Earlier this week, Wes Anderson could be found meandering through an empty Hollywood Bowl, his hands folded behind his back as he made his way to the stage, giving a warm grin as he looked off at the 17,000-plus seats.
The Bowl team is giving him a brief tour ahead of a slate of concerts hitting the venue this weekend, where those seats will be filled with fans likely decked out in Margot Tenenbaum-inspired fur coats or Moonrise Kingdom-esque coonskin caps, as Wes-heads will be in tow to celebrate the sounds of his beloved filmography.
“There’s so many great people in this thing, but having Jackson Browne perform this song, these two songs, that’s a little surreal for me,” the ever press-shy Anderson tells The Hollywood Reporter in a brief moment at the end of that visit, where he also met up with longtime collaborator Jason Schwartzman, and the pair filmed a brief promotional video for the concerts. “I saw the other day when they were rehearsing, and I’ll say it was just a kind of overwhelming moment for me.”
For three decades, music has been an unofficial character in Anderson’s canon, an X factor in establishing the equal parts quirky, tragic and whimsical tone that’s defined all his films and turned him into one of cinema’s most influential auteurs.
