The wunderkind director talks to Ben Kenigsberg about his stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s much-loved children’s book.

The foray into animation shouldn’t seem like a stretch for Wes Anderson: his movies have always teemed with a love of colour, detail and precision that lends itself perfectly to animated films. But the finickiness that defines Anderson’s sensibility may have also led him into a conflict with his crew. Quoting members of the animation team, a Los Angeles Times article accused Anderson of directing his first non-live-action film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, by e-mail.

“The question was that I was going to not be there, and also that I was going to direct it as a non-animator – as a live-action movie director – and be this controlling about it,” Anderson says. “It’s insane for a cameraman who’s working on a film for a director to talk to a reporter that way in the middle of a job.” In fact, Anderson says, he and director of photography Tristan Oliver settled their differences later on during filming, a year after the quote had been offered, and Oliver apparently came to regret saying unprofessional things about his boss.

But it makes a certain amount of sense, right? Shouldn’t the director be on set watching figurines being photographed, however tedious that might seem? “That’s not inspiring to me, to sit there and watch that,” Anderson explains. “It’s not possible for me to sit there and watch that.” Instead, he designed an elaborate system that allowed him to supervise 30 camera setups from his computer. His editorial department and storyboard artists followed him wherever he went. “The film is exactly the way I wanted it,” Anderson says, with a tone wavering between pride and petulance, “and the way we made the film the way I wanted it was because we figured out a system that suited me.”

In any case, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a wry and funny adaptation of the beloved Roald Dahl book, done in a style that dovetails well with Anderson’s retro inclinations: it’s packed with distinctive celebrity voices (George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Anderson regular Bill Murray), asides that seem intricate for their own sake (such as the animals’ uproariously complicated version of cricket) and a genuine affection for eccentricity (one of Anderson’s chief clashes with Oliver was over the potentially distracting use of fur in stop-motion). Anderson drew inspiration from Ray Harryhausen, Rankin Bass holiday specials and the movies of the Brothers Quay, sources in which the process of animation is actually visible on screen.

A decade after Rushmore, Anderson’s own influence is as strong as ever, surfacing in everything from Napoleon Dynamite to The Brothers Bloom. He’s also become the poster boy for a certain brand of humour: words like “twee” and “quirky” abound in reviews of his work, which you might think would get on his nerves. But Anderson shrugs off that mantle. “What someone might describe as quirky details to me – my point of view is, these are just my ideas,” he says. “That’s what I choose to do because I think it makes it better or because it’s something that I can do that’s different.” The same goes for his imitators. “My influences are so important to me that if somebody were to cite me as one of theirs, I would be honoured by that,” he says. “But I don’t know if I’m that conscious of who that would be.”

After the mixed reception accorded to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited, The New Yorker recently identified what it saw as a backlash against Anderson’s movies. But the director isn’t interested in engaging with detractors. “There’s no upside to me having that conversation,” he says. “I focus on my work because it’s my life. Beyond that, it’s not something I really want to discuss.”

Fantastic Mr. Fox opens March 25.