Late last summer, on the secluded tip of Conanicut Island, in Rhode Island, an Episcopal reverend and his wife, a nurse, were watching Wes Anderson shoot his new movie, Moonrise Kingdom.
The Rev. and the Nurse, who live just a few houses away, were drinking frozen daiquiris and had been corralled, along with the rest of the neighborhood folks, a little way up the road, so they didn’t disrupt the filming.
“You know, we talked to Wes for a while yesterday,” the Rev. said, hushing his tone, because someone already had called for quiet on the set. “And he’s very nice. Very, very nice.”
“Yes, a very, very nice young man,” the Nurse agreed.
It was late on a weekday, and Anderson — wearing a powder-blue shirt, corduroy pants and Wallabee boots — could be seen working just off the dirt road, in the sideyard of a red waterfront house. The house has ornate white scalloped bargeboard and had been a lighthouse decades ago. Anderson sat in front of a small stone-circled bonfire. On the other side of the fire, a young girl, one of film’s stars, was saying her lines. Moonrise Kingdom, set in 1960s New England, reportedly is about two kids who run away from home.
Nearer to the local crowd, Bill Murray, who is in the movie, had been swinging a golf club in some tall grass. Some of the neighborhood folks — daiquiris-in-hand — were talking about trying to get him back to their houses for a few drinks.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I told Wes,” the Rev. said in a stage whisper. “I said to him, ‘Wes, I watched your movies’” — the Rev.’s nephew had brought over Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited and The Life Aquatic a few weeks earlier — “And then I said, ‘Wes, I noticed that you don’t treat men of the cloth very respectfully.’ I asked him what he had against the clergy.”
The Nurse interrupted the Rev.
“Oh, let’s go talk to Bill!”
Murray had walked up to a nearby wooden fence and a small crowd had gathered on the other side. The Nurse said that the locals never got together like this, adding “Usually, we just keep to ourselves around here.” The actor, who was wearing Nantucket-red shorts, had his hand rested on an older woman’s head, but she didn’t seem to mind.
Near the fence, the Rev. ran a finger down either side of his mustache and continued: “So I asked Wes. I said, ‘Why treat the clergy like that? You threw a priest down the stairs in Tenenbaums?’” The Rev. was laughing.
Someone again called for quiet on the set. “And you had a nun with a gun in Rushmore?”
The Nurse, who had been asking Murray whether he had played any golf nearby, returned to the conversation. “And Wes was nice. Very nice. He just smiled.”
“He said he hadn’t really thought of that,” the Rev. said.
After a few minutes, someone called for quiet again. The actress Frances McDormand was in front of the old lighthouse, about to practice her lines, so the locals were shuffled down the dirt road, where they had set up a table with more daiquiris. The filming wasn’t quite done for the day, but the Rev. and the Nurse excused themselves, saying it was time to eat. Daiquiris in hand, they wandered back up the road.
And a little later, the actor Bruce Willis showed up, wearing a blond wig and a policeman’s uniform with pants that were a few inches too short. He shook hands with a few locals.
A retired husband and wife — the owners of the old lighthouse — were then plucked out of the crowd to shoot a scene with Willis.
The director asked if the husband’s shirt looked like it could have been from the 1960s.
“I’ve had this shirt since the sixties,” the local said. The local’s wife, however, had to wear a prop cardigan.
