Day: June 26, 2023

On the page, the speech a military general delivers in the film “Asteroid City” might look a little loopy. On the screen, delivered with verve by the actor Jeffrey Wright, it reaches even greater heights of both oddity and emotion.

“I wanted to write something that, in a way, only Jeffrey could do,” said Wes Anderson, the film’s director and screenwriter, during an interview in New York. He wanted to tell a story of the generations of this character’s family.

“Jeffrey turns it into more like a poem,” he said. “But it’s a poem that is delivered with a sort of ferocity.”

The speech is executed in one take, with the camera dollying side to side as well as forward and backward, to capture all of Wright’s beats. Anderson said it was achieved with a complicated setup using “a crazy set of dolly tracks, sideways dolly tracks with a section of track that glides on the top of the three tracks,” a rig conceived by Anderson’s key grip, Sanjay Sami.

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