wes anderson draws on venetian palazzos and painted illusions for the phoenician scheme
After its premiere at the Cannes Festival 2025, in competition for the Palme d'Or, Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme unveils an opulent fever dream of mid-century European power, industry, and family dysfunction. Focus Features opens the film in select US theaters on May 30th, 2025, with a wide release following on June 6th.
Beyond Benicio del Toro's magnetic turn as Anatole 'Zsa-zsa' Korda, a 1950s tycoon who survives his sixth plane crash, the film is a love letter to craftsmanship, practical effects, and the immersive possibilities of set design. Shot almost entirely at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany, Wes Anderson's tenth feature film transforms its soundstage locations into a total cinematic spectacle. 'It was going to be a movie made on a soundstage,' he explains. 'I knew the stages.' This is Anderson's most extensive use of studio environments yet, and his collaboration with production designer Adam Stockhausen delivers a visual world inspired by illusory marble walls and columns, found in Venetian palazzos and Berlin villas.
images courtesy of Focus Features Adam Stockhausen's set design draws from venetian palazzos
Production designer Adam Stockhausen, Anderson's longtime collaborator on Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City, and the short film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, returns to the filmmaker's signature world of symmetry, theatricality, and obsessive detail. For this film, The Phoenician Scheme, the American production designer orchestrated an ever-shifting mosaic of spaces to house Zsa-zsa's sprawling ambitions and inner contradictions. 'There were several key references,' recalls Stockhausen. 'Probably the most important were inspired by Calouste Gulbenkian's Paris house and a palazzo in Venice. There are actually a couple of locations, of course, but mostly just as a basis for builds.' For the grand entrance gallery, the team visited castles and villas around Berlin. 'Many had trompe l'oeil marble walls and columns of remarkable craftsmanship,' adds producer Jeremy Dawson. 'So we decided to replicate that, not as a fake version of the process, but in the same real hand-painted way it had been done originally, back then.' Read More Video: How Does DRAM Work?
The interior of Zsa-zsa's grand residence sets the tone with its marble walls, burnished brass, and priceless art, curating the life of a collector-king. Anderson and art curator Jasper Sharp secured loans from institutions including the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Nahmad and Pietzsch collections. Renoirs and Magrittes sit alongside 14th-century wood carvings, brought in under strict white-glove supervision. 'Several people that I approached hung up the phone laughing,' recalls art curator Jasper Sharp. 'But a combination of curiosity and the sense of adventure won out.' One standout piece, a Renoir once owned by actress Greta Garbo, now sits above Liesl's bed— 'the perfect foil to the madness going on around it.'
Benicio del Toro and Mia Threapleton as Anatole 'Zsa-zsa' Korda and Sister Liesl custom props by cartier, dunhill, and prada
The production's approach extended far beyond wall treatments. The infrastructure model of Korda's land-and-sea scheme was designed by Simon Weisse, who previously built the miniatures of Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. This time, the model had to be strong enough for Benedict Cumberbatch to scale and fragile enough to be blown apart. 'We practiced in the parking lot,' remembers producer Jeremy Dawson. 'Simon and his model-making team spent the entire shoot building the thing and we blew it up on nearly the last day.'
Design details sneak into every frame. Erica Dorn and Lucile Gauvain led the graphics team behind the hieroglyphics in the Egyptian Revival ballroom, while Milena Canonero's costumes carried Anderson's signature stylization from hat to shoelace. 'Working with Wes on the costume design, one has to enter into a special frame of mind,' observes Canonero. 'It's a very sophisticated concept that has to fit together with the art direction and photography and performances like a hyperreal jigsaw puzzle.' Del Toro agrees. 'Wes's writing, a little bit of me, and Milena's wardrobe,' he comments. The practical effects team (Nefzer Special Effects) grounded the visuals in physical texture, using a puppet was used for the dragonfly on the window, cotton balls for clouds, and rear projection skies. 'Adam's production is just crazy,' remarks del Toro. Even Liesl's Cartier-crafted gift, her Dunhill corncob pipe, and her Prada rucksack were custom-made, drawing on Zsa-zsa's obsession with bespoke legacy. ' What would Zsa-zsa get for Liesl? He would have Cartier do it, so we asked, and they did it for us,' says Anderson. Read More Croma furniture collection by Lagranja Design for Systemtronic
Adam Stockhausen delivers a visual world inspired by illusion marble walls haus 5 renamed in tribute to the filmmaker's visual legacy
Studio Babelsberg, already legendary for hosting Fritz Lang's Metropolis, fully embraced the production. After The Phoenician Scheme's filming, the Haus 5 building, which hosts costume and production design offices, was officially renamed The Wes Anderson Building. 'Walking around the spaces for the first time, I don't think I will ever, ever forget that feeling,' admits Mia Threapleton. ' I don't know how [Adam] did what he did. I don't know how his brain does what it does.'
Through physical design, The Phoenician Scheme is a maximalist opera of control and collapse, where every detail reveals something about Zsa-zsa's inner workings. As Anderson puts it: 'Our film is about a man who is like a mountain.'
the interior of Zsa-zsa's grand residence sets the tone
Michael Cera as Bjørn Lund
Milena Canonero's costumes carried Anderson's signature stylization from
The Phoenician Scheme is a maximalist opera of control and collapse
Wes Anderson unveils an opulent fever dream of mid-century European power, industry, and family dysfunction
project info:
name: The Phoenician Scheme | @thephoenicianscheme
director: Wes Anderson
producer: Jeremy Dawson
production designer: Adam Stockhausen
costume designer: Milena Canonero
graphic design: Erica Dorn, Lucile Gauvain
miniature & model effects: Simon Weisse
visual effects: Nefzer Special Effects
studio: Studio Babelsberg, Potsdam, Germany
release: select theaters from May 30, 2025, wide release June 6, 2025
distributor: Focus Features | @focusfeatures
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17-year cicadas – here for a good time, not a long time – are out. But which 17-year cicadas?
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How to Root for a Merciless Man, According to Wes Anderson
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The Manhattan hotel at which I'm interviewing Wes Anderson has striking views of Central Park out of its windows. Looming a little more ominously, however, is the Trump International Hotel and Tower, one of the president's many jutting edifices dotted around the globe. I wouldn't have noted it, except that Anderson's new film, The Phoenician Scheme, is about a tycoon with hands in many pots: arms dealing, manufacturing, large-scale infrastructure projects. In conceiving the character—a businessman named Zsa-zsa Korda (played by Benicio del Toro)—the director told me that he was thinking of a more old-fashioned type of European magnate, in the vein of Aristotle Onassis or Gianni Agnelli. But 'I think that everything's filtering in,' he allowed with a chuckle. 'We're all reading the same newspapers.' Anderson has (unfairly) earned a reputation as a maker of fidgety little cinematic dioramas, meticulously designed but hermetically sealed off from reality. But his work is clearly responsive to modern life: His previous feature, the staggering Asteroid City, was a charming dramedy about a space-age desert town encountering aliens that also managed to capture the feeling of people going into lockdown in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Anderson wrote Asteroid City while in quarantine, an experience that appears to have directly informed its sense of anxiety and claustrophobia. ('Your imagination is responding to whatever the stimuli in the world is,' he told me.) The Phoenician Scheme, by comparison, is light and zany, as Korda embarks upon a madcap dash across the globe to save his dwindling fortune. As I noted to him, it also obviously seems to prod at the preening foolishness of today's mega-rich land barons. [Read: Only Wes Anderson could adapt Roald Dahl this way] I worried he'd deflect the comment—Anderson often talks about his screenwriting process as somewhat mysterious, in which he moves among scenarios in ways that surprise even himself. But he noted the strange manner in which more serious subjects were intersecting with his otherwise delightfully wacky tale. Much of the film finds Korda in transit, typically by airplane—even after surviving multiple crashes caused by would-be assassins, which stokes growing anxiety over how many times he can make it out alive. Korda's steadfast preference for flight travel, however, is meant to reflect his social status; airplanes, Anderson said, have become the ultimate symbol of wealth and power: 'Now,' he observed, in reference to the $400 million aircraft recently gifted to Donald Trump, 'we've got a 747 coming in from Qatar.' If reality is 'filtering in' to The Phoenician Scheme, it's transformed through the usual bundle of Andersonian layers. The film is cold-bloodedly whimsical, asking the audience to root for a merciless man who endeavors, ever so incrementally, to understand some deeper human truths. It follows Korda and his estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novitiate nun who insists on the immorality of her father's business interests, which starve and impoverish people worldwide. Korda professes disinterest in Liesl's concerns, but as he flies from country to country dodging assassination attempts and strong-arming fellow businessmen, Anderson allows his protagonist's heart to grow just the teeniest bit: 'My original impression of what I thought we were going to do was a ruthless, brutal, unkillable businessman who is just on his path, totally focused on his own mission and is going to do a lot of damage to not just the people around him, but the world at large, in his own interest,' he told me. Then he wrote the first scene and was surprised to find that it came out more farcical: a comical action set piece in which Korda's secretary is blown in half and Korda has to land a crashing plane by himself. 'I do feel a bit like you start writing a thing, you have your preconceptions,' Anderson said, 'and then it just starts to tell you what it wants to be.' The Phoenician Scheme thus became something funnier and stranger, in which Korda's cruelty is quietly moderated by his daughter and his unspoken fear of death. Every time he brushes close to expiration, Korda is zipped to a surreal, black-and-white netherworld where he's judged by otherworldly beings (including God, played by Bill Murray, wearing white robes and sporting a big beard). As he tries to convince other tycoons (played by other familiar members of the Anderson ensemble, such as Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, and Mathieu Amalric) to help him finance an ambitious infrastructure proposal, Korda begins to tap into a sense of fellowship he'd otherwise been missing. As he does with Korda, Anderson introduces each of these competing captains of industry under absurd circumstances—such as at a high-stakes basketball game and during a dramatic nightclub shootout—that are befitting their characters. 'These tycoon-y character people, they're cartoons,' Anderson said. 'They always have eccentricities and peculiarities because they can do anything they want.' But his inspiration, beyond famous faces like Onassis or the legendary oil middleman Calouste Gulbenkian, was his own father-in-law: Fouad Malouf, a Lebanese engineer to whom the film is dedicated. This bore out in both Korda's professional interests and his attempt to build a relationship with Liesl: At one point near the end of his life, Malouf produced a series of shoeboxes from his closet of effects gathered throughout his career, and explained their contents to his daughter. The Phoenician Scheme repeats that shoebox imagery. With even his most outlandish stories, Anderson said, 'it just becomes more personal without even me intending it to.' The most fascinating challenge of the film, at least to me, was keeping the screwball energy high while otherwise heeding Anderson's specific style. 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As I tried to describe Del Toro's on-screen presence to Anderson, I ended up referencing his 'whatever' (American for je ne sais quoi). Del Toro's early roles (in 1990s cult films such as The Usual Suspects and Excess Baggage) smacked of knockoff Marlon Brando: all movement, mumbling charm, and giddy chaos. But with time, the actor has learned to communicate decades of regret and the darkest emotional headspace with barely a flicker of his face. That's the power of his presence, or, as Anderson agreed, his 'whatever.' This isn't the first time Anderson wrote with an actor in mind. As we spoke, he mentioned the late Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums. Hackman's character, Royal Tenenbaum, is another intense father figure who, like Korda, is both brilliant and terrible. But Anderson scripted him two decades ago, before he became a parent. I asked him if the intervening years had changed his investigations into the sins of fatherhood, and he nodded. 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This girl is on fire 🔥
This girl is on fire 🔥 The "John Wick" universe has some new blood. Ana de Armas makes a strong pitch as Hollywood's top action heroine in "Wick" spinoff "Ballerina" – and she gets strong backup from the hitman himself, Keanu Reeves. The franchise return is the latest major summer movie to check out at the cinemas, though if you're in the mood for something quirkier, there's Wes Anderson's comedy "The Phoenician Scheme" with Benicio del Toro and Mia Threapleton. And if you're looking for something to stream at home, here comes a third season of Netflix's soapy dramedy "Ginny & Georgia." Now on to the good stuff: See a fiery Ana de Armas unleashed in 'John Wick' spinoff 'Ballerina' Ever since her criminally short but movie-stealing scene in the last James Bond outing "No Time to Die," action-movie fans have been waiting for Ana de Armas to be unleashed in a full two-hour film. That time is now, fam: She kicks, punches, shoots and stabs with gusto in "Ballerina," a "John Wick" side adventure that focuses on a dancer/assassin (de Armas) who goes after the cult that murdered her dad. It's a strong effort that conjures the neo-noir feel of the other "Wick" flicks with different kinds of fight scenes and an engaging new lead character. (Peep my ★★★½ review.) I sat down with de Armas at CinemaCon, the convention of theater owners, to chat about working with Reeves again on "Ballerina," yearning for more action in her career and how they crafted her character's fights to her disadvantages. 'She gets tired and she's overwhelmed and they keep coming at her. And the only thing that keeps her going is the motivation that she has," says de Armas, who also pays tribute to "Ballerina" co-star Lance Reddick. Introduce yourself to Mia Threapleton's talents in 'The Phoenician Scheme' Benicio del Toro is a delight as a global arms dealer everyone's trying to kill in the Wes Anderson comedy "The Phoenician Scheme" but so is newcomer Mia Threapleton as the guy's estranged, pipe-smoking nun daughter. Here's a fun fact: She's Kate Winslet's kid. She told my bud Patrick Ryan that she dreamed of being a marine biologist ('I feel far more at home under the water than floating on top of it") but seeing Jodie Foster in "Bugsy Malone" sold her on acting. 'I remember thinking, 'This person is amazing!' I wanted to be her,' Threapleton says. "The Phoenician Scheme" is a solid entry in Anderson's signature oeuvre, and a new movie means an update to our ranking of Anderson's weird and wonderful films. Stream Season 3 of Netflix's soapy 'Ginny & Georgia' Are you like me and need to catch up on Netflix's "Ginny & Georgia"? (My bad, got waylaid by the superb "Department Q"!) My colleague Erin Jensen wrote up a guide to what you need to know about the main characters in Season 3 and what you should remember about Season 2. Arrested matriarch Georgia Miller (Brianne Howey) has apparently killed two husbands and framed her son's abusive dad for embezzlement in order to protect her beloved children, so obviously I need to get on that. If you're looking for more streaming shows, TV critic Kelly Lawler has a roundup of everything premiering this weekend. Even more goodness to check out!
