Watch: How to Spot Wes Anderson's Style From the Very Beginning of His Career

Wes Anderson is, arguably, the most influential filmmaker of the past 20 years. Certain stylistic flourishes are indelibly associated with him, and perhaps more than any living individual, Anderson can claim credit for the ascendance of 'quirkiness' as an aesthetic. He has been the subject of countless parodies and birthed a thousand indies; without Wes Anderson, would there be a Napoleon Dynamite?

However, there was a time before Wes Anderson was Wes Anderson, and it's this time period (and the movie he made then) that is under examination in a new video by Thomas Flight, searching for the roots of Anderson's mature style throughout his first film, Bottle Rocket. Check out the video below.

Bottle Rocket's release in 1996 announced the arrival of a new talent, though in his debut, Anderson had yet to define the cinematic universe that he was to become known for. Then again, debut films (and novels) are very rarely fully mature works. In order to make a film, one must first make a film, with all of the attendant costs and logistical planning that entails.

In the mid-90s (pre-DSLR revolution), it was considerably more difficult to make a movie; making movies is still not exactly easy, but it's easier to get your hands on equipment and resources that filmmakers, for decades, had to beg, borrow, and steal just to have access to for a weekend.

Furthermore, it might be instructive to remember that in the pre-drone era, aerial shots were exponentially more expensive, time-consuming, and dangerous. 

There is the fact that Anderson had never directed a feature film before, though he had made a 15-minute iteration of Bottle Rocket that was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. There's a heavy French New Wave influence that appears in the short (the jazz soundtrack, handheld black-and-white cinematography) and which has stayed with Anderson's films through his career.

What we see, especially in the short, is Wes Anderson stripped bare, without a budget. There's also the fact that Anderson has stated that his lack of experience in filmmaking led to moments on the set of the Bottle Rocket feature where he realized that he didn't know certain elementary things about directing a scene. What is evident, however, is a raw talent, and 9 out of 10 people, given a camera and the resources to make a film, would not turn in anything half as interesting.

Flight makes the point that Anderson's way with dialogue is apparent in this early work, which is also interesting because it was co-written with Owen Wilson, a long-time friend and collaborator. Hallmarks of Anderson's visual style that make an appearance in Bottle Rocket  are his use of pans, zooms, and long tracking shots, "all ways of using camera movement to develop a shot" but ways that become, of course, inexorably more complicated with time and money.

This video is a good look at Anderson's early stylistic traits, the ones which were apparent from the beginning before he was not just a filmmaker, but a style icon. 

Source: Thomas Flight