Wes Anderson is indisputably one of the most original and intriguing directors working at the moment. His films are characterised by a distinct abstract style which achieves an essence of something powerful yet quirky, serious yet charming.

Refreshingly he both writes and directs his films, and has equally taken small roles in them at times, becoming, for example, the voice of Weasel in Fantastic Mr Fox. He was born in Houston, Texas in 1969 and read Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. This is where he met Owen Wilson for the first time, who has subsequently featured in and collaboratively written almost all of Anderson's films. He works with the same actors in the majority of his films, but not in a Burtonesque ‘here's Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter being wacky again’ sort of way. He pulls it off by varying and altering the size of the actors’ roles, meaning that no performance is ever tired or repetitive.

Frequent appearances are made by Owen, Andrew and Luke Wilson, Bill Murray, Angelica Huston and Jason Schwartzman, among others. But he does not rely solely on these; Anderson's most recent film Moonrise Kingdom features Bruce Willis as Captain Sharp, a lonely police officer (an amusing nod to his trademark action hero role), who takes pity on our orphaned protagonist. Other highlights include Ben Stiller as a former child genius and bereaved father of two in The Royal Tenenbaums, and Natalie Portman as the elusive love interest in Hotel Chevalier, Anderson’s short prologue to The Darjeeling Limited.

The joy of Anderson's films comes from his unity of the fantastical and of the everyday. Conversations are unpolished, full of pauses and fillers, capturing the dynamic between characters with a subtlety that extensive dialogue could not. The familiarity of these sometimes awkward, sometimes poignant colloquies, and the imperfect, conflicted natures of the characters, is what allows the audience to identify with them even in moments of obscurity. The fantasy elements of Anderson's films add fun and humour, but do not dominate them.

At each film's heart is exploration of the personal issues we all face. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou depicts the journey of an outlandish oceanographer seeking to destroy the jaguar shark who ate his closest friend, Esteban du Plantier. The film’s focus is not on the abstractly-animated shark  or the other oceanic creatures, but is instead on the issue of Steve's grief and the irrational recklessness it stirs in him. When asked “That’s an endangered species at most. What would be the scientific purpose of killing it?” he simply replies “Revenge”.

By amalgamating the contrasting worlds of reality and the imagined, Anderson plays with our suspension of disbelief; the audience readily accepts the impossible because Anderson creates a tangible world where it becomes practicable. In his words “That's the kind of movie that I like to make, where there is an invented reality and the audience is going to go someplace where hopefully they've never been before.”