This week, we thought we’d celebrate 30 years since the 1993 Sundance Film Festival, considered one of the defining moments in modern indie filmmaking.

by Olivia Hunter Willke, Contributor

Martin Scorsese named Bottle Rocket his 7th favorite movie of the 90s, stating: “I love the people in this film, who are genuinely innocent, more than even they know.” Genuine innocence is not usually the first thing one draws from a plot revolving around a planned robbery. The purity displayed by the characters in Bottle Rocket is more childlike than moral. The film begins with Dignan (Owen Wilson) “breaking” his best friend Anthony (Luke Wilson) out of a voluntary mental institution on the day of his release. While Anthony was hospitalized, Dignan has been planning a robbery. With the help of Bob Mapplethorpe (Robert Musgraves) as the getaway driver, they practice and rehearse the ins and outs of theft. After robbing a small bookstore in preparation for the bigger job, they decide to lay low in a motel within the flat, grassy plains of Texas country. There, Anthony meets Inez, a maid working at the motel. He falls in love at first sight, despite the fact that she doesn’t speak a word of English.

There is an aching earnestness in Wes Anderson’s earliest work, due in large part to his writing partnership with Owen Wilson. Twee stylishness masks a deep-seated pain stemming from feeling different, alone, or, more often, one and the same. The quirk never compensating for a lack of depth, quite the opposite. The oddball characterization and eccentric beats are meant to heighten the alienation demonstrated on screen. What the characters feel, we feel, but with the addition of weaving through aesthetic avenues that accentuate the absurdity of our inherent individual nature. Dignan and Anthony both hold a guilessness that borders on virtue. But gullibility is certainly not something that leads to favorable odds when pulling off a heist. The characters fill in the distance from each other with projection, or in more pleasant terms, dreams. Bottle Rocket is ultimately about wanting and acting on that want, for a better life, for love, for peace, regardless of the reality of any given situation. All of the characters are in a constant state of dreaming, perhaps this is what makes them so innocent as opposed to simple ignorance.

When thinking of this film, one of the first things that comes to mind is this photograph:

1992, Wes and Owen jump for joy, emerging from Columbia Pictures after securing funding for the feature Bottle Rocket. Bottle Rocket would go on to score the worst test screening points in the history of Columbia Pictures at the time and ended up playing no more than 49 theaters in the U.S. But here, in this photograph, there is not a single ounce of fear or cynicism. What we see is hope and belief, in oneself and vision, it’s palpable. Here, Wes and Owen almost mimic Dignan and Anthony, young and full of ideas a bit too precious for this world, with nothing ahead of them but possibility. It’s an optimism that would go on to carry them far from the steps of Columbia Pictures and into auterist canon.