The first example of a director remaking one of his own short-films on this list, 1996 saw Wes Anderson remake his 1994 Bottle Rocket (actually made in '92 but not premiered until Sundance '94), using his original actors, brothers Luke and Owen Wilson. The short was noticed by a certain James L. Brooks, who set up Anderson and the brothers in a lab at a Columbia lot and encouraged them to turn it into a feature. That they did, and, two years later, Bottle Rocket became Wes Anderson's first proper film. With a director as distinctive and inventive as Anderson - whose use of colour, set-design and screenplay innovation is the best in the business - you might expect Bottle Rocket '94 to be the first example of his style, but it's actually a much more muted affair in terms of tone and colour (it's shot in black and white, probably because of cost issues), ensuring it's something closer to the work of a Jim Jarmusch. The remake, for obvious reasons, is much more of a Wes Anderson film, then, playing to basically the same beats as the original, with Anderson and the Wilsons adding some extra layers to render Bottle Rocket both deeper emotionally and more comedic, too. The film also marks Anderson's first collaboration with his regular cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, a vital part of Anderson's now-inimitable aesthetic.
