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    Wes Anderson on Roald Dahl and ‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’

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    For years, the director puzzled over an adaptation of “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.” Then he let the characters say things they weren’t meant to.Fifteen years ago, while the director Wes Anderson was adapting Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” into a stop-motion animated film, the author’s widow, Felicity, asked whether he saw cinematic potential in any of Dahl’s other tales. One came immediately to Anderson’s mind: “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” a short Dahl published in 1977 about a wealthy gambler who learns a secret meditation technique that allows him to see through playing cards.Many filmmakers had inquired about adapting “Henry Sugar” over the years, but Dahl’s family was happy to set it aside for Anderson. There was just one problem.“I never knew how to do it,” he said.The 54-year-old filmmaker typically works at a prodigious pace, putting out distinctive comedies like the recent “Asteroid City” and “The French Dispatch” (2021) every two or three years. But he has spent nearly half his career trying to crack “Henry Sugar.” The breakthrough finally came when Anderson decided to use more than just Dahl’s dialogue and plotting: He would also lift the author’s descriptive prose and put it in the mouths of the characters, allowing them to narrate their own actions into the camera as they happen.“I just didn’t see a way for me to do it that isn’t in his personal voice,” Anderson explained. “The way he tells the story is part of what I like about it.”The result is a 40-minute short starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley and Richard Ayoade, with a delicious assist from Ralph Fiennes as Dahl. After premiering at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, “Henry Sugar” will be released Wednesday on Netflix, followed by three more Anderson-helmed Dahl shorts — “The Swan,” “The Rat Catcher” and “Poison” — that employ the same actors and meta conceit of using Dahl’s prose in dialogue.(That prose has been under a microscope of late because of a plan by Dahl’s publisher to edit out language that was deemed offensive, some of which reflected the author’s racist views. “I don’t want even the artist to modify their work,” Anderson said when asked about it at a Venice news conference. “I understand the motivation for it, but I sort of am in the school where when the piece of work is done and the audience participates in it, I sort of think what’s done is done. And certainly, no one besides the author should be modifying the work — he’s dead.”)I spoke to Anderson about his Dahl projects in Venice. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.When you read Dahl as a child, you feel like he’s telling you things another adult wouldn’t. While watching your characters say Dahl’s prose directly into the camera, I felt that same conspiratorial connection again.Oh, that’s good. And yeah, every kid who experiences it has that same thing. There’s mischief in every Dahl story, and the voice of the writer is very strong. Also, there was always a picture of him in these books, so I was very aware of him and the list of all his children: He lives in a place called Gipsy House, and he’s got Ophelia and Lucy and Theo. Do you know about his writing hut?I didn’t until I watched “Henry Sugar,” but it looks like you recreated part of Dahl’s house for the scenes in which Ralph Fiennes plays him.When I made “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and I was working on the script, we stayed at the house for some time. In those days, that writing hut was still filled with his things and left the way he had it. [Dahl died in 1990.] There was a table with all these sort of talismans, little items laid out, which I think he just liked to have next to him when he was writing. He had this ball that looks like a shot put, made of the foil wrappers of these chocolates he would eat every day. He’d had a hip replacement, and one of the talismans was his original hip bone. And there was a hole cut in the back of his armchair because he had a bad back. It is odd to have somebody write in a way that’s sort of cinematic.You grew up imagining Dahl and the place he lived. How did it feel to stay there?It was a dazzling thing. It’s the house of somebody who has a very strong sense of how he wants things to be.Something I’m sure you can’t relate to it all as a director.No. [Laughs] I remember the dinner table, a great big table with normal chairs, but at the end of it is an armchair — not a normal thing at a dinner table — with a telephone, a little cart with pencils and notebooks, some stacked books. Essentially, “You can all eat here, and this is where I sit and have everything I want.” Also, he bought art and he had a good eye. I remember there’s a portrait of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon next to a portrait of Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud. The place is filled with interesting things to look at.It sounds like the kind of set I might expect to see in a Wes Anderson film, filled with these totems and details.Things that are about a character. Yeah, and he’s quite a character.As you thought about adapting “Henry Sugar” over the last decade and a half, did that give you time to figure out why you were so drawn to it?I always loved the nested aspect of it. I do these nested things in my movies starting with “Grand Budapest,” but I think it possibly comes from “Henry Sugar.”Another thing that you carry over from recent works is the idea of theatrical artifice: You want the viewer to see how this story is put together, and even the walls of the set are wheeled in and pulled apart. What draws you to that approach?When you watch a movie, generally you’re seeing someone try to create an illusion of something happening, because in fact right off the frame is a light and a guy with a microphone. But for me, the theatrical devices really happen. So I think to some degree, I like the authenticity that a theatrical approach can bring. It’s a way to tell the story where there’s a little sliver of the documentary in it, even though most of what we’re doing is the exact opposite of a documentary.And the viewer feels along for the ride, especially in some of the long takes that have a lot of choreography.On the set there’s so much to wrangle, but when it all starts to happen, it is quite a great thing to sit down and say, “Wow, look at that, 90 seconds of the movie is happening right in front of us right now.” Every time with complicated shots that have tricky staging and lots of things for actors to do, there’s usually the feeling that this may not work, that what needs to happen here may never occur. So it’s always this great relief as you see it evolve and say, “No, we’re getting there and they’re going to do it.”When they nail one of those tricky long shots, what feeling do you have?“Next!” That’s usually what it is.You don’t allow yourself even a moment to exult in the perfect take?There’s a little moment of, “Ooh, that was a good one.” Then, “OK, so do we do lunch? Or we could set up [the next shot] and then eat.” That sort of thing.In your recent movies, you’ve had very large ensemble casts. Why did you decide to tackle all these Dahl stories with such a small troupe?I thought we’ll do just English actors, and I had people in mind who I already knew and some people who I wanted to work with, so it’s not an unfamiliar group. But the idea of doing it as a little theater company, in the writing part of it I started thinking, “Maybe we’ll do the thing they do on the stage sometimes, where someone’s playing this role, but also this and this.”You’ve said that you tried to work with Dev Patel in the past, and this is the first time he said yes. What had you offered him before?Well, I don’t like to say, because then the actor who was in it says, “Oh, I wasn’t the first choice?” But I love Dev, and in this thing, Dev is the youngest of them, so he has an advantage when it comes to paragraphs or pages of text. If you work with people at different ages and you’re giving them a lot to do, you can see how it really is so much easier when you’re young: On “Moonrise Kingdom,” we had a lot of people who were 12 and they knew every word of the whole script. It was like we had 11 script supervisors on set.As a precocious American kid reading Dahl, you might wonder what it would be like to live overseas. Now that you’re based in Paris, have you become the person that you imagined in your mind’s eye?My experience is you stay yourself and you realize, “Oh, I guess I will always be a foreigner.” Which is not a bad thing, but I can’t say I’ve ever felt like now I pass. I am a Texan. Even if I’m living in New York or in Los Angeles, where I’m from is Houston. It’s built into my identity. I think if you’re from a city where you might want to live, or near it, then you have a different thing: Like Noah Baumbach, he has a deep life in New York that goes back all the way to the beginning of his life and generations of family connections and all that stuff. For me, New York is just the friends I made.Growing up within a small perimeter is probably quite different from growing up with a big, big view of the world. I hadn’t really spent much time outside of my little territory until I was in my 20s.Is it gratifying to have your perimeter so much larger now?Yes. It’s an adventure to be able to say, “Well, I’m going to have breakfast in the cafe over here that I just know from movies up until a certain age.” That is fun. It’s definitely entertaining to live abroad, even if it is a bit isolating. More

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      Venice Film Festival Finds Drama Without Zendaya

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      Day 1 brought challenges but not “Challengers,” the film that had been scheduled to open this usually starry event until it was delayed by the strikes.The sky in Venice wept on Wednesday, for there were no pictures to be taken of Zendaya in couture clambering from a speedboat.No? Too much? Well, it’s hard not to sound melodramatic at a film festival where the movies are big but the mood swings are even bigger. Let me clear my throat, take a swig of this Aperol spritz, and start again …The 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival kicked off on this rainy Wednesday with several big-name auteurs in attendance but few of the stars that this event has come to count on. With dual strikes by the writers and actors guilds forcing a Hollywood shutdown, and the actors forbidden from promoting studio films during the labor action, Venice will inaugurate a fall film season that is still in significant flux.The first day was meant to be turbocharged by the presence of Zendaya, who turned heads here two years ago in a series of stunning dresses while publicizing the first installment of “Dune.” But the shutdown cost Venice the new film she stars in, Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” in which she plays a tennis pro who has to make a romantic choice between two best friends, played by Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist (the cheeky marketing materials tease that on at least one night, she chooses both).Without its lead available to support the film, MGM delayed the release of “Challengers” to spring 2024 and yanked it from the Venice lineup. Taking its place as the festival’s opening-night film was “Comandante,” a World War II film told from the point of view of Italian submariners. While it’s well-shot and full of suspenseful battle sequences, “Comandante” features exactly zero tennis hotties contemplating a threesome, which may hinder its ultimate appeal with a Venice audience that was promised starry romantic high jinks.Though the festival’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, admitted at a news conference on Wednesday that the likes of Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) will not be attending Venice because of the strike, other actors who hail from more independent productions have managed to secure guild waivers, including “Ferrari” star Adam Driver, “Memory” lead Jessica Chastain, and the cast of Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla.” They’re expected to show up on the Lido this week alongside a posse of high-powered directors that includes David Fincher (“The Killer”), Ava DuVernay (“Origin”) and Richard Linklater (“Hit Man”).Still, the strikes loom large. At Barbera’s news conference, the jury president, the filmmaker Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”), dressed for maximum solidarity, donning a “Writers Guild on Strike!” shirt and a similar button on the lapel of his sport coat. He noted that as of Wednesday, the writers had been on strike for 121 days, with the actors joining them for the last 48 days, and he called on studios to compensate those artists fairly.“I think there’s a basic idea that each work of art has value unto itself, that it’s not just a piece of content, to use Hollywood’s favorite word right now,” Chazelle told reporters, adding that that idea “has been eroded quite a bit over the past 10 years. There’s many issues on the table with the strikes, but to me, that’s the core issue.”Chazelle was joined by the directors Martin McDonagh and Laura Poitras, who both wore shirts supporting the Writers Guild. They are part of a jury that includes the filmmakers Jane Campion and Mia Hansen-Love, among others.“I’m not sure I entirely deserve this spot, but I will do my best to live up to it,” Chazelle said. “I thank Mr. Barbera for his foolishness in letting me try it out.”Though Chazelle has been to Venice a few times before, to debut “La La Land” and his follow-up, “First Man,” he said he still found the place quite surreal. “That fact that you take a boat to a screening, it’s silly,” Chazelle said. “Cinema, to me, is a waking dream and that, to me, is Venice.”See what I said about melodrama? When you’re in Venice, where even the paint peels in the most picturesque way, you just can’t help yourself from indulging. That’s how your columnist felt last night in the rain, mulling over two of the worst disasters to hit Italy in quite some time: St. Mark’s Square was flooded, and there was no Zendaya. But at least the sun will come out tomorrow here, as will the new films by Michael Mann and Wes Anderson. More

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      Venice Film Festival 2023: What to Watch For

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      New films from David Fincher, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay and Michael Mann will make up for the absence of stars kept away by the Hollywood strikes.A year ago, the Venice Film Festival had enough star power to put even celebrity-worshiping Cannes on notice. Highlights were quickly beamed all over the world, including the notorious “Don’t Worry Darling” kickoff that fueled endless speculation about the film’s director, Olivia Wilde, and her stars Florence Pugh and Harry Styles; the news conference where an unexpectedly sagacious Timothée Chalamet predicted imminent societal collapse; and the tearful Brendan Fraser comeback that began on the Lido and culminated in his best actor Oscar win.But without all of those celebrities, can Venice still go viral?The 80th edition of the festival, which begins on Wednesday, will be significantly affected by continuing strikes by the Screen Actors Guild (or SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America, since the actors’ union has instructed its members not to do press for any studio movies until the strike against those companies is resolved. That puts Venice in a bind, as it’s regarded as one of the best places for Hollywood to unveil starry awards-season titles. Few major actors will even be permitted to attend this year.The actors’ strike has already cost Venice its original opening-night film, Luca Guadagnino’s sexy tennis romance, “Challengers,” since MGM delayed it from September to spring in the hopes that its lead, Zendaya, will be allowed to promote it several months from now when the strikes might be resolved. (A low-profile Italian film is opening instead.) And I’ve heard of a few more starry fall films that were earmarked for Venice but opted for the Telluride Film Festival instead, since that event is less driven by the photo ops and news conferences that are no longer feasible in Italy.Despite some of those trims, the Venice lineup is still enticing, with an auteur-heavy list featuring directors nearly as famous as their leads. And Venice has proved before that it can adapt to unfavorable limitations: Amid the pandemic in August 2020, the festival opted for a smaller, partly open-air edition that still went on to premiere the eventual winner of the best picture Oscar, “Nomadland.”Emma Stone, left, and Mark Ruffalo in “Poor Things,” from Yorgos Lanthimos. Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures, via Associated PressThis year’s program includes two films about assassins-for-hire: David Fincher’s new thriller, “The Killer,” stars Michael Fassbender, while Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” features the “Top Gun: Maverick” breakout Glen Powell, who also served as a co-writer. I’m curious about the off-kilter comedy “Poor Things,” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”) and starring Emma Stone as a sexually curious Frankenstein’s monster. Ditto “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s second directorial effort, after “A Star Is Born.” He’s cast himself as the composer Leonard Bernstein, opposite Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia, and his decision to wear a prosthetic nose has already set off controversy.Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” was a big hit last year, but what will that story look like through Sofia Coppola’s lens? The “Lost in Translation” and “Marie Antoinette” director puts her spotlight on Elvis Presley’s wife with “Priscilla,” featuring Cailee Spaeny as teen bride Priscilla Presley and the “Euphoria” star Jacob Elordi as the singer. Ava DuVernay has adapted the Isabel Wilkerson book “Caste” for her new film, “Origin,” which stars the Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis in an examination of racism and systemic oppression. And though Michael Mann has secured a guild exemption that would allow the cast of “Ferrari” to promote it in Venice, I’m curious whether his new film’s press-shy lead, Adam Driver (as the racer-turned-car-magnate Enzo Ferrari), is willing to do a full-blown media blitz for the movie, which the hot indie studio Neon is releasing in theaters on Christmas Day.Two years after the release of his Oscar-winning breakthrough “Drive My Car,” the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi returns to the festival circuit with “Evil Does Not Exist,” which originated as a dialogue-free short and became a feature-length film about ecological collapse. And two months after releasing his feature-length “Asteroid City,” the director Wes Anderson is opting for something shorter with “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” a 37-minute Roald Dahl adaptation for Netflix.Harmony Korine premiered his biggest film, “Spring Breakers,” at Venice back in 2012, and he’ll return with the mysterious “Aggro Dr1ft,” which stars the rapper Travis Scott and was shot solely using infrared photography. He’s not the only director taking chances: Pablo Larraín, the director of “Jackie” and “Spencer,” has set the divas aside for a moment to make “El Conde,” a black-and-white supernatural fable that reimagines the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a bloodsucking vampire.And then there are the chances that Venice itself is taking when it comes to three auteurs: It is premiering “Dogman” from Luc Besson, who was accused of sexual assault but cleared by prosecutors; “The Palace” from Roman Polanski, who was convicted of unlawful sex with a minor but fled before he could be sentenced; and “Coup de Chance” from Woody Allen, who has denied sexual abuse accusations by Dylan Farrow, his adopted daughter.Venice will also serve as an elegy of sorts for the director William Friedkin, who died earlier this month and whose final film, the naval drama “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” will premiere posthumously on the Lido. Adapted by Friedkin from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk, it stars Jake Lacy and Kiefer Sutherland. More

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      Wes Anderson’s Secret Weapon: The Camera Moves of Sanjay Sami

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      Sami brings ingenious design, a D.I.Y. spirit and pure athletic ability to the job of key grip — pushing and pulling heavy camera rigs with exacting precision.Wes Anderson’s intricate films are known for their jewel box sets, vibrant costumes and starry ensemble casts. But there’s another element that gives his movies their distinctive look and feel, and it comes in the form of a 52-year-old grip.Sanjay Sami, a native of Mumbai, India, got his start on Bollywood movies and has been working with Anderson since 2006, mostly as a dolly grip. It’s a rough job, pushing and pulling a camera mounted on a dolly — a setup weighing up to 900 pounds — along hundreds of feet of track built for a scene, and Sami has engineered, invented and refined it into an art form.On a typical movie, a dolly might move the camera left to right or back and forth. In the Wesiverse, it goes in all those directions — and sometimes up and down, too — in a single tracking shot, allowing, Anderson said, for unbroken expression. “It means the actors can stay in real time, and you can create something that really exists, in front of the camera.”Equal parts ingenious designer, D.I.Y. repair guru, rail engineer, cineaste and athlete, Sami is, according to many cast and crew members, Anderson’s secret weapon.“He can masterfully execute the most intricate camera moves I’ve ever seen,” said Adrien Brody, a frequent Anderson star, who called Sami “exacting and relentless and extremely devoted.”Last year, on “The French Dispatch,” Sami executed the most complicated shot of his career, a 70-second walk-and-talk through an unusually active police station, performed as a monologue by Jeffrey Wright, with the dolly speeding up and slowing down to keep pace with his clipped delivery.Sami moving the camera so it follows, from left, Jason Schwartzman, Jake Ryan and Tom Hanks for an “Asteroid City” shot.via Focus FeaturesThis year, Sami topped that with a scene in “Asteroid City,” Anderson’s latest, in which Brody moves through a long theater space in an exquisitely detailed choreography of sets, props, walls, actors, dialogue and camera, which “has to come off of a set of tracks and then be loaded seamlessly onto another set of tracks and hit numerous precise marks at very specific timings,” Brody noted.Another complex moment came early on in “Asteroid City,” filmed in Spain and set in an eerie, midcentury Southwestern landscape. Wright, playing a general, gives a speech to a young group of astronomers and junior scientists, as the camera moves back and forth and side to side (almost a star pattern) on a triple-layered track, setting the scene and building a sense of Wright’s character.The director Wes Anderson narrates a sequence from his film, featuring Jeffrey Wright.Focus Features“There’s a lot of responsibility, because we are the viewer’s eyes,” Sami said, in a video interview from his home in Mumbai. “We’re moving the emotion and the story, more than just moving the camera.”Anderson sends Sami scripts early on in his projects, and then the animatics — rough animations that convey the long tracking shots the filmmaker likes. “He’s the one who points out, ‘This is tricky,’” Anderson said. “He’ll express the physics of it to me.”And then Sami bends the usual laws of cinema, inventing a new rig or ordering an unheard-of amount of track, where other filmmakers might resort to green screens or other visual effects. “The thing I love is, with Sanjay, we essentially are using the same equipment that we might have used on a movie 75 years ago,” Anderson said, “but we’re arranging it in a way that it hasn’t been arranged before.”In a scene in “The French Dispatch,” for example, Owen Wilson’s character arrives riding a bicycle, and the camera tracking him has to quickly start and stop at the same rate that he does — one of Anderson’s visual signatures. “But we’re accelerating a huge amount of weight from a standstill on one grip’s power, as opposed to a light bicycle that he’s already at speed with,” Sami said. So he concocted a system involving a bungee cord anchored to a truck that could spring the camera up to the right velocity instantly.“I think what he likes about working with me is that I hate saying no to anything,” said Sami, who has also worked with Christopher Nolan. “No matter how crazy the demand is, I always want to find a solution. Maybe a crazy solution. That’s part of what makes my job really interesting.”“Sometimes the crazier the method, the happier he is,” he added of Anderson.Sami has worked on Anderson’s commercial projects and every live action film since “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007), when he impressed the filmmaker by devising a way to fit a dolly into the narrow old rail cars they used as a set: he mounted a hidden track on the train’s ceiling.To achieve Anderson’s vision, Sami must often run at full speed, weighted down with gear — a Steadicam, which he also operates, is over 60 pounds — spin around and come to an abrupt, dizzying halt. “It’s 10 or 12 hours of very, very physical work,” he said. “It’s not just endurance — you need a huge amount of strength to be able to stop and start those moves, or you’re going to hurt yourself.”So he has an exercise regimen of daily resistance training specifically for an Anderson flick. “I used to play rugby, and a lot of the rugby training crosses over,” he said.Before he got into movies, Sami was an industrial diver and underwater welder, working on oil rigs. He got his start in the film industry during a marine contractor strike, when a friend invited him onto a set. “I saw this traveling circus full of crazy people who come together briefly, make a movie. And then it’s another movie — same circus, different clowns,” he said. “I loved it.” (He also has a degree in political science — a fanciful enough background that he himself could be a Wes Anderson character: the Life Aquatic, and on the Rails, with Sanjay Sami.)Collaborating with Adam Stockhausen, Anderson’s production designer, and Robert Yeoman, the cinematographer, Sami — whose official title is key grip, the head of his department — has an unusual amount of input. “He’s sort of a producer for us,” Anderson said. “He helps us figure out how we’re going to get things done. And he’s a good manager of people. So his voice comes into the discussion in ways that have nothing to do with pushing a dolly.”Sometimes the simplest-seeming shots are also the most difficult to create. For a carousel scene in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” using a real ride wouldn’t match Anderson’s slightly surreal concept. Instead, they built a circular track with a pie-shaped platform atop it, and more track atop that. It was capped by a skateboard-style dolly, for the carousel horse. Once it rolled into the frame and the actress Saoirse Ronan hopped on, two off-camera grips clamped it down. “And then we start pushing the whole pie-shaped wooden piece on the circular track,” Sami said. The moment lasts barely 40 seconds, but it “always stands out to me, because it was the beginning of some of the more complex things that we started doing.”Beyond the dense, staccato paragraphs and action Anderson’s scripts require of the big stars, a battalion of extras — not always trained actors; he likes to hire locals on location — must nail every tiny detail, like smoothing a mustache or blowing a smoke ring, at the exact right moment, in the right sequence, to cue each other and the camera. There are verbal, visual and motion cues, all marks to hit with strict precision. “Two inches is a mile to Wes,” Sami said. “He’ll notice if you’re off by three millimeters.” (Sami uses lasers to guide his positioning.)And they don’t just run these scenes a handful of times. “Sometimes, by the time everyone’s got their part of the choreography together, we’re on Take 25 or 27,” he said. “And when you start getting into those numbers, if the actors all get it right and you get it wrong, no one’s going to remember anything except the fact that you blew that good take.”Sami, Yeoman and Anderson on the set. “There’s a lot of responsibility, because we are the viewer’s eyes,” Sami said. “We’re moving the emotion and the story, more than just moving the camera.”via Focus FeaturesAnderson swore he didn’t intentionally challenge his grip to new heights with every project; it just happens. “But I do like to feel free to do whatever we might picture, and to know that Sanjay will find a way,” he said. On a forthcoming Netflix short, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” based on a Roald Dahl tale, Sami literally sent the camera soaring. “He built a track going up into the sky at an angle,” Anderson said. It leans like a ladder in midair, “and the camera is on another track with a jib arm and a dolly attached to the top of the jib.”For Sami, all the sweat, effort and dizzy spells are worth it when he sees the finished product onscreen. “I’ve done more than 80 feature films, and the ones I’m most proud of are the ones that we do with Wes,” he said, “because it’s just work that, for me, from a grip point of view, doesn’t exist outside of this world.” More

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      Wes Anderson’s Best Needle Drops

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      Hear songs that memorably accompanied scenes in “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and more.Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tenenbaum in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” She’s always late, but worth waiting for.Touchstone PicturesDear listeners,One day when I was 14, I stayed home sick from school and watched a weird little movie called “Rushmore” on Comedy Central. When it was over, I thought to myself, “Oh, so that’s what a director does.”I had never before encountered a movie that so distinctly seemed to come from a single person’s perspective. The filmmaker Wes Anderson had created his own alternate reality, with its own color scheme, its own vernacular, and — perhaps most crucially — its own killer music. I wanted to live inside of that world. I bought the soundtrack as soon as I could.For aspiring aesthetes, Anderson’s movies can be gateway drugs. Eager to catch all of his cinematic references and influences, his films led me to the work of directors like François Truffaut, Yasujiro Ozu and Satyajit Ray. But the songs in his films are vehicles of discovery, too. I’d never heard the Creation’s “Making Time,” that garage-rock classic with guitars that rev like a souped-up engine, or the Who’s gloriously bombastic rock opera “A Quick One, While He’s Away” until I saw “Rushmore.” I learned about Nico from “The Royal Tenenbaums” and Seu Jorge from “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.” Anderson’s carefully curated soundtracks felt, to me, like eclectic, handmade mixtapes.As I got deeper into movies, I realized that even the most personal-seeming film is the result of collaboration with countless others: cinematographers, production designers, wardrobe stylists, and, of course, music supervisors. The needle drops in most of Anderson’s films are the result of his longtime working relationship with the music supervisor Randall Poster. In more recent movies, like the Oscar-winning “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and the underrated “The French Dispatch,” he’s also worked with repeatedly with the composer Alexandre Desplat, who has composed intricate and appropriately quirky scores that help bring Anderson’s worlds to life.In honor of Anderson’s new movie, “Asteroid City,” which I am very excited to see when it comes out this weekend, I put together a playlist of some of the most iconic and unexpected songs featured in his films. Quite a few have become inextricably tied to Anderson scenes. Never again will I hear “These Days” without picturing Margot Tenenbaum walking off a Green Line bus in slow-motion, or “A Quick One, While He’s Away” without imagining Herman Blume destroying poor Max Fischer’s bicycle. Sic transit gloria, indeed.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. The Creation: “Making Time”The tracks used in Anderson’s movies often serve as unofficial theme songs for characters, reflecting the way they see themselves — the song playing in their own heads as they walk down the street. Fischer, the scheming protagonist of “Rushmore,” is too square to truly embody the bratty, take-no-prisoners attitude of this jangly 1966 rocker from the British band the Creation; for him, it’s more of an aspirational soundtrack. (Listen on YouTube)2. The Ramones: “Judy Is a Punk”Anderson is a master of the montage, and many of his most memorable ones rely on a great, propulsive song to give its disparate shots a unified mood. One of my favorites compiles footage of a private detective’s dossier on Margot Tenenbaum’s secret life in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” The sonic jump-cut from silence to the Ramones’ explosive “Judy Is a Punk” sets the moment apart from the rest of the film, and makes all of Margot’s exploits seem that much cooler. (Listen on YouTube)3. Paul Simon: “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”Or maybe this is my favorite montage in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” When the disreputable patriarch Royal, played indelibly by Gene Hackman, wants to bond with his precocious, track-suited grandsons Ari and Uzi, he takes them out for some light mayhem: go-karting, water-balloon-throwing and petty larceny — all to the tune of Paul Simon. It’s against the law! (Listen on YouTube)4. Seu Jorge: “Life on Mars?”Anderson’s 2004 feature “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” featured the Brazilian musician Seu Jorge as a kind of one-man Greek chorus, singing acoustic covers of David Bowie songs in Portuguese. The melodies are so universally recognizable that you don’t need to understand the language to at least hum along to Jorge’s tender, sweetly crooned renditions of classics like “Rebel Rebel,” “Starman,” and of course, “Life on Mars?” (Listen on YouTube)5. Nico: “These Days”It’s the scene that launched a million Halloween costumes: Richie Tenenbaum waits for his escort from his days on the circuit, his sister, Margot. As usual, she’s late — but well worth the delay as she gets off the bus in her ever-present fur coat and raccoon-rimmed eyes, to the heart-stopping musical cue of Nico’s “These Days.” (Listen on YouTube)6. The Beach Boys: “Old Folks at Home/Old Man River”Several Beach Boys songs are used to great effect in “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” but none as stirringly as “Old Man River,” which soundtracks a heavenly moment at the end of the film when the animals find themselves in a supermarket. “Get enough to share with everybody,” Mr. Fox instructs, “and remember, the rabbits are vegetarians and badgers supposedly can’t eat walnuts.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Françoise Hardy, “Le temps de l’amour”In “Moonrise Kingdom,” from 2012 and set in 1964, young Sam and Suzy run away together and attempt to live out their own feral version of adulthood on an island. Among their possessions is a portable record player for 45 RPM singles, meaning they can soundtrack their own lives. Just before the awkward beachside dance that results in their first kiss, Suzy puts on Françoise Hardy’s 1962 single “Le temps de l’amour,” an achingly perfect choice for a 12-year-old trying on an air of sophistication like a pair of too-big high heels. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Rolling Stones: “Ruby Tuesday”As it’s used in a crucial scene in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” this early Stones classic casts such a rosy, romantic glow that you almost forget that you’re rooting for Richie Tenenbaum to end up with his adopted sister. (Listen on YouTube)9. The Kinks: “This Time Tomorrow”Like the Beach Boys in “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” sometimes an Anderson film will feature several songs from a single artist. Anderson’s fifth feature, “The Darjeeling Limited,” conjures its Indian setting by using instrumentals from the films of Satyajit Ray, though its placement of several songs from the Kinks’ 1970 album “Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One” — including the sweetly bleary “This Time Tomorrow” — serve as reminders that the film is filtered through a Westerner’s sensibility. (Listen on YouTube)10. The Who: “A Quick One, While He’s Away”Yet another top-tier Anderson montage, from “Rushmore”: a battle of petty acts of revenge between Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) and Blume (Bill Murray), given an anarchic grandeur thanks to this nearly nine-minute epic by the Who. Fun fact: While the version that appears on Rushmore’s official soundtrack is from the Who’s unrivaled 1970 concert album “Live at Leeds,” the version used in the film comes from the storied 1968 BBC special and eventual live record “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.” (Listen on YouTube)11. Van Morrison, “Everyone”Anderson has a knack for ending his movies with a bittersweet, emotionally resonant song that lingers in the air long after the credits roll. One of my favorites is “Everyone,” the clavinet-kissed Van Morrison track that rings out at the end of “The Royal Tenenbaums.” At once melancholy and hopeful, it’s the perfect way to conclude a movie that pierces your heart even as it’s making you laugh. And I think it’s a pretty good ending for this playlist, too. (Listen on YouTube)The Amplifier was written in a kind of obsolete vernacular,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Wes Anderson’s Best Needle Drops” track listTrack 1: The Creation, “Making Time”Track 2: The Ramones, “Judy Is a Punk”Track 3: Paul Simon, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”Track 4: Seu Jorge, “Life on Mars?”Track 5: Nico, “These Days”Track 6: The Beach Boys, “Old Folks at Home/Old Man River”Track 7: Françoise Hardy, “Le temps de l’amour”Track 8: The Rolling Stones, “Ruby Tuesday”Track 9: The Kinks, “This Time Tomorrow”Track 10: The Who, “A Quick One, While He’s Away”Track 11: Van Morrison, “Everyone”Bonus TracksSeriously, behold that performance by the Who in “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus,” and bow down to Keith Moon in all his glory. Some people believe that the reason the Stones shelved the TV special and did not officially release it until 1996 was that they thought the Who upstaged them. I’ll let you be the judge: Watch this performance and ask yourself if it’s an act you’d want to follow.If you’re looking for new music, too, this week’s Playlist has fresh tunes from Meshell Ndegeocello, Doja Cat, Peggy Gou and more. More

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      Watch Jeffrey Wright Give a Rousing Speech in ‘Asteroid City’

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      Wes Anderson narrates a scene from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.On the page, the speech a military general delivers in the film “Asteroid City” might look a little loopy. On the screen, delivered with verve by the actor Jeffrey Wright, it reaches even greater heights of both oddity and emotion.“I wanted to write something that, in a way, only Jeffrey could do,” said Wes Anderson, the film’s director and screenwriter, during an interview in New York. He wanted to tell a story of the generations of this character’s family.“Jeffrey turns it into more like a poem,” he said. “But it’s a poem that is delivered with a sort of ferocity.”The speech is executed in one take, with the camera dollying side to side as well as forward and backward, to capture all of Wright’s beats. Anderson said it was achieved with a complicated setup using “a crazy set of dolly tracks, sideways dolly tracks with a with a section of track that glides on the top of the three tracks,” a rig conceived by Anderson’s key grip, Sanjay Sami.Read the “Asteroid City” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Wes Anderson’s ‘Asteroid City’ Premieres in Cannes

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      At the film’s Cannes premiere, the director’s customary cast, themes and even camera moves were all on display — well, except one.Wes Anderson’s directorial style is so distinctive and particular — so Wessy — that it’s spawned no end of recent A.I. parodies. But how do those imitations compare with the real thing?Many of Anderson’s signature obsessions are on display in his new movie, “Asteroid City,” a ’50s-set comedy about different sets of parents accompanying their space-obsessed kids to a convention in the desert, where they all must quarantine together after receiving an unexpected visitor from the skies. (Strained family dynamics, nerdy children and whimsical settings … check, check, check!)Critics appeared split on the movie after its Cannes Film Festival premiere on Tuesday: though “Asteroid City” got glowing notices in The Telegraph and IndieWire, Variety deemed it “for Anderson die-hards only.” That suggests this is his Wessiest movie yet, a case that could certainly be made when you consider the following:It’s filled with his favorite actors.The expansive cast includes several Anderson regulars, including Jason Schwartzman as a war photographer and Tilda Swinton as a kooky astronomer, plus Jeffrey Wright, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber and Tony Revolori. Scarlett Johansson, previously called on to do a voice in Anderson’s stop-motion “Isle of Dogs,” gets her first live-action role for the director as a self-absorbed actress who finds herself quarantined next door to Schwartzman. Only two Anderson veterans are missing: Bill Murray, who was originally cast in “Asteroid City” but reportedly had to drop out because of Covid-19, and Owen Wilson.There are big stars in small roles.Actors clamor to star in Anderson’s films, and he takes full advantage: Even the tiniest supporting roles are typically filled with heavy hitters (as in “The French Dispatch,” where Emmy winner Elisabeth Moss is essentially a featured extra). “Asteroid City” welcomes A-lister Tom Hanks into the fold as Schwartzman’s father-in-law, though he’s not as significant a presence as you might expect. Still, at least he’s got more to do than “Barbie” star Margot Robbie and recent Oscar nominee Hong Chau, who each pop in for the briefest of cameos. In future Anderson films, maybe they’ll be upgraded to the main ensemble.It’s got a complicated framing device.Anderson’s films often call attention to their own storytelling by nesting the narrative within another narrative: Perhaps it’s all taking place in a book, or the vignettes are stories in a magazine. In “Asteroid City,” the director indulges in his most complicated construction yet: We’re meant to be watching a TV broadcast (hosted by Bryan Cranston) that dramatizes the story of a playwright (Norton) who wrote an unproduced stage production called “Asteroid City.” Those framing segments are shot in black and white. It’s only when we leap into the idea of his play that Anderson transports us to the gorgeous teals and burnt oranges of the desert, where most of this story within a story (within a story!) unfolds.It all takes place on rigid lines.Though Anderson has become less fixated on placing his actors in the smack-dab middle of the frame, he still blocks his camera movements and choreography in “Asteroid City” so that everything and everybody moves on an x or y axis at all times. (If you want to sneak up on someone in a Wes Anderson movie, do it diagonally. They’d never think to look!)There are deadpan expressions of grief.Schwartzman’s war photographer has something he’s meaning to tell his children: Their mother has died. Or, more specifically, their mother died three weeks ago and he just hasn’t found the right moment to bring it up. The situation is outrageous, but Schwartzman’s performance is classic Wes deadpan, and though most of the cast members give the same steady line readings, that house style is at its best when you can sense real, troubled currents underneath a placid exterior.But it could have been even Wessier …If, after reading all this, you think “Asteroid City” couldn’t get more Wessy … well, it could! At the film’s Cannes news conference on Wednesday, the actor Steve Park said that before shooting began, Anderson created a feature-length, animated storyboard, or animatic, in which he did all the voices himself. “Release the animatics,” Jeffrey Wright intoned solemnly.… especially if it used slow-motion.Later in the news conference, a reporter confronted Anderson about one trademark that’s disappeared: Though he used to use slow-motion sequences fairly often — think Gwyneth Paltrow dramatically exiting her bus in “The Royal Tenenbaums” — recent films like “Asteroid City” have all but dropped the device. “I have a series of ways I like to stage things and I don’t know if I’m in command of them — it’s part of my personality,” Anderson said, before growing concerned. “That’s one of the tools that I’ve used often, and I should look for some spots for that,” he promised the reporter. “I’ll take the note. And I’ll do it!” More

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      Cannes 2023: The Films We’ve Excited About Seeing

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      Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese and Todd Haynes have works premiering this year at the festival on the French Riviera.Wes Anderson’s films have premiered at a wide variety of festivals, but after “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012), “The French Dispatch” (2021) and his upcoming ensemble comedy “Asteroid City,” Cannes is the fest he keeps coming back to. Last week, I asked Anderson what he finds so compelling about a debut on the Croisette.“The reason to go to Cannes, I think, is because they said yes,” he deadpanned. “After that, there isn’t really much to contemplate.”Well, there’s a little more to it than that, Anderson admitted: For cinema lovers, there is no holier pilgrimage to make than to the Cannes Film Festival, where movies are treated with the utmost reverence and routinely given marathon standing ovations.It is a place where great auteurs have been canonized, like Martin Scorsese, who won the Palme d’Or in 1976 for “Taxi Driver” and will return this year with his new feature “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and Quentin Tarantino, a Palme winner (for “Pulp Fiction” in 1994) and Cannes habitué who’ll be back at the fest this year for a wide-ranging conversation that may touch on his upcoming final film.“I look at Cannes in relation to the other movies I know showed there, and I feel lucky enough to be included in the program that debuted those films,” Anderson said. “For me, it’s a chance to be involved in this movie history, which I love.”A scene from “Elemental.”Disney/PixarHarrison Ford in a scene from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”Jonathan Olley/Lucasfilm Ltd.A Cannes launch can be awfully expensive for a studio to bankroll, since the airfare, star entourages and five-star hotels alone all add up. Still, the return on investment can be major. Last year, “Top Gun: Maverick” launched with a fawning Tom Cruise summit and sent fighter jets flying over the south of France, while Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” threw a rock concert on the beach where drones traced Elvis Presley’s silhouette in the sky. Both films leveraged their splashy debuts to become some of the best-performing global hits of the year, and were nominated for the best-picture Oscar, to boot.This year, several star-driven films will attempt to capitalize on a Cannes bow, including “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” which is being billed as Harrison Ford’s final appearance in his most iconic role. Can it overcome the tepid response to the last sequel, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” and the substitution of James Mangold (“Ford v Ferrari”) for Steven Spielberg as director of the series? At least the addition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, in her most high-profile role since “Fleabag,” will add a welcome jolt to the franchise.The director Todd Haynes, who premiered “Carol” at Cannes, returns to the festival with another female-driven two-hander: “May December,” which stars Julianne Moore as a teacher whose scandalous relationship with a former student is scrutinized by a movie star (Natalie Portman) preparing to play the teacher in a film. Other star-heavy films include “The New Boy,” featuring Cate Blanchett as a nun in her first role since “Tár,” and “Firebrand,” with Jude Law as Henry VIII and Alicia Vikander as his last wife, Katherine Parr.And then there are “Asteroid City” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the fest’s two most anticipated premieres. The former takes place at a 1950s retreat for space-obsessed youngsters and stars Anderson staples like Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson and Tilda Swinton, as well as new recruit Tom Hanks, about whom Anderson said, “I couldn’t have had a better time working with anybody.” Scorsese’s Apple-backed film charts the mysterious murders of the Osage tribe in the 1920s and will bring stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro to the red carpet.Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from “Killers of the Flower Moon.”Apple TV+Natalie Portman in a scene from “May December.”via Cannes Film Festival(Still, weep for what might have been: Greta Gerwig’s candy-colored July release “Barbie” will skip an early premiere at Cannes, depriving us of a red-carpet fantasy to trump all others.)In recent years, the winner of the prestigious Palme d’Or award has often gone to a film with breakout-hit potential, like “Parasite” and “Triangle of Sadness.” The director of the latter film, Ruben Ostlund, will preside over this year’s competition jury, a group that includes Brie Larson and Paul Dano, and they’ll be picking their favorite from an auteur-heavy lineup that includes several former Palme winners.Among them are Wim Wenders, who took the Palme for “Paris, Texas” and returns with “Perfect Days,” about a Tokyo toilet cleaner, and Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose new film “Monster” is the first film he has shot in Japan since his Palme winner “Shoplifters.” No director has ever taken the Palme three times, though Ken Loach could this year, if his new working-class drama “The Old Oak” proves as acclaimed as “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” and “I, Daniel Blake.”This year’s Cannes has its fair share of long films — “Occupied City,” Steve McQueen’s documentary about Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, runs four hours and six minutes — but not every buzzy premiere will be feature-length. The fest will also premiere shorts directed by Pedro Almodóvar (“A Strange Way of Life”) and the late Jean-Luc Godard (“Phony Wars”), while launching “The Idol,” an already-controversial HBO series from the “Euphoria” mastermind Sam Levinson starring Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye.Eita Nagayama, right, in a scene from “Monster.”via Cannes Film FestivalA scene from “The Zone of Interest.”A24And though the festival will offer G-rated pleasures in the form of Pixar’s new film “Elemental,” it wouldn’t be Cannes without a few envelope-pushers. Keep an eye on Catherine Breillat, whose sexually explicit filmography (“Fat Girl,” “Romance”) gets a new entry with “Last Summer,” about a lawyer who falls for her teenage stepson.Then there’s the film I’m most curious about: “The Zone of Interest,” an Auschwitz-set drama from the director Jonathan Glazer. Rumor has it that Cannes passed on Glazer’s audacious “Under the Skin” back in 2013 and was eager to make up for that mistake. Since Glazer’s films (“Birth” and “Sexy Beast”) are infrequent but stunning, a new project from the director is reason enough to say yes to Cannes — and after that, there isn’t really much to contemplate. More