From Faber & Faber's Projections: Tod Lippy's interview with Wes Anderson

Can you talk about having Jim Brooks as a mentor during your rewrites of the Bottle Rocket script?

With Jim Brooks, we went through what seemed at the time to be, like, a year of work, which in fact when I look back on it was only three or four months. But three or four months of really intense scrutiny, which we weren't prepared for, and which forced us to kind of learn how to make a screenplay. We were really overconfident about the material - we were set in our ways after having written one screenplay. Sometimes I really don't understand how Jim saw that we could make a movie out of it. The first thing he heard was a five-hour reading. For a caper-comedy. That's something that probably shouldn't be so epic.

But he was a combination of patient and properly aggressive to get us to figure stuff out. Especially with me. And now, when we're writing, that's what we think of, this stuff we learned from Jim. He'll often say, "Well, the way I learned it was like this" - I mean, he probably invented the way he says he learned it - but that's kind of the thing we do now, we often think of the kind of "rules" that we learned from Jim. How to make the story work, and what you need to do as far as the audience is concerned.

Projections 11
New York Film-Makers on Film-making
edited by Tod Lippy
faber and faber
© copyright Tod Lippy, 2000