Film can be difficult to curate as not much material tends to survive once production has wrapped. Not so with the director Wes Anderson who has kept a meticulous archive of objects from all his movies ever since he came to reshoot some of the scenes for his first feature film, Bottle Rocket, in 1996 and found the props he had created had been sold. From that moment on, Anderson stipulated in his contracts that he would be the one “who looks after things”, as he put it.
The mind-boggling extent of his universe-building, and the control he exercises over it, is at the heart of the film-maker’s first retrospective, which opens at the Design Museum this week — a scrupulously curated, visual feast of more than 700 objects from the past three decades, many of them well-known to Anderson devotees.
