By James Mottram
The Phoenician Scheme actors Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera talk basketball, getting starstruck, meeting their heroes, and working with the enigmatic Wes Anderson.
When FilmInk joins several cast members in Cannes’ Marriott hotel to chat about Wes Anderson’s new movie, The Phoenician Scheme, one thing is clear. The writer-director behind The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel is about as secretive as some of his characters in this latest adventure, an exquisite-looking espionage yarn. Benicio del Toro, who plays a shady 1950s tycoon named Zsa-zsa Korda, recalls only getting twenty script pages initially. It was not a dissimilar experience to Anderson’s 2021 movie The French Dispatch, in which he was initially only sent his segment of that multi-pronged tale.
“When he told me he wanted me for this, I didn’t know if it was gonna be five stories or ten stories,” says the actor, “so I read the twenty pages, and it was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ He then says, ‘I’m gonna send you the next twenty.’” This kept happening, with del Toro only gradually learning that Korda was the lead, rather than being one tiny piece of a bigger mosaic. “Then I go, ‘Oh, my God, he’s still there!’ Now, this is like ‘Mayday! Mayday!’ This is a lot of work now! Then it became ‘May all your wishes come true.’”
Likewise, 24-year-old British actress Mia Threapleton knew nothing about her character – Korda’s estranged daughter, Liesl, a nun whom he entrusts his entire estate to – when she first auditioned. “There was no character description at all. Literally, all it said was ‘young girl’.” Her self-tape audition was scenes from Anderson’s canine animation Isle Of Dogs, and it was only much later that she got a recall, where she was set to audition with Anderson’s assistant, using “original material” that she was given just 45 minutes ahead of time.
The top-secret brief was eight pages from scene six in the film, where Zsa-zsa, Liesl and Bjorn – the curious-looking Norwegian tutor played by Michael Cera – all meet. “I knew that I had to pull as much information as I could out from these pages and really just try and understand as much as I could,” says Threapleton. “Because still, at that point, I knew nothing. So, it was there. Suddenly I had this little gem of shiny information.” Needless to say, the pages were taken off her straight afterwards.
Still, for Threapleton, it was a genuine dream come true to collaborate with Anderson. “This really did happen last week,” she reveals. “I was going through some boxes at home, and I found my old journals, and I found an entry…I think I was 13. It was written on the 12th of November 2013 and I wrote ‘Watching Moonrise Kingdom again. Bloody loved this film. Would love to work with Wes Anderson one day.’ I mean, I do really remember looking up at stars and really wishing that this could happen.”
Michael Cera, the American actor famed for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, was also a newbie to Wes’ world. Like Threapleton, he’d grown up loving Anderson. “Wes, to be honest, has been a huge influence on my general sensibility and my taste, because I discovered him as a kid, when everything is very formative. I saw The Royal Tenenbaums in the theatre and that was a discovery for me. I was, like, 11 or 12. I knew who Ben Stiller was, and Owen Wilson and Gene Hackman, but I didn’t know anything about Wes.”
Attending the showing with his mother, Cera was so taken with this familial saga – starring Hackman, Wilson and Stiller – that he immediately checked out Anderson’s earlier movie Rushmore. “And then I saw everything after. So, Wes is a North Star.” Several years later, Cera met Anderson, just at the time his 2007 breakout movie Superbad hit cinemas. “I think my agent somehow arranged a general meeting, and Wes was open to it. It was very friendly.” They stayed in touch, but it wasn’t until now that he was asked to join the ever-growing troupe of actors that Anderson employs.
Shot at Studio Babelsberg in Berlin – the famed German soundstages where Fritz Lang and many other greats have made movies – The Phoenician Scheme was filmed, like nearly all Anderson movies, with a communal spirit. The cast and crew would all live together and eat together. But with so much prep work to do, del Toro wasn’t always able to join. “I couldn’t be present at all these great dinners. I showed up for many of them, but not all of them, because I had to go back and get my beauty sleep!” he chuckles.
Del Toro’s research was widespread, from the Armenian multi-billionaire tycoon Calouste Gulbenkian to the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, as well as movies like Citizen Kane, with its media kingpin inspired by William Randolph Hearst. Anderson even had a library of DVDs for the actors to borrow and draw inspiration from. “I like DVDs,” smiles del Toro. “I myself have a little bit of an antiquated brain. I like vinyl. I like DVDs. You can touch them. And I feel that in a way, with Wes Anderson movies, you can touch them.”
This being an Anderson ensemble, the cast is insane. While Korda tries to repair his relationship with Liesl, he continues his quest to bankroll the titular infrastructure scheme. And so he courts Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston, playing industrial titans Reagan and Leland, and Riz Ahmed, as the Middle Eastern-born Prince Farouk. Then there’s Scarlett Johansson and Benedict Cumberbatch as weirdo relatives of Korda, Jeffrey Wright as a ship’s captain, and Mathieu Amalric as a fez-wearing nightclub owner. And, of course, Bill Murray as, er, God.
Given the actors on show, Threapleton did get star-stuck on occasions. “I did have a moment of going, ‘Oh, it’s Woody. Woody’s talking to me at dinner!’” she says, alluding to Hanks, who voiced the aforementioned cowboy in the Toy Story movies. Then there was Breaking Bad star Cranston. “Bryan also bumped into me and said, ‘Are you eating lunch with anyone? Do you want to go outside and eat lunch?’ And I thought, ‘Okay, it’s not Walter White. It’s Bryan Cranston. These are all your co-workers, Mia!’”
She did, at least, have a good handle on the story. “We meet Liesl and she has grown up in a convent and has not seen her father for six years. They have no relationship…and that’s how she’s ended up as the person that she is. And then we see Zsa-zsa and we also realise later on that that’s what happened to him as well. The way that he is, is a reflection of his own experiences. And then together, as they go through the story, their identities and their realisations about themselves as individuals change phenomenally, and they have an enormous impact on each other.”
Scripted by Anderson and his regular co-writer Roman Coppola, once again the theme of family is prominent in an Anderson movie. “So much is about the complexities, and the nuances of a parent-child relationship,” notes Threapleton. Her co-star agrees. “I love all the characters, and I like all the adventures and all these characters that come in and out,” says del Toro. “But I did like the arc of my character. And how you learn about him. He comes around and he learns and his conscience is sparked by the relationship with his daughter. It’s so rich.”
As is typical for an Anderson movie, the production design by Adam Stockhausen is utterly stunning. Their combined skills make for some jaw-dropping work. Take the opening credits sequence, an overhead shot of Korda in a beautiful bathroom as nurses and others fuss around him. But it wasn’t the easiest sequence to shoot, with Anderson wanting everyone to move at quick speed while he filmed the actions in slow motion.
“Wes goes, ‘I need you to work really fast.’ Everybody’s got to move fast – it’s choreographed like a dance,” says del Toro. “And I say to Wes, ‘You’re doing it in slow-motion? Just shoot it in normal speed.’ He says, ‘No, it’s going to be different!’ I think I was sitting in that bathtub for eight hours, and I really wanted to get it going. I looked like a prune! And when I see it, it’s different. It’s not real speed, it’s slow motion. But it’s just something special. As credits go, it’s one of the best, up there with Raging Bull, maybe.”
One of the most bizarre scenes comes as Korda must play basketball against Reagan, Leland and Farouk. Del Toro grew up in a neighbourhood where he’d bounce the ball on hard cement courts. “So the ball, when it hit the cement, it just was loud, it would echo.” He was much more impressed with the soft, near-silent clay courts that Berlin had. While everyone says that he was easily the best basketball player in the cast, del Toro is having none of it. “Tom Hanks had a good shot!” he grins. So, there you have it: Tom Hanks and Benicio del Toro, with hoop dreams of their own.
The Phoenician Scheme is in cinemas now.
