How the Vintage, Postcard Town of Wes Anderson’s ‘Asteroid City’ Was Built (Exclusive)

Adam Stockhausen, Oscar-winning production designer, and frequent Wes Anderson collaborator, knows something about whimsy. During his time working with the prolific director, he's designed a bubblegum pink behemoth of a building for The Grand Budapest Hotel, a '70s small-town newspaper office in The French Dispatch, and a Norman Rockwell-inspired summer camp in Moonrise Kingdom. 

His latest project, the comedy Asteroid City due in theaters June 16, brings viewers into a new kind of pastel-colored Wes Anderson world. And this time, there's a sci-fi twist. 

Stockhausen was tasked with creating two different worlds for the film: a theater where a troupe of actors is putting on a play and the world of the play itself, a desert town called Asteroid City, where the characters convene to attend a Junior Stargazing Convention. Stockhausen's first question, he exclusively told The Messenger, was: "Where in the world do we do this?"

"We talked about everything from Death Valley to the spaghetti westerns to the backlot at Cinecittà outside of Rome," he said. "We were just sort of locking it in and saying, well, it's very rough, but here's an idea of what our town would look like in that valley; here's an idea of what it would look like in the desert in Spain, or we could build the whole thing from scratch." 

They settled on Chinchón, a suburb outside of Madrid, where the production team could create the illusion of being in the middle of nowhere, building a 1950s postcard-like town washed in soft greens, yellows, and blues. "There was something so great about the hot desert sun in Spain," Stockhausen recalled. "We were looking at references, and Wes was gravitating towards the strongest of the colors, the red, red dirt, and the way [the red rocks look] in the warmest sun at the end of the day."

Anderson and Stockhausen chose a white wash paint on the buildings, which helped set off that deep desert red. The interiors were where they could go for it with the colors, using a mishmash of bright pastels for the inside of the town's old-fashioned luncheonette, plastering the walls with orange wallpaper. 

With the location set, Stockhausen went on a research trip to build the look and feel of the town, doing a deep dive into reference photos of roadside cafes and motor court hotels. The sets were peppered with finds from eBay, which proved to have a wealth of Americana decor, from horseshoe cups to china sets.

Weaving the layered stories of a theater company (shot in black and white) and the fictional realm of Asteroid City allowed the production team to play with scale as the actors navigated between the two worlds. "Asteroid City is this huge place," Stockhausen said. "But then when Augie [Jason Schwartzman] walks through a door, he comes out the backside of it, and the thing is tiny on this little stage. And then he starts walking backstage, which you think would be cramped and small, but [the] space expands."

The town of Asteroid City took several months to construct and many more months of planning to make sure the layout fit perfectly with Anderson's strategic camera choices.  

"The way Wes works, a lot of the shots are pre-planned," Stockhausen explained. "So the positions of [sets] aren't random; they're all laid out mathematically so that as you turn here, you'll hit this next thing, and then you slide over from there, you reach the next thing." 

The day the crew shot the opening sequence of the make-believe town, pulling back to reveal the world Stockhausen had designed, felt "deeply satisfying" for the production designer. All the pieces lined up the way just the way they should have. He had grown to really love their little desert oasis. 

"Asteroid City was a special place to actually go and spend time, this charmed month or two that we spent in this place together," Stockhausen said. "It had a strong presence."