Wes Anderson On ‘The Phoenician Scheme’, His Creative Process And How He Chooses His Movie Titles

Wes Anderson’s latest movie The Phoenician Scheme, stars Benicio del Toro as Zsa-Zsa Korda, a rich businessman who has survived many assassination attempts and who just designated his only daughter, Liesl, a nun played by Mia Threapleton, as sole heir of his estate.

The filmmaker’s career is currently being honored at the French Cinemateque in Paris, where the visitors can admire set pieces, costumes, props and photos from their favorite Anderson’s movies. Anderson also lent the Cinemateque some of his work notebooks, with the temporary titles used for every single one of his films. For exemple, The Darjeeling Limited used to be called India Movie for a while, and Moonrise Kingdom or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, were respectively named The Island Movie and The Oceanographer Movie.

While speaking with the filmmaker over Zoom, I asked him about the temporary title of The Phoenician Scheme, and how he came up with the final titles of his films. He said, “The Phoenician Scheme’s temporary title was probably The Tycoon Movie.”

He added: “Usually, I feel like we’re kind of waiting to hear it, or one of us will say it accidentally or something like that. But you know, I had a funny conversation with a reporter from Germany the other day, who really hated the title of The Phoenician Scheme, and he especially hated the German translation, which was even more complicated. But he asked me, ‘Do you think a bad title can ruin a good movie?’ And I said ‘Gosh I hope not, I mean…’”

Anderson explained that in German, the title translated to The Phoenician Master Scheme, so Der Phönizische Meisterstreich. Yes, it is way more complicated than the original one.

Anderson joked, “It’s a worse title in German!”

For The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson collaborated once again with French music composer, Alexandre Desplat. The two artists have been working together ever since Fantastic Mr.Fox came out in 2009.

Anderson said, “Alexandre and I have worked in different ways on different movies, because a movie like Fantastic Mr.Fox or The Grand Budapest Hotel, or even The French Dispatch, there’s a lot of music and a lot of different pieces. Whereas a movie like Isle of Dogs, there’s music all the time, but most of the music is just drumming and something very simple, there’s probably one, two or three themes. It’s really the same music played in different ways and reinterpreted. The same with Moonrise Kingdom, there’s essentially one piece, but many different arrangements.”

He added: “This new one, there is less music, but it is quite a lot darker, it’s quite simple, it’s an interpretation of Stravinsky’s theme from the Firebird. So there’s a lot of actual Stravinsky and then, there’s Alexandre’s kind of dark score. We work very closely together because we’ve been friends for so long, and he used to live very close to me in Paris. And his new atelier is close to me as well, so we work in the same quartier together, and we have fun. You know Alexandre is the only composer I know that will come with us to the Cannes Film Festival and do everything with us, he likes to be part of it all. He’s brilliant, he’s got a very special kind of musical mind.”

Anderson is known for storyboarding his movies and showing what the next scene is going to look like to his cast. While this method has been praised by many of the actors he has collaborated with, Anderson revealed that it mostly has to do with budget and timing.

“We do the script first, but often when I’m writing the script, I might have ideas of how we might film it, so I might have some notes or a plan on how we might stage something, especially what we might build, what the set might be like. Nowadays, when we have maybe 10 or 15 pages, we start working on this storyboard version because it’s very time consuming. So I don’t wait until we have the whole script. But the script always comes first, we might just do a first section of the script and begin it.”

He added: “The reason we do the storyboards has not really anything to do with the actors, it has to do with the construction of the sets, to know what we need to build, so we can built the most efficiently. We don’t build more than we need, essentially, it’s a way to make the movie within our budget. But it’s a way to make something that maybe will feel bigger than our budget would normally allow. It’s also a part of the process where I can take the time to really dream about what we might do, without a lot of pressure or people around. It’s a version of writing, but for the visual part, for how to shoot it. I like that experience.”

Anderson told me that he has worked with the same two collaborators for years, a storyboard artist named Jay Clarke, and his editor, Edward Bursch, who first started as Anderson’s assistant. This storyboarding method comes from animation, even if in that case, a whole team of people is needed to work on it. “Here, it’s just the three of us,” Anderson told me.

I told Anderson that I had interviewed Lyna Khoudri a few years ago, for the release of The French Dispatch. The actress had then shared an anecdote about the director gifting a pair of traditional French slippers called Charentaises to the entire cast.

Anderson said, “Oui! Because we were in Charentes, we needed the charentaises for the prisoners in our story, they all have these charentaises with stripes, yes, but then it became a present for everyone.”

Anderson jumped on this opportunity to share that he would love to work with Khoudri again. He said, “But you know, Lyna, she’s very, very good! I would like to do another film with her because so far I haven’t had the chance.”

He added: “She was playing with Frances McDormand and Timothée Chalamet, and she was very forceful. Playing these scenes with Frances McDormand, she was very confronting! She’s speaking French and English back and forth, there is a lot of dialogue, it’s a difficult task for an actor and she was perfect.”

The Phoenician Scheme is now playing in theaters.