Just what is The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou about? The trailers sell it as a comic romp about an oceanographer on a Moby Dick-like quest to kill a shark. But naturally with writer/director Wes Anderson, it’s more complicated than that. Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is a broken man inside, and he takes it out on the people on his boat. The quest, through all its hardships, is ultimately about his own personal growth.
This type of comedy-drama fits in with the work Murray has been doing from Rushmore to Lost in Translation through Life Aquatic. “You have to show emotion, you have to be able to do it,” Murray said. “We all have these emotions, but how do you execute it? How do you demonstrate it and affect people? This is a pretty hot group of actors. These people all have serious chops, you know. So when this movie gets emotional, everybody's working on it. It's really pounding. That scene in the submarine is very emotional. That's because everybody's in it. They're right on top of it, and completely dedicated to what they have to do. They did their research in what they have to do.”
Murray is complemented by the likes of Owen Wilson, Angelica Huston, Willem Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum. Some are veterans of Anderson’s world and others are newcomers. Wilson, who has co-written every Wes Anderson movie except The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, felt it easy to slip back into the actor’s role this time around.
“It wasn’t that big a deal because even on the first movie that we worked on, Bottle Rocket, was always Wes as the director,” Wilson said. “And when you show up on set, you’re the actor, so it was never like I was hanging around looking over his shoulder. If I wasn’t in the scene, I wasn’t on set. So on a movie like Rushmore, I wasn’t there at all. I was filming Armageddon at the time. And then on Royal Tenenbaums, it was just kind of when I was in a scene. So I leave it up to Wes’s judgment because I trust him to do stuff.”
Huston saw a similarity between her character, Eleanor Zissou, and her character in Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. “I think [Steve] loves Eleanor and I think she loves him back but I think she’s the one person who’s really clocked him,” Huston said. “And he’s charming and he’s seductive in his way and albeit a little bit boisterous and blustering. But it’s interesting to me that both the women in this movie really clock him. And that’s a sort of similar theme as in Tenenbaums in which Ethelene is very bound to Royal but we see her learning in Tenenbaums exactly who he is and what he’s up to. I think Royal has more guile than Steve Zissou, but I think again its guys who like to get their way and don’t necessarily want to be found out.”
Willem Dafoe acknowledged his role as a new addition to the ensemble, “just by virtue of the [other actors] having a history with [Anderson]. Nothing formal, but just being around them and seeing how they deal with each other. Also, you really look to Angelica and Bill and Wes. You look to see what the drill was, basically, to see what the world was, and you not just try to fit in, but you see what your job is and then take it from there.”
Jeff Goldblum, who also joins the ensemble for the first time, approached his role as rival Alistair Hennessy with some quirky Goldblum-isms, but looked to Anderson for guidance. “He's so specific and meticulous and his vision is so particular and I certainly wanted to extract from him and collaborate with him,” Goldblum said. “Show me what you have in mind exactly. I wanted to plumb the depths of his vision of this thing. Early on, we got together and he said just specific things. He said, ‘Grow your hair.’ Many things are written into the script, more than any script you've read, the lengths of people's cuffs, the color of this. Things keep occurring to him, he keeps inventing, he's very inventive, very creative, he keeps inventing and he said, ‘Besides everything I've written, grow your hair and cut your sideburns to this length exactly.’ Very specific and I said okay.”
Anderson was inspired to apply his brand of characters to the genre of oceanographic documentary because of his own love for the format. “The germ of the idea was the Cousteau stuff from TV that I watched growing up and Jane Goodall and National Geographic specials and Mutual of Omaha and Wild Kingdom and all of that stuff,” Anderson said. “Those hero scientists, which we don’t have too many of those any more. And Zissou comes from this French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, one of my favorite photographers. His brother was nicknamed Zissou, and he took many, many photographs of him, some of his most beautiful photographs and he was this amazing character who was an inventor and he built, this was around the turn of the century, he built airplanes and little cars that would go downhill and things for going under water and so he photographed him with his crazy inventions that worked or didn’t work, crashed or didn’t crash and so I just liked the spirit of that character. Originally he was called Steve Cocteau, but I felt like that had too many associations. I think those guys are the more like an idea of a character, like a surface of a character, and they’re a setting. But the actual story and the actual relationships among the characters and the actual role that Bill Murray is playing, that’s drawn more from people I’ve known and my own experiences and all of that kind of stuff, I think.”
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is now playing.
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