Wes Anderson talks 'The Phoenician Scheme,' Gene Hackman and his Cannes bus

CANNES, France -- CANNES, France (AP) — Wes Anderson isn’t driving the bus. Laurent is. That’s the name of the driver who’s bringing Anderson, and his bus, to the Cannes Film Festival.

As they drive from his home in Paris to the South of France, Anderson explains by phone: “I don’t drive the bus. You have to have, like, four years of training and an EU bus driver’s license. The thing is, if you’re going to drive a bus like this, you’ve got to be able to drive it in reverse, too.”

For years, Anderson has, in favor of the normal festival cars that shuttle guests, brought his own bus to Cannes so his whole cast can arrive together at the premiere. On Sunday, Anderson and company (including Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Scarlett Johansson and Bryan Cranston) will pile in for the premiere of Anderson’s latest, “The Phoenician Scheme.”

It’s another example of how Anderson has made something quite unusual into a regular tradition.

With remarkable regularity, Anderson has been crafting movies uniquely his own since his 1996 debut, “Bottle Rocket.” There are variations. Some are expansive family dramas ("The Royal Tenenbaums"). Some are more intimate ("Rushmore"). Some are more densely layered ("Asteroid City").

“The Phoenician Scheme,” a leaner tale which Focus Features will release May 30, is Anderson working in high comic gear. A playful and poignant kind of thriller, it stars Del Toro as the tycoon Zsa-Zsa Korda, who decides to name his daughter, a novitiate (Threapleton) heir to his dubiously accrued fortune.

The wheels keep turning for the 56-year-old Anderson. But there are signs of time passing, too. The Cinémathèque in Paris is hosting an Anderson retrospective, as well as an exhibition of props, costumes and artifacts from his expansive personal archive.

Anderson, who has a 9-year-old daughter with his wife, the costume designer Juman Malouf, spoke about those things and others on his way to Cannes to unveil “The Phoenician Scheme," a movie that adds yet another fitting mantra to the world of Wes: “What matters is the sincerity of your devotion.”

ANDERSON: We’ve been keeping this stuff for so long. The experience of doing it was kind of great. I’d sort of get pulled over there to approve things. And my reaction was, “Well, we have more stuff.” So we kept adding things. My daughter has lived with a lot of this stuff. The “Fantastic Mr. Fox” puppets have been in our apartment in New York ever since we made the movie in boxes. Over the years, she takes them out and plays with them.

ANDERSON: (Laughs) Jason, and Bill, have a way of catching you off guard with a turn of phrase. But I like that description. It’s kind of an amazing experience to have had Jason involved in our movies for so long given that he was 17 when I met him. It’s fun and a strange feeling. The decades have to elapse for you to have had that much time together. And it’s quite shocking that they do. But there it is.

ANDERSON: I didn’t have something I thought I wanted to communicate about what it’s like to be a father. The story really come out of an idea for Benicio and for this character. But I don’t think he would have had a daughter if I didn’t. That’s my hunch. He’s a special kind of a father, in all the worst ways. But nevertheless, there’s something we related to. That’s probably somewhere in the DNA of the movie.

ANDERSON: If I were to say what is the first idea of the movie, it is that face. It’s not an image of the setting, it’s an image of Benicio in a close-up as this character. His face is just so expressive and interesting. It’s a special advantage he has. He’s quite mesmerizing just looking at him on camera, his chemistry with the exposure of film. In “The French Dispatch,” there were electric moments on the set. But the electricity was amplified when we went back into the cutting room. The wheels started turning. When we showed “The French Dispatch” however many years ago in Cannes, I did mention to Benicio there, “Just be aware, there’s something else coming."

ANDERSON: Essentially, you’ve put your finger on the movies that were written for a specific actor, along with Jason in “Asteroid City.” Owen and I were talking about Gene Hackman by the time we had 10 pages of a script. Ralph was the idea for the character in “Grand Budapest” before there was even one page. But I never had one where I thought of someone in such a tight close-up. With this movie, somehow it’s the face and the eyes and the closest close-up.

ANDERSON: First of all, Gene Hackman, one of the greatest movie actors ever. He did enjoy the movie, I think, between action and cut. He said, “That’s when I have a good time.” But he really didn’t enjoy the parts in between, which is most of the time. He wasn’t wildly taken with the script in the first place. I don’t think he loved the idea of being that guy. I think he thought: “There’s a lot of things I don’t like about this man and I’m not sure I want to live as him.”

Also, I was very young. He was shy and reserved, though he could also get quite explosive. We didn’t know each other well. Sometimes, when we had conflict, we often had open conversations about what just happened. And I felt like I learned so much about him in those times. And he would often become much more gentle.

I don’t want to assume a great friendship because I don’t think he would have ever have referred to our relationship (laughs) in those terms. But I really liked him. He just carried so much tension and he used in the work, but it was sometimes bordering on a little abusive, especially to me. (Laughs)

ANDERSON: I think that’s the case sometimes. When he saw the movie, he told me, “I didn’t understand what we were making.” But he totally understood it when he saw the movie. It worked for him. He liked it, and I think he liked what he had done it. I later thought: I wish I had paused for three days of shooting, edited some of the scenes carefully and then shown him: Here’s what you’re doing and here’s what we’re doing. I think maybe if I had done that, we might have had a gentler time.

ANDERSON: The path that I’ve had as a movie director, I don’t know if that’s totally available right now. I don’t know if the kind of movies I started out making would have been made on the same scale or with the same support or with any audience available. To get to the point where I can make the movies I make I now, I just don’t know what route that would take. I think some things have changed fundamentally. But I’m not 25 years younger than myself, so I just do what I do.

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Jake Coyle has covered the Cannes Film Festival since 2012. He’s previously interviewed Wes Anderson in Cannes about “Asteroid City” and “The French Dispatch.”

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