Wes Anderson Talks Fatherhood, Interest in Making a Musical, and Why He Had Benicio del Toro Channel The Mummy

Wes Anderson has said more than once that the idea of The Phoenician Scheme began while he was reading biographies on 1950s European tycoons. These were the titans of industry who became a peculiar kind of celebrity in their day; men like Aristotle Onassis and Gianni Angelli.

Yet one of the most amusing things for anyone who buys a ticket for The Phoenician Scheme this weekend is how much of the film as a whole is immersed in that mid-20th century aesthetic, from Europe to Hollywood; soundstages to North Africa. After all, Phoenician is shot entirely in the kind of artificiality that Michael Curtiz used to make Casablanca (1942)—a film that Anderson nearly namechecks when he has Benico del Toro’s Euro mogul Zsa-zsa Korda wind up in a nightclub run by Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric).

So when we sat down with Anderson to discuss The Phoenician Scheme, those allusions, and how intentional some might be, was at the top of our mind—while others came as a complete surprise, such as when the director pointed to how the film’s third act set in a decadent Egyptian-themed hotel was alluding directly to Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932). But what most intrigued was how Phoenician returns to some of the emotional stakes of a father figure and their child, a theme Anderson explored more than once in early films like Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic. But as he now admits, it’s a different thing 20 years later after he became a father in 2016. Now he is closer in age and experience to Steve Zissou than Ned Plimpton.

In the below interview we discuss all that, plus a small spoiler in the last question about who Anderson needed to cast as God.

This partially came out of you studying European moguls like Onassis and Angelli. What is the fascination for you with industrialists of this time period?

I would say the first idea of the movie, equally and simultaneously, was both for a Euro tycoon type and it being Benicio. So it was always here’s a character that we could make a movie around Benicio playing. There was an aspect of it where we were drawn to a certain type. Some of the things that are shared by rich, rich men—each of these guys, the ones that we read about or knew about, they have these things in common, but they’re also each totally unique because they’re idea people, and they have the means to do whatever they want. So they often have interesting eccentricities that are different.

But there is a type. There are things that unite these guys, things we see again and again, in people who’ve arrived in that kind of position. And we felt like there’s something that we can dig into here, especially with Benicio. 

Were you looking for a role for Benicio in a movie when you were ideating this?

It was just both at once. There was not a moment of “what could we write for Benicio?” And there was not a moment of “who could play this tycoon?” It was bang, the two things together. 

Do you see him as a bit of a throwback to this era in terms of his performance? 

What I think of as a classic movie star, most of them are dead. And Benicio, to me, is like one of those. He’s like somebody who would be a movie star in any decade we pick of the history of cinema. This guy has the thing; a relationship to grains of film on a piece of [celluloid]. Whatever that is, he responds well to that photographic exposure. 

Why do you think that quality seems to be rare these days? 

That’s a good question. One thing is this: the way they used to do it is somebody’s gonna discover you, you’re going to have a sort of period of finding your way, and then you’re gonna click with the audience and then you’re going to work continuously. And you probably have one studio where you do almost all your work and you get loaned out now and then, but you’re working all the time, and the directors you’re working with are working all the time, and you’re living in the movie community of Hollywood. 

That’s all gone. Now you spend two years trying to raise the money and you live in Austin, and you go make a movie in Vancouver or whatever it is. It’s just not the same industry the way it was. Like to make a musical now, I think compared to what Vincente Minnelli had in front of him, we’re at a disadvantage. Doris Day is like a virtuoso, who’s doing this all the time and she’s going to sing and dance and show up for rehearsal at 6 a.m. for six weeks straight, and when it comes on the day to shoot, everybody knows what to do, and they nail it.

And the alternative is they’re fired, you know? [Laughs] That’s their job, they take it seriously. They say, ‘Yes, Mr. Minnelli’ and they get on with it. I think it’s just a different world of cinema. 

Could you see yourself making a full-fledged, wall-to-wall musical? 

I would love to. I mean, my daughter loves musicals. I started to get more interested in them because of her. It was not really ever my thing. Like Meet Me in Saint Louis now is a favorite movie of mine, and I think I’d seen it when I was like 11 on TV, but it wasn’t a movie I knew. I know it now because of her. The Pajama Game, to me, is some kind of masterpiece. But I will say I wouldn’t even know how to begin. [Laughs] But maybe that’s a good thing, you know? Maybe that’s a good place to start. I don’t know where.

Related to this, with The Phoenician Scheme were you looking for inspiration at the movies that were made in this era? The name Korda carries a lot of connotations. 

Yes, yes, yes, completely. I don’t say “here’s the key movies in relation to this that I really feel we [channeled].” It wasn’t like we were thinking about Citizen Kane. But it feels like an old movie to me, you know? It feels like a kind of story that might have been produced by Alexander Korda. But people have mentioned to me like Mr. Arkadin, that Orson Welles movie. And I like Mr. Arkadin, but it hadn’t occurred to me while we were doing it. It’s later I say, “I see a connection there.”

Or another one called David Golder, have you ever heard of that one? It’s Julien Duvivier [as the director]. That’s one I hadn’t thought of, but I don’t know how much it really has to do with [Phoenician]. 

Maybe because he was a fellow expat from Hungary like Korda, but one I wondered about was if the allusions to Michael Curtiz were intentional? 

Probably a bit with Marseille Bob and that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think so. There is something about Hollywood as a colony of Europe, you know? Our movie is a soundstage movie, basically. It’s the way Hollywood always was. I mean, it’s not like they went to Casablanca! [Laughs]

Yeah, I was also thinking of Robin Hood when Benicio throws the deer down.

That was completely stolen from Robin Hood, 100 percent. That one is without question. I was like, “He comes walking in like that, and I think we’re going to do a Robin Hood scene.” That’s another one. Robin Hood is also my daughter.

Speaking of your daughter, you have explored relationships before between adult children and troublesome father figures like Royal Tenenbaum and Steve Zissou. But this is the first one you’ve made since you’ve become a father yourself and it feels different. Do you think that has changed your perspective on this dynamic?

Yeah, it’s different. Essentially I’m Benicio’s age. And Benicio has a daughter. [Co-writer] Roman Coppola has a daughter. I have a daughter. Somehow, even though we have the perspective of looking at our own fathers and our own experiences and father figures, it’s no longer just that. It’s now being that. That’s a different thing. And the experience of having a child, it really just sort of changes everything.

Has your perspective on Royal or Steve Zissou changed at all?

Like judging them a bit?

Yeah.

I would say no, but only because I don’t identify with them. I feel like I don’t judge them. I wouldn’t do it that way myself. [Laughs] It’s that kind of thing, but I think that [feeling toward them] sort of stays consistent.

I wanted to talk a bit about the aesthetics of the movie. I recently was in Egypt, so I loved the third act, and I was curious if you had been a longtime admirer of ancient Egyptian art?

That’s interesting. My wife is Lebanese, and it wouldn’t be called The Phoenician Scheme—Phoenicia was where Lebanon is, and the movie is connected to my experiences of entering into a Lebanese family and becoming part of a Lebanese family. The character Benicio plays has a strong connection to my wife’s father. 

Lebanon has a strong connection to Egypt, in particular in the sense of their cinema. The cinema of Lebanon is Egyptian cinema. That’s the Hollywood of the Middle East, or it was Egypt. And my wife’s mother, she left home and went to Cairo, and that’s where she went to university and became a writer. So my connection to Egypt and interest in Egypt kind of comes through Lebanon and through them, I think. 

I will say that Ancient Egypt just has its own fascination, and it’s such a distinct culture, so distant, so beautiful, magical, and we’ve seen it portrayed and recreated. It’s very ancient, ancient, but we’ve seen it reinterpreted in so many different ways and it’s entered into our culture in so many different ways, so you know it’s a strong presence. 

So for us, somehow, they had to end up in a place like that. I think that Benicio, in the last part of the movie, he’s done up to look like Boris Karloff in The Mummy. His costume, his fez, his whole look kind of comes out of that. And I think our hotel is really inspired by Egyptian revival, this period where Egypt was a big public fascination.

I didn’t make that connection. Before I go though, I just wanted to add: of course Bill Murray needed to be God.

I mean, who else could play it?

The Phoenician Scheme is in limited release now and opens in wide release on June 6.