What inspired you to make this particular Roald Dahl book into a movie?
Wes Anderson: It was the first Dahl book I ever owned as a child. I loved the tunneling and the whole underground aspect. Mr. Fox has to rescue his family even though he got them into trouble in the first place. That appealed to me—as did Roald Dahl’s imagination. A lot of your work centers around family dysfunction. How did you work that into this story? In the book, Mr. Fox has four cubs, but they don’t really have individual personalities or names, so there’s a degree to which we added in the dysfunction. The book is very short, so we used Dahl as an inspiration—not just his book but the whole body of his work. When you were casting, did you immediately think of George Clooney for the lead? More or less, right off the bat. I realized we had set out to make a British film, but very early on, it was clear we’d written American voices. Then we decided to make the animals American and the humans British, because it’s not particularly a violation of reality to have animals without Britis
