When it comes to Wes Anderson, production designer Adam Stockhausen admits he’s a fan first, collaborator second.
“I love the way he tells stories,” says Stockhausen, who first worked with the auteur as an art director on The Darjeeling Limited. Since then, Stockhausen has served as production designer on Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel (for which he won an Oscar), The French Dispatch, this year’s Asteroid City (released in June by Focus Features) and the director’s recent series of short films — The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher and Poison — based on stories by Roald Dahl for Netflix.
“I love how he thinks visually,” Stockhausen adds. “I definitely like the challenge it brings to help make that happen.”
The director’s latest feature — which showcases performances by regular Anderson players Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber and Bryan Cranston, plus Scarlett Johansson and Tom Hanks — is a metatextual comedy set in 1955 that largely takes place in the fictional Western town of Asteroid City, where a collection of child astronomy enthusiasts (and their parents) gather for a stargazing convention. Under the night sky, however, Asteroid City is visited by an extraterrestrial being, and the visitors are locked down by anxious government officials.
Top: Stockhausen designed a handful of buildings in Asteroid City, from the motel where the
Junior Stargazers and their families stay to this roadside luncheonette. Bottom: Stockhausen’s detailed sketch of the luncheonette.
Cafe: Courtesy of Focus Features Sketch: Adam Stockhausen/Courtesy
Grace Edwards (left) as Dinah and Scarlett Johansson as her mother, actress Midge Campbell, having a meal at the lunch counter.
Focus Features / Courtesy Everett Collection
Johansson’s Midge sparks a romance with photographer and recent widower Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) through their facing bathroom windows at Asteroid City’s motel. For Midge, the focus was on the movie star’s toilette, whereas Augie turned his space into a makeshift kitchen, laundry and photo darkroom.
Focus Features / Courtesy Everett Collection
Of course, the twist is that the Technicolor events taking place within Asteroid City are actually scenes from a stage play — presented as a Playhouse 90-style TV special documenting the making of the production — with the film serving as a love letter to creative institutions like the Actors Studio and the films and TV of the era.
Stockhausen says his work started with the town of the film’s title, and he began by sourcing images of the American Southwest from the postwar period. A notable reference point was Monument Valley and its panoramic vistas famously captured by director John Ford in seminal Westerns like Stagecoach and The Searchers. “I had this amazing collection of postcards — like, 100 antique images of cacti and stripes in the middle of roads,” he says of his detailed photo research. “All sorts of little specific things, and then working our way out into the bigger ideas.”
Movies from the period that featured matte backgrounds were also useful to give an expansive vision of a small town in the middle of nowhere. “They would define an environment within the context of a built set,” Stockhausen explains. Because what takes place within Asteroid City is a play within a film, Stockhausen conveyed a sense of surrealism, particularly with faux rock formations and painted backgrounds. The production designer says that the question became “How do we extrapolate [this stage] onto the biggest, grandest scale? Not because of the physical limitations of being on a stage, but because we liked it — how can we make it enormous? There’s a quality to it that makes it feel like it’s a set, but in a way that’s heightened and special.”
For the motel, where the Junior Stargazers and their parents stay while in Asteroid City, Stockhausen avoided specific Western locations, instead designing cabins to look like they “could be from upstate New York or Maine, something transported to the Southwest.” That was a directive from Anderson himself, who wanted to avoid buildings made out of adobe or other natural materials. Sourcing various images of period New England cabins, Stockhausen pulled together the best features. “We picked a crown detail from one roof, the shingling on the side of another building. We used an awning because we liked the look of the stripes on it,” Stockhausen says. “It became a giant idea machine: Look at all these amazing things we can pull from and put together to make something that’s completely fresh and new and original.”
Jason Schwartzman as Augie Steenbeck, a recent widower.
Focus Features / Courtesy Everett Collection
Wes Anderson’s trademark stylistic details play into the film’s humor. Here, vending machines line the exterior of the motel’s office, where goods of all varieties — and for all ages — are made readily available.
Courtesy of Focus Features
From left: Gracie Faris, Ella Faris and Willan Faris as Augie’s free-spirited daughters. The background features add depth to Asteroid City, all of which was built on a soundstage.
Focus Features / Courtesy Everett Collection
This story first appeared in a December standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.