Wearing a seersucker suit and looking a tad terrified, Wes Anderson took the stage not long ago at the Venice Film Festival to accept the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award, a prize, he said, that has a “biblical” ring to it. Anderson noted that a cursory glance at the award’s Wikipedia page revealed that many of the previous winners had received the honor at the premieres of some of their very worst movies.
“And I hope I’m not here to repeat that phenomenon,” Anderson said, noting that his Venice movie, an adaptation of the Roald Dahl story “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” was only 40 minutes long. “So as soon as it gets rolling, it’s almost over. And so maybe it’s 37 minutes left by the time you don’t like it — if you don’t like it.”
Nearly everyone liked it. Ingenious and arch — what else would you expect from Anderson? — “Henry Sugar” tells a tale of the transformation of its title character (Benedict Cumberbatch, delightful) from scoundrel to selflessness, making stops along the way in Calcutta and at Dahl’s own “writing hut.” (The author is played with a curmudgeonly zest by Ralph Fiennes.) It’s one of four short films Anderson recently made from Dahl stories. The others are “The Swan,” “The Rat Catcher” and “Poison,” and they’re all available on Netflix.
The director kept writing more to the story after the film’s completion. He’s even played with the idea of making a feature-length version. “Perhaps one day I’ll do it,” he says.
Anderson and I first met 13 years ago when I presented him an award for another Dahl adaptation, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which had won the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. honor for animated film. Neither of us touched our dinner before the presentation, and we bonded over our mutual terror.
“I won’t take even a sip of wine if there’s the possibility that I might have to give a speech,” Anderson says, calling the other day from his Paris home.
“The Golden Globes load up the table with wine,” I say ...
”... hoping you will stagger to the podium,” he says, finishing the thought. “You don’t want to feel too free on television.”
Between the four Dahl shorts and the feature-length “Asteroid City,” a moving meditation on nothing less than the mysteries and meaning of the cosmos, not to mention the joy that a dancing puppet roadrunner can elicit, Anderson has enjoyed a banner year.
And he’s ready to break from the gate in 2024 with another script ready to shoot, one that he wrote with frequent collaborator Roman Coppola. It will star Benicio Del Toro, Michael Cera and a third actor he’s not ready to reveal. The ensemble will be rounded out with a “gang of people,” a.k.a. Anderson regulars. We talk about a few of them, and then he asks later that I not name any of them. Cera, whom he first met about 20 years ago, will be a newcomer to the troupe.
“You must have seen that scene he plays in ‘Twin Peaks,’ when [David] Lynch went back for the second round,” Anderson says. “Wally Brando. Those are the only two words you need. Just type them in and watch the scene. It’s incomparable.”
Cera and Lynch are kind of perfect for each other, I say, noting the actor’s sincere, restrained and deeply felt delivery in his cameo as a drifter dressed like Marlon Brando’s biker in “The Wild One.”
“I love David Lynch. The moment ‘Blue Velvet’ hit home video, I was the perfect audience,” Anderson says of Lynch’s 1986 classic, which he first saw around age 18. “It was this dazzling, wild thing, unlike anything I’d ever seen. I’d watch it again and again and again. Then ‘Wild at Heart’ came out while I was at the University of Texas, and that’s another flavor of David Lynch, as wild as it gets. And we loved Nicolas Cage, who was doing such particularly wonderful things — though now too.”
Cage would be a fun actor to write for, I suggest, because ... who wouldn’t want to see Nicolas Cage in a Wes Anderson film?
“Well, I did have something in mind once,” Anderson says, “but I didn’t manage to get him to do it. But he’s great.”
If you’ve watched the Dahl shorts on Netflix, you may have started with “Henry Sugar” — the longest one and the title Netflix is submitting for the live action short Oscar. It begins with Fiennes’ Dahl sitting down to write and then hurtling into a rush of narration about the title character and the specifics of the story we’re about to be told. That presentation, using swaths of Dahl’s prose in dialogue, continues throughout “Henry Sugar” and the other three shorts as well.
It’s an interesting conceit, I say, not to mention a challenging one. Once you decided on the course, did you worry it might lose the audience with all those torrents of words?
“I certainly had the feeling of, ‘This could be very boring,’” Anderson admits. “But I did not obsess about whether it would work. I knew the key was finding the right actors, because it’s a particular set of muscles that are being used here.” (In addition to Cumberbatch and Fiennes, Anderson employed Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, Rupert Friend and Richard Ayoade in multiple roles.)
The approach speaks to a confidence, also seen in “Asteroid City,” where Anderson deploys his familiar nesting of narratives to an even greater degree. It’s as if he read all the talk — positive and negative — about the way he frames his storytelling and decided to double down.
Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley, Dev Patel and Richard Ayoade wear many hats in this playful adaptation of Roald Dahl’s short story.
“I want to make something that’s engaging and entertaining and have the audience feel something that I’m not necessarily dictating what that’s meant to be,” Anderson says. “But how I’m doing that, I guess I do think at a certain point, you start to say, ‘I’m comfortable going out there a bit because I’ve got something in mind.’ I don’t think it’s being more confident or less aware of the audience. But having learned the rules and having followed them, I think I’m a little bolder with saying, ‘I want to try this.’”
That said, he’s self-aware enough to know that not everyone responded immediately to “Asteroid City.” Without me even asking, Anderson starts to laugh and offers: “That one, I will always say, ‘If you like it, see it again. If you don’t like it ... still, see it again. Maybe.’ It’s hard to convince someone if they didn’t like a movie to see it again. But I feel like it’s one of those ones where we might have a chance on a second viewing. It’s peculiar enough where it might be more accessible.”
I mention I heard that from a few people, including my colleague, Times film critic Justin Chang, who appreciated “Asteroid City” more when he revisited it. Knowing the structure, the story clicked in ...
“Which is a challenge,” Anderson says, “because, ideally, you’d love it to click the first time. But if they’ll give it a second go, then that’s a luxury.”
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