Wes Anderson: ‘You’re hoping for the right accident’

We speak to the mastermind behind The Phoenician Scheme about family, fathers-in-law, and the great, grand plan of all things Wes Anderson.

The Phoenician Scheme marks Wes Anderson’s twelfth feature film, starring Benicio Del Toro as Zsa-zsa Korda, a rich, ruthless businessman who sets out on a complex journey to secure his legacy with his estranged daughter and a bewildered scholar in tow. As well as featuring an entire cosmos of stars, the story hits on themes of family, legacy, beauty and death. With a career retrospective taking place in Paris and London this year, artistic legacy has been weighing on Anderson’s mind.

LWLies: Am I correct in thinking that The Phoenician Scheme is a story you first conceived of a while ago?

Anderson: I think I first mentioned it to Benicio when we were screening The French Dispatch in Cannes. So that’s maybe like three or four years ago, something like that. There wasn’t much to it at that point. I didn’t really know what it was. I just had the vague idea of a movie built around him with a character like this.

Ah, so did you write the character of Zsa-zsa with Benicio in mind?

Yes. You know, I worked with Benicio before when we did The French Dispatch, and I asked him to do that one because I had been wanting to work with him for years before that, and he has something really quite mesmerizing about him. I loved working with him on The French Dispatch, but even more, when we were in the editing room, I just saw the most striking moments, and there were places where I could barely choose what to use. From that I knew I wanted to make a movie with him at the centre and that’s what this grew out of.

It definitely feels like there’s a relationship between Moses Rosenthal and Zsa-zsa Korda in terms of their appreciation of art and criminal aspects.

Yeah. You know, I’m not sure if I would think to cast Benicio as someone who is smaller than life.

No, and rightly so! How did Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera come into the picture?

Michael and I had met many years ago and we talked about working together. I think it was probably about 20 years ago. I’m sure he was a teenager, and it was only when I wrote this part that I thought, ‘Oh, here’s the chance to have Michael.’ and it was quite early in the process. I don’t think we finished writing it before I told him about it. He came over to my apartment in New York and we sat down together and he read… some of it. Mia, on the other hand, we searched for many, many months and saw hundreds and hundreds of actresses, and so she just was the person we kind of discovered from that search.

Is that unusual for you? It feels like oftentimes you’re working with people that you know, so this feels more like Moonrise Kingdom, where you had the big search for your two leads.

Yes, whenever you’re casting very young people – and Mia’s on the border – it’s always a search, and when we did Asteroid City we had a group of teenagers, and we had a big, long search for each of those parts, a lot of people that we were exploring. I didn’t really particularly want to have somebody who I knew or who audiences know. But Mia, the first audition I saw of her, which was just her reading a scene that we had prepared, she just seemed totally authentic and I could just sort of feel her thinking on camera. But it really came together when we figured out what the character would look like and when we got her in costume. We did this in London with Benicio and Frances Hannon, our old hair and makeup designer, who didn’t even work on the movie, she was just with us for a day. Mia really became Leisl and it was only then we said, ‘We know exactly what we’re doing here and we have the right person and she’s perfect.’

She did an amazing job. In her interview for this issue she said that she remembered watching Fantastic Mr. Fox in the cinema when she was nine, and I felt ancient all of a sudden.

Not compared to me!

For you it must be even more surreal. Speaking of costuming, obviously Liesel is a nun and Zsa-zsa has these biblical dream sequences within the film. As a former Catholic school child myself, I’m aware that never really leaves you as a person, but it did stand out to me because your films don’t tend to have strong religious overtones or connotations. Are you able to tell me where that came from?

Well, this character is somebody who has empowered himself and feels empowered to, let’s say, change the landscape for everybody else. He’s one of those people who, historically, we’ve seen put themselves in a position to exert their will on populations and regions and so on. So Zsa-zsa takes it for granted that he should have these powers. He doesn’t question them, but over the course of the movie he is constantly confronted with his own death, and it does begin to change his priorities and sense of his place in life, and he begins to see death somewhat differently. In his mind it takes on a biblical sort of aura, and although Zsa-zsa tells us he’s an atheist, there’s this biblical motif that is a part of this process of him dealing with life and death and penance and atonement. As well as it being part of his character, this is something that we discovered in the writing process because as soon as seconds after the movie starts, he’s dead, at least for the first time.

But there’s another influence which we had in mind all along, which is [Luis] Buñuel, and I mentioned this to Benicio. Buñuel is like the film version of your Catholic upbringing that never leaves you. Buñuel is the most exaggerated form of that. He has this satirical look at the world, but it’s not quite satirical because it’s also surreal. Everything is infused with something to do with religion, and its iconography and its rules, and his bristling in relation to it. Somehow that was a part of our character and our story from the beginning. I even think, while Benicio is the perfect casting, Buñuel himself might have played Zsa-zsa quite well too.

That leads me onto Phoenicia itself, because one of the things I’ve always loved about your films is the creation of these whole worlds that exist beyond ours. Phoenicia is an ancient civilization, but I’m curious about the relationship between your Phoenicia and reality, and how you wanted your own version to feel?

My wife is Lebanese, so over the last 20 years or so, I feel very connected to Lebanon and one of the inspirations for this character is my father-in-law, who was a businessman and very different from Zsa-zsa, but with details that he shares with him. He was a wonderfully intimidating person, and I think our Phoenicia has a bit of Lebanon and probably a bit of Egypt, reaching across into the Middle East. We wanted to draw on the European and Western exploitation of the Middle East by businessmen. It filters its way into our story.

But ultimately our story is a pastiche, our land is a pastiche, and our history is a pastiche, and it is a bit of a fantasy. So not so atypical for me, I find myself naming a new region, which I’ve done over and over again. I will say this one just seemed to announce itself to us right at the beginning.

I did wonder about the connection to your father-in-law, as the film is dedicated to him. I imagine he was a better father than Zsa-zsa.

He certainly was, but you know, he had a thing: he was a generous, wise person, unlike Zsa-zsa really, but he did have this aura of terrifyingness. Just to walk into a restaurant with him was to get everybody’s attention.

He had a gravitas?

Yes. Waiters had a tendency to snap to it when he arrived. You can’t really learn that. You just have to be that.

My perception is that Benicio has a similar presence, is that correct?

My feeling is Benicio can hide it if Benicio wishes to. I think Benicio is a gentle person, but it takes very little effort for him to seem like he isn’t.

Like many of your films, The Phoenician Scheme features a lot of fine art, and I liked that you show all the paintings in the end credits. How do you decide on the art you use in your work?

Well, usually we’re making things for a movie and there may be some inspirations. We had these Russian forger brothers who worked on The Grand Budapest Hotel, and they did wonderful work, and they made a Klimt for us. They’ve also made other pictures for us: some cubist paintings that we had in the Henry Sugar movies we did, and they made me a Kandinsky that I have at home, all these fakes. And they’re wonderful fakes; they age them and they’re great.

In the case of this film, I had the notion that I would like to use the real thing which you never do on a movie because, if you say, ‘We’re going to use a Renoir,’ well, it means that there’s a group of people who come with that painting, and there are rules, and you can’t get a light too close to a Renoir, and the temperature of the room and the dust level in the room has to be maintained, so it becomes an obstacle. And of course people don’t really want to give you their Renoir. But our friend Jasper Sharp, who’s a curator, we went about the process and we found pieces that were not too far away, that we weren’t transporting across the globe, so we borrowed things, and we did have a team of different security and different gloved people looking after them, and it was fine. It takes a bit of effort, it has a bit of cost, but it was a great thing because you could feel it on the set. These pieces never just appeared, they arrived with some fanfare and with a bit of warning. ‘Everybody, here’s the real thing.’

The actors felt it. They were in the presence of these real pieces, and Zsa-zsa is a collector. He likes to own things. He’s a possessor. For instance, he gives his daughter this rosary, and we decided, ’Well, let’s use real diamonds, real emeralds, real rubies.’ We went to Cartier, and they made this piece for us, and they own it, but they loaned it to us. Every time Liesel is holding this in her hand, she’s holding however many thousands of euros of diamonds and rubies. It took Mia some time to feel comfortable, because it would break sometimes and it had to be repaired, but it was interesting and fun to do it that way, and I think they look better.

As someone who is so particular about aspect ratios and film formats in your films, I’m curious to know if there’s any film formats you’d be interested in working with. VistaVision is having a renaissance at the moment…

Well, I wanted to shoot on VistaVision.

Oh, no way!

We didn’t do it in the end because the logistics of it seemed to defeat us. At a certain point, we were just trying to make a certain budget work, but VistaVision was my first choice. What I actually am planning to do and just am doing some tests right now to determine is… so, I shoot on film. This movie is shot on 35 millimetre film, but as you know, 99% of the theatrical screenings in a cinema are a DCP, and the DCP is almost like you’re screening the negative. When you make a print, there’s grain in the print. So you have the grain from the negative and you have the grain from the print, and it’s not as sharp as the DCP. The DCP is as sharp as the original negative. I’ve watched my films as a DCP against the 35 millimetre film print, and the print is… it has the quality of film, and the film print is different. It has the magical thing of being a film print, but it doesn’t have the detail of the DCP. So what I’m going to try to do here is to make 70 millimetre prints from our 35 millimetre negative, which has been made into a 4K DCP, and see what that’s like because I think that that might be a kind of combination which hasn’t quite been done, and which might produce a very good film print.That’s a response to what you just said, which is not really an answer to your question.

No, no, you did answer the question! That’s fascinating to hear – and it’s interesting given how many films shot on digital are transferred to prints nowadays.

Well the idea is you just shoot on 65 the old way, 65 millimetre and you print on 70, but maybe using the digital intermediate at 4K might match something like that… but anyway, I guess we’ll see. I probably will not accomplish the same effect, but it’ll be some other thing in between.

And you always discover something from doing these experiments. Sometimes the things that you end up creating are not what you wanted to create, but they’re great anyway.

Yes. You’re hoping for the right accident.

What a lovely way of putting it! Speaking of fathers and daughters, your daughter has a small part in this film, and I was curious to know if this was her idea or your idea?

I think virtually every filmmaker’s daughter who’s ever been in one of their films, it was the daughter’s idea. [laughs] I was reluctant to put my daughter in a movie. But I’m glad I put her in because I love what she did.

Oh, I loved what she did! She understood completely her role.

She was very thoughtful about it and very focused, and it was a great experience for her, but you know, I don’t particularly think everybody needs to know that that’s who that is, but I guess anybody who’s interested will quickly figure that out. She loved doing it, though. I will say she wants to do it again.

The Phoenician Scheme is rooted in the idea of legacy, whether that’s familial legacy or artistic legacy, and what we leave behind, and what is left to the wider world when we die. Not to sound horribly morbid, but I’m curious, is that something that you end up thinking about a lot?

Let me think… I’ll say this: I have never made a movie where I would feel comfortable saying, ‘oh, that one was a mistake’. I’ve only made the movies I really wanted to make: my own movies. If somebody likes one and hates another, they’re still part of my family, and I just have to live with whatever they all are, how they are. I’ve always tried to treat them as a body of work to some degree, and even now we’re doing a thing with the Criterion Collection, they’re releasing my first 10 movies as a boxset. We’re doing a similar thing with the soundtracks, and we have the books about the films, and so on. So it’s something that I am conscious of and have been conscious of. I want these movies to all sit together as a set.

After the event of my death, I don’t really know if there’s really much point, but I do think about it in relation to my daughter. She’s going to be the one who is responsible for this stuff and I want it to all be in order for her. And I feel like so many people’s work, my own and all my collaborators – and there’s a lot of collaborators and a lot of artisans of so many kinds, all these actors, my co-writers and directors of photography, and production designers and painters and sculptors and puppet makers – all this work is contained in these movies. I feel it’s partly my job to look after them.

This ties into the exhibition that is happening at the Cinémathèque Français at the moment and that will be in London later in the year at the Design Museum, and making sure that this work isn’t lost to time like so much amazing art and so much amazing film history is.

You know, the exhibition wasn’t something I particularly wanted to do because I knew it was gonna take some time. It’s too much trouble! But I’ve been saving all this stuff all these years. I’ve been storing all these props and pictures and all these puppets, and so every now and then someone would want to show them. I kept saying, ‘I need to be older for this,’ but then when the Cinémathèque wanted to do it we decided it was time. The Cinémathèque to me is something that’s important to support, and the fact they wanted to do this, turned out to be a way for us to get everything organised for it to be an ongoing thing, so it’ll go to London, and then it has other destinations after that. I was dreading the process because I just want to work on my movies! But then in the course of it, working with a lot of people who I know well, and then Cinémathèque and the Design Museum, it turned out to be a good experience. I was there yesterday, in fact, because I had an official task to do, and there were all these kids and students in there, looking at our puppets… there was something rewarding about it.