Wes Anderson: Jumping right in, how did Metrograph start?

Alexander Olch: It started about seven years ago. I was traveling to theaters around the U.S. with a documentary I directed, The Windmill Movie. The man who released that film theatrically was Jake Perlin, and an idea came into my head that there was a way to fill a theater with Jake as the artistic director. And I suppose that, slowly but surely, Metrograph has become my latest feature film.

It's been a great thing to watch, because what we've seen over the past 20 years is our favorite cinema houses dying off, one by one. Film Forum remains, Walter Reade and the various screens at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art remain, but practically nothing has been added into the mix—except Metrograph. For a lot of us New Yorkers, it's been a totally unexpected, wonderful surprise.

Even the theaters that inspired me growing up in the city are all gone. I fell in love with movies going to the Beekman, to the Plaza, to the Ziegfeld.

Even the Ziegfeld is gone.

Even the Ziegfeld is gone. All those places had a sense of something special in the building. They had glamour. When I was a young boy, it had started to fade, but you could still sense that there was something special, something beyond the films. That's part of what made me fall in love with movies in the first place. That feeling has been slipping away, and it was very important to me to rekindle some of that excitement.

Alexander Olch is best known as a tie designer. (He has a store around the corner from Metrograph.) Few people in the fashion world knew about his top-secret cinema project until it opened.

As you know, we used to have repertory theaters all over the city. It was kind of the center of the moviegoing world. Now we have more old American movies showing on any given night in Paris than in New York. In Paris, you can go to see Ruggles of Red Gap on a Wednesday night at 9 p.m. and the room is full. That almost went away from New York for a while, but you're bringing it back.

And in Paris, the schedules are so insane—I remember it from when I was young. There were six showtimes for six different films in the course of one day. And now, somewhat to our projectionists' chagrin, we are doing that here at Metrograph. When we were designing the marquee, there were questions about how many lines of letters we needed. How many movies could we put up on the boards? And we actually ended up with enough lines that we can have signage for six different movies playing on the same day.

Tell me if you think this is true: I feel like one of the most powerful things about movies in general is that a movie is a kind of time machine. —Wes Anderson

Wow. Have you had six in a day? Have you filled the signs yet?

We have definitely filled the signs. The letters we use on the marquee are handmade tiles that stick onto the wood board with magnets. Then there are special red tiles that say “Sold Out,” and happily we had to make more of those.

That's the dream of the proprietor: placing an order for more red “Sold Out” letters.

When you were young, how important was actually going to the movies?

Metrograph's trained projectionists handle the archive-quality 35mm film.

We had one repertory theater in Houston, where I'm from, called the River Oaks Theatre. And that was one of those where they eventually split the balcony into two small screens. It became an art-house triplex. They had The Rocky Horror Picture Show to keep the place alive. In fact, the two giant multiplexes within a few blocks of the place were built and flourished and then died, but the River Oaks is still there.

Oh, wow!