Wes Anderson got his start as a director with Bottle Rocket, which he wrote with Dallas’ Owen Wilson and filmed in North Texas. Since then, he’s directed The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom and other films and earned three Oscar nominations.

Now he’s the subject of a book by Dallas native Matt Zoller Seitz. You might remember him from his days as a film critic for the Dallas Observer. He’s now the editor of rogerebert.com and the television critic for New York magazine. His book-length interview with the director is titled, simply, The Wes Anderson Collection. So we asked him: What about Anderson warrants a book?

“One of the things that jumped out at me immediately way back when – which is about 1994, when I saw the short-film version of Bottle Rocket – is he had an incredibly assured style that was very sophisticated. It was obviously built from a lot of component parts, but you couldn’t readily identify them. They weren’t obvious immediately,” he told us. “As I said in one of the pieces in this book, ‘Wes Anderson does not make references. He has influences.”

Be sure to subscribe to The Big Screen on iTunes. Stream this week’s episode below or download it.