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Order of Operations: Wes Anderson on The Phoenician Scheme
Mia Threapleton and Benicio Del Toro in The Phoenician Scheme Wes Anderson has retroactively described the over-schedule and over-budget making of his fourth feature, 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as the kind of production that would never be allowed to happen now. That’s partly because of shifting Hollywood windows of financing possibility, but that’s likely also in part because the writer-director wouldn’t let it happen again. On 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson made sure to work in a more sustainable and flexible way. As Jason Schwartzman told Richard Brody in 2009, “Wes not only pitched a rough idea for a movie, he also pitched a rough idea of how he’d like to make the movie, which was ‘I want to do a movie with no trailers; all the actors do their own makeup; we shoot it in the streets, without blocking off streets. I don’t want it to be a big production. I don’t want actors wandering away and sitting in their trailers for 30 minutes. I want everyone to stay on set.’”
Steven Rales’s Indian Paintbrush has served as Anderson’s main financier since The Darjeeling Limited, with Rales stepping in as a producer as well beginning with 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom. But Anderson is also one of his own producers via his production company American Empirical Pictures. So, it makes sense that his latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, can serve as a metaphor for the frustrating and prone-to-collapsing nature of film financing. Phoenician’s schemer is Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), an international magnate and inveterate scoundrel introduced co-piloting his own plane, setting the pace for a globetrotting plot driven by his pursuit of various financiers. Accompanied by estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) and his new insect tutor, the ostensibly Norwegian Bjorn Lund (Michael Cera), Zsa-zsa embarks on a global tour to fill out the gap financing for an ambitious real estate project that will seal his legacy. (The film is an inadvertent companion piece to The Brutalist, another recent film about architecture and financing.) This quest mirrors Anderson’s own vigorous pursuit of foreign tax credits (Germany for Grand Budapest Hotel, France for The French Dispatch, Spain for Asteroid City).
His previous feature, 2023’s Asteroid City, was largely filmed outdoors. For Phoenician, Anderson shot (on celluloid, as in all his work save stop-motion features) at Studio Babelsberg in Germany, where he constructed a typically intricate series of interiors in a mix of aspect ratios, moving from one chapter and character to another before bringing them all together at the end, akin to the cast reuniting to serve as the audience for Max Fischer’s final play in Rushmore.
The Phoenician Scheme is Anderson’s second feature during a productive three-year run, following Asteroid City and four short films adapted from a Roald Dahl short story collection including 2024’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, a career peak that won Anderson an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. Following The Phoenician Scheme’s Cannes premiere, I spoke to Anderson for precisely 20 minutes at a New York City hotel. The film is out now from Focus Features.
Filmmaker: Starting with Fantastic Mr. Fox, each of your films has introduced at least one new format: Fantastic Mr. Fox is 1.85 stop motion, Moonlight Kingdom is 16mm, Grand Budapest Hotel has your first segment in Academy ratio and color, Isle of Dogs is 2.35 stop motion, French Dispatch has your first segment in Academy ratio and black-and-white—you get the idea. To what extent do you think of that new format first and then write for it, and at what point does it enter your script process?
Anderson: Isle of Dogs being widescreen, for instance, was something we were thinking from the beginning because we were thinking of a certain era of Kurosawa that is widescreen, TohoScope. Asteroid City, I did have the thought that we’re going to be in Academy, and then in the script, it says “We suddenly go to color widescreen.” That was a sort of effect. With this one, we had been thinking about doing it in VistaVision. I thought, “I’d like to use the full gate, the full negative of the VistaVision,” which is 1.47—which is not really the way people normally use VistaVision. They don’t use the whole negative; they use VistaVision to make a 2.0 frame. But there’s more top and bottom, so [I decided to] use the whole thing. We didn’t do it for various reasons, but I said, “Let’s just keep the shape we were planning.”
Filmmaker: What was the financial obstacle with VistaVision?
Anderson: Everybody else did it, so I don’t know why we didn’t manage to succeed. One thing is, we changed cameramen at a certain point [after years of collaborating with cinematographer Robert Yeoman, Phoenician is Anderson’s live-action first feature shot by another DP, Bruno Delbonnel], so that was complicated. We were doing some tests; we had a thing going and then [after the change in cinematographers, the thinking] was, “Well, does this [still] make sense?” Another thing is that we revamped our budget. We were getting too expensive and said, “OK, we need to slim this down.” There was probably still a way to do it, but at a certain point, I wanted to just focus on our actors, the storytelling experience with this company of people and not get distracted, because it was becoming [a distraction]. People were getting confused.
Filmmaker: When it comes time to deciding the container and pillarboxing for multiple ratios, what’s your philosophy on that?
Anderson: Well, sometimes the movie has some weird requirements. For Asteroid City, if you saw it in the cinema, when it was widescreen it was the whole frame, and when it was Academy it’s black on the sides. They’re the same height vertically. But for home video, because it’s going to be 16:9, the widescreen is [letterboxed], so the Academy part of the movie was actually taller. It used the full TV screen, so it’s different from how it’s [originally] presented. I thought, “Oh well, I’d rather use the whole [height]” because I knew it wasn’t going to be presented in the right shape anyway.
Filmmaker: You’ve been one of your own producers for a number of years now. What does producing mean to you on a concrete level?
Anderson: In a traditional [production process], the producer is the person who’s going to say, “I have this book I’ve bought. Can I hire you to write and direct it? It’s my job to find the cast and a movie star who’s going to get in a [certain] range of funding.” I have my own [production company], so I’m doing some of those jobs because it’s my project. My main producing partner, Steven Rales, his company [Indian Paintbrush] is going to make the film, and Jeremy Dawson, John Peet, my other producing partners, work with me in other ways, but I’m going to go get the cast myself. I like to schedule the thing. I want to find where we’re going to shoot it and build a schedule myself first, then work with the assistant director and develop it further. A lot of it has to do with stuff I don’t like to do in a normal way, mostly with trying to find a way to make it fun. [Anderson is known for trying to have dinner with his entire cast every night during production.] That’s my biggest job as a producer: how to make it fun. I don’t want an inefficient production because I know it’s not fun when things get sprawling and you’re over budget. It’s stressful. So, I try to figure out, “How do we shoot this movie within reasonable perimeters?” We’re not traveling all over the world, we don’t have to shoot 120 days and we’re not going to let the budget become so high that now we’re feeling like we’re not going to be able to cover the cost, that it’s going to lose money.
Filmmaker: What did scheduling on this film look like?
Anderson: Actor availability. It’s not a movie where everybody’s going to be there the whole time; Benicio, Michael, Mia, they’re going to be there the whole time, but it’s not like we keep going back and forth among [the other] characters. We go and visit this guy or woman and have a little chapter with this person, then they’re gone except for a bit at the end. So, the scheduling was our main group, then the first visitor, the second visitor, the set that goes with [each] person and, along the way, trying to figure out, “How do we get the end of the movie when they’re going to be together? Does this person need to come back once?” That’s the puzzle.
Filmmaker: Do you ever find yourself cheating the presence of two people in putatively the same shot with an invisible whip pan or something like that?
Anderson: I mean, we do any trick we need to. I’ve had things where everybody in this shot is here [in the foreground], except Frances McDormand is back there in the chair. She’s not here, she’s going to be back in five days, but we need to shoot this now because some of these guys are going to leave. We’re going to shoot her [later], and she’s going to get added [in post]. It’s basically simple split-screen, but they’re marking exact measurements on the floor—height, distance, lens, every detail. Sometimes, we’ve got a thing where we just nail [what they call] a bazooka, a kind of tripod, to the floor. “No one touch this! We’re going to come back in five days, we’re going to put the camera [there], it has to be exactly the same place, and we’re going to pick it up with her.” We’ve done a bit of that.
Filmmaker: So, invisible compositing is a go-to for solving that problem if you need to.
Anderson: Yeah, that’s a crazy way to solve a scheduling problem, but we have. We’ve had scenes where actors played scenes with each other, and it’s [actually] the actor playing a scene with me, [later on] the other actor playing a scene [against me] and [then we] put it together later on.
Filmmaker: Over the last few films, you’ve accumulated some experience in integrating digitally captured stop motion within a 35 millimeter frame. How has that learning curve been for you?
Anderson: When you’re doing something in stop motion, you can make choices that you just couldn’t make otherwise. So, for instance, in [The French Dispatch] I’ve got a bunch of guys with machine guns; there’s a wall here, they’re going to shoot it up and the wall is going to go to pieces. Well, the version that you can do in stop-motion is more elaborate, more detailed, more specific. The version you do with effects on the set could be great, too, but that’s different. We did a stop-motion wall getting blown up, and it really worked. The only thing that gives it away would be that you might watch it and say, “There’s no way that they could have done that.” But I don’t think we’ve done it a lot.
Filmmaker: I was thinking of Asteroid City, with the alien and the spaceship.
Anderson: Right, yes, our alien. The casting of the alien was a particular animator who I wanted to do it. I wanted her to be the alien, essentially. So, that was sort of like, “Kim Keukeleire should be playing this role, and that means we need to do it in stop-motion because that’s what she does.”
Filmmaker: In terms of music, coming from Henry Sugar, where there was basically no music, here there’s a lot of music low in the mix. How did those decisions come about?
Anderson: There was some some electronic Italian music that I had in mind from The Mattei Affair. It’s kind of scary, almost like horror movie music, and it was our temp [track] for a while, [along with] all of this Stravinsky. There are places where I thought the music really needs to be quite subtle. We tried it loud, and it wasn’t working—it’s as simple as that. What do you need to do to make the thing work so you don’t interfere with the actors? Those kind of choices aren’t very preconceived. Everybody’s in the mix saying, “Let’’s make it so you can barely hear the dialogue,” [but] it’s all about what feels like it’s working. The center of it was always Stravinsky.
Filmmaker: I saw a credit for an LED screen and virtual production. I have no idea where that was, and I don’t know if you’ve done it before.
Anderson: It was our airplane. [I’ll do] anything to keep a greenscreen off our set. So, for our airplanes, we had a miniature unit for shooting clouds, then we used LED screens out the windows to show our cloud footage. That way, the actors felt like they were on an airplane.
Filmmaker: Were there any kinds of new problems that you had to assimilate in terms of the shadows that they cast? Or is it all just like, the light can be adjusted, and it’s OK when it comes through the windows?
Anderson: I would say it fell in the category of, you know, bit of a nightmare. There were all kinds of issues. They’re really designed to work with digital filmmaking, and we’re not digital. We’re on film, so the color values don’t line up, and there’s a lot of testing and tinkering that has to happen to get it to sit right. But whatever it is, [cinematographer] Bruno [Delbonnel] sorted it out and it looks right. So, it looks like what we wanted, which is maybe slightly surreal—not quite reality, but some good version of reality.
Filmmaker: What is your approach to writing newspaper dummy text? Because you know that people are going to hit pause and read it.
Anderson: The answer to that one is, it’s a kind of a nightmare, too. We have a lot of newspapers in this movie. I just can’t let it go. If somebody’s interested in the movie, I want them to pause, because we’ve actually written the stuff, either me [alone] or working with John Peet. Erica Dorn does graphics for us. The process of getting it all right is extremely time consuming, but fun. But, if we went through and said the number of hours that went into these things, we would say, “That’s absurd.”
Filmmaker: Do you manually typeset it or just do it digitally?
Anderson: It’s digital. At least that’s digital.
