“When you’ve made a lot of movies, you develop your own systems for how to go about them,” says Wes Anderson. He’s in Paris, where he lives much of the time, far from Hollywood, giving one of the first interviews about his 13th feature film, The Phoenician Scheme.
“Movies are complicated,” he explains. “Sometimes you’re trying to do something difficult very fast, and when you have a group that works together, they find their own way to navigate these missions. I guess the big thing is, when you’re in your twenties, you’re tending to do somebody else’s system that you’ve walked into… and when you’ve done however many of them, then you tend to have your own way.”
No one else makes movies like Wes Anderson. His films, somehow both whimsical and melancholy, naturalistic and painterly, suggest an auteur who spends hours fussing over the placement of each exquisite item in his trademark God’s-Eye-View overheads. The last thing you would expect, given his perfectly composed shots, dollhouse-meticulous set design, elaborate backstories, and idiosyncratic dialogue, veering from hilarious to heartbreaking — is how quickly he works.
“We were shooting fast, as it’s an independent film with a tight schedule. Wes runs a very tight ship. He’s very organized,” says Benicio del Toro, star of The Phoenician Scheme.
The Oscar winner is joined onscreen by Michael Cera, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Bill Murray, who has appeared in almost every one of Anderson’s movies.
Cera remembers looking around the set while shooting a basketball scene, and saying to co-star Mia Threapleton, a newcomer to Wes Anderson films: “This is never gonna happen again.”
Threapleton would visit on her days off to see everyone work.
“I would cycle in on my bike and hang out on set, hiding behind plant pots and under tables so I could just be in the space and watch what was going on. It was just too fun to stay away,” she says.
Though the cast includes many veterans of starry Marvel spectaculars, a Wes Anderson movie is the furthest thing from a big-budget epic: His sets are communal, with everyone generally working in the same location — for The Phoenician Scheme it was in Germany — with few frills.
Del Toro explains that in the morning, actors would change into their costumes in their hotel rooms and come down to the lobby for makeup.
“They’re ready for you when you walk through the door on set. You drop your bags and you’re rehearsing immediately,” he says.
No one does it for the money — Anderson’s actors often work for the minimum amount possible. Ed Norton once told People TV that he earned about $4,200, the SAG minimum, on Anderson’s 2012 Moonrise Kingdom. He lived during filming in a house in Newport, Rhode Island, along with Anderson, Murray, Jason Schwartzman and several in the crew.
“I lost money for sure on every Wes Anderson movie I’ve ever done. It’s a money-losing proposition, there’s no question,” Norton said. “But it’s like being in the best theater company ever.”
The faith of the Wes Anderson Players is such that that they submit to exactitude even some community theater performers would reject.
Many actors detest being told how to say a line — Christopher Walken once told The New York Times he has “always resented punctuation” and takes it out of scripts. For any director to give any actor a line reading — to recite the line as the director wants it spoken — can be seen as an insulting lack of confidence.
“Wes is one of the very few people that I ever say, ‘Just say the line,’” Norton told People TV. “He’s so funny. I’ve never really done anything in one of his films where basically I didn’t just say, ‘Can you say the line?’ He says it and then I just repeat it.”
Starting with the first of his Roald Dahl adaptations, 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson has made animatics — essentially moving storyboards — of each of his films before shooting them. He provides the voices, which offer vocal coaching and creative inspiration.
Del Toro’s character in The Phoenician Scheme is Zsa Zsa Korda, an oil tycoon in the fictional country of Phoenicia who hopes to leave his empire to his estranged daughter, who is now a novitiate nun, Sister Liesl, played by Threapleton. The actress says she watched the animatic “five or six times” before filming.
“Sometimes Wes would say, ‘Can you go back tonight and just watch this beat from the animatic? I just really want to make sure we’re getting this right,’” she tells MovieMaker. “So it was very much a tool as well as a brilliant reference, and I very much used it as both.”
But Anderson manages to be both exacting in his plans and open to ideas about their execution. When he recorded the animatic dialogue for Cera’s Norwegian character, for example, he did it without an accent — leaving that up to the actor. Cera worked out the accent with a dialogue coach and Norwegian friends.
“It gave me something to buck into with the character,” Cera says.
One scene required del Toro’s character to plunge into quicksand.
“Some of those scenes, you’d be covered in mud from the swamp scene, then have to go back to the hotel real quick, wash up, go to hair and makeup, and you go and do another scene. Being covered in mud, that stuff would get in your nose and ears. You couldn’t hear, you couldn’t smell. I’m almost in every scene so I had to stay on point to a certain extent. It was demanding, and I knew it was going to be, so I was ready for it,” he says.
Wes Anderson on Planning The Phoenician Scheme
Anderson is 56 now. But even in his twenties, he never felt like a director following someone else’s system.
Almost all of his films, going back to his debut, 1996’s Bottle Rocket, involve characters making a plan, then adjusting as it goes off course. Anderson wrote Bottle Rocket with his former University of Texas at Austin roommate Owen Wilson, who also starred in the film, when both were unknown. They went on to co-write the second and third of Anderson’s films, 1998’s Rushmore and 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums, and Wilson’s brother, Luke, appeared in all three. Owen Wilson, who starred in all but Rushmore, told MovieMaker in 2023 that if he and Anderson hadn’t been roommates, “I maybe would have gone into advertising or something.”
Anderson’s combination of careful planning and room for collaboration helps explain why the same key players keep coming back.
Roman Coppola has worked with Anderson on writing six films, starting with 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited, also written by one of the film’s stars, frequent Anderson collaborator Jason Schwartzman.
For all the detail in Anderson’s movies, they often start off as very general ideas. Like the first spark of The Phoenician Scheme:
“The movie started with both the character and the actor at once. I just had this idea that I would like to make a movie with Benicio playing an Aristotle Onassis-era Euro business magnate,” says Anderson.
He notes that del Toro is “such a strong presence… If you point a camera at him, you get this force.”
Anderson and Coppola expanded on the idea as they typically do.
“Sometimes I’ll be like, ‘I have a great idea. Okay, this is what happens,’” Coppola laughs. “And then Wes will say, ‘Nah,’ and you’ll be a little disoriented. Then I’ll say, ‘Here’s a pretty stupid idea, it’s really corny, but what if that happens?’ Then Wes goes, ‘That’s it, perfect!’ You never know what’s gonna fill that spot until you just workshop it with him.”
This process eventually led to The Phoenician Scheme’s flashbacks, blackouts, and political machinations, which are intertwined with the family drama.
“My contributions are simply well-poised questions,” Coppola explains. “’Well, what happened before that?’ or ‘When he did this, wouldn’t something of this nature happen again?’”
He notes that he and Anderson “very seldom talk about themes or concepts.”
“I’ve heard it said, and I don’t disagree, that a lot of Wes’ films deal with a significant father figure, like in The Royal Tenenbaums or The Darjeeling Limited. So I get it, and I think those things are present and valid to touch upon or feel. But in the writing process, that’s never discussed.
“It’s not like we say, ‘Oh, we should do this because it’ll say that.’ We’re only thinking, ‘What do they do next?’ It’s funny, because sometimes with Wes I might be like, What are we trying to say here?’ And he goes, ‘We’re not trying to say anything — just what happens.’”
Their lives inevitably inform their work. He notes that both he and Anderson have daughters, adding, “to me there’s something fitting in The Phoenician Scheme about this father wanting to be close to his daughter and maybe he’s failed her in certain ways. He has something to learn from her and she has something to learn from him.”
Like all great filmmakers, they also pull from — or subvert — past cinematic history.
“We didn’t watch Citizen Kane to get inspired, I can say that,” Coppola notes. “But a larger-than-life figure like Charles Foster Kane who has a hunger for influencing others—it’s in the background.”
Other touchstones include Julien Duvivier’s 1931 film David Golder, about a rags-to-riches Jewish immigrant who reinvents himself as a powerful New York business magnate, and Francesco Rosi’s 1972 The Mattei Affair, about an Italian industrialist whose private plane crashes. As anyone who has seen the The Phoenician Scheme trailer knows, the film includes del Toro’s Zsa Zsa surviving a plane crash.
Sometimes family and cinematic influences converge in obvious ways: Coppola, the son of Francis Ford Coppola, grew up on his father’s movie sets. Schwartzman, who made his film debut as the star of Anderson’s 1998 Rushmore, is Roman Coppola’s cousin and Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew. (His parents are producer Jack Schwartzman and actress Talia Shire, Francis Ford Coppola’s sister.)
But the cinematic and familial connections aren’t always so obvious. Though Anderson always knew he wanted del Toro to play Zsa Zsa and Cera to play Bjorn, a tutor, he cast a wide search for Sister Liesl. She auditioned via self-tape.
“Mia was one of many people auditioning, and she was very good,” says Anderson. “I saw her on a little small square on my computer screen, and I thought, ‘Well, whoever this is, she’s got special talent.’”
Then he noticed a familiar voice.
“Mia was reading opposite Kate Winslet off-screen, who was disgusing her voice with a Cockney accent,” Anderson continues. “Eventually, I put together that Kate is Mia’s mother, but I didn’t know she was from an acting family when I saw her at first.”
Eventually Threapleton learned that her mother has a tangential connection to Anderson’s filmography: The Titanic star helped inspire the name of Cate Blanchett’s character, Jane Winslett-Richardson, in Anderson’s 2004 The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou — “one of my favorite films,” says Threapleton.
Building Phoenicia
The fictional setting of The Phoenician Scheme, Phoenicia, is an amalgamation of Middle Eastern countries and pure imagination. (The people we now call Phoenicians, who lived from roughly 2500 to 64 B.C., may also be an amalgamation, a convenient category created by others to describe a group of people, in separate city-states, who did not necessarily consider themselves countrymen.)
“Phoenicia is parallel to the world we know but not quite,” says Cera, who adds that the land has “its own logic.”
Anderson builds his intricate realities with help not just from a reliable troupe of A-list actors, but from department heads he turns to again and again. He sets up others for success.
Anderson has been personally nominated for eight Oscars and won once — for Best Live Action Short Film for his 2023 Roald Dahl adaptation The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, one of four short films based on Dahl works combined into Netflix’s feature-length The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More.
But Anderson’s collaborators did especially well at the 2015 Oscars, where the winners included The Grand Budapest Hotel’s Milena Canonero, for Best Achievement in Costume Design, Frances Hannon and Mark Coulier for Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling, Alexandre Desplat for Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score, and Adam Stockhausen and Anna Pinnock, for Best Achievement in Production Design.
Almost all are back for The Phoenician Scheme. One new face is cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, filling in for Anderson’s longtime cinematographer Robert Yeoman.
“I had just taken Bob away from home so many times over the years so it was really more logistical,” Anderson says. “We decided to use a European-based director of photography for once. We’ve done a lot with Bob just in the last few years. We did The French Dispatch and these Henry Sugar short films all in quick succession. … I’ll do more things with Bob still. He’s not retiring.”
Anderson’s films benefit not just from his colleagues, but from remarkable objects. His movies are so known for elegance that people lend him their own beautiful pieces.
“There’s a Magritte painting over the fireplace in one scene, and it’s a real Magritte,” says Cera. “There were museum handlers on set.”
Adds Threapleton: “There’s also a real Renoir in my character’s bedroom.”
The authenticity extended to her props.
“I had two pipes,” she recalls. “I had a little clay one and then another one which was made by Dunhill, and that had semi-precious stones in it and also precious stones. It was beautiful. It was quite fun to be puffing on.”
She also had two rosaries.
“The rosary, the original one, is just beautiful, with lovely red beads — very simple but elegant. The other one, the secular one, was lovingly made by Cartier, so it’s definitely not made of fake things.
“I was very terrified to hold it initially, but Wes was like, ‘No, this is now an extension of you. If you want to hold it whenever you want to hold it, it’s yours. Just hang on to it.’”
And a knife.
“The beautiful knife,” she says, “is gorgeous, not sharp, just a very beautiful, ornate blade.”
But the team is also notably efficient, saving and recycling set elements within films. Stockhausen has noted that in 2021’s The French Dispatch, for example, a floor in one scene was a wall in another.
Working With Bugs
Of course, some things are beyond anyone’s control, and the best any artist can do is enjoy the process of discovery.
There’s a showbusiness adage to never work with children or animals, but Cera blew past it for The Phoenix Scheme, working extensively with insects. His character, Bjorn, has a thing for collecting them.
“There was one arthropod that I was the most nervous about,” Cera says. “Apparently if a praying mantis gets their little pincers into you, they won’t open their joint up. They’ll just close it and lock on, and you gotta kill it or else it won’t come off. But they never did, fortunately—it was very gentle.”
Anderson would weave bugs into scenes depending on whether they seemed agreeable on a given day.
“Well, you don’t direct bugs. You work around them,” Anderson says. “We knew Bjorn was going to have bugs with him, and sometimes it was a matter of saying, ‘What insect is inclined to participate in this scene?’
“We’d try a couple of things and then see what worked out. A lot of it just relied on Michael Cera and his relationship with these insects. I think he liked working with the bugs.”
The Phoenician Scheme arrives in theaters Friday from Focus Features.
Wes Anderson, photographed by Valerie Sadoun at The Ritz London for MovieMaker.