In 2006, Wes Anderson, weary and at the end of a long string of films that began with 1996’s Bottle Rocket, and proceeded through Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums and, most recently, the expensive and unevenly reviewed The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, made a commercial. In the ad, which was commissioned by American Express, Anderson himself is caught on set while directing a scene from a film that sharply resembles François Truffaut's Day for Night—“Making movies: How do you do it? What’s it like?” he asks the camera. As Georges Delerue’s soundtrack saws away in the background, Anderson reviews props, meets a young fan, tweaks dialogue, admires an actress, and finally gets hit in the face by another cinematic allusion, a flock of birds. A $15,000 helicopter shot is too expensive, he’s told––a reference to his underfinanced second movie, Rushmore––so he reaches into his pocket, and hands over his wallet. “I got it,” he tells his producers: “Save the receipt.”

Wes Anderson grew up as the second of three brothers in a well-off family, and had the good fortune to attend the prestigious St John’s School, in Houston, a setting that would later inspire Rushmore. At the University of Texas, Anderson wore preppy L.L. Bean clothing, wrote short stories, and studied writing for the screen and stage. In one such class he met Owen Wilson, the aspiring writer and actor who would become the co-writer on his first three films, and who would star in all but one of them. After their first project together, a 1994 short that would eventually become Bottle Rocket, Anderson and Wilson sought both financial backing and work-for-hire in the film industry, but could not, in Anderson’s words, find employ: “We couldn't get the rewrite job on a movie that wasn't even going to get made.” This frustrating pause, however, would end quickly, and both Anderson and Wilson’s rise to success was unimpeded in the aftermath of Rushmore, which finally made Anderson a respected and somewhat bankable auteur and gave Wilson the confidence (and/or marketability) to pursue a lucrative acting career in Hollywood.