Wes Anderson accused of ‘directing by email’

Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox, an animated adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s novel which opens in UK cinemas today, features the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, and, just like almost every film that Anderson directs, Bill Murray.

Since its world premiere at the London Film Festival last week, Fantastic Mr Fox has been greeted enthusiastically for its deadpan wit and innovative stop-motion cartoon technique. However, it has emerged that the filming was compromised by the fractured relationship between Anderson and his crew. The Los Angeles Times has reported that Tristan Oliver, the director of photography, was particularly critical of his boss. Oliver's main complaint was while the rest of the team were working at their east London studio, Anderson was trying to direct the project by email from Paris.

"It's not in the least bit normal," Oliver said. "I've never worked on a picture where the director has been anywhere other than the studio floor!" And that wasn't the worst. "I think he's a little sociopathic, I think he's a little OCD," Oliver continued. "Contact with people disturbs him. This way, he can spend an entire day locked inside an empty room with a computer. He's a bit like the Wizard of Oz. Behind the curtain."

Tristan Oliver wasn’t the only one. Asked about the atmosphere on Fantastic Mr Fox, Mark Gustafson, the director of animation, responded wearily: "Honestly? Yeah. He has made our lives miserable. I probably shouldn't say that."

In his defence, Anderson, who has previously made Rushmore, The Royal Tenembaums and The Darjeeling Limited, simply said that he "didn't want to be at Three Mills Studios for two years."

Aside from his dubious attendance record, he was also criticised for his ignorance of stop-motion, the expressive animation technique used in the Wallace and Gromit films and Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas.

On this point, Anderson, who was making his first animated film, was again unrepentant. "It's not the most pleasant thing to force somebody to do it the way they don't want to do it," he said. "In Tristan's case, what I was telling him was, 'You can't use the techniques that you've learned to use. I'm going to make your life more difficult by demanding a certain approach.' The simple reality is the movie would not be the way I wanted it if I just did it the way people were accustomed to doing it."

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING: Leo Robson, the Financial Times: "It works – just about. The film’s central gimmick, partly derived from Dahl’s book, is that despite genetic evidence to the contrary, foxes are human too – prone to myopia and insensitivity, dogged by marital and professional troubles. This gives Anderson a quirky new environment in which to tell his well-worn tale of a misfit family finding equilibrium." (Verdict: three stars out of five).

Todd McCarthy, Variety: "The second talking-fox picture of the year, after Lars von Trier's Antichrist, this one features not genital mutilation, but a leading character who gets his tail shot off. It also boasts some of the most gorgeous autumnal color schemes devised by someone other than Mother Nature herself, animal puppets festooned with actual fur, and a sensibility more indie-rarefied than mainstream."

Henry Barnes, the Guardian: "Fantastic Mr Fox is one of very few adaptations of classic British children's literature that moves a story into our era, while remaining faithful to the original author's vision in both look and feel." ·