Wes Anderson

Bottle Rocket bombed at the box office in 1996, pulling almost nothing from its Sony limited release. But Martin Scorsese called it one of the ten best films of the decade, and that critical credibility was enough to get Rushmore greenlit. Bill Murray, whose agent had seen the first film and loved it, came aboard for $9,000 (SAG minimum) and gave the kind of performance that restarted his entire second act. At the 1999 Independent Spirit Awards, Anderson won Best Director. He was 29.

The Grand Budapest Hotel did $175 million worldwide and won four Oscars, his highest commercial watermark by far. Since then, the 'Accidentally Wes Anderson' Instagram movement has turned his aesthetic into something anyone can recreate with a phone camera, which is either a compliment or a problem. The Phoenician Scheme landed at Cannes 2025 as a spy thriller with Benicio del Toro. Whether the films keep pace with the brand is the actual open question.

He grew up in Houston, the middle of three boys, making films on his father's Super 8 camera. His parents divorced when he was eight, which he has said was the defining event of his childhood, and the dysfunctional families in his movies are that same wound on a loop. At the University of Texas, he and Owen Wilson sat in a playwriting class for weeks without speaking until Wilson walked up in a hallway one day and started talking as if they already knew each other. His brother Eric's drawings appear in several of his films. He lives in Paris now, which explains the movies and absolutely doesn't.