The French Dis­patch sounds like Wes Anderson’s biggest movie yet

As movie obses­sives start scan­ning the cal­en­dar and com­pil­ing men­tal lists of what to look for­ward to in 2020, Wes Ander­son​’s name keeps crop­ping up again and again.

The Amer­i­can writer/​director is still prepar­ing his next fea­ture The French Dis­patch, but a fes­ti­val debut some­time this year is prac­ti­cal­ly guar­an­teed – if not at the upcom­ing Berli­nale (they pre­miered both Isle of Dogs and The Grand Budapest Hotel) then prob­a­bly Cannes.

Until then, inter­est­ed par­ties have a new wind­fall of infor­ma­tion to digest cour­tesy of Vari­ety. The arti­cle in ques­tion focus­es on the city of Angoulême, the French pro­duc­tion and ani­ma­tion hub in which Ander­son chose to sit­u­ate his lat­est fea­ture, but it also teas­es a film of unprece­dent­ed scale for the ambi­tious, per­fec­tion­ist auteur.

The French Dis­patch, a star-stud­ded peri­od piece about an Amer­i­can newspaper’s Euro­pean out­post work­ing through the post­war years, brought Angoulême the largest sin­gle oper­a­tion it had ever host­ed. The Vari­ety piece men­tions Raiders of the Lost Ark hav­ing paid a brief four-day vis­it to the provin­cial com­mu­ni­ty, con­trast­ing that with Anderson’s near-six-month shoot, the longest of his live-action career.

The over­all impres­sion of big­ness is rein­forced by the bud­get, esti­mat­ed at $25 mil­lion by Vari­ety, mak­ing it a tie with that of The Grand Budapest Hotel for the largest of Anderson’s career. That grandeur won’t extend to the run­time, how­ev­er; the IMDb page cir­cu­lat­ed this morn­ing, claim­ing that the film will stretch over four hours in two parts, has been con­firmed as fake by Fox Search­light. Don’t believe every­thing you read online, kids.

But the fact remains that Anderson’s movies keep grow­ing in size and audac­i­ty, from the rol­lick­ing trans-Euro­pean adven­ture of The Grand Budapest Hotel to the her­culean mul­ti-year effort required to bring Isle of Dogs to life. How he’ll out­do him­self once again is anyone’s guess, but you don’t shell out for six months in a pic­turesque French ham­let unless you’ve got big things planned.