Into the lion’s den: Wes Anderson on The Phoenician Scheme

When we think of the handful of Japanese words that have made it into English, ‘tycoon’ doesn’t usually come to mind. But it’s an anglicisation of taikun, a term that was used to refer to the shōgun – the erstwhile military leaders of Japan who were nominally appointed by the emperor but were, thanks to the resources and muscle they commanded, the men who really ran the show. The words we choose to borrow can be telling; the word ‘tycoon’ seems a tacit acknowledgement that powerful businessmen have always had quasi-governmental power. They shape nations, for better and – frequently – for worse. 

Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, is centred on just such a figure. The year is 1950; the initial setting, in true Andersonian style, is somehow both precise and fanciful: we’re cruising at exactly 5,000 feet above the ‘High Balkan Flatlands’ in a private jet co-piloted by its owner, industrial magnate Anatole ‘Zsa-zsa’ Korda (Benicio del Toro). Suddenly, a hole is blown into the side of the jet, slicing the meek-looking passenger in the back of the plane clean in half at the waist. Korda ejects his co-pilot (Stephen Park), crash-lands the plane in a cornfield and, riddled with injuries, stalks implacably toward the camera until his bruise-puffed face fills the frame.

That the camerawork and del Toro’s physicality here recall nothing so much as Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003) bears out the sense that this is the darkest opening to any Anderson film. But that’s not to say it’s a major departure: after the dizzying intertextual gamesmanship of Asteroid City (2023) and the wry, ironic reportage stylings of The French Dispatch (2021), The Phoenician Scheme is a return to caper territory, with all the straightforward pleasures that implies. Like all of Anderson’s live-action films since Moonrise Kingdom (2012), it’s set in the 20th century; as ever, his loving arrangement of artefacts of material culture is a way of masking personal and familial dysfunction. But since The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), all his films have hinted at dysfunction at higher levels too – institutional, societal – and The Phoenician Scheme is no different, swirling as it does around an all-too-timely narrative: Korda’s hyper-capitalist mission to create a fully integrated multinational industrial conglomerate, no matter how many of the world’s bureaucrats and politicians try to stop him – or kill him.

Korda, however, is as skilled in the art of survival as he is in the art of the deal. The current resonances with a certain American businessman turned potentate are undeniable: assassination attempts seem only to make him stronger; his business schemes involve convincing investors that he has more money at his disposal than he really does; he’s entirely unfazed by ecological or human-rights concerns. Has Wes Anderson gone political?

When I catch up with Anderson, he’s holidaying on the Japanese coast, north-west of Kyoto. As we speak it becomes clear that the origins of The Phoenician Scheme lie not in recent anxieties about overweening businessmen but in a particular artistic curiosity. “I wanted to write a role for Benicio to play, to build a movie specifically around Benicio,” he tells me. In a 2023 interview with Le Monde, Anderson had said that his next film would feature del Toro “in every shot”; though del Toro has ended up less omnipresent than that would suggest, The Phoenician Scheme is the first of Anderson’s features since The Grand Budapest Hotel to revolve around a single protagonist rather than a diffuse ensemble cast. It’s also the first of his films to have been conceived around a single actor. “The main thing,” he says, “was to have Benicio playing a man who is accustomed to changing the world to fit his desires, who has this kind of brutal ambition, and who is very comfortable moving populations and workforces and vast quantities of resources around to do what he wants.”

There is, of course, another breed of globally mobile decision-maker capable of shifting human and financial capital around the world to realise their vision: film directors. The comparison isn’t all that far-fetched: the very name ‘Anatole Korda’ seems a conflation of two émigré filmmakers, Anatole Litvak and Alexander Korda, both of whom were active around the time the film is set. (The ‘Zsa-zsa’ presumably comes from the actor Zsa Zsa Gabor, who, like Korda, was of Hungarian origin.) At one point in the film, Korda presents an intricate automaton of his conglomerate-cum-microstate to an audience of investors – almost like a test screening. It’s a mechanised version of the kind of theatrical device that has popped up throughout Anderson’s oeuvre, from the Vietnam War-set stage extravaganza in Rushmore (1998) to the meta-textual framing of Asteroid City.

Is Korda a swindler? “He’s certainly crooked, but I don’t think what he’s undertaking in the story is a con: it’s a real project,” says Anderson. “A person like this is a highly invasive species. He’s doing what he wants to do, which is not what’s good for the world. But at the same time, he has an idea for something. It’s not necessarily just bad for the world. His project will change a region, in some ways for the good and in some ways for the worst. That’s a tradition of businessmen that we think of not as conmen but as capitalists.”

After a bit of market manipulation by some shady bureaucrats that sends the value of ‘bashable rivets’, which are key to the project, sky-high, Korda has to scramble for financing to close ‘the gap’. There’s a double meaning here: the gap is nominally a shortfall in cash, but the real gap is an emotional one, and to fill it Korda needs to learn to be a better parent. He attempts to reverse years of parental neglect by plucking his world-weary daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novitiate, from her nunnery, and making her his heir and protégée, sweeping aside his nine sons in the process. Liesl is reluctant: she’s sure that Korda killed her mother (dead or absent mothers are a longstanding Anderson trope) but Korda is bent on convincing her that his half-brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch) was responsible.

And so the narrative begins in earnest, with Korda, Liesl and the mild-mannered Bjorn (Michael Cera) – secretary to Korda and tutor to Liesl – hurtling around Europe and the Middle East to secure financing. This is where two additional Anderson characteristics come into play: neat structure and a starry, expansive cast. The bulk of the movie is divided into five chapters, one for each party of investors; Korda needs them to put up 20 per cent of the money apiece. (Echoes of the film world here, too: this could almost be a guide to funding international co-productions.) There’s Prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed) and an American duo (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston) who are happy to conduct business by shooting hoops; a French nightclub owner (Mathieu Amalric) who finds himself beset by terrorists; a friendly seadog (Jeffrey Wright) willing to give Korda a transfusion of blood as well as cash; Korda’s cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson), an infrastructure project manager to whom Korda proposes marriage; and the dread Nubar, who bears a striking resemblance to Orson Welles in Mr. Arkadin (1955).

Of these players, Threapleton, Cera and Ahmed are new additions to the Anderson troupe. Del Toro and Threapleton play off each other nicely; when I ask Anderson about his approach to the wonderfully bruising sound design in relation to his characters, he says: “Benicio is so visual… He’s strong, he’s punchy, he’s forceful, and his presence kind of takes over. I would say the same about Mia. And the way those two are together probably guides the process in a certain way.” 

Meanwhile, Cera plays Bjorn with a Norwegian accent so preposterous it rivals Mark Ruffalo’s Victorian cad in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023); it’s one of the film’s funniest suits. “He’s just a wonderfully inventive, charming actor,” says Anderson. “He’s got a jolting sort of talent – you feel it right there in front of you. He’s the kind of person whose first take will be really interesting, as will be however many other takes you do. There’s something about acting – probably like dancing or playing the violin – where it’s an advantage if you start doing it very young. It gives you an extra something, a little leg up. It’s like you’ve been living in front of the camera.” (Cera, whose first acting idol was Anderson regular Bill Murray, was cast in his first feature film at the age of 11.)

Cumberbatch played the title role in Anderson’s Netflix short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2024), but this is his first feature for the director. Though the name Nubar sounds like an acronym or a code to be cracked, it’s based on a real figure: Nubar Gulbenkian, son of Calouste Gulbenkian. Both were 20th-century oil tycoons, among the richest men of their generations, but the father kept a tight leash on his son, paying him an allowance instead of a salary. (Sample anecdote: one day in 1938, Nubar decided to have a working lunch and charged $2.22 to the company; Gulbenkian père reprimanded him, leading Nubar to blow his top and sue his father for $10 million, later dubbing the lunch “the most expensive chicken in history”.) This dynamic bleeds into The Phoenician Scheme: Korda and Nubar’s late father was distant, manipulative and extravagant, traits inherited by both sons.

The film was also inspired by another real-life figure: Fouad Mikhail Malouf, the father of Anderson’s partner Juman Malouf. A former director of the UK subsidiary of a Middle Eastern construction company, he left a great impression on those who knew him. “He was the kind of guy who, if you walked into a restaurant with him, whether the other patrons knew him or not, they’d sort of straighten up and pay attention,” says Anderson. “They wouldn’t want this guy to get mad at them; they’d be a little scared. And in his face he had something not unlike what Benicio has as a character. But he was also gentle, very intelligent, and had great wisdom. He said this thing to me about his colleagues: that they were ‘all lions’. Then I met some of them, and they weren’t really lions. But he was. I guess I always have been drawn to lions. I like being a sidekick to somebody like that.”

Affable as he is, it’s hard to imagine Anderson being a sidekick: he famously oversees every element of his films in detail. The craftsmanship and art direction on display in The Phoenician Scheme are typically fastidious, and in some ways bolder than in his previous work. Though art history has featured in Anderson’s work before – most notably the ‘Renaissance’ painting that serves as a plot point in The Grand Budapest Hotel, in reality a work made by the painter Michael Taylor specifically for the film – the director decided to forgo props when it came to representing Korda’s collection.

“Usually in movies you use copies, or make original art that’s a kind of pastiche of a recognised style,” Anderson explains. “But at a certain point I thought, ‘I would like to have the real thing in this movie.’ And then it became more specific: ‘I would like to have a Renoir in his daughter’s room; I would like to have a Magritte or a surrealist work in this part of the story; I would like to have Renaissance paintings and religious imagery in this other part of the story.’ But it all has to do with Korda’s character.”

Like the art collection of the central family in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End (2024), Korda’s predilection for art reminds us that while they’re busy transforming the world (for better and worse), industrial billionaires have one eye on posterity – which is where patronage comes in. Houston, Texas, where Anderson grew up, is home to the Menil Collection – the museum that means the most to him, thanks to its formative collection of African, abstract expressionist, surrealist and pop art – which was founded by the French oil tycoons John and Dominique de Menil; Anderson points out that Roberto Rossellini was one of their beneficiaries in the early 1970s. Anderson himself is unusual among directors in having a dedicated patron: Steven Rales, who made his fortune as the co-founder and co-owner of the industrial conglomerate Danaher Corporation, regularly gives political donations (usually to Democrats, sometimes to moderate Republicans), acquired The Criterion Collection and Janus Films last year, and has financed all of Anderson’s films since The Darjeeling Limited (2007) through his company Indian Paintbrush. “Over the years, Steven has become more and more crucial to me and my own filmmaking process on a day-to-day basis,” Anderson told the Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that the world-shaping mogul at the centre of The Phoenician Scheme ends up such a sympathetic figure.

At a time when billionaires are wielding more power than ever, a story about a magnate who recalibrates his priorities and comes to embrace love and corporate responsibility might strike Anderson sceptics as naive at best. In its scope, setting and human cost, Korda’s project also brings to mind Neom, Mohammed bin Salman’s gargantuan urban project, which is generally considered to be the world’s biggest construction site. It is estimated to have cost at least $500 billion so far and has already led, according to a recent ITV documentary, to the deaths of thousands of workers. (In The Phoenician Scheme, Korda, who spends most of the film implicitly treating slave labour as a financial given, ultimately resolves that “the slaves will be paid”; if only the real world were so simple.)

Others may note that the director tends to depict left-wing radicals fondly but unseriously: in The French Dispatch, the muddled young soixante-huitards seem full of conviction without ever being sure of what exactly it is they’re fighting for. “The French Dispatch is a comedy, so nobody was going to be portrayed with deep respect,” he tells me, pointing out that he took his cues from the New Yorker correspondent Mavis Gallant, on whose dispatches from Paris that section of the film was based. “Her description [of the May ’68 protests] was more complete than others I’ve read. She didn’t care about whether she was portraying them the way they wanted to be portrayed; she was portraying them the way she saw them… To me, the movie’s on the side of the protesters. We just don’t treat them humourlessly.”

Given that the radicals in The Phoenician Scheme are first seen terrorising a French nightclub in 1950, you might think they’re Algerian freedom fighters; but they sport berets and their leader is played by Richard Ayoade in his usual affectless tone. Is Anderson satirising Algeria’s National Liberation Front, or simply using terrorists as a vehicle for injecting a little chaos into the plot?

“Our terrorists were inspired by Luis Buñuel,” Anderson explains, referring to the terrorists who appear in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). “They come from a surrealist sensibility… There’s a style that goes with this kind of portrayal of these kinds of insurgents, and I guess I’m drawn to it.” Anderson wrote the part for Ayoade: “The character is very verbal and thoughtful; he’s an interesting terrorist… I feel he comes more from movies than from real life.”

It’s a useful way of looking at The Phoenician Scheme: unconcerned with faithfully recreating a historical period, it celebrates an array of filmmaking sensibilities from 1970s Europe, ranging from Italian conspiracy thrillers – specifically Francesco Rosi’s The Mattei Affair (1972), also about a high-flyer who commutes by private jet and has a target on his back – to the late work of Buñuel and Federico Fellini. Even when discussing some of the film’s historical inspirations, Anderson seems to view them through the prism of cinema: “You think of [Aristotle] Onassis and [Giovanni] Agnelli and [Stavros] Niarchos, mid-20th-century European businessmen with an Antonioni-esque style, who go through life with their egos, leading the way and affecting vast numbers of people.”

That’s not to say the film is a pastiche: Anderson’s auteurial imprint is keenly felt throughout. Like all his films, it hums with the joy of filmmaking, of camerawork and sight gags and narrative momentum. “As many reference points as you can have and things you can steal from other people’s movies,” says Anderson, “ultimately you have your characters, your plot and the moment when you’re trying to get to the next part of the story. And you see what you can invent.”