When asked by a journalist to name “the next Martin Scorsese”, Scorsese himself picked out Wes Anderson. Given Anderson’s precipitous rise up the ranks, he barely needed such an endorsement. Even though his fourth film, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004), proved something of an expensive flop, his whimsical, melancholy movies have spawned a fiercely loyal cult following, especially among college-educated hipsters.

Few directors’ films deserve the term “character-driven” more than Anderson’s. His films are also casting-, music-, mood- and even production design-driven (he works with more or less the same key production personnel every time), but whatever powers their engines, action and plot are but trace elements in the fuel. “The idea is to make this self-contained world that is the right place for the characters to live in, a place where you can accept their behaviour”, Anderson has said of his approach to scriptwriting, a task he performed in collaboration with college buddy-turned-actor Owen Wilson on his first three pictures, Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. (The Life Aquatic was co-written with Noah Baumbach.)

The behaviour of his characters can be decidedly if deliciously odd. Full of neuroses, quirks and dreams that come to naught but still drive them on, they often inhabit slightly timeless parallel worlds that look almost like the real thing but aren’t quite. See, for instance, his fantasy 1950s-style New York City in Tenenbaums or the patently artificial, set-constructed ship of fools in The Life Aquatic that seems to be floating somewhere between Italy (where the movie was filmed) and the Philippines (where its pirates come from).

The dialogue in Anderson’s films offers meaty, quotable lines that have attracted big players like Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett and Gene Hackman. But part of the charm of the films is that the characters the big names play are as treasured as the walk-on parts incarnated by old friends like Kumar Pallana, a one-time convenience store clerk who’s appeared in all Anderson’s movies. Other trademarks include a lyrical deployment of slow motion, contrapuntal use of vintage pop (especially by 1960s Brit rockers like The Kinks and The Rolling Stones), and dazzling long takes to round off the final scenes.

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