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

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.