10 Secrets That Made Recent Movies Awesome
5. A Real Functioning Town Was Built - Asteroid City
Asteroid City may not be an all-timer Wes Anderson movie, but it's still a gorgeous, brilliantly acted piece of work quite unlike anything else we've seen this year.
The ensemble dramedy takes place in the titular remote American desert town, and the locale effectively becomes one of the movie's prominent characters in its own right.
And the reason this works so well? Production designer Adam Stockhausen literally had a functioning town built on Spanish farmland.
The town you see in the movie isn't merely a superficial facade - it straight-up had its own underground electricity, plumbing, and sewage systems, and the crew also built a surrounding desert area stretching for half a mile.
While that's certainly an uncommon amount of effort, it paid off dividends in the final film, given how genuinely lived-in, even real, Asteroid City feels.
That Anderson managed to pull it off while roping in one of his most stacked casts ever on a mere $25 million budget is nothing if not a major miracle.