Why Wes Anderson's famous voice cast couldn't say no to Isle Of Dogs

If Wes Anderson wants you to be in his animated movie, you cannot say no to him.

According to the US film-maker, the secret of getting an all-star voice cast is to ask them for just a few hours of their time.

"If it is someone you know, it is difficult for them to say no, they can't hide. The only reason they would say no is because they don't want to be in the movie, and you have to be blunt to do that," the 49-year-old said at our interview at the Peninsula New York hotel, laughing.

"So with this one, we got everybody we wanted. A lot of them were people I have worked with before... (or) have known for a long time."

Anderson is referring to his latest stop motion animated comedy Isle Of Dogs, which boasts a cast that includes Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Yoko Ono and Liev Schreiber. It opens in Singapore tomorrow.

Set in a dystopian Japan in the future, Isle Of Dogs envisions the country in the grip of a canine crisis and mass anti-dog hysteria.

In a floating junkyard known as Trash Island, a pack of exiled dogs led by Chief (Cranston) discover a human pilot named Atari (Koyu Rankin) who crash-landed in his plane.

The 12-year-old ward to corrupt Mayor Kobayashi had set off alone in search of his bodyguard-dog Spots (Schreiber).

With the assistance of his newfriends, he begins a journey that will decide the fate of Japan.

Indeed, the key to the movie was the young Japanese actor.

"Koyu has a crucial role because he is the hero. He was only eight, and his character is 12. But he has a great voice and he did something that was surprising and interesting. Also, it is almost all in Japanese, so I don't understand what he is saying, I just get the emotion," Anderson said with a laugh.

Getting Japanese artist Ono was a different story.

Anderson had always been a fan of her work and wanted to name a character after her.

"But then I thought if I am going to ask for her permission, maybe I should just ask if she should be the character. She said she would consider it.

"So I went to see her and I showed her images and the script and what we were working on and what the character was meant to look like. She was positive and encouraging and told me she would do it. And the great thing was that we could pay homage to her and have her creativity in the movie too."

Anderson directed, wrote and produced Isle Of Dogs, which won him the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, collaborating on the story with his frequent partners Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola.

"We wanted to do something sort of futuristic. We wanted a pack of alpha dogs who were all the leader. And we wanted to live in a land of garbage," said Anderson.

"The Japanese setting came entirely because of Japanese cinema. We love Japan, and we wanted to do somethinginspired by Japanese movies, so we ended up mixing the dog movie and Japan movie together.

MANIPULATION

"We started to make a story about these animals who are exiled because the society around them has been manipulated to turn against them for somebody's specific gain. It is about dogs, but really, it is about something that we see cycles of throughout history and that became the subject of the movie.

"As we were making the movie, it was strange how much what we were doing seemed to be happening on the front page of newspapers. Not just in one place, but all over the world."

This is Anderson's second time making a stop motion film, after 2009's Fantastic Mr Fox.

He said: "It is a unique way to make a character because there are so many other kinds of animation where people bring craftsmanship and artistry, but in this one, they do it with their hands in a mysterious way.

"The dogs have a complicated skeletal kind of structure in the faces, so those are manipulated by the animators frame by frame. They disappear into a dark room and come out with an X number of seconds of something that has now been brought to life. To me, that is the most special thing about stop motion."

In terms of blocking and staging action, Anderson said he does it the same way in both stop motion and live action.

"The difference is that sometimes I feel like in live action, I would struggle to have a set that has this much scale. The thing you can't do in live action is you can't say the mountains should be lower. And sometimes that is what you are doing, you are just adjusting the whole world to the frame, and that is a luxury."

Two specific things inspired him when it came to Japanese influences. The first was the old woodblock prints he studied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

"They became sort of part of a catalogue of inspirations. We did not necessarily even imitate anything, we just had them with us and somehow, they were finding their way in."

The second was Japanese cinema.

"The 50s and 60s (Akira) Kurosawa... that was a big thing for us. It was always conceived as an animated movie, but I would do a thing that I had never done before, which was to try to imagine, if someone asked me, what would this be like if Kurosawa had made it?"