Wes Anderson is reuniting with a bulk of familiar faces to build one of the most star-studded ensembles in recent memory for Asteroid City. As is a trademark of Anderson-directed pictures, Asteroid City takes a simple concept and executes it with a layer of absurdity, but below the surface lies a deeper meaning. One of those deeper meanings comes in a thought-provoking statement uttered by Tilda Swinton’s Dr. Hickenlooper to Jake Ryan’s Woodrow Steenbeck when she remarks that his “curiosity is [his] greatest asset.”
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Speaking to ComicBook.com, the Asteroid City cast took this concept and applied it to their own careers, revealing what they believe to be their greatest assets as storytellers.
“My greatest asset is lately my choice of collaborators,” Jeffrey Wright said. “You don’t do these things alone, and the collaboration can be everything. It can be miserable if you don’t choose wisely, and it can be extraordinary when you do. I think I’ve had the opportunity now over time to recognize better those who I want to work with and have the space and the opportunity to work with a great group of collaborators. If you look at this [ensemble] led by Wes, it doesn’t get much better than that.”
“Curiosity is great,” Stephen Park said, agreeing with Hickenlooper’s initial statement. “I don’t know if I can improve upon that.”
“Openness,” Hope Davis, who plays Sandy Borden in Asteroid City, added. “You have to be open to the world and to what’s coming at you next and be flexible and ready to jump.”
Adrien Brody, the most experienced Wes Anderson collaborator of this bunch, echoed much of what Wright said but also pointed to the ability to choose being key to delivering a good story.
“I think that with time and age and experience, you do learn that the collaborative nature of this work is so essential to creating great work,” Brody echoed. “I do immerse myself in anything that I do wholly. It is to be able to make those choices, but to also have a degree of luck of having those paths connect at the right time because some of those choices are out of your hands, as we know, is the greatest key to doing meaningful work.”
Asteroid City has its wide theatrical release this Friday, June 23rd.
