Henry Selick.

Henry Selick: I have another connection now to Alan Ladd Jr., because the producer I’m working with, John Carls — I’ve known him for years and I never realized that he’s married to Alan Ladd Jr.’s daughter.

TJ: That’s a crazy bit of Six Degrees.

HS: So basically I want to go to John — we’re developing a project — and see if Laddie can get behind a big DVD push or something to get [Twice Upon a Time] out again. I’d love to re-cut the darn thing.

TJ: I would love to see you re-cut it. Tell me about how you first met Wes Anderson. Did he call you up because of Life Aquatic or because of Fantastic Mr. Fox? And are you even attached to Fantastic Mr. Fox? The information in the trades is a bit ambiguous.

HS: It’s sketchy in the trades, but he first approached me through Michael Siegel, who represents the Dahl literary estate. I know him from having worked on James and the Giant Peach. And Wes approached me and talked about Fantastic Mr. Fox, and then it was more a segue into “By the way, there’s another movie I’m doing first, Life Aquatic.” That was a while back, like two years ago. Then many, many months went by and I finally had my first meeting with him, and we talked about why he wanted stop-motion creatures in Life Aquatic. I myself had a lot of doubts, because he really wasn’t that familiar with stop-motion. He’d seen my films. I don’t know if he’d seen a Ray Harryhausen film. So I approached it cautiously, because I didn’t want to start doing the work and then have Wes realize “Hey, this isn’t real! What’s going on? It’s hurting my movie!” But I give Wes credit, he’s a true visionary.

TJ: How much of Anderson’s work had you seen before he talked to you?

HS: I’d seen Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore, and both films, I think, are brilliant. I hadn’t seen Bottle Rocket at the time. But I knew the moment I saw Rushmore — when I saw that film, I felt a strange connection. I thought he was incredibly talented. For me, at that time, that was the best role I thought Bill Murray had ever had. How Wes handled Jason Schwartzman, and just the handmade quality to things, the artifice, the acts, the curtains and all. I really fell for it. Ultimately that’s why Wes wanted stop-motion. He likes to hand-craft his films. He’s not flying his cameras around all the time. He would always rather build something for real than do it with CG or composite models.

Selick helps create a baroque artifice for The Life Aquatic world.

TJ: That is the beautiful thing about his work, that wonderful baroque artifice. Even the intertitles are scrunched up incredibly close to the edge of the screen. He wants you to notice that proscenium edge.

HS: I wasn’t over there in Italy — I went to visit him before he started shooting the film, it was primarily shot in Italy at sea and on stage at Cinecitta, and he was very, very precise about color, camera placement, everything. And it’s beautiful. It does add up.

TJ: Did Wes and Noah come up with names for the fish, or did he let you go wild and then insert your fish names into the screenplay later?

HS: We never went wild for what creatures were going to be in there. There’s a few creatures that, design-wise, we were pretty much given free reign. But he always had a certain idea of what the fish had to deliver. The crayon pony-fish, that colorful seahorse, was written to be a seahorse with crayon colors. So there’s always a good starting point. The sugar crabs were meant to be pretty realistic crabs that happen to look like candy. So in most cases, the original idea was his.

TJ: I know some fish in the screenplay didn’t make the cut. The rat-tail envelope fish made the trailer but not the film. And the screenplay mentions a bright red octopus in the scene with the submerged plane. Did that get made?

HS: It got made. It got made to fly out of a window. Originally they went inside the plane and there was a sea scorpion, but the whole sequence got trimmed. The movie was running long. Those exist. And the octopus, we made it a paisley-colored octopus.