Every­thing we know about Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch

Today marks the big 5 – 0 for film­mak­er Wes Ander­son, a peren­ni­al favorite of the staff here at LWLies. Fifty may seem young for such an estab­lished, well-regard­ed direc­tor, but that’s just what hap­pens when you start crank­ing out tri­umphs at age twenty-seven.

To com­mem­o­rate this mile­stone birth­day, we’ve decid­ed to take stock of all that’s known at present about his next fea­ture, announced to be titled The French Dis­patch. It’s scarce­ly been a year since Anderson’s long-ges­tat­ing stop-motion fea­ture Isle of Dogs bound­ed into the­aters, and already news of his return to live-action has begun to circulate.

Anderson’s tenth film will revolve around ​“the out­post of an Amer­i­can news­pa­per in a fic­tion­al 20^th-cen­tu­ry French city,” as the offi­cial syn­op­sis goes. To com­pli­cate mat­ters, Ander­son has described the upcom­ing film both as ​“a love let­ter to jour­nal­ists” but also ​“not a movie about free­dom of the press.”

First with The Grand Budapest Hotel and then Isle of Dogs, Anderson’s been on some­thing of an anti-fas­cism kick late­ly, and it sounds like that’ll con­tin­ue here. (Smart mon­ey says the film will be set around World War Two or the youth unrest of the ​’60s.) In an inter­view with the French-lan­guage pub­li­ca­tion Char­ente Libre, Ander­son con­firmed that the film employs a three-sto­ry­line struc­ture and said that ​“It is more a por­trait of this man, of this jour­nal­ist who fights to write what he wants to write.”

As cast­ing goes, The French Dis­patch will pair him with new­com­ers and old favorites alike. There’s no short­age of holdovers from the Moon­rise King­dom and Grand Budapest era: Bill Mur­ray, Frances McDor­mand, Saoirse Ronan, Til­da Swin­ton, Léa Sey­doux, Willem Dafoe, Math­ieu Amal­ric, Owen Wil­son, Adrien Brody, Bob Bal­a­ban, and Jason Schwartz­man will all appear.

They’re joined by a host of first-timers, includ­ing Tim­o­th­eé Cha­la­met, Elis­a­beth Moss, Hen­ry Win­kler, Beni­cio del Toro, Kate Winslet, Lois Smith, Christoph Waltz, Grif­fin Dunne, and Fish­er Stevens. (When Wes Ander­son calls, all you say is ​“yes.”) A hand­ful of French per­form­ers round out the cast – Lyna Khoudri, Vin­cent Macaigne, Denis Méno­chet, to name only a few – echo­ing the Japan­ese per­son­nel fill­ing out the call sheet on Isle of Dogs.

Curi­ous par­ties may not have to wait too long to learn more, how­ev­er. Ander­son wrapped pre­lim­i­nary shoot­ing in mid-March before return­ing to the city of Angoulême this month for a dance scene with stu­dents, and has esti­mat­ed that he’ll have a cut ready before the year is out. Ander­son took Isle of Dogs to the Berli­nale last year, and the tim­ing would sit­u­ate him per­fect­ly for a return in 2020. Vive la journalisme!