When the director Wes Anderson and the actors Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray and Gwyneth Paltrow took the stage in 2011 for a panel celebrating the 10th anniversary of Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” there was no need for small talk before addressing the elephant in the room.
“So, no Gene Hackman?” began the director Noah Baumbach, the panel’s co-moderator, introducing an apparently genuine nervousness into the discussion.
Hackman, who was found dead on Wednesday afternoon with his wife at their home in Santa Fe, N.M., at the age of 95, loomed over “The Royal Tenenbaums” in every possible sense.
Within the film, of course, he is the paterfamilias — he is Royal Tenenbaum, “the displaced patriarch,” as Hackman put it in an on-set interview — of the remarkable, scattered family at the center of Anderson’s third film, the one that took him from art houses to the mainstream.
That 2011 panel dived into Hackman’s presence, particularly an off-camera gruffness, that distinguished him from the whimsy typical of Anderson’s work. Here was the avatar of 1970s grit and paranoia — who had won an Oscar playing the bad-boy narcotics detective Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection” — dropped into a very different type of cinematic vision, from a very different generation.
The tone throughout the panel, particularly from Anderson, was respectful and appreciative. But it was clear that Hackman stood out on set. At the time of filming “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Hackman was already considering a retirement that just a few years later he announced and stuck to, Anderson said. None of the panelists had been in touch with Hackman during the intervening years, they said. And they all remembered him being terse with Anderson.
“I was a lot scared,” said Huston — herself the daughter of a famously testy film legend, the director John Huston — “but I was more concerned with protecting Wes.” She told a story of the actor telling his director to “pull up your pants and act like a man.”
Appearing Thursday on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” Murray said that on set, Hackman had been “irritable,” but that he sympathized with him. “To him, Wes Anderson was just a punk kid, and Gene’s made some of the greatest American movies.”
In retrospect, the clash between these two sensibilities can be seen onscreen. It may have made sense for Hackman’s character — an estranged father haltingly, and only somewhat successfully, trying to win back his family’s love. But it may also have been driven by a conscious, deliberate mismatch with some of the material.
“I wouldn’t change my approach by the way a director chooses to shoot a film,” Hackman said in that 2001 interview, speaking to the camera seriously while clad in an extremely Wes Anderson ensemble of gray pinstripe suit, pink shirt and red tie. “You have to be faithful or honest to your own sense of performance.”
“The Royal Tenenbaums” may be remembered best as a comedy — dark and moving at times, but fundamentally funny and uplifting. Hackman, who tended to appear in dramas, took the most from the serious bits.
“I prefer heavier kinds of scenes, with tension in them,” he said. “I had a couple scenes with Anjelica — who plays my ex-wife — that were fun for me because they were somewhat difficult.”
At the time of the film’s release, even among a cast studded with famous names like Huston, Murray, Paltrow, Alec Baldwin, Danny Glover, Ben Stiller and Luke and Owen Wilson, Hackman stood out.
The role introduced Hackman to a new generation of moviegoers, ones born years or decades after 1970s classics like “The French Connection” and “Superman” and perhaps too young even to appreciate his string of heralded supporting roles in 1990s classics like “Unforgiven” and “The Firm.” Years later, it was clear who was in everyone’s thoughts. Anderson and the assembled actors credited Hackman not just with his performance as the movie’s central figure, but with bringing the cast together. “He was a catalyst,” Huston said.
“Anytime we are together and talk about the movie,” Anderson said, “we always talk about him. He was a huge force.”
