Last week, Criterion Collection announced it would be releasing “The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years” box set featuring 4K versions of the director’s first 10 feature films, starting with “Bottle Rocket” (1996) through “The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun” (2021).
While the celebrated director’s films have previously been released on DVD and Blu-ray, including Criterion versions up through “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014), when Anderson was on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast to discuss his new film “The Phoenician Scheme,” he made clear this wasn’t simply a matter of doing UHD/HDR upgrades.
“We’ve been working on it for some time,” said Anderson of the upcoming box set. “I like the idea of having this set. It’s ten movies, it’s an even number.”
Anderson’s relationship with Criterion dates back to “Rushmore” (1998) and, based on his comments on the podcast, working with Criterion to bring his films together in a specially designed box set was something that was important to him.
“I always have thought of my films for whatever reason, as being a body of work, an ongoing thing, not just the films as one by one, but as a set of things,” said Anderson. “I used to say, I feel like the characters from one of my films could walk into another of my films and fit into that world. Eventually, I started making period pictures, where that doesn’t quite make as much sense anymore.”
There are filmmakers who have gone back to restore their films for an updated home video release and have re-edited or utilized new digital tools to create new versions of their work. For example, Wong Kar Wai’s recent career Criterion box set was notable for its different color grades of his beloved films.
At the time, Wong Kar Wai wrote of the changes, “As the saying goes: ‘no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’ Since the beginning of this process, these words have reminded me to treat this as an opportunity to present these restorations as a new work from a different vantage point in my career.”
The suglassed Hong Kong auteur’s comments mirror those of Terrence Malick, who once commented, “No one asked Bob Dylan to play a song the same way every night. Why should I have to make one film?”
But Anderson made clear he doesn’t have the same philosophy about his own work, and had taken a different approach working on the upcoming Criterion box set. “I’m not big on, ‘let’s make a new version,’” said Anderson. “For me, it’s like the movie has gone out and it sort of belongs to the audience at that point.”
That said, Anderson did take advantage of the process to spend time fixing things he hadn’t been 100 percent pleased with in the previous releases, while also overseeing how his films translated to the new video and audio formats, which isn’t always a straight one-to-one.
“In the process of this Criterion box set, for instance, there were things that we could refine,” said Anderson. “There were things that didn’t translate quite right in the original home video versions that we corrected.”
Focus Features’ “The Phoenician Scheme” is in select theaters now and will be released nationwide Friday, June 6.
Criterion will release “The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years” on Tuesday, September 30. You can pre-order here.
To hear Wes Anderson’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
