OVER A SINGULAR CAREER, WES ANDERSON HAS MOUNTED HIS MOVIES WITH UNCOMPROMISING PRECISION. NOW, AS HE UNVEILS THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME, HE TELLS US WHY HE LIKES THINGS TO BE PICTURE-PERFECT

WORDS JOHN NUGENT

PROLOGUE

A Punctilious Prelude

THE telephone rings. A voice emerges from the other line, clear and crisp and deliberate. “Hello,” says the voice. “This is Wes. I’m calling at exactly five o’clock. Right on the dot.”

That is director Wes Anderson, applying as much care and attention-to-detail to his press commitments as he does to his films. Anderson’s conversation with Empire begins as if in character: meticulous, fastidious, punctual to the second. We can’t see him, but it’s a safe bet he is wearing an immaculate tweed suit-and-tie combo.

The Texas-born director’s panache is now legendary. Across 11 films, he has practically established a genre all of his own, a corner of his beloved art form unique to him. From quirky crime comedy Bottle Rocket to the grand family saga of The Royal Tenenbaums to the Eastern European capers of The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson now has a remarkable body of work, his films in dialogue with each other, a rich visual shelf of living pop-up books, teeming with eccentric characters and intricate depictions of family life.

Joining that canon is The Phoenician Scheme, another assiduously crafted affair with an oddball sense of humour, told through a Eurocentric lens. It tells the story of Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), a ruthless businessman in post-war Europe attempting an ambitious infrastructure scheme while trying to reconnect with his nun daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton). It is darker and steelier than some of Anderson’s work but still charming, sweet and handsomely mounted. And very, very Wes. “You never know how something works its way into what you end up getting on film,” he ponders. But we’ll have a go.

CHAPTER 1

The Substance Behind The Style

WES Anderson’s films are beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that he can be dismissed as simply a stylist. But there’s always an engine driving that perfectly calibrated beauty. “We always have something on our mind,” he asserts. Take 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, a sweet confection partly inspired by the novels of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and the historical analysis of Nazi-occupied Europe by Hannah Arendt. Or 2023’s Asteroid City, a goofy pastiche of a 1950s alien romp that’s also a pandemicinspired three-in-one meta-commentary on creativity and the cosmos. The Phoenician Scheme, too, is a sharply composed and carefully ordered diorama — with the real world underlying it all.