"[For The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou], I'd thought all along that one of the characters should play music on the deck of a ship. I'd never used any Bowie songs before, and he's one of my favourites, so somewhere along the way I started saying, "He could be doing 'Space Oddity' here..." and so on. And eventually I went, y'know what, they're all Bowie songs. Only later did we cast a Brazilian, who sang in Portugese. I've never met Bowie, but a friend of mine heard him on the radio saying he liked this stuff. Must be strange for him."

Wes Anderson, Uncut #94, March 2005

"Why Bowie? Well, Bowie’s one of my favorites, and I’ve never used him in a movie, so I just thought I was going to have a bunch of songs that were going to be sung by one of the characters on the deck of the ship and it seemed like Bowie was the best bet. It was only halfway through the writing that we kind of made his crew more international and made that character Brazilian and named him Pele and then it became Bowie songs in Portuguese. We had the licenses to come of them."

Wes Anderson, Cinema Confidential, 2004

"Yeah, [Bowie's]’s heard [the songs]. He said he loved them. I never spoke to him but a friend of mine heard him on the radio and he said, this was six months ago or something, he was talking about a top secret project he couldn’t say anything about, ‘a film I can’t say what the film is, but a fellow sings some of my songs in Portuguese and it’s very interesting,’ and that the only thing, that’s the only report I’ve ever heard, which might not be true even, but that’s what my friend heard.”

Wes Anderson, Cinema Confidential, 2004