“You and I both respond to goals”: ‘Bottle Rocket’ at 30

The audience did not like what it saw. “Kind of a shocking number of people walked out,” Luke Wilson recalls of Bottle Rocket’s first test screening in a 2008 making-of documentary included on the film’s Criterion Collection Blu-ray.  A long-in-the-works film whose origins stretched back to 1991, when director/co-writer Wes Anderson and star/co-writer Owen Wilson met as undergrads at the University of Texas at Austin, Bottle Rocket had seemed to be nearing the finish line when the team behind it felt confident enough to show it to a theater full of strangers. Then that line started to shift further and further away. Like the film’s protagonists, the Bottle Rocket team had a plan: finish the movie, then premiere it at Sundance—the “Bottle Rocket” short film had played there and Owen Wilson and Anderson had partly developed the feature at the Sundance Institute—and then watch it find a wider audience powered by festival acclaim. But the plan kept getting disrupted and nothing about the feedback that greeted the film’s first screenings suggested they would soon be back on track. “I still remember those first cards,” Luke Wilson continues. “There was one that just had scrawled on it, ‘This is shit.’”

In the end, it all worked out. Thirty years after Bottle Rocket opened in limited release in February 1996, Anderson has gone on to craft a singular filmography, making what can only be described as “Wes Anderson movies,” and the Wilson brothers continue to have successful acting careers. Yet while revisiting Bottle Rocket on this anniversary, I found myself playing out a what-if scenario. What if Bottle Rocket had been just a charming one-off? The ’90s are littered with fondly remembered independent films from directors who never made a second feature, had to wait years to release a follow-up, shifted into other roles, or simply left the business. What if Bottle Rocket was one of them?