Wes Anderson reflects on being an ‘old father’

Wes Anderson has reflected on being a father to his seven-year-old daughter Freya at the age of 54.

The filmmaker lamented that he is an “old father” to his child, whom he shares with his partner, designer and author Juman Malouf.

In a new interview published on Saturday (10 June), the Asteroid City director said he did not give his own mortality any thought until he became a parent.

“I never used to think about having not much time left for this or that, or noticing how the time had disappeared so fast,” he told The Times. “It didn’t have an emotional effect on me whatsoever.”

However, parenting a young child has made him think about it more often. “But now my daughter will be, well, I will be very old when my daughter is still very young,” he continued.

“I am an old father. And maybe with modern medicine it’s better than it used to be, but you know…”

Anderson, whose family home is in Kent, was reminded that he had once said he hoped to die at the age of 90 on a film set.

He said: “Yes. That’s good. But I do feel a different thing now, which is somehow my family is more part of it now. And the only thing about [dying on] the film set is that they won’t be there.

“But, you know, they don’t need to see me die. They have enough to worry about. They can just take my ashes.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Anderson shared his thoughts about a popular TikTok trend that sees users creating short clips about their everyday lives in a film style similar to his.

He revealed that he does not watch the TikTok videos and erases them “immediately” if someone sends one to him.

Anderson and Malouf have been together for more than two decades, and she has collaborated with him on a number of his projects.

The couple curated an exhibition at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum in 2018, comprising of 537 objects from the museum’s collection. It was titled Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures, and also exhibited at the Prada Foundation in Milan the following year.