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" Wes Anderson&amp;#039;s second film, Rushmore, takes place at a prep school, but it does not star a wide-eyed Robin Williams braying, &amp;quot;Carpe diem!&amp;quot; before a roomful of future Rhodes scholars. No, the twenty-nine-year-old Anderson, whose first film was 1996&amp;#039;s Bottle Rocket, offers up a less saccharine notion of adolescence in Rushmore, which he directed and (with Owen Wilson) cowrote and for which, if there is any justice, he will win an Oscar. In the movie, a conniving student named Max (Jason Schwartzman) falls in love with a teacher (Olivia Williams) and befriends a wealthy older man (Bill Murray) whom he convinces to intercede on his behalf with the teacher but who ends up falling in love with her as well. Max, furious at the betrayal, sets out to destroy his older friend and to capture the teacher&amp;#039;s heart--and in the process proves to be quite a wicked little bastard. Which makes it very funny.  Esquire: Tell me a little about your prep-school experience. Was there really a kid like Max where you went to school--and if so, would you have hung out with him? Anderson: If I had seen this movie in tenth grade, I would have felt like Max was a perfect role model, because he found a way to be a top-notch person in the school and still be able to make terrible grades and get rejected from colleges. And by that age, I was already a lock for getting rejected from colleges.Do you see Rushmore as similar in spirit to Harold and Maude, apart from the fact that they both have Cat Stevens in the soundtrack? I love Hal Ashby&amp;#039;s movies and loved Harold and Maude, and those were definitely movies that we had in our minds, especially in the way that it has that unreal feeling. It feels more like a fable.And then there&amp;#039;s Dead Poets Society. . . . Yeah, Dead Poets Society completely romanticized high school and suicidal kids and everything. Originally, though, we did have Max try to commit suicide. We sort of tried to play it for laughs, which is probably not that great an idea for a suicide scene. So we wrote it out. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a1627/esq0299-feb-mahb-7/>