Sometimes I don’t respond in a wholly favorable manner to a film made by and cast with people I somewhat - or even largely - adore. Surely this is not uncommon? After finding two thirds of The French Dispatch to be more remarkable than anything the director had made up to that point, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City left me in a shrug two years later. It was fine, in the way most of his films are fine. Cheery, colorful, quippy, and cast supremely well, even if the characters are frequently given little to do (though as the opening of The Grand Budapest Hotel shows us, sometimes the ones with less than five minutes of screen time impact us the most).

But in Asteroid City there is a backstory that I quite liked, which is infrequently shown, where the creators behind the televised play we are watching go about their processes, voicing concerns with how characters are to be played, and What It All Means. Here, we find Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, and Edward Norton, discussing with a class of actors how to approach “a sleeping scene/a scene of sleep”. Of all the comfortably B&W behind-the-scenes pieces of Asteroid City, I love this one the most…

…because words and gestures and movements within the scene feel so off-the-cuff and natural, occasionally giddy, that it doesn’t at all feel as tightly wound and precise as I know Anderson’s films are.