Wes Anderson's 'Isle of Dogs' Cast Interview Video is the Most Pitch Perfect EPK Ever

Wes Anderson's latest film, the upcoming stop-motion animated Isle of Dogs, has its North American premiere at SXSW on March 17 before its wide release next week. In anticipation of the film's upcoming release, Fox Searchlight dropped a cast interview video that may be the most Wes Anderson EPK ever made. And dare we say, maybe the cast EPK to end all cast EPKs?

Due to the nature of making a stop-motion animated film, Anderson and his team didn't have the luxury of gathering the actors on set to shoot the traditional talking-head EPK video. Instead, Anderson decided to make the EPK interviews part of the animated project itself. According to an interview with Vulture, Anderson explained, “Each of the actors did an interview and answered questions on their own—some recorded themselves on their iPhones—and we spent the next several months figuring out how to make those into the cast interviews.”

Edward Norton bumped the mic multiple times during his recording, so naturally a terribly placed boom and an overly eager interview subject needed to be created. Bill Murray recorded his interview in the back of a moving car, leading to the tram ride for his character's interview.

The workflow of recording the interviews before creating the EPK animation followed the same process as the feature film. Anderson explained that the cast recorded the entire script first, then Anderson and his collaborators determined the type of dog each character should be and how they should look. For example, “Bryan [Cranston] has a very powerful, forceful voice, and he played this dog with a kind of intensity, so we spent a very long time working on the puppet before we could say, 'This puppet is good enough to deliver this performance,'” said Anderson. The look of Duke, played by Jeff Goldblum, needed to work with Goldblum's particular speaking pattern and musicality while also expressing what Goldblum may be thinking while he speaks. Anderson relied on his master puppetmaker, Andy Gent, who also worked on Fantastic Mr. Fox, to bring these dogs to life.

You can watch how they created the Isle of Dogs cast interview EPK in this amazing 360° timelapse video:

Isle of Dogs premieres this Saturday, March 17 at SXSW if you're lucky enough to catch it. The rest of us will have to wait until the film's release in U.S. theatres on March 23.

Source: Vulture