As The Phoenician Scheme delights audiences in theaters worldwide, Wes Anderson welcomes Ella Kemp into his wonderful world by breaking down the films that inspired his latest.
Every Wes Anderson film offers a cinematic education: a glimpse into the singular filmmaker’s universe, his quirks and loves and obsessions that have been growing and morphing over nearly 30 years now.
But what Anderson’s oeuvre also offers is an understanding of where he sits within a broader landscape: he is, like so many of our favorite filmmakers, a cinephile first and foremost, always reaching back towards what laid the foundations of his craft and opening up a conversation towards what to watch next.
So for The Phoenician Scheme—his story of a family man, a family business and all the intricacies and complexities that come with that—Anderson shared with Letterboxd a typically idiosyncratic list of influences: yes, Citizen Kane, but also the likes of David Golder, which has no more than 613 logs at the time of writing, and Terror’s Advocate, seen by fewer than 1,500 Letterboxd . Solidifying Benicio del Toro’s Zsa-Zsa Korda as an international businessman with the weight of history on his shoulders, it should come as no surprise that his maker’s mind has left no stone unturned to find the touchpoint to tell his story.
“It’s not a movie I ever knew well, I just stumbled across it on the Criterion Channel. But we knew we were doing a movie about a sort of ’50s Euro tycoon, and I had this idea that he was like somebody who had stepped out of an Antonioni movie. We knew it was Benicio del Toro, should he agree to do it, but when I saw this film, I saw this man who was, first of all, involved in negotiations between government and business, and who was kind of a middleman mediator, a role that our character was beginning to take in our story. The Mattei Affair is one of those movies with a guy right in the middle of it, and we’re with him from start to finish across all these meetings. In our movie, we know Benicio was taking us through this story, and we’re never going to leave him.
And a real fact about Mattei, he traveled by fighter jet. He could get from Palermo to Milan in 45 minutes or something—I’d never heard of that—and he had his own jet pilot with a helmet, but then he was killed. The links with our story were apparent immediately, but interestingly, what maybe most prominently inspired us was the look and the music. For a significant period of time, we were using the score as our temp music. So it wasn’t just thematic, but also in the style of the movie that we found an inspiration.”
“Kurosawa worked across different modes: he has these city movies, business movies. I group The Bad Sleep Well and High and Low together. There are the family dynamics, which are power dynamics, and the drama of the corporate world, and this chorus of reporters giving us information in a very blunt, direct way, which inspired our own technocrats in The Phoenician Scheme.
There’s also the photography of the film, which we don’t emulate directly but has always inspired me, especially in Isle of Dogs. It’s the wide-screen photography with many people in the frame at once: Kurosawa could do that with a group of people in 1962 suits and ties, and he could do it with a group of samurai in the countryside. But the other thing I would say is that Toshirō Mifune in both of those movies, he’s a real movie star. They had a spectacular collaboration and run of movies, and our movie was always a movie star movie. If I was going to say who else could have played this part, I don’t think of many people. But given the language obstacles nevertheless, Toshirō Mifune would be a good replacement.”
“There are conflicts and there is even tragedy in the film, but it’s an irresistible celebration of filmmaking, which is his life, François Truffaut. For me, any movie could be inspired by Day For Night. Jean-Pierre Léaud is in it, and Truffaut met him when he was fourteen years old—I have a similar thing with Jason Schwartzman, who I met when he was a teenager also, and we’ve worked together for years and years and years, and we’ve stayed close. One of the first things we did together was watch The 400 Blows.
And in fact, my wife for my birthday a few weeks ago, she took us to the Cinema Christine, but I didn’t know what we were going to watch. And that’s what came on the screen. So with our daughter who hadn’t seen the movie, who’s nine, we watched Les Quatre Cents Coups, which was great. But anyway, Day For Night has an exhilaration about it.”
“David Golder is about this guy who’s come from Odessa or someplace like that. He’s made his way through Europe, and his family had money in Russia, and they lost it. They fled, the father built a new fortune in , in Paris, and they in fact lived just around the corner from where we live in Paris.
So there’s this family relationship with money and this powerful father figure which had something to do with our story, and there’s a relationship with the daughter which is darker than the one in ours. I love Julien Duvivier, who’s one of the great French movie directors. Also, along with Toshirō Mifune, Harry Bauer could have played Benicio’s part in our movie, and he gives a pretty stunning performance.”
“Lincoln is one of my favorite Spielbergs, and his collaboration with Tony Kushner is a magical thing in cinema today. Obviously there’s this other collaboration in it, which is Daniel Day-Lewis, and so the three of them have something special together. Another thing that strikes me very much about this film, is that it is possibly the best cast movie of all time. There are so many great performances, it is so finely done, and it’s just the spectacular expertise and exuberance in the filmmaking. You can feel the excitement of, ‘Wow, look what Daniel Day-Lewis just did.’
I don’t know if that explains my connection with it to The Phoenician Scheme exactly, except that when I make a list of movies, sometimes they’re movies that we used to just watch with my director of photography on most of my films, Robert Yeoman, every time before we went to make a movie that essentially have nothing to do with the movie, but they had to do with making movies. We would always watch Chinatown, and Rosemary’s Baby, and we’d watch Jaws. We had these movies we just kept going back to, and Lincoln has become one of those movies.”
“Barbet Schroeder made this film about this man who, I wouldn’t say he’s unscrupulous, but his scruples begin to turn into something else. He begins his career as an attorney, this man called Jacques Vergès, as a grown-up with a strong moral com. He’s an anti-colonialist, but in the course of his life, the temptations and intrigues and also the reality of accomplishing his political desires—violence and death—turn his moral com into something else. He’s a fascinating character.
And Barbet Schroeder is somebody who will go in a room with Idi Amin and come out with an interesting interview. Barbet doesn’t get particularly scared, and he’s willing to go out to the darkest places. It’s interesting also, there’s a film by Marcel Ophüls called Hôtel Terminus, about Klaus Barbie who Jacques Vergès, the person portrayed in Terror’s Advocate, defended. In the middle of this much longer documentary that Ophüls made, there’s a age just about Vergès, and it’s like a miniature version of the movie Barbet made.”
“This is the first Buñuel movie I saw, when I was eighteen maybe, and I didn’t really get it. I didn’t like much about it. Six months later, I saw Diary of a Chambermaid with Jeanne Moreau, and that one spoke to me. I then started seeing some of the movies that he made before that, The Young and the Damned, The Exterminating Angel, Nazarin, and then I saw Belle de Jour. By the time I rewatched The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, I had a sense of what his tone was, and I suddenly got him. He made me laugh, and I felt like I was on board with wherever he was going to take me. And where he is going to take you is wherever he wants: his unconscious is the barometer.
Whatever surrealist thing he’s drawn to, he will go with it with such a sure hand that you go with him. There’s also this religious ingredient in his films, in his personality, that’s there through everything. Whatever it is, it’s barbed and satirical and a Buñuel movie is always funny. I don’t think our movie would have guerrilla terrorists in it if Buñuel hadn’t. Bourgeoisie in particular has a relationship between government and business that I feel has some connection to our film. But I also think that, for the last time, if I was going to have to replace Benicio with somebody, I might consider replacing him with Luis Buñuel himself. If we had to. Fortunately, we didn’t have to.”
‘The Phoenician Scheme’ is in theaters now worldwide courtesy of Focus Features and Universal Pictures.
