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Shortly before the premiere of his new film, The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson reflects on his journey to becoming one of the world’s most distinctive filmmakers. By Andy Hazel.
Wes Anderson reckons with redemption in The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson sits in a high-backed swivel chair that, over the course of our interview, gets a real workout. A pinstriped blue-and-white seersucker suit and a tightly buttoned lime-green shirt hug his willowy frame. Collar-length hair, swept back, accentuates his sharp features. He looks as if he’s just stepped off the set of one of his films.
“We’re suit twins!” he says delightedly, gesturing to my crinkled linen suit before extending his hand for a brief but firm shake. “Seersucker and linen, the perfect summer combination.”
That Anderson is premiering his new film, The Phoenician Scheme, here at the Cannes Film Festival is both practical and poetic. It is where the film – a stylised fable about a father–daughter relationship – was born two years earlier, when Anderson met with Benicio del Toro to discuss starring in his next film as “some kind of European business tycoon”. Cannes is also one of the last bastions of a cinema culture that still values undivided attention, and Anderson, a devout cinephile, makes films that reward it: dense with detail, with dialogue so meticulously composed that they invite repeat viewings. It is a level of care unusual in modern cinema. Why is it so rare?
“I think some people might say, ‘that’s not the kind of movie I want to make’,” he replies. “I’ve found a system that lets me be involved in everything early on, so by the time we’re on set, my ideas are sharper. At some point I realised we were missing opportunities by not working together early enough. Now I have a process of visualising and preparing that’s become so evolved, maybe even a little crazy, that a tremendous amount of work can happen before we get to the set.”
A Wes Anderson film usually evokes pastel palettes, nostalgic settings, precisely composed frames and plainly delivered dialogue. It’s a style he returns to again and again, making him one of the few directors whose work is instantly recognisable. Anderson’s characters tend to create or adhere to rules, prefer order and neatness, and speak bluntly and without guile. He agrees that he sees a lot of himself in these traits.
“Well, probably not the blunt statements,” he says thoughtfully, his Oxford brogues planted on the ground as he gently swivels, knees angled like compass points. “But maybe the rule-making. Certainly, when it comes to work and life, I do tend to have my methods. I’m 56 years old and I have a lot of established ways of going about my work, and that’s probably a psychological tic.” He pauses.
“And tics are probably comforts, things you do to make yourself feel better, feel calm or something. For me, that’s also the way to make it fun.”
Born and raised in Houston, Anderson describes his childhood as “insular”. The son of an archaeologist and a writer, his early obsession with books and films, and later a Super 8 camera, fed a passion for storytelling. “I didn’t have any real perspective about where people were coming from,” he told a journalist in 2014. “I didn’t have a radar.”
Anderson studied philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he met actor Owen Wilson. Their friendship sparked a creative partnership that led to Bottle Rocket, a short film that was completed in 1992 and accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. There it caught the eye of producing legend Polly Platt, who urged her friend James L. Brooks, best known as the producer of The Simpsons, to watch it. Brooks met with Anderson and Wilson and agreed to finance a feature-length version.
“James L. Brooks was our mentor and real guru, screenwriting teacher and movie-making teacher for me and Owen in the beginning,” Anderson says. But the most memorable advice came from Platt’s former husband, director Peter Bogdanovich.
“The day before we started filming, Peter quoted Roger Corman when he told me, ‘Take it one shot at a time.’ When he said it to me, I was sort of like, ‘Well, how else are we gonna take it?’ ” Anderson laughs. “But when I started to really make a film, I realised what he meant.
“It was like saying, ‘Don’t try to think of the whole thing at once, because you can’t.’ Just focus on getting your next part of the story and put everything you’ve got into that. And then go to the next one. And then go to the next one. And the days will pass and eventually you’ll have all the ingredients of a whole movie. That’s still great advice. The thing I learned to do is to go one shot at a time, over and over and over again.”
As Anderson’s career took off, it shifted eastwards. From small-town Arizona (Bottle Rocket) to Houston prep schools (Rushmore), the elite dysfunction of New York City (The Royal Tenenbaums) and a metaphorical Mediterranean Sea in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The Darjeeling Limited continued the trajectory, taking Anderson’s cleanly expressed American melancholy and setting it against India’s abundance of spiritualism and humanity. This newfound compassion infused his return to American soil for his lauded coming-of-age story, Moonrise Kingdom. Looking back, Anderson sees a gradual growth towards creative confidence and artistic freedom.
“I’ve made so many movies now, and I used to fret over things, ideas we were trying, experiments we wanted to pull off,” he says. “But I worry less than I used to. The first time I started doing scenes in black-and-white, I asked myself, ‘Can we really do this? Can a colour movie switch to black-and-white?’ Or when I played with aspect ratios, I thought, ‘Will this be distracting?’
“Now, we might cut to a single shot that’s widescreen and in colour, then go right back to black-and-white. In The French Dispatch, the English-speaking actors spoke English, and the French actors spoke French. Sometimes they were subtitled, sometimes they weren’t – even when they were having a conversation in the same language. At the time, I felt this is what works. This actor is better in French, that one in English, and audiences can adapt pretty readily.”
Anderson’s latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, continues his longstanding fascination with men caught between legacy and regret. Like The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore and The Grand Budapest Hotel, it follows a protagonist reckoning with the debris of his own myth-making.
Benicio del Toro plays Zsa-zsa Korda, the richest man in Europe and a perennial target of would-be assassins. After surviving yet another attempt on his life, Korda is granted an audience with God, played, with typically serene mischief, by Bill Murray. Korda resolves to reconnect with his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novitiate nun who wants nothing to do with her father or the empire he offers her.
Their uneasy reunion unfolds across the fictional landscape of Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia, a stylised road trip punctuated by chases and celebrity cameos. Anderson’s eye for detail remains, but his focus has shifted. Where early films cast adults as comic tyrants viewed from the outside, his more recent work draws closer to the emotional texture of ageing. The Phoenician Scheme is his most violent and action-packed film yet, and his most elegiac, tracking one man’s journey towards spiritual redemption and the acceptance of death even as he tries to realise one last grandiose project. Anderson has said that this preoccupation – also explored in his Netflix anthology series of Roald Dahl adaptations, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More – may have begun with the death of his father-in-law, the Lebanese businessman Fouad Malouf.
“He was a very, very smart man, and quite intimidating,” he says. “I had seen how he and my wife related for years. I have a daughter now too. She’s only nine, so it didn’t directly inform the father–daughter relationship in the film, but I think that’s why it’s so central.”
Anderson met his wife, costume designer Juman Malouf, just before making Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009. She voiced a character and later contributed to Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel. During that production, Anderson was introduced to the use of rough animated storyboards called animatics by animation director Mark Gustafson.
Anderson began making his own, quickly sketched cartoons in which he voiced every character. Originally for himself, they are now shared with cast and crew. As Willem Dafoe said after seeing one, “This guy doesn’t even need actors. The film is already made.” It’s a comment that plays into the misconception that Anderson’s films leave no room for spontaneity. He disagrees.
“People ask, ‘Is there any improvisation on the set?’ ” he says. “I mean, everything in the movie is improvised at some point. Writing a script is improvising, really. It’s acting it out, a kind of rehearsal. It’s not a novel, it’s a thing to be played, and so much of it is discovered in that process. How the actors perform is all improvised. The words are basically there, but the gestures, the behaviour – that’s all them. Then we say, ‘What are we liking?’ So, there’s some point of inspiration for everything. I don’t bristle at the idea there’s no improvisation, but I do feel it is all kind of improvised in a way, it just happens early.”
For Jeffrey Wright, who has appeared in Anderson’s past three films, the director’s clear ideas are a gift to an actor. “He gives you very specific notes to play, because he’s already playing them,” Wright says. “The rhythms of the dialogue, the style of performance – it’s not natural, it’s theatrical. You don’t hear it on the street: you hear it on a stage. I think that’s something he adores or is at least nostalgic for.”
I share this comment to Anderson and ask if he ever feels pressure to cast people he considers his friends. “Any time spent with Jeffrey is time well spent,” Anderson says, smiling. “The pressure I feel to write for someone like him is that the part has to be good enough. That makes the movie better. It’s not about obligation. It’s good fortune to have access to a company of people like this, so I want to use it.”
As well as Wright, Anderson’s company includes some of Hollywood’s most successful actors, such as Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Rupert Friend, Willem Dafoe and Bryan Cranston. All were in Asteroid City and all return for The Phoenician Scheme.
“We’ve often thought of him as a conductor,” Cranston says. “He has a troupe of players and he conducts. So much of this, a little less of that, put the focal point here. Because he’s a conductor, each of us can
focus on our performance and trust he will put it all together in a beautiful composition at some point.”
Friend, who plays a hard-nosed financier in The Phoenician Scheme, agrees. “Being in an ensemble, there is a real feeling of being lifted up from all sides. Because Wes does away with hierarchy, there is no star. There are obviously very famous and respected actors in his films, but because there are so many of them it’s not apparent that there is a lead.”
In Anderson’s productions, cast and crew often share accommodation and eat together. While making Bottle Rocket, they stayed in the motel in which they were filming. For The Darjeeling Limited, it was a small palace outside of Jaipur. At Cannes, it is customary for actors to arrive to their premiere one by one, each emerging singly from a luxury car to the wall of cameras. Anderson and his cast use a minibus.
“The Cannes Film Festival is frightening and overwhelming,” Anderson says. “There’s pressure and there’s excitement and there’s a lot of work to be done. So, how can we make it the most fun for us to do that? There’s a lot of raw material there that you can have fun with,” he says of his company. “And we have figured out, over time, a pretty fun way to go about it.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 4, 2025 as "The maestro".
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