Wes Anderson and cast attend Moonrise Kingdom press conference

Moonrise Kingdom opened the Cannes film festival in fine style last night, with the opening night gala preceded by a star-studded press-conference attended by Wes Anderson and his entire cast.

A key theme of the high-spirited conference was just how much fun it is to work on a Wes Anderson production. "It’s clearly a family that has been created over the years," said Tilda Swinton. "I felt like I had been invited to a wedding and one that I was really happy to be invited to."

There was plenty of praise for Anderson's directing style, with newcomer Bruce Willis particularly effusive about the filmmaker. "I found it really refreshing to be directed and to be asked to perform the part in a really specific way," he said. "In a world where on a lot of films you don't rehearse and nobody really talks to you about it, it was so nice to be asked to work in a certain way."

Fellow A-lister Ed Norton also enjoyed the community feel of the shoot. "All of us started by reading about Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre players… there's a romance to that," he said. "As an actor I used to dream about how fun it would be to be a part of a troupe like that. Wes has put one together."

Unsurprisingly however, it was Bill Murray who stole the show, musing about how they could have hired Van Damme if Willis wasn't available, before going on to describe the general feeling of working on an Anderson project.

"These are what you call ‘art films’,” began Murray. “I don’t know if you know what those are, but they’re films where you work very, very long hours for no money. All we get is this trip to Cannes. That’s it. But fortunately we’ve saved from other jobs we’ve worked on, so we can [ afford to ] work with Wes over and over again."

Moonrise Kingdom opens in the UK on 25 May 2012.