Hollywood Bowl Celebrates 30 Years of Wes Anderson Music

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.

Now, that character is officially getting its leading role, as the scores and needle drops across all his movies from Bottle Rocket to The Phoenician Scheme will take center stage starting with the first show at the Bowl on Friday night, and two more on Saturday and Sunday.

As Anderson alludes to, Browne is among the performers for the event, where he’ll perform his classic “These Days,” which will forever be associated with the filmmaker thanks to Nico’s version soundtracking the iconic Royal Tenenbaums scene where Gwyneth Paltrow’s Margot Tenenbaum makes her way off the bus to meet Luke Wilson’s Richie.

Other than Browne, Beck, Mark Mothersbaugh and Devo, Jim James, Rufus Wainwright, Karen O and Jenny Lewis are all among the star-studded acts on the bill, and The L.A. Phil will perform select film score songs of Anderson’s composers Mothersbaugh and Alexandre Desplat as well, marking the first time many of the compositions have ever been played before a live audience. And fitting for an Anderson affair, Bill Murray is serving as the shows’ emcee.

“It’s crazy this hasn’t happened before,” Schwartzman, who’s co-starred in seven of Anderson’s films and had the lead in 1998’s Rushmore, says from a dressing room at the Bowl two days before Friday’s first concert.

Schwartzman, who served as the founding drummer in L.A. rock band Phantom Planet before he pivoted to acting, is on the lineup as well, where he’s going to play two songs and jokes he’ll do “whatever else they ask of me.”

Anderson’s films of course have no shortage of celebrated musical moments between Mothersbaugh and Desplat’s scores and the pop music choices Anderson selects with his longtime music supervisor Randall Poster. “These Days” may be the most famous, but among many more, there’s also The Faces’ “Ooh La La” closing out the final scene in Rushmore, as Max Fischer dances in slow motion with Rosemary Cross before the final curtain close. Or The Beach Boys’ “Heroes and Villains” in the first heist in Fantastic Mr. Fox. Or the Rolling Stones’ “Play With Fire” in The Darjeeling Limited as Francis, Peter and Jack finally open up to their long-vagabonded mother without saying any words.

“It’s so hard to pick just one,” Schwartzman says when asked to pick his favorite. “It changes with the mood. I love this piece Mark Mothersbaugh wrote when they storm the beaches at Ping Island in Life Aquatic. It’s such a great, odd piece of music. Or maybe ‘Needle in the Hay’ in Royal Tenenbaums.“

Outside of an eclectic mixtape of artsy rock hits and orchestral compositions, the shows look to give an unfettered look at just how definitive the music choices have been in establishing Anderson’s movies.

“It’s not even just a character, the music’s always been another actor,” Schwartzman says. “With Wes’s films, you’re working with the music as an actor in a way I’d never experienced before, and I haven’t really since. Right after I was cast in Rushmore, I went with Wes to his car, and he took out a TDK cassette tape that just said ‘Rushmore Songs. And he played the entire soundtrack for me in order as it later would appear on the actual soundtrack, walking me through every scene over the music and what I’d be doing while it was happening.”

He recalls several scenes from the film being shot live to the music in the background, further adding that throughout his decades of experience working with Anderson for decades, “a scene is being explained to me with pieces of music.” Schwartzman says that as an actor, that sort of intentionality around the music helps inform him on who his character is and how he makes decisions.

“It’s not just you. It’s the clothing, it’s the camera, it’s lights, and part of it’s the song. It helps you move. I’m sure like if you put on headphones and put on something and you walk down the street, don’t you feel like you walk differently?”

It can be hard to describe what an Anderson film sounds like, but you know it when you hear it.

“It’d be like the equivalent of the weather in a scene. Sometimes the notes can be the snow, the rain, the leaves blowing, the sun,” Schwartzman says, humming a brief crescendo as a descriptor. “I love the sonic quality of them. The way they’re recorded. The close-up mic sound of Mark Mothersbaugh’s recordings. The plucking sounds. And they always have interesting combinations of instruments playing off each other. It never gets boring, the compositions are like tiny movies themselves.”