The Cannes Film Festival has a way of inspiring its attendees. Just take it from acclaimed auteur Wes Anderson, returning to the Riviera for his fourth time with The Phoenician Scheme. “When we were here four years ago with The French Dispatch,” said Anderson during last week’s press conference, “I said to Benicio, ‘Something’s going to be coming your way. I hope you’ll be interested in this.’”
At the time, Anderson only had an image of the film’s lead, Benicio Del Toro, dressed as shady industrialist Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda. “I didn’t know what was going to happen,” continued Anderson. “I just knew this character, and he was moving relentlessly through the story. And you can’t kill him.”
Del Toro, who had only ever worked with Anderson on the episodic multi-character ensemble French Dispatch, sparked to the idea, especially since Anderson wanted to collaborate with him at such an early stage while developing the script with longtime writing partner Roman Coppola. “I get to channel the kid in me to really explode,” del Toro explained. “And that’s unique as an actor.”
“Benicio was part of forming it with me,” said Anderson. “This character has a ruthlessness and a brutality. But the layers are in Benicio, and that informed the story when Roman and I were writing it.”
Unlike his previous film, the meta-textual quasi-sci-fi Asteroid City—heavily self-reflexive, slower-paced and tinged with ennui—The Phoenician Scheme plays like a propulsive thriller, opening with the comically determined Korda surviving another plane crash (his sixth), yet again having evaded the assassins constantly trying to kill him. “I’m in the habit of surviving,” says the tenacious tycoon, famously known as Mister 5% for taking a lucrative cut of every business deal he touches.
But the near-death experience makes him reconsider his life just enough to summon his estranged daughter-turned-nun Liesl (Mia Threapleton) from her convent for an important family meeting at Palazzo Korda. His plan: make Liesl the sole heir to his estate, and immediately assign her to be manager of his business affairs—specifically the Korda Land and Sea Phoenician Infrastructure Scheme. And so Korda insists on taking her through each of his projected ventures and uncommitted business partners across Phoenicia, involving railway magnates, shipping vessels, dams, tunnels, and more than a few exploited laborers pilfering natural resources.
“We were writing something that we intended to be very dark,” said Anderson, “a character who’s not concerned about how his decisions are affecting populations of workforces and landscapes. The darkness of a certain type of capitalist. But it took us somewhere else.”
That new direction was all due to the good-hearted Liesl, who turned this tale into a Wes Anderson staple: the family drama. “I have a daughter, Roman has a daughter, Benicio has a daughter,” said Anderson. “If we didn’t, then Zsa Zsa probably wouldn’t have.” In Anderson’s telling, the real gambit in the Phoenician Scheme is Korda’s reconciliation with the resistant Liesl. “This whole business venture, without him knowing it, is just a way for him to get back his daughter,” Anderson explained. “He’s created this vast ritual that they go through; and by the end, it’s less and less the thing he wants.”
Korda harkens back to classic Anderson antiheroes like Royal Tenenbaum in sharing a megalomaniacal outlook on life, an amoral pursuit of winning at any cost, and a slippery identity protected by money. “I don’t live anywhere,” Korda says to Liesl at one point. “I’m not a citizen at all. I don’t need human rights.”
The larger-than-life rogue, charmingly dangerous and willfully dismissive of life’s rules, was inspired by Anderson’s late father-in-law, a businessman and engineer named Fouad Malouf (to whom the film is dedicated). “He was a very warm, wise person. He was very alpha. Maybe a little scary at first. Strong. The first conversation I ever had with him, I asked him what the men who worked with him were like. And he told me, ‘All lions. I only work with lions.’ He was a lion.”
Anderson surrounds del Toro not only with Liesl, but also with her tutor, Norwegian entomologist Bjørn Lund (Michael Cera). For both Threapleton and Cera, The Phoenician Scheme is their first time working with Anderson. “I’ve been a huge fan forever,” Cera told Observer during a conversation after the press conference. “I saw The Royal Tenenbaums in the theater when I was, like 11, and loved it. The Life Aquatic, Bottle Rocket. I watched Rushmore 8000 times. It was just one of the most important movies to me, and one that helped me find my tastes.”
Threapleton also confessed to being a diehard Anderson fan—not to mention a longtime aspirational member of his ensemble. “I was going through some old journals recently,” said Threapleton at the Cannes press conference. “And I stumbled across an entry from 2013 that said, ‘Watching Moonrise Kingdom again. Bloody love this film. Really wish I can work with Wes Anderson one day.’”
Cera admitted that he was so fascinated with watching Anderson direct that he spent much of his time on set whenever possible—so much so that Anderson joked Cera was pulling a Willem Dafoe. “I kept finding ways to get into shots that had not been planned with me,” Cera explained. “Wes said that that was the Willem Dafoe trick from The Life Aquatic. Dafoe would just say, ‘Do you think my character Franz should just be up on that ridge over there?’”
Cera and Threapleton are in almost every shot with del Toro, and the film really focuses on the trio’s misadventures together around Phoenicia. “We were very fortunate to have a chance to rehearse with Wes, the three of us,” said Cera. “And Wes said that he never does that. I remember him saying that that was his first time ever doing rehearsals.”
All three of the actors’ performances seem atypical for a Wes Anderson film, and their rehearsals together might have given them a chance to develop a deeper emotional bond than usual. Although castmate benedict cumberbatch felt like the genial, goofy Cera was born to be in a Wes Anderson film. “Watching Wes use Michael is like God discovering water: it seems like a pretty obvious, natural element to have in his arsenal as a filmmaker,” said Cumberbatch at the press conference. “It’s the perfect partnership.”
A journalist then asked if Anderson had any plans to use Cera again. “Me?” Anderson replied with surprise. “I say yes. But I’m just asking.”
Cera smiled at the answer. “I’ll agree with Wes. With a hopeful yes.”
“Let’s shake on it,” replied Anderson. “Sometimes people say yes, but they don’t really mean it later. Let’s get this on the record.” And the two exchanged a firm handshake while the journalists clapped.
