On Rails.

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK ‘THE FRENCH DISPATCH ’, 2023, By Matt Zoller Seitz, Pg 160

“If I didn't tell you what I did, you'd never know what I did." That could be the motto of a great stage magician—but it's a line from Wes Anderson's key grip Sanjay Sami, an illusionist of a different sort. Anderson and Sami have a unique relationship: Sami's the person who figures out how to pull off camera moves that the director has been warned are impossible. The French Dispatch would prove to be the culmination of their decade-plus partnership, which spans four features and multiple commercials. In addition to all the sinuous camera moves scattered throughout the other segments of The French Dispatch, Anderson had written a spectacular, showstopping, can-you-even-believe-it dolly shot that followed Roebuck Wright through police headquarters as he described the place in voice-over. On paper, it read like a more controlled and hyperkinetic version of the crane shots in The Life Aquatic that followed Steve Zissou and company throughout the bisected Belafonte. Anderson told Sami that he wanted the camera to move laterally, seeming to pass through walls as it followed the narrator through the building; suddenly shifting direction by ninety degrees in order to walk in front of him; resuming lateral motion; and so on. This would have been manageable (after a half day's rehearsal or so) Isere Anderson willing to film the scene with a Steadicam, a motion-stabilized handheld camera employed by many a virtuoso director. But he didn't want to use a Steadicam. He wanted everything done on dolly tracks because, as Sami put it, "there is a level of exactness to Wes's dolly shots that cannot be achieved with a handheld camera, even a Steadicam. The put the camera on tracks to getprtheeciseifofnecWt that demand is so great that you have to of a dolly is what makes it a Wes Anderson shot." wants. The stability, the rigidity of a dolly is what makes it a Wes Anderson shot.”