O, 'TENENBAUMS' WES ANDERSON GATHERS A STAR-STUDDED CAST TO CREATE AN UNUSUAL CINEMATIC FAMILY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

There's a reason why the one-of-a-kind movies made by Wes Anderson are all, at some wayward level, about trying to belong: Anderson has a kind of mania for family, surrogate or otherwise, that's reflected both in the stories he tells and, with increasing expansiveness, in how they are brought to the screen.

``There have always been certain families that I've wanted to get myself adopted into,'' admits Anderson, who with only three feature films to his credit has certainly been adopted by cineastes into the pantheon of contemporary filmmakers as one of its most unique and intelligent comic voices, ``although I've always felt a strong bond to my own family as well.''

First there was ``Bottle Rocket,'' the short film Anderson co-wrote (like all of his movies) with University of Texas classmate Owen Wilson, about the efforts of a group of suburban slackers to join the fraternity of criminal masterminds. That impressed the respected Hollywood director and producer James L. Brooks (``As Good as It Gets'') so much he backed an expanded version of it, which critics loved, test audiences hated and Columbia Pictures had no idea how to market. Then came ``Rushmore,'' about a slightly underprivileged kid who loved his prep school in the worst way ... and couldn't cope with getting expelled for it.

Now, somewhat inevitably, Anderson is taking on the fundamental unit of belonging in his third and most ambitious project to date, ``The Royal Tenenbaums'' (opening Friday). It's a comedy about a clan of early-peaking, New York geniuses and their ne'er-do-well father's belated, self-serving attempts to re-enter their lives after decades of confidence-shattering insensitivity.

The new movie features previous members of Anderson's moviemaking family, including key crew personnel and his brother, Eric, who draws detailed sketches of Wes' visual concepts.

A familiar cast

Among the returning players are Wilson and his younger brother, Luke, who have gone on to admirable acting careers of their own following their ``Bottle Rocket'' debut; Bill Murray, who gave one of the most soulfully memorable performances of his career in ``Rushmore''; and even Kumar Pallana, the former proprietor of an Indian restaurant in Anderson's hometown Houston neighborhood, who has now appeared in all three of the director's films. Other off- and on-screen connections include Owen Wilson's close buddy and frequent co-star Ben Stiller, and Gwyneth Paltrow, who has dated Luke Wilson. Those last three play the screwed-up Tenenbaum children (Owen plays a neighbor who has always wanted to be one of them); their mother is played by Anjelica Huston, her new suitor by Danny Glover; and the royally selfish Royal, patriarch of the whole shebang, is Gene Hackman.

Between all the Oscar winners, comedians and old acquaintances, Anderson juggled one of the most eclectic casts in recent movie history. It could have been a disaster of clashing styles, tones and personalities.

Good thing he's got those strong family values.

``Part of what he does is provide a really good atmosphere to get to know your family fast,'' says Huston, whose father John and grandfather Walter were Hollywood Royals in both senses of the term. ``We were all together a lot. In a lot of big movies, everyone gets very removed and they're off in their trailers. This had an intimate feeling to it.''

A place for everyone ...

Another thing that might remind some people of home: a benign but highly controlling parent figure. You only need to watch ``Tenenbaums'' for a few minutes to realize that everything about every shot - down to where each actor is carefully placed in the frame and the often uniformlike costumes they wear from scene to scene - has been directorially overdetermined to a compulsive degree.

This took a little getting used to for some of the newcomers to Wesworld ... even for a guy who, in his long and prolific career, could be expected to have seen everything.

``A lot of times, actors are not aware of the visual, where the director's head is in terms of how he's setting a shot up,'' says Hackman, who has made close to 80 movies since the mid-1960s. ``Not in this film. A lot of the shots were very static, and as an actor who likes to get up and be physical and instill a lot of behavior in my characters, that was somewhat off-putting at first. But then I recognized what Wes was trying to do. It's an interesting process because it takes a lot more focus. You can't dissipate your energy. It's a way of making films that, for a certain kind of film, works quite well.''

And one which, other actors feel, paradoxically affords an unusual kind of creative freedom.

``Wes writes such specific characters, in terms of the descriptions of how they dress, what they look like ... and you have to kind of go backward from there,'' notes Stiller, himself a sometimes writer/director (the recent ``Zoolander,'' in which he co-starred with Owen Wilson). ``The reality of the film is, basically, its own reality, and from what he gives you you've kind of got to fill it in for yourself.

``There really, actually, is less room than in most movies for improvisation, though I think that's because everybody respects Wes' writing and his scenes, which are so specific in terms of their set-up and the blocking and the way he sees the world,'' Stiller adds. ``Every once in awhile you come up with an idea and he's very open to them, but it's kind of hard. In another way, though, it's very freeing, because there's less having to say, 'How do you make this scene work?' Sometimes you have to do that when you get on the floor to shoot a scene. But he has such a clear idea of what he wants to do, so you just kind of do it.''

A personal compulsion

Anderson, who is kind of like an intellectual version of that uncle who always sees the humor in everything, is no less mindful of the absurdity quotient that comes with such a micromanaging shooting style.

``I'm now at a thing where I have obsessive weirdness about what needs to be in the frame,'' the director admits. ``I'm like, 'This person has got to be exactly there; can you please measure and make sure they're the exact distance?' I'm worried that I'm almost overcontrolling things now, and I'm kind of inclined to think that, maybe, the next movie needs to be freer.

``Then again, maybe this movie calls for it more than others do,'' says Anderson, overprotective of his baby to the end.

If the actual filming of a Wes Anderson movie is an exercise in painstaking precision, the conceptual process sounds like the exact opposite: an extended free-form bull session, the way writing partner Owen Wilson describes it.

``It's kind of just hanging around and trying to think up stuff that makes the other one laugh,'' says Wilson, who is currently starring (with, coincidentally, Hackman) in the hit war drama ``Behind Enemy Lines.'' ``With this, Wes wanted to do a movie about a family of geniuses set in New York, and things kind of spun out from there. What's probably the problem is that we don't begin with a real plotlike story; it's like a funny idea or a funny character, and then we work it out from there.''

Funny Wilson describes that as a problem, since it's one of the main reasons why their films impress discerning actors, critics and even producers. Indeed, despite his being one of the least categorizable, independently personal filmmakers around, all of Anderson's films have been released by major Hollywood studios, a virtually unheard-of phenomenon for such a distinctive director.

Even more so since, though ``Rushmore'' did better at the box office than ``Bottle Rocket,'' Anderson has yet to make any distributor the kind of money big studios associate with a hit.

`Where do I fit?'

``The thing I don't know is, where do I fit in the modern film industry,'' Anderson admits. ``How big can 'Tenenbaums' be? Who knows and it's a long shot, right? That's what I say.

``But my feeling is, if I can continue to make movies with this kind of access to the tools of it, get a studio behind it to the extent that (Disney's Touchstone division) is, and actors who I really like and want in it, I'm going to be fine. This didn't have a huge budget by any means; just $25 million, half of what most movies cost, and I feel great about it. You do have to make 'em some money to keep going like this, though, so I don't know.

``But as far as how I fit into things, I don't even have a thought about it,'' says the cinematic poet of oddball efforts to fit in. ``All I think about is the movies we've done and the movies we want to do, continuing to try to tell those stories. I don't know if you should try to evolve as a filmmaker, I don't know if there should be an effort to do that. I just know that I want it to be my thing, because that's what makes me feel like it all sticks together in the best way and is the truest to itself.''

CAPTION(S):

9 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Dad (Gene Hackman)

(2 -- cover color) Mom and friend (Danny Glover and Angelica Houston)

(3 -- cover -- color) Neighbor (Owen Wilson)

(4 -- cover -- color) Son (Ben Stiler)

(5 -- cover -- color) Daughter and son-in-law (Gwyneth Paltrow and Bill Murray)

(6 -- cover -- color) Son (Luke Wilson)

(7 -- cover -- color) Filmmaker

(8) A Tenenbaum family portrait: Luke Wilson, left, Gwyneth Paltrow, Gene Hackman, Ben Stiller (with Grant Rosenmeyer and Jonah Meyerson as his sons), Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover and Kumar Pallana, a favorite of director Wes Anderson.

(9) Director Wes Anderson, left, discusses a scene with Gene Hackman on the set of ``The Royal Tenenbaums''