When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut “Bottle Rocket,” the rookie director got a shock. Columbia Pictures had sent all the movie’s props off to a store, which had then sold them for next to nothing.

So when he made his next movie, “Rushmore” (1998), Anderson decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into an S.U.V. when the shoot was over, then drove the hoard away to look after it himself.

That decision ended up helping not just Anderson himself. Over the past two-and-a-half years, curators at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled Anderson’s storage facility in Kent, England — which contains thousands of items from his movies — to compile a museum retrospective of the director’s work.

The show opened at the Cinémathèque Française this week, where it runs through July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in the fall.