 Wes Anderson and Bill Murray at the “Fantastic Mr. Fox” press conference in London. Photo courtesy of the London Film Festival.Then Murray even managed a loving jab at Roald Dahl’s widow. After the panel was asked whether they shared Dahl’s tendency to get moody and depressive in the weeks leading up to a project’s release (as his widow, Felicity had noted). Murray answered by relating his own experiences with Mrs. Dahl.
“I was just with Felicity Dahl all day and she made me feel that way too,” Murray said. “She brings out the real fear in you… He’s dead now so he’s safe. She can’t do him any damage now. Whatever happened in their household should stay there.”
After another uproar of laughter died down, Murray saved himself.
“She’s quite a person,” he said. “They had quite a life together and she’s very devoted to him very much even now. I’m sure that in that moment it must have been very forceful for to realize there is nothing she can do for him. It’s an anxiety no person can help you with. It’s your own question about your own self worth. But she’s a wonderful, wonderful woman and if I were going to remarry I’d take a chance on her.”
All of the actors joked that it seemed ridiculous that they were even up there considering how little work they actually did on the project.
“In fairness, we worked for a few days out on a farm together and ran around playing in barns,” Clooney said when asked if he would consider doing voice work again. “And Wes worked for a year and half or two years on this project. So in some ways, us even being up here is sort of silly. This is Wes’s job… So I’d imagine this question should really be for him.”
One question that did head Anderson’s way subtly related to last week’s controversy in that The Los Angeles Times reported various animators on “Mr. Fox” felt Anderson was absent for much of the film’s production, “emailing-in” his direction.
“Animating is a very slow, painstaking process,” Anderson said to a reporter who asked how he got along with his animators. “The animators become the actors at that point. At the most, during this movie, we had 30 units going on at once. So we kind of created this system. I was not in London during the whole shoot. I was sometimes in other places. It’s very consuming, so you have to work on it all the time while you’re shooting. And we set up a computer system where I could look through 30 different cameras at once and see what’s on each set and work with all the different people.”
Anderson insisted that he loved making the film. “I feel like stop-motion is part of my arsenal for things to use with movies now,” he said. “I really enjoyed it.”
Whether or not that’s true, it’s merely history now that the folks at the London Film Festival have approved “Mr. Fox” for its Stateside debut next month. The film premieres as the opening film of AFI FEST and then hits theaters across the country on Thanksgiving. The London Film Film Festival, meanwhile, continues through October 29th. indieWIRE will continue to report from the scene.
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