Rushmore
Writer and director Wes Anderson
and actor Jason Schwartzman
In the wondrously warped landscape of Rushmore, the action is driven by the whims of a 15–year–old prep school student who not only views a sad sack steel tycoon as his peer, but engages him in a pitched battle for the affections of a widowed schoolteacher. On paper, this may sound hopelessly ludicrous, but director Wes Anderson makes it work by establishing the film's skewed perspective at the get–go, then building a credible world on this unconventional foundation.
"The premise is odd," says actor Jason Schwartzman, summing up Anderson's philosophy. "Now make it real, and it'll be funny."
Unlike so many comedies with a teenage protagonist, where laughs come at the expense of characters who are already grotesques, Rushmore (1998) takes a wholly different approach. Here, true eccentrics are presented with matter–of–fact clarity, and the humor grows from the ways they cope with the often bizarre hurdles placed in their path.
"They're all like characters from some children's story," explains Wes Anderson, "they're slightly exaggerated, they have weird qualities. But then we made the performances as real as we could possibly make them, combined with the fact that the actual events of their lives are very peculiar and almost unreal."
"We always wanted to make it like this kid [Max Fischer] really existed," Schwartzman adds. "When we did each scene, Wes's main direction was 'Make it like it's a documentary.' That's the way we tried to act it."
Within the context of Rushmore, Max Fischer takes desires that for most adolescents (indeed, most adults) would only be fantasies and transforms them, through his sheer force of will, into reality. Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman have different ideas of what gives him this ability.
"Max has a ton of imagination," explains Anderson, "and he believes in himself in a super–hero kind of way. He just trusts in his own native talents and charisma and superiority and, in some ways, he's completely overestimating himself. But he does just have this feeling of confidence and drive that lets him carry things through, and he has a good spirit about it all."
"I think the movie is Max's mind," says Schwartzman in Detroit. "It's told through his eyes, so nothing is impossible, and everything that Max thinks, he does, because he's ambitious. He's got no other way of acting except directly. So if he thinks something, he'll do something and nothing can stop him. But the movie really is a fable, so everything is fantasy and everything is possible."
The way in which Rushmore stems from and so fully expresses the perspective of its central character, combined with Schwartzman's eerily dead–on performance and Max's pursuit of an older woman, have drawn comparisons to director Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967). Anderson insisted that there wasn't any conscious decision to emulate that highly influential film (although a brief swimming pool scene is a direct homage), but he did contact Nichols at one point.
"I talked to Mike Nichols about being in Rushmore," he explains. "I wanted him to be the headmaster [of the Rushmore Academy], but he wouldn't do it. Then I showed him the movie later and he really loved it. He helped us with a lot of things and told a lot of people about it. It was great to go through that because I'm such a fan of his."
Anderson, 29, who co–wrote the screenplay for his second film with longtime friend and collaborator, Owen Wilson (part of the creative team behind the off–kilter caper comedy, Bottle Rocket), ended up filming on location at his own alma mater, St. John's School, in Houston, Texas.
"We wanted to do a school movie," says Anderson, who spoke via cellphone while travelling cross–country (he refuses to fly), "and almost simultaneously, there came the character of the kid who loved the school and was a terrible student."
He cast 18–year–old acting novice Jason Schwartzman, a musician (the drummer of Phantom Planet), "in part because the character does a lot of awful things, and I wanted someone that you're going to stay with in spite of all that."
For his part, Schwartzman cites The Godfather (1972), which starred his mother, Talia Shire, and was directed by his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola, as a example of the collaborative nature of filmmaking and how that cooperation can create something truly distinctive. One aspect of Rushmore that particularly excited Schwartzman was the music: a set of raucous British Invasion songs that Anderson picked long before filming began.
"Wes gave me a cassette tape and said, 'That's the vibe of the movie'," explains Schwartzman. "He had all the music for each scene picked out, so sometimes, right before the scene, we'd listen to the music just to get into it. Or on some scenes where there's no dialogue, just music, we actually had music playing while we shot."
In addition to their raw energy, which gives Rushmore some of its jittery charm, the songs were used to express the inner turmoil of Max Fischer.
"Max sees himself as an adult who has work to do," Wes Anderson explains, "but he's a teenager, and he's a rebel even though he doesn't want to be. It's just in his blood. So the music addresses the adolescent issues which he tries to gloss over, the stuff in him that he doesn't want to express."
© 1998, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.