My depiction is based on a photo that Wes gave me of Mavis Gallant, photos my friend showed me of her smoking cigarettes and typing and of time I spent with Lillian Ross years ago.
Lo and behold, a friend of mine was a dear friend of hers in Paris and the executor of her will. McDORMAND Wes suggested I read Mavis Gallant’s work. He sent me the script several weeks later because in typical Wes fashion, he was still working on it. WRIGHT He described this amalgam of nonfictional characters that made up Roebuck Wright - Baldwin being one of them A.J. From the very beginning, it was all kind of magical. I tried on my red jacket as the narrator of “Moonrise Kingdom” and possibly a funny hat.
‘Summer of Soul’: Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples and others shine in Questlove’s documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival.Scott and Manohla Dargis, selected their favorite movies of the year. Soon after that he asked me to be in “Moonrise Kingdom.” After “The Darjeeling Limited” in 2007, I wrote him a fan letter, to which he replied. TILDA SWINTON I saw “Bottle Rocket” and I’ve seen each film since as it came out - in awe. Even then I would have done any role that Wes would have come to me for. He surprised me - here was a director who I admired so much and he had known of my work for years, and told me he had actually gone with Owen to see “King of the Hill,” a film Steven Soderbergh had done, and I was cast in it at 19. He’s a gentleman, he took me to dinner, we walked around downtown. I have seen all of Wes’s films since.ĪDRIEN BRODY Probably 2005, we met in New York. We went back to see it together and he concurred. I went home and told Joel there was somebody out there doing something familiar. IntroductionsįRANCES McDORMAND By chance, I saw “Bottle Rocket” by myself the day it opened in N.Y.C. The conversations have been edited some spoilers follow. In phone and email interviews from around the globe, his collaborators (including newbies Jeffrey Wright, who plays a James Baldwin-esque food writer, and Léa Seydoux, as a prison guard who models for an artist-inmate) spoke about inhabiting his inventive world together. He even likes verisimilitude in the extras: “I often employ people with their own pets in the background.” “What I like to do is go to a place and have us all live there and become a real local sort of production, like a little theater company - everything works better for me that way,” said Anderson, who lives in Paris. “The French Dispatch,” about writers at a midcentury magazine based on The New Yorker, is set in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé and was filmed in Angoulême, France. As soon as I had Bill Murray, I wanted him on the next one. “But as soon as Owen Wilson and I started making a movie, well, I wanted Owen to be involved with the other movies I would do. “I don’t know who gravitated toward whom,” Anderson said, in a voice message sent from the production of his 11th film, outside Madrid.
Along with his fastidious and vibrant visual sense and staccato pacing, his company of free spirits has become his signature. But Wes Anderson’s 10th movie, “The French Dispatch,” was made in much the same way, and with much the same cast, as many of the features that preceded it. It’s his first film set in France, and the first done as an anthology.