An Interview with Matt Zoller Seitz at The Lifted Brow

This interview took place between New York and Melbourne, via Skype.
- James Robert Douglas

I. ON VINDICATED BELIEFS
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TLB: Could explain a little bit about the genesis of The Wes Anderson Collection?
MZS: What do you mean, like how the book came about?
TLB: I think it’s your first book, as far as I can tell. Is that right?
MZS: It is actually my second book. I wrote a quickie biography of Brad Pitt almost twenty years ago, and it paid for my move to New York.
TLB: Who published the Brad Pitt biography?
MZS: This publisher in Dallas—who normally published, like, baseball card collectors manuals—decided he was going to get into the celebrity biography business, and called me up one day and said “hey, I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars to write a biography of Brad Pitt, but you have to finish it in the next three months and there won’t be any royalties.” And I said that’s fine. My wife and I were about to move to New York, anyway, and we needed the money. And so I wrote it. It was that simple. I don’t even remember the name of the publisher, but they were local, and the guy operated out of an office in a warehouse district. It was really tiny. It was kind of a fly by night operation.

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