large.

‘Asteroid City’ Was More Difficult To Design Than Previous Wes Anderson Films
Image via Focus Features

When I saw this movie, even though I didn’t see it in IMAX, it felt so immersive just looking at the city. I remember that at the same time, there were all those dumb TikTok trends, like “This looks like a Wes Anderson movie!” Then you see Asteroid City and it looks way better than anything you would see on the phone. I’m curious, was this film more difficult than some of the other movies you’ve done with Wes Anderson?

STOCKHAUSEN: It kind of was because it had this kind of inequality. A lot of times with Wes’s stuff it’s not unusual for us to be looking at each individual setup or each individual shot as its own set, where we’ll do kind of an extravagant thing, we’ll shoot one shot at it, and then that’s it. We’re kind of used to that, so that’s very challenging. But what was sort of different about this one is Asteroid City, as a place, had all of that. We had very detailed stuff that we were doing in the motel, in the luncheonette, in the street itself, at the phone booth, in the observatory, in the gas station, in all these different places. We were doing all that specific work, making all those sets work, but then that whole thing had to work as one universal piece, as well, because each of those sets functioned as the background for the others, if that makes any sense. There was no hacking anything. The whole thing was this 360 degree reality where we could look anywhere, and that’s fine, we do that kind of work, but it also had to serve the really specific needs of all of those other scenes at the same time.

So, it was a lot of trial and error on the computer and 3D modeling of this place. Every time we would develop something, we would then have to go back and check what the implications of that were for every other scene in the film in Asteroid City. Of course, there’s the backstage part of the film, as well, which was separate pieces that we shot in the neighboring towns.

Related ‘Asteroid City’ Shows What Wes Anderson Thinks of His Own Films ‘Asteroid City’ is the closest Wes Anderson has come to explaining his distinct visual aesthetic.

So how far along in the creative process does Wes usually call you up to bring you on since you guys have been working so insanely?

STOCKHAUSEN: It’s different movie by movie. The way I describe it is to say we start talking when he’s ready to and when he’s ready to kind of let things go off the page and into the conversation about how to do it. So that means sometimes the script is done, sometimes the script is almost done, sometimes it’s percolating along, right? But it comes at the point when he’s ready to say, “Okay, I think we understand what Asteroid City is, but to take it further we need to talk about what it’s really going to be and how we’re going to do this thing” Then we start to talk about exactly that question, and say, “What’s the way to do this thing?” Then, everything that we’ve been talking about for the last few minutes are very much the early conversations that he and I had starting to develop this thing, and saying, “Should we be in Death Valley? Should we be in Monument Valley? Should we be in Big Bend Park in Texas? Should we be in the Spaghetti Western locations in Spain? Should we be in a backlot behind one of the big stages in Europe?” And kind of rolling through all of those possibilities and saying, “Well, what does that mean if we did that? Here’s what it might look like,” and, “What does that mean for the piece?”

Working With Steve McQueen on ‘Widows’ and the Upcoming ‘Blitz’
Image via 20th Century Studios

So, I know your next project is Blitz, the Steve McQueen movie. Can you give us any details?

STOCKHAUSEN: I can say that I’ve worked with Steve a bunch before. He and I did 12 Years a Slave and Widows, and it’s just amazing fun working with him again. He’s such a wonderful filmmaker, and this was an incredible experience and I can’t wait to see it.

Related ‘Blitz’: Cast, Crew, Filming Details, and What to Expect Audiences can experience the massive bombings of The Blitz through the eyes of a group of Londoners during World War II.

I’m just such a fan of his work. I remember seeing Widows, I’m based in Indianapolis, but I’m close enough to Chicago, and I’ve never seen Chicago portrayed in that kind of way on screen.

STOCKHAUSEN: That’s great to hear. That’s great. That was the whole challenge of that piece was how to really see Chicago, not just kind of parachuting in and looking at sort of postcard images of it, but to really find those women’s lives specifically in the town the way they would be in the correct socio-economic areas, in the correct ethnic areas, and in so doing to have it be a real portrait of them, and thereby, also, the city when you look at the whole package of it.

For my final question, do you know what you’re doing next? I know Wes Anderson is rumored to be working on something else. I know Spielberg has other things lined up, as well. Do you?

STOCKHAUSEN: We’re definitely prepping with Wes on another film, but I can’t really talk about it.

Asteroid City is now available to stream on Peacock.

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