How to Root for a Merciless Man, According to Wes Anderson

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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.
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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. Each set is carefully assembled, with the blocking of each shot perfectly aligned, and Anderson's rat-a-tat dialogue is delivered exactly as written. Still, there's a spontaneity to the storytelling and the world it's moving through. Anderson's locations reference real places, but they always feel exciting and new, never derivative.
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The director's particular approach—one that eschews on-set trailers, keeps all of the cast together (including dining communally and staying at the same hotel), and moves from scene to scene quite quickly—is unusual for larger-scale filmmaking. But Anderson is clearly cheered by the enthusiasm his performers have for the process, and how well the newer members of his family of players have taken to it. Michael Cera (who is fantastic as a fussy Norwegian tutor in Korda's employ) and Riz Ahmed (as Prince Farouk, the heir to the fictional nation of Phoenicia, which is vital to the plot) were Anderson's two big additions this time around, and the filmmaker said that both actors dove in with aplomb. And it shows—they fit comfortably among the Anderson stalwarts, capturing the archness typical of the director's characters.
Del Toro's performance is the most crucial component to The Phoenician Scheme; it's the first Anderson movie centered on a single lead since The Grand Budapest Hotel, starring Ralph Fiennes. Del Toro had been in Anderson's head as Korda from the start, so much that he informed the actor of the idea while they were promoting their prior collaboration, 2021's The French Dispatch. Anderson remembered his pitch being vague to a comedic, overblown degree: 'I told him there's some Buñuel aspect to it.''
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. 'Tenenbaums was completely from the point of view of looking up at the old man,' he said. Now, at age 56, the director is practically Korda's age; he also has a daughter, as do Del Toro and Anderson's frequent story collaborator Roman Coppola: 'I guess we're coming at it from the father's point of view, but, I will say, with a bit of the perspective of still thinking about our own fathers.' The Phoenician Scheme strikes that balance: It's wiser, and it has the looser silliness that comes with middle age—but it's looking up at those imposing father figures, tycoons or no, with awe and fear all the same.
Article originally published at The Atlantic