What’s it about?
“It’s a romance between a 12-year-old boy and girl set in 1965 on an island off the coast of new England,” says Anderson. “The inspiration was my memory of what it’s like to fall in love when you’re that age (or at least what you think is love at the time), and how overwhelming it is. It just sort of blindsides you. When you read a book when you’re that age you can get so invested in that that the book can become your whole world. That relates to the movie also. The movie is partly about how children at that age have this overpowering need for fantasy.”
What inspired it?
“There’s two movies that I really love that were both kind of huge inspirations for Moonrise Kingdom,” says Anderson. “One is a movie called Black Jack that’s directed by Ken Loach. The other one is another British movie that’s the first thing Alan Parker ever did. He wrote the script. It’s called Melody. They’re both movies that I only found as I worked on this story. I was looking for movies that are about pre-teenage romance. And there’s a Truffaut movie Small Change. That’s really one of the inspirations for this movie, because it’s what made me start thinking about doing this sort of story.
