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Lifting the curtain on some of the season's most exciting new releases.
Asteroid City, the new film from Wes Anderson, sets its scene in a small slice of roadside Americana, upon which descends an assemblage of kid geniuses, their parents, and scientists for a scholastic convention. An old-school diner, motel, and auto repair shop feature in the footprint, the structures flanking a highway that extends endlessly out of town in either direction. The glorious reds and oranges of the desert pass easily for Arizona or New Mexico, especially when seen together with the primary color palette of the city’s architecture. But the town, constructed specifically for the production, actually sits on the outskirts of the small Spanish farming town of Chinchón.
There is a long tradition in Hollywood of shooting Spain for the American West–Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, including Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly are prime examples. Below, Asteroid City production designer Adam Stockhausen and producer Jeremy Dawson join us to break down why they, too, filmed in Europe, plus what it was like to build a small American roadside town from the ground up.
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Where is Asteroid City?
Adam Stockhausen: The movie was shot outside of Madrid, Spain. Asteroid City itself is in a farm field about halfway between the little town of Chinchón and the next town over, Colmenar de Oreja.
Jeremy Dawson: In fact, when we’re not there, chickpeas and watermelons are the two main crops that they grow there. It isn’t natively a desert, because, obviously, they’re farming there, but it is very flat which is why we picked it. There’s this nice orange color of the dirt, Adam can tell you more specifically, but it’s a very local dirt. If you go three miles in the other direction, you don’t get that color.
AS: We actually brought all of the dirt in, but it is local. It’s pulverized rock more than it is dirt, from a quarry that’s also right in between these two towns. It’s what you get when you dig into the ground. The actual field we were working with started with topsoil, and we took samples from all these different parts of the quarry to get the color that we wanted—because we’d be spreading it all over the ground, it was important that it be from right nearby. It’s kind of amazing that it turned out to be this Southwestern red color that pops. We knew we’d have to augment the desert.
JD: One thing that was appealing about the area, as opposed to [Anderson’s last film] The French Dispatch, where we needed the verticality of a French town, was that we needed the big sky feeling that you get in the American West. We wanted good weather, for big bright blue skies to contrast the earth. We also had some beautiful shots getting into magic hour and into dusk, as the sky darkens, that would just take your breath away. Every day, we’d just find ourselves saying, “Look at these clouds!”
JD: It’s about the way we want to work. It’s great to be out there in the middle of the desert in America, but if you need to put people up or you need a piece of wood or a new prop you don’t want to be driving 200 miles in either direction. So our goal was to find a flat piece of land with the big skies and the horizons that was also near enough to a place where we could live together and where we could get the resources and things we needed. We love shooting in Europe. Wes likes shooting in Europe, it really works for us. And there's a long history of shooting the American West in Spain.
We work like a theater troupe, in the sense that a lot of the same actors come and they put on a new costume each time and off they go. Wes really likes to create this communal aspect where everybody stays together, they can live together, and eat together. We lived out of the Parador de Chinchón, which was one of these old Spanish historic buildings that the government has taken over and turned into a really nice hotel that has a lot of historic detail. It was an old convent just on the edge of this little town and then we could walk, golf cart, bicycle ride, whatever out into Asteroid City where we’d be from dawn to dusk.
What were you trying to capture about the American West? Did you have any references?
AS: There were literal photographs of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, through all different eras, but also old Burton Frasher postcard collections. Sometimes, what you're looking at is a big gesture–the way the carnival comes to town in Ace in the Hole. And other times, it's a tiny, tiny little thing, like, look at the way the sign that says “Steaks” sits on top of this building with a tin roof.
JD: And also, this movie has a kind of humor to it as well, like, where you know, the actual part that takes place in the West is an imagination of a play that's being theoretically performed. There is something kind of fantastical about it, even cartoon-y sometimes in the color palette and [with references like] the little on ramp to nowhere that have a real sense of humor.
AS: It’s important to note that even in the film, this isn’t a real town. At the beginning, we wondered about using a real town and looked at the sites where they shot all of these Westerns in Spain. We asked, you know, what if our luncheonette and our gas station and all our pieces were in some of those existing sites? And it somehow wasn't as much fun. It didn't quite work the same way as making our own town.
We just released a big package celebrating roadside Americana, and so the motor court motel is on my mind—have you ever stayed in one? Any like the one in this film?
AS: I don't think I have. I mean, I've stayed in a million little strip motels, where it's one row of 20 rooms and they're attached. But never one exactly like this. The conversation about it started with It Happened One Night in terms of the feeling of the place and the feeling of walking in amongst these buildings and going to the communal showers and the sort of trellises attached to the buildings and greenery growing around. And then we looked at hundreds of photographs of the real places that don’t really exist anymore. I'm saying, “Well, look at this window detail. Look at this interior. Look at the way there's no siding on the inside of the building, the timbers are just painted white”
JD: My partner and I just watched Niagara last night. It has a great motor court, with a better view than ours.
AS: Amazing diner, too.
Were you at all able to enjoy Spain during your off-time?
JD: There was very little time off, to tell the truth. We ate a lot jamón and tomatoes and, from time to time, maybe people got to spend a moment in a hammock, but we didn't do a lot of tourism. Chincón is this kind of medieval town—it's a completely different reality that you're walking through. And sometimes, on a nice night, you could sit outside a cafe and have a beer or something. But we were really immersed in Asteroid City, because you’d go down this dusty farm road and it was right there. Maybe I would have felt differently if we had to drive 20 minutes out of town to get to it.
There is a black-and-white portion of the film that is not set in Asteroid City–where did you shoot these parts?
AS: We found every usable location that we could. Actually, we found this garlic warehouse on our little strip. It was really just an empty room where they were storing a couple tons of garlic that were drying and chilling and getting ready for eating. It had the most amazing smell. We built sets inside.
Is Asteroid City still standing?
JD: No, it's not. We returned it to the farmers back there—I think you can probably get some good melons around there now.
