‘The Phoenician Scheme’ Is Here, With Wes Anderson!

Sean and Amanda take a deep dive into one of their favorite directors' newest films: Wes Anderson’s ‘The Phoenician Scheme.’ They discuss the new themes Anderson tackles that he typically avoids, celebrate the phenomenal performances from Michael Cera and Mia Threapleton, and discuss how a second viewing can unlock a better understanding of the movie’s ideas (1:36). Then, for the first time in Big Picture history, Wes Anderson joins the show to discuss the movie, the connective tissue across his filmography, and how he experiments in new projects (50:37). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Wes Anderson Producer: Jack Sanders This episode is sponsored by State Farm. A State Farm agent can help you choose the coverage you need. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the brand new Zach Lowe Show. That's right, I'm back to have the same in-depth NBA conversations you're used to. We're going to talk about the games, the X's and O's, the drama. The playoffs are coming up and now you get to see every episode in full on video on Spotify and on my own YouTube channel. Episodes drop every Monday and Thursday with a collection of guests you're going to love. So make sure you follow and subscribe to the brand new Zach Lowe Show on Spotify or wherever you watch or listen to your podcasts. Let's go.

• 0:35Sean Fennessey?

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• 1:18Sean Fennessey?

  That's LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture. Terms and conditions apply.

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• 2:03Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessey.

• 2:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 2:05Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the Big Picture, a conversation show about Wes Anderson. On this episode, we will dive deep into The Phoenician Scheme, the latest film from Anderson, a portrait of an aging tycoon, his daughter, and the financial plot binding them together. Later in this episode, for the first time in Big Picture history, Wes Anderson joins me to talk about his work, this new movie, how having a family influenced his work. I'm very excited. I hope people will listen to our conversation. Wes is, of course, an icon to the big picture, so it was pretty cool.

• 2:37Amanda Dobbins?

  What, can you give me a preview of the fit?

• 2:39Sean Fennessey?

  A simply a white button down shirt, buttoned all the way to the top, a long collar.

• 2:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 2:46Sean Fennessey?

  And immaculately coiffed hair.

• 2:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Beautiful.

• 2:48Sean Fennessey?

  That was pretty much it.

• 2:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 2:49Sean Fennessey?

  We were on Zoom.

• 2:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 2:51Sean Fennessey?

  But it was, it was quite nice.

• 2:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Alright, that's great.

• 2:52Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, let's just do it. Let's just dig into The Phoenician Scheme.

• 2:55Amanda Dobbins?

  It's a holiday here.

• 2:56Sean Fennessey?

  It, it, yeah, I mean, his, his movies are very important to us. He may or may not figure into this project that we've been working on somewhere down the list.

• 3:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:06Sean Fennessey?

  I can't even remember.

• 3:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah, he does. But I like, I, my heart stopped for a moment. Spoiler alert, sorry. I was just like, oh, God, we forgot Wes. And then, no, no, it worked out.

• 3:14Sean Fennessey?

  We wouldn't.

• 3:14Amanda Dobbins?

  It's good.

• 3:14Sean Fennessey?

  Um, so it was exciting when he gets a new movie. This movie is a bit of the same, a bit different. And it's an interesting story. As I said, it is about a tycoon and aging businessman named Zsa Zsa Korda, um, who appoints his only daughter, who is a, an aspiring nun to be.

• 3:31Amanda Dobbins?

  A novitiate.

• 3:32Sean Fennessey?

  A novitiate, thank you. Uh, she's going to be the sole heir to his estate, despite the fact that he also has nine sons. Korda embarks on this new enterprise and they soon become the target of all of his rivals in the world of business and international espionage. And they, they go on some hijinks. You know, there's a lot of adventures. This is a very chapterized Wes Anderson movie, as they have been frankly forever. Incredible cast in this movie, which is often the case now in his, his movies. Benicio is the star. Michael Sarah is in this movie, Riza Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Matthew Almerich, uh, Richard Iawadi, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, and an actress I'd not seen before, Mia Threapleton, who is the daughter in the film. So.

• 4:16Sean Fennessey?

  I think we'll go pretty far in on this movie. It's a lot of movie to take in. You saw it last night. I saw it a second time with you last night. What'd you think of the Phoenician scheme?

• 4:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, just a really big time for you as a daughter of fathers. Really very exciting. Girl Dad Cinema has come to Wes Anderson. No, I loved it. Come on. I'm excited to talk to you about it because you've seen it twice. And as a result, some of your takeaways in this document are very different than mine. I found this movie to be extremely funny. And it, it to me like plays as a comedy with bigger ideas either going on or being gestured at, or there for the taking if you want them, but you can watch it as, as, as a caper. And it plays really well.

• 5:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I thought both Benicio del Toro and Mia Threapleton were lights out. As I'm like, they have to be because it is about them. It is, it is, it's not a two-hander. It has everyone that you just mentioned, but like they carry the story. And I think this role was written for Benicio del Toro.

• 5:20Sean Fennessey?

  It was.

• 5:20Amanda Dobbins?

  And he is amazing.

• 5:23Sean Fennessey?

  I think this is the best part he's had in a long time. Maybe since Sicario.

• 5:27Amanda Dobbins?

  And, you know, as with like all Wes Anderson things that there it's, there's a lot going on in the frame and it's like highly designed and deadpan and funny. And then also, you know, if you're on his frequency, like very soulful and there's a lot of longing, bad dads grief, all that. So like a lot of there, it was, in some ways it was seeing all the Wes Anderson furniture, like rearranged in a new way. And I don't mean that as a detriment. I mean that as like it's

• 5:59Sean Fennessey?

  Such beautiful furniture.

• 5:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, it's beautiful furniture and it's also like you enter his world. And it's like, okay, what, like, what are we talking about this time? And, and how are we going to do it? And, and how is it going to make us feel? And I find that exhilarating. So I'm a huge fan.

• 6:15Sean Fennessey?

  You could say that this started with the Grand Budapest Hotel, but for me, the last three films now. The French Dispatch, Astrid City and this film, I had the same viewing experience the first time, which is that I was immediately comfortable. I, I think that this, the kind of, the color and the design of his worlds and the way that he frames them literarily, the acting style, I'm, I'm on board with all of it. A lot of people are not on board with it at this point, and that's fine. But if you're on board with it, you're happy. But I found myself trying to catch my breath to keep up with the pace and the amount of character and story that he's jamming into these movies. And his movies are one hour and 40 minutes, essentially. They're not these kind of epics. And so, the first time I saw this film, I

• 6:59Sean Fennessey?

  really enjoyed myself, but I wasn't sure that I could really get my arms around it thematically. I laughed at all the jokes. I do agree that there's a great, a lot of physical comedy and a lot of violence focused comedy in this movie, which is a new flavor for him. But the second time I saw it, I was like, this is a huge thematic film. Same thing with Astrid City. We talked about it with Astrid City, where it's like, you watch the first time, it's a ton going on, there's a lot of familiar faces, expansive new world, intergalactic story. And the second time you watch it, you're like, this is a very simple story about longing and regret and the inability to connect with people. This movie was the same thing for me the second time I saw it. I was like, this is a very deep story. This is barely shaded autobiography at times about relationships in his life.

• 7:43Sean Fennessey?

  Film is dedicated to his father-in-law, Fuad Malouf, and the Benicio character is clearly, in some ways, modeled on him. His father-in-law was a Lebanese businessman who had a kind of grand stature. And I would say Benicio has that, but also has this like, self-undermining quality to him because of the relationship with his daughter, which is a very profound feeling when you have a daughter. I talked to Wes about that. He said Roman Coppola, his co-writer on the movie, has that.

• 8:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's palpable.

• 8:13Sean Fennessey?

  It's a, it's a thing. You are the daughter of a father.

• 8:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. But, but it like, even in the movie, it's, you know, and it's, the, I think you started with French Dispatch, because French Dispatch, Astrid City, and now this movie are almost like, kind of nesting dolls in, in their form.

• 8:29Sean Fennessey?

  It is like a new trilogy.

• 8:30Amanda Dobbins?

  There's a story within a story within a story, and there are, and the way that you're learning about things, you know, has had like, the literal, you know, frameworks, like sometimes as a painting that he wants to put on things in, in movies. But there is, there is so much going on, and they're not different storylines, but.

• 8:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Different frameworks, for lack of a different word. But this is also, in spite of all that, like, really just a father and a daughter. And it can be about geopolitics, and it can be about the Bible, and it can be about regret, and like, it is about all those things, but it is very purely, at the end, just him trying to figure out his relationship with this young woman, and it is, I think, really affecting and lovely in that way.

• 9:16Sean Fennessey?

  I agree. I was quite moved by it, like I said, especially the second time that I saw it. We should talk about each of those things that you located, because I think they're all right. I think all of those ideas are in the movie. I do think that this movie, unlike the previous two, while it does have a series of stacked frameworks on top of each other, and all of these chapter headings, and this actual scheme that you're kind of like mathematically following as the movie goes along, it's very linear.

• 9:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 9:40Sean Fennessey?

  It's not, "Let's go back to the old framework that we were setting you up with, with the story inside the story," or the TV show that is presenting the play that we were writing to get us to the story, or "Let's go back to this article that was written some years ago that reflects the inner life of the journalist that we're talking about. This is the story about a man and his daughter, and what is going to happen to the future of his business and this plot that he has."

• 10:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 10:01Sean Fennessey?

  And that's pretty much it. And the movie that it reminds me of the most in his career is The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

• 10:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 10:08Sean Fennessey?

  So, Life Aquatic, also a father and a son story, but in this extravagant, elaborate world, that is a mission story. It is like a road movie, an adventure story, where you're kind of going from one place to another to accomplish something together and figure out how these two people who have been estranged, this is, again, a story of estrangement, can be reunited emotionally. And even when I was talking to Wes, I was thinking about how like, my opinion on Darjeeling Limited has kind of changed a lot over the years, and I really didn't get it and like it. And I thought like, it was like, over for me and Wes Anderson when I saw that movie. And I thought Steve's, Life Aquatic was like, the best movie ever when I saw it, and I've kind of gotten further away from it.

• 10:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Those are both like deep 20-something feelings also, by the way.

• 10:48Sean Fennessey?

  They are. But that's such a misanthropic movie, and I didn't think that that was really in his spirit at all. I've come to understand life and his work very differently over time. But Life Aquat-- that movie's a long time ago.

• 10:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Sean Fennessey?

  And the fact that he can do all these new things with this new turn to violence, this, honestly, I thought genuinely political point of view that the movie has about the way that power operates in the world, but also-- Still be able to return to these core themes and feelings that have been defining his work for the last 25, 30 years.

• 11:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 11:19Sean Fennessey?

  It's like, that, that to me is like the stuff of a great artist, you know, that he is someone who knows how to be forward looking and also be connected to the past stories that he's told. And so I think, I don't want to be too defensive about the like, West needs to find a new slant or whatever conversation around this movie. But there are some people who are like, I'm a little sick of the diorama approach. And I'm going the other way now with him where I'm like, go further and go deeper, like push harder, find something else that is even weirder than what you're doing right now.

• 11:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Wait, he is just such a singular filmmaker and especially to our generation. It's like, you know, you're in a West movie one second in, and I, I think very few filmmakers like, kind of have, have that buy-in. Where they have managed to create an entire film language, or you know, very few filmmakers of our generation. So like, just keep doing it, like keep, you know, making your own little worlds. I was going to make some sort of like video game reference, but I don't play video games, but it does seem like, you know, that my understanding of it is like, you create this other space. And just like, keep going, what else can you find?

• 12:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 12:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And I, and I'm, once you've bought the ticket into the space, which I have, I'm like, I'm good, I'm with, I'm with you.

• 12:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think there, there is obviously an opportunity for him creatively to do slightly different things without abandoning what he, the worlds that he has created. Like I think of Hotel Chevalier, the short film.

• 12:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Sean Fennessey?

  Attached to D'Argio Unlimited where it's like tonally, that's a very kind of like sad, angry French film. Inside of an American adventure story about brothers. This movie, it looks a lot like the pageantry of Asteroid City and French Dispatch. But I, I'm trying to like figure out like, what is it that makes it so meaningfully different to me, aside from that linear quality? I think some of it is like.

• 13:12Sean Fennessey?

  It's anticness is really, really high energy. The movie opens with a plane crash and before the plane crash, there's a violent explosion.

• 13:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Sean Fennessey?

  On a plane.

• 13:25Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true, but it's like.

• 13:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's like, it's like Looney Tunes.

• 13:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's Wes Anderson violent. It's like paper mache, you know? It's, it's, it's beautiful and funny and also definitely you see one half of a person's body.

• 13:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 13:36Amanda Dobbins?

  At the end of it.

• 13:37Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I think that there's, the decision is really fun and it makes it, I think that people would accuse some of his movies of being cartoons, but this one's actually closer to being a cartoon in terms of the execution across the board. Like there's a moment that I clocked immediately after the plane crash early in the movie, where all of the items that are on the plane are sort of scattered in a cornfield. And Penista del Toro's character is always reading and there are all of these books. There's these sort of like nonfiction guides to flowers and insects and ancient civilizations.

• 14:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, they're, they're all like classical and many of them are art texts as well.

• 14:14Sean Fennessey?

  Which is kind of dovetails neatly with this theme that is going throughout the movie of the kind of the great works and then who has access to the great works. There's a very memorable title sequence in the movie in which after surviving a plane crash, we're told it's his sixth plane crash that, that Ja Ja Corda has survived, that he has tended to in his, in a bathtub and all his servants are surrounding him. It's an overhead shot.

• 14:38Amanda Dobbins?

  It's great. It's the title sequence.

• 14:40Sean Fennessey?

  The title sequence is very cool. Um, and all of these nurses are tending to him and he's smoking a cigar and being patched up and I guess he's in sort of like a milk bath, like a salt milk bath. And Stravinsky is playing.

• 14:56Amanda Dobbins?

  And he's giving scrambled eggs and champagne.

• 14:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And so he's like wounded and living the good life. And it's like that perfect contrast of this is a man of high taste who's like a real motherfucker. He's a rapscallion and is, why is he doing these things? And is he doing them for the right reasons? And can we like get emotionally invested in rooting for this guy to succeed? But you know, it's, it's intoxicating when someone who might not be such a good person has great taste and kind of knows what the like, the greatness of the world can be.

• 15:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is like the Wes Anderson, like archetype of all, you know, I like bad dad for lack of a better word. Though I guess they are technically by our parenting textbook standards, all bad dads. But I don't even think for a minute. The movies love them from the very beginning. And so you, as an audience member, whether it's Royal Tenenbaum, or whether it's, you know, whatever Bill Murray character you want, including in this one, God. And, literally.

• 15:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. A vengeful trickster god, played by Bill Murray.

• 16:03Amanda Dobbins?

  These, these older men, these authority figures, who have not always done the appropriate thing, but, you know, glide through the world with such panache, that you would just want to be closer to them.

• 16:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I like the way that he frames

• 16:19Sean Fennessey?

  the sort of like unease that he has around his daughter. Because very quickly after he survives this plane crash, he brings her back into his life. She's studying as a novitiate to be a nun, and he wants her to be the heir. And he has to kind of just convince her to drop God. And this is happening simultaneous to these visions that he starts having in the film.

• 16:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 16:38Sean Fennessey?

  And there's a completely different kind of filmmaking style, black and white, different aspect ratio. And you see that Benicio, maybe because he's just had too much brain trauma, that he is starting to confront his mortality, almost literally amongst the tribunal of faith.

• 16:55Amanda Dobbins?

  And I mean, it's, it sort of looks like the pearly gates. You know, like, there is some sort of like dais, where various religious authority figures.

• 17:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham.

• 17:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Sherlock Gainsborough at some point, you know, they're all, and they're all, and they're very solemn. And it like, definitely, there's a trial aspect to it. So I just assumed it was kind of, I almost took it, it's like, because he's died six times. And it's sort of like, you know, like each time, you almost make it in, and then, and then kind of, what was the discussion before you get sent back?

• 17:28Sean Fennessey?

  And so, you know, this movie, which is about this father and daughter and their relationship, and it's about this, this man trying to achieve this mission, is also really like a movie about mortality and facing death. You know, and that being on Wes's mind is really interesting. Obviously, it's not the first time he's addressed the subject, but maybe not so literally, where you've got a guy confronting physically the prospect of going into the afterlife.

• 17:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. I mean, characters have died. And also, like, Asteroid City is very much about grief. But it's from this, you know, it's from the people, perspective of the people left behind.

• 18:00Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 18:01Amanda Dobbins?

  As opposed to this, which is the main character. Kind of dancing with it.

• 18:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and I think it's also a movie that like made by a middle aged guy thinking about the decisions he's made up until this point, you know, like the big part of the movie is Zsa Zsa being forced to try to remember what happened. For example, like it's like one of the key disputes between he and his daughter is that it's believed that Zsa Zsa killed her mother.

• 18:27Amanda Dobbins?

  They say.

• 18:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 18:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Whoever they, whatever their names, so I can sue them for libel.

• 18:31Sean Fennessey?

  Great memory, great moment in the movie.

• 18:34Amanda Dobbins?

  It's really, it's a very funny movie, yeah.

• 18:37Sean Fennessey?

  And this idea that like Zsa Zsa almost like can't remember the details of what happened to his wives and lovers over time, or like he's kind of shading the truth in that way that powerful people sometimes do, where it'll be like, it'll be like a hard denial.

• 18:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:51Sean Fennessey?

  And then a vague comment connected to that denial that is just a very observant piece of writing. And then there's, I'm reluctant to be like this movie is about Donald Trump because it's not about Donald Trump.

• 19:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Sean Fennessey?

  It's not specifically about the American president right now, but there is a kind of mode of leadership that is happening in the world. I asked Wes about this, he more or less confirmed it.

• 19:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:18Sean Fennessey?

  That is like, these people kind of get away with whatever they want and they're like lie all the way to the end and they hurt people and it kind of usually works out for them. Sometimes it doesn't, but for the most part it does. And this is the way that the world works, deal with it. Even though it's an antic madcap fun, also sentimental drama, it does have a bit of that in it. What did you make of that part of it?

• 19:38Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I, the Trump stuff did not jump out to me, but that's probably willful at this point. I'm, you know, blocking it wherever possible. It is obviously politically engaged as well as also there is a lot of religion in this as well, which I thought was interesting and I like want to talk about because those are two things that he doesn't typically confront, like.

• 19:59Sean Fennessey?

  It's true.

• 19:59Amanda Dobbins?

  In text, like using the words.

• 20:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yep. Politics and faith and even capitalism are not really like big focuses of his work.

• 20:07Amanda Dobbins?

  And there are, there are some images in the Bible, the Bible scenes that are clearly very much engaged with just like money and, and how it works. And so I think.

• 20:21Amanda Dobbins?

  I think I did grab parallels to The World Now, but for me, because this is like a retro, you know, as all Wes Anderson films are, they're set like in another world, 50s to 70s, that is a better version of the one that existed, but also still like has all of the problems.

• 20:40Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:41Amanda Dobbins?

  And.

• 20:42Sean Fennessey?

  Very well put.

• 20:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, because it's set in the 50s, I thought it was more a little bit like this is, this is both how it is and how it's always been.

• 20:50Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, if, if, if there's any sense of that. So I didn't immediately tie it to present like headlines specifically, which was a, a great relief and reprieve, but, um, but yeah, I did feel that sense of commenting on, on the way the world works and the way that certain people luck into things or, or, or take things. And then, and then everyone else who was left behind as a result.

• 21:19Sean Fennessey?

  Movie is also a showcase for a person that I'm sure most people who are watching it must have thought to themselves, surely Michael Sarah has been in 10 Wes Anderson movies and he's never been in a Wes Anderson movie, even though in some ways he is sort of the prototype or the Wes Anderson performance style. I'll say this really lived up to my expectations of Michael Sarah in a Wes Anderson movie. Um, I think he's incredibly funny in this film. He's presented in the film as a tutor and is it an entomologist? Etymologist? What is the study? Someone who studies bugs?

• 21:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Entomology, entomologist sounded right, but let's, yeah. Entomologist studies insects. Bingo.

• 21:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Born in Oslo. His name is Bjorn. He's, he's, he's doing that accent.

• 22:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 22:04Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, all the way through, uh, dressed and styled hilariously, often in crushed velvets and corduroys. And he's got a swoop of curly blond dyed hair. Um, and he perhaps unsurprisingly falls in love with Zsa Zsa's daughter.

• 22:21Sean Fennessey?

  And he's given a lot to do in this movie.

• 22:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Who's named Liesl, by the way, and like there, there is a whole Sound of Music. There, there are several references in which I appreciate.

• 22:32Sean Fennessey?

  Did you see her Swiss passport?

• 22:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, of course. And like, her name's Liesl. Yeah, like, like, you know, that's the daughter. Anyway.

• 22:38Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I really liked Michael Sarah. I, I hope this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship for he and Wes. Apparently they met each other 20 years ago and just never got around to getting together, even though he's been working with every other actor that is like him in that time.

• 22:54Sean Fennessey?

  And yeah, let's talk about Mia Threapleton. Um, so this is Kate Winslet's daughter.

• 22:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Which ones you know it is unmistakable.

• 23:01Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't know it until I last night after I saw the movie.

• 23:04Amanda Dobbins?

  The second time.

• 23:05Sean Fennessey?

  Twice. Wow. I didn't know. And I, in my head, I thought to myself, Threapleton, that's a familiar name. I remember. There was, there is a Jim Threapleton. I didn't, I was kind of putting it together, but when I was watching the movie, no, but exactly what you just said is how I felt, which is I read it and I was like, oh. Yeah, fuck yeah, it is. That like so clearly is the performance style, the tone of her voice, the sort of like the gravity that she has as a performer. It's unmistakable.

• 23:28Amanda Dobbins?

  And I don't mean to take anything away from her. She's like amazing in it and holding her own against this like just absolutely.

• 23:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Like charismatic Benicio del Toro, just not scene eating, like scenery eating, but like energy eating.

• 23:45Sean Fennessey?

  He holds the screen.

• 23:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he's a real star.

• 23:48Amanda Dobbins?

  And she, she is funny. She's got the timing. She has the real presence, which, and like, she has the Kate Winslet presence and also kind of the, like the jawline. So, so when you know, you can really see it, but it is, um, it, it's uncanny in like the best way when you understand, because she, she clearly has the same thing that makes Kate Winslet a great actor.

• 24:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I really, I mean, her chemistry with both Sarah and Del Toro is really impressive. Two extremely seasoned actors. She had appeared in a couple of things prior to this, but I never clocked her before. She's also wearing the nun's habit the whole time.

• 24:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 24:25Sean Fennessey?

  Or the officiant's habit the whole time.

• 24:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Then she has sort of like Prince Valiant hair.

• 24:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, we, we see her hair in a couple of small moments.

• 24:35Sean Fennessey?

  And the movie itself, once we've kind of established this journey that they need to go on to develop the literal Phoenician scheme, where there's going to be the construction of, so here's the thing about these movies.

• 24:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Sean Fennessey?

  There is a plot and the plot.

• 24:48Amanda Dobbins?

  It, it happened.

• 24:49Sean Fennessey?

  Sort of matters.

• 24:50Amanda Dobbins?

  It happened so fast. And in voice, who was doing the voiceover? It was a name, it was a voice that you had recognized, but now I've forgotten.

• 24:59Sean Fennessey?

  I genuinely can't even remember.

• 24:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Or maybe it was newsreels. Anyway, it happened so fast that I had the moment, like seven minutes and I was like, oh, fuck. I just missed the setup of the Phoenician scheme. I'm like, oh, God, how am I, so I appreciated that then, I like, the, the chapter breakdowns, and I guess the, the things that people find annoying were very helpful to me in a basic, okay, so now we're going to see this character and now we're, it's like earmarks along the way of where this story is going because I didn't understand, I, what was the Phoenician scheme? It was like a dam and also a train.

• 25:34Sean Fennessey?

  It looks like it's a, an attempt to build.

• 25:36Amanda Dobbins?

  A giant public works project.

• 25:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, well, I don't know, but not public, probably private.

• 25:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 25:40Sean Fennessey?

  In conjunction with the, you know, royal king of Phoenicia.

• 25:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Of lower something Phoenicia.

• 25:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 25:49Amanda Dobbins?

  They specified.

• 25:50Sean Fennessey?

  It, it is an attempt to, to build a giant structure that makes an enormous amount of money for these international industrialists. That's what's a movie about international industrialists, which doesn't sound very appealing on paper and yet is incredibly amusing. And so the journey that he has to go on is to kind of continue to raise these funds to accomplish this scheme, which seems like a fairly faulty plan. And then along the way, we find that Zsa Zsa is relatively untrustworthy businessman, someone who is constantly fiddling with it, as they say throughout the movie, changing the, the parameters of each deal.

• 26:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Friend and his, his band of faceless bureaucrats also were fiddling with it.

• 26:30Sean Fennessey?

  Dramatically undermining him because of the bashable rivets and the way that they have shifted their value in the marketplace.

• 26:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Of course, normal.

• 26:37Sean Fennessey?

  It's really funny that he keeps building out these really ornate stratagems around the movies, but that the movies themselves like don't, they don't even need that, you know what I mean? By the time he gets to the end of the movie, like, did it work or did it not work?

• 26:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 26:48Sean Fennessey?

  That's not really the point of, what matters is the relationships and the way that you feel about the characters.

• 26:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Because it matters a little bit in this one.

• 26:56Sean Fennessey?

  It does, but the outcome, you sort of feel like they would have gotten to that place, no matter whether it had worked or not, that the relationship is what ultimately was most, most under threat and that preserving it and protecting it was what mattered. So it does lead to this kind of episodic series of encounters with various people along the way. We start with Prince Farouk, played by Riz Ahmed, that invariably leads to a meeting with the Sacramento Boys, portrayed by Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks. This then leads to a basketball sequence. I never expected to see a basketball sequence in a Wes Anderson movie, but it's there. They are literally playing horse, two on two.

• 27:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 27:37Sean Fennessey?

  Benicio and Riz Ahmed versus Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks. Now, I'm not entirely sure any of these four men have ever played basketball before, based on their performances. Tom Hanks got the closest, I thought.

• 27:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. That is built into, quite literally, the writing of Riz Ahmed's character.

• 27:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. He is like, I don't know this game.

• 27:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. But it's, I don't think it's supposed to be like the Olympics, you know?

• 28:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's not, but they are, you know, they've got their Stanford sweatshirts, you know?

• 28:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, the styling is really funny.

• 28:05Sean Fennessey?

  It's very good. I love the sequence that leads them to this meeting.

• 28:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Tom Hanks is in Pepperdine.

• 28:09Sean Fennessey?

  Is he?

• 28:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 28:10Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, good. You know, when I was a kid, I wanted to go to Pepperdine. I don't even really know why, other than I knew it was on the coast of California.

• 28:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Really? It just has some of the most impressive real estate that you can have.

• 28:18Sean Fennessey?

  It's a beautiful campus. I can't say much about the school. It's a, it is also a...

• 28:22Amanda Dobbins?

  It is a religious, I think.

• 28:23Sean Fennessey?

  Jesuit.

• 28:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Jesuit, yes.

• 28:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, it is a Jesuit university. And I love the sequence that leads to them. Obviously, there's like this assassination attempt, one of many assassination attempts on Ja Ja during the course of the film. They race through the desert, they get into this train tunnel, they take the, I don't know what those little cars are, where you...

• 28:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah, I don't know either, but yeah.

• 28:45Sean Fennessey?

  Anyway, they're on the train, they find the way to the end of the stop, coming in the opposite direction is the train that brings Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston. And the only way to solve their financial dispute is a game of horse. They play horse, and it's incredibly amusing. While they're playing horse, Liesl and Bjorn sparks are starting to fly whilst drinking beer. And...

• 29:11Sean Fennessey?

  I'm trying to think of like, you know, the Bill Simmons line of conversation on this would be like, who are the Sacramento boys? Like which NBA players are there right now? You know, like they're, they're giving me a little bit of Tyrese Halliburton and Aaron Neesmith. You know, and I say that with not a lot of affection, given where we are with in the Knicks Pacers series.

• 29:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 29:27Sean Fennessey?

  Like by the time this comes out.

• 29:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's okay. I.

• 29:35Sean Fennessey?

  We won last night.

• 29:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I saw, I watched most of it. Um, I don't, I saw Halliburton do that thing in game one and I don't think he has the swag. So.

• 29:43Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you for saying that out loud. I appreciate it.

• 29:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I wish you guys well.

• 29:46Sean Fennessey?

  It's probable the Knicks have been eliminated.

• 29:48Amanda Dobbins?

  By the time.

• 29:49Sean Fennessey?

  And the Pacers are in the finals. If that's not the case.

• 29:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 29:53Sean Fennessey?

  Let this stand as a monument to greatness forevermore, this conversation. So we, we see the encounter between these two guys that quickly then leads to, um, they don't quite get the financial compensation that they need.

• 30:06Amanda Dobbins?

  They get some of it. They get 15%. So there's a, that's another like helpful signpost, right? And we're just, it's, it's some easy math also. You just gotta get to a hundred.

• 30:14Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 30:15Amanda Dobbins?

  And they're just counting the percentages of how much they get to cover the gap. I still don't really understand what the gap is. But I, I guess it's how much they.

• 30:23Sean Fennessey?

  Tell you what, I don't either.

• 30:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. All right.

• 30:24Sean Fennessey?

  Even though I've seen it twice.

• 30:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I think it's something about how the price of the rivets went up.

• 30:29Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:29Amanda Dobbins?

  And so then everything's going to cost more.

• 30:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 30:32Amanda Dobbins?

  But Florida doesn't want to put in more money. So he needs the other people too.

• 30:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's related to those kind of resolution of the movie, which I find to be just a little bit silly. But anyway, eventually they, they go to visit Marseille Bob, played by Matthew Almaric. Um, and then we meet Richard Iawati's kind of revolutionary character who comes into the movie. And we go on and on. Eventually we get to Jeffrey Wright's character, who's another industrialist.

• 30:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 30:53Sean Fennessey?

  Who's building a great ship and a great port.

• 30:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:56Sean Fennessey?

  And eventually we get to cousin Hilda, Scarlett Johansson's character.

• 31:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 31:00Sean Fennessey?

  She is a second cousin of Zsa Zsa and maybe a prospective wife.

• 31:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 31:05Sean Fennessey?

  In an effort to draw out more funds, but also maybe not. And maybe there is.

• 31:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I didn't really know.

• 31:11Sean Fennessey?

  Romantic connections, sort of not Scarlett Johansson. Yeah. You're always kind of a coin flip on ScarJo. What'd you think in her, about her in this?

• 31:16Amanda Dobbins?

  She just wasn't in it very much. I didn't really know what was going on with Hilda.

• 31:20Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 31:21Amanda Dobbins?

  And the, and the her utopia, which just seemed like a, like a kibitz or something, right?

• 31:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yes. I think that's right.

• 31:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, but we didn't spend a lot of time there and it didn't seem to materially affect how anyone turned out.

• 31:34Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, that ultimately leads to the big, the big showdown.

• 31:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Sean Fennessey?

  Right?

• 31:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 31:39Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I'm, I'm forgetting this, the, the quicksand. I mean, there's a quicksand in this movie. You know, there's a jungle, there's another plane crash, there's a jungle adventure.

• 31:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:47Sean Fennessey?

  So many things happen, which is why I think this like overload of story is such a fascinating choice. And eventually there's a big showdown with the long threatened brother Newbar. Who is Ben, uh, Benicio del Toro's half brother portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch. He may also be materially involved in the life and death of Liesel and Liesel's mother. And then there's a big showdown at the end of the movie. Uh, Benedict Cumberbatch maybe only should be in Wes Anderson movies is one of, one of my takes.

• 32:19Amanda Dobbins?

  He's so great.

• 32:19Sean Fennessey?

  Great in the final five minutes of this movie. Very, very good. I'm always a little bit iffy on him.

• 32:25Amanda Dobbins?

  The roses, you know, they released that poster or something and I was like, oh, okay. This is, you guys thought you had something different.

• 32:33Sean Fennessey?

  Does the War of the Roses have a big place in your heart?

• 32:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Not a big place, but it's a very useful reference point in films and in, and in life. And I enjoyed doing the rewatchables with Bill and Mallory on that divorce kids time. Um, anyway, that's Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, two actors I like and circumstances I'm not sure about. And this is a circumstance I'm sure about. So I agree with you.

• 32:58Sean Fennessey?

  He's wonderful. And then there's a dramatic conclusion to this movie, as there are for all of them. Um, and yeah, the first time I watched it, like I said, I had a little bit of a, I didn't have a hard time following the story, but I felt like I was only following the story. I wasn't thinking about the movie.

• 33:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 33:13Sean Fennessey?

  As much and kind of what it means and what it represents and kind of like vaguely subterranean ways he tries to throw ideas into it. I also felt like, I don't know how much you've been reading about the movie since you saw it last night, but I feel like one, he's been just doing more press and been talking about it more. And because there's so many more themes, he's been sort of forced to answer questions about some of these things. And he's usually a little bit circumspect about the intention of the movie. And he's not, while he's not locating it specifically, he cast his daughter in this movie. She has a small role in the movie, you know, the idea of the father, daughter relationship being so important, but then also wending that in with. The way the power operates in the 21st century.

• 33:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 33:53Sean Fennessey?

  Is such a, it's just an interesting stew, I would say, for him.

• 33:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. The, the, all of the Bible stuff stuck out to me.

• 34:01Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:01Amanda Dobbins?

  And they do say, they say like biblical multiple times, like they actually use that word as kind of like a, a chorus. To draw your attention to, to those scenes and to, to some of what it's trying to explore.

• 34:16Sean Fennessey?

  And I think because of where, you know, the story is, is located, like the Venetian scene, like being in the Middle East, being in that part of the world where a lot of those stories are born is also a factor there too. And sort of like locating, you know, the fact that Zsa Zsa is kind of obsessed with history and ancient civilizations. And like all the erotic texts that he is reading related to those times. And constantly thinking about like patrons and great businessmen and the people who sought power and gained power.

• 34:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 34:40Sean Fennessey?

  Across the arc of history.

• 34:41Amanda Dobbins?

  He lives in like a Venetian palazzo in the UK.

• 34:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 34:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 34:46Sean Fennessey?

  Which had been converted and was built in 1545. You know, most of the music in the film, the Stravinsky music and all the paintings are all 17th century paintings, you know? It's just a film that's like firmly rooted in real histories.

• 35:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Sean Fennessey?

  Um, that is unmistakable. And I was like, I can barely like get two dumb pod episodes out a week. And this is now four movies in five years and the movies are packed.

• 35:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Sean Fennessey?

  They're dense. And I know he's got his team and he's, you know, Adam Stockhausen, the production designers on all of these movies. This one is actually quite interesting because Bruno Del Benel is the cinematographer and it's his first time working on a West movie. I think it's the first West movie that Robert Yeoman didn't shoot. So Robert Yeoman is going to be 75 years old. He's been working on these movies forever. I think maybe he was just on another movie or something. But it didn't, I didn't sense like a dramatic visual shift.

• 35:41Amanda Dobbins?

  No, there, there were a few shots that I thought were interesting that were just kind of. Not the one person center in the in the frame and and some use of the horizons in like different ways that were that were new and and interesting.

• 35:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah, I you're right. I think that that like a little bit less focus on the into into camera portrait shot.

• 36:05Amanda Dobbins?

  There's plenty of it, but it, you know, at this point in West, when you see a different composition, you're like, oh, I've never seen you do that before. Or oh, you've, you know, tilted it like this.

• 36:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I I had the same experience. I I asked him about that, too. I was kind of like, I feel like you were still trying to like experiment a little bit, like the aspect ratio is changing a couple of times and it looks a little bit different than what you had done before. And I think also the fact that he's able to build all of this plot around story, but not lose sight of the relationships is just it's just very rare. You know, there's just not a lot of filmmakers, I think, that are capable of consistently achieving that. I don't know that this is this isn't the best Wes Anderson movie. I think most people will regard this as like kind of like Midwest or minor West, but I would encourage everyone, if they're a fan of his films, just go back a second time, the way that I did, the way I imagine you will, and keep discovering.

• 37:01Sean Fennessey?

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• 38:11Amanda Dobbins?

  What I liked about this is that it is so dense, not just in terms of theme and story, but you know, just stuff, references, the rest of it all. But there is a simplicity to it that I don't really think you got in Asteroid City because that has like eight different main characters. And, and this is a story of two people. So I think in some ways you can wrap your arms around it a bit more the first time and then you can go back and go into it. I don't know if that, the fact that it's like about two people's issues as opposed to 15 makes it like minor or whatever. I did, this is a comedy and in as much as it is about everything that we just said

• 38:51Amanda Dobbins?

  in a way that Asteroid City is like one of the most deeply, I guess, it's not a tragedy, but it's, it's, and it is, can be funny, but it is about matters of the heart in like a very, very.

• 39:05Sean Fennessey?

  Exactly.

• 39:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And French Dispatch is sort of like an intellectual exercise. So I, I put it more in the French Dispatch category in terms of like the, the Anderson canon, but I do, it's a neat trilogy that he has going on that I, that I think is interesting. And it, and like, and it's fun to watch. Like this is an enjoyable movie.

• 39:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I agree with you. I think, so he's apparently already at work on a new film that he's writing with Richard Iwati and I think Roman Coppola. And he's got this unique thing where he's not.

• 39:43Sean Fennessey?

  The Russo Brothers insofar as like that communicates like $300 million budgets, but he just sort of knows how to make these movies. He has a kind of assembly line quality. It's most of the same artisans and craftspeople who work across all the same movies. He has this production style where they write the movie. He talks to the storyboard artist and then they start building the animatics. So they know what the movie is going to look like and the way that it's going to like, you know, play out once they shoot it. And so as long as he maintains that kernel of inspiration on every project, like he could just do this for 30 more years, you know? Like the person that he reminds me of is Woody Allen, you know? Where Woody Allen, every year and a half was like, here's another thing.

• 40:27Sean Fennessey?

  It's kind of like the last thing, but if it's a good version of it, it's going to be deep and interesting.

• 40:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 40:32Sean Fennessey?

  And obviously Woody Allen, definitely a major influence on Wes in a variety of ways, but maybe not as much visually. And then the other thing too is like the sort of like Bergman and Fellini types that Wes has like celebrated the European Masters over the years, where they both made like 25, 35, 40 movies.

• 40:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 40:49Sean Fennessey?

  And you're watching them and you know that it's like the same series of kind of setups and obsessions, and they have this troupe of actors that return over and over again. But each one has like just tilted a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right in terms of what it's most interested in or what has happened in the artist's life that they're then filtering into the film. These, these kinds of careers are super rare.

• 41:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you read this movie at all as a movie about filmmaking? Did it, did it?

• 41:17Sean Fennessey?

  Well, tell me what you mean. No.

• 41:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, it's about a guy who has an impossible task and he's got to wrangle money and resources from a lot of different people who, and maybe he is not the most trustworthy, but neither are they. And then there is like a faceless set of bureaucrats who send a spy, AKA producer, to watch over him. And then all he really needs is his little troupe, his family, and then the nine boys, you know, just like which, and then there's that line about.

• 41:49Sean Fennessey?

  The electricians, yeah.

• 41:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, there's the, the line about why does he keep adopting? And it's like, I play the numbers, you know? One of them has to be on it, which is if you think about it in terms of filmmaking is very funny. I don't know. It's, I mean, it was right there. Like it doesn't really seem like filmmaking is that complicated to Wes Anderson. And it does seem, also seem like he has figured out. A series of, you know, partners in financing and everything where he can just kind of do what he wants. But, um, you know, like the unveiling of the model of the Phoenician scheme, just being this like incredibly like intricately, intricately designed thing on top of thing on top of thing. Um, look at my masterpiece. I was like, oh, okay.

• 42:34Sean Fennessey?

  The actual representation of the Phoenician scheme at the end. Yes, there is a kind of self-knowledge in the way that-

• 42:39Amanda Dobbins?

  It doesn't not look like the poster for Grand Pudapost Hotel or any other thing.

• 42:42Sean Fennessey?

  Completely true. And I think he's just a self referent, self referential and self-aware.

• 42:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Sean Fennessey?

  Which is like a very powerful skill to have as a filmmaker.

• 42:50Amanda Dobbins?

  And I, I don't think it's by any means like the only text, but I just, I was kind of like, oh, I wonder if you thought about this because I'm thinking about it.

• 42:57Sean Fennessey?

  I'll bet, I'll bet he did, but not in a purposeful way. It was sort of like, I am just pouring myself into something, which I believe in, you know? You mentioned like the financiers. He's in this unique position where he's got Stephen Rails, this producer and billionaire who's been backing all of his films for the last few years. And he's got this deal with Focus. So Focus releases most of the movies. And this dovetails neatly with our conversation because Stephen Rails recently became the 20% owner of the Indiana Pacers. So this is a man who produces all the Wes Anderson movies, which are, we cherish. He's also the owner of the Criterion Collection and Janus Films.

• 43:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 43:30Sean Fennessey?

  So this is-

• 43:31Amanda Dobbins?

  So are you writing to him about your complaints about the Wes Anderson collection?

• 43:35Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I don't have any, well, I'll, I'll share my concerns.

• 43:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 43:39Sean Fennessey?

  They're not complaints because I haven't even seen it yet, but, uh, to Mr. Rails, I say, I wish you nothing but no success in the playoffs.

• 43:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 43:46Sean Fennessey?

  But I hope that you continue to support cinema in the profound way that you have forevermore. Cause like, this is one of those people who's like really kind of holding stuff up.

• 43:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 43:55Sean Fennessey?

  With his wealth, which is also kind of a theme of the movie that artists need benefactors and- So Criterion is releasing, uh,

• 44:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Sean Fennessey?

  A 10 film collection from Wes Anderson.

• 44:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 44:07Sean Fennessey?

  In 4K for the first time, these films. And I think it goes all the way up to The French Dispatch, right?

• 44:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 44:13Sean Fennessey?

  So, you know, you know, I'm gonna fucking buy it, right? Like, I'm gonna buy it.

• 44:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 44:18Sean Fennessey?

  I wanna have it on my shelf.

• 44:19Amanda Dobbins?

  How many of these films do you individually have on Blu-ray?

• 44:22Sean Fennessey?

  I have all of them.

• 44:22Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, no, on 4K.

• 44:24Sean Fennessey?

  None of them, because none of them are available.

• 44:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so you have all of them on Blu-ray?

• 44:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, I think maybe one or two of them in the Criterion question.

• 44:30Amanda Dobbins?

  What happens to the Blu-rays when you get the 4Ks?

• 44:33Sean Fennessey?

  It's a wonderful question. Uh, they go in a cabinet.

• 44:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 44:36Sean Fennessey?

  And then I think about whether or not I should like either give them to someone or sell them.

• 44:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 44:41Sean Fennessey?

  Because I don't really need them anymore.

• 44:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. What is the?

• 44:44Sean Fennessey?

  But I don't actually do anything about it.

• 44:45Amanda Dobbins?

  What's the Blu-ray resale market like? Is it like?

• 44:47Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, it's robust.

• 44:48Amanda Dobbins?

  What's the?

• 44:48Sean Fennessey?

  Tens of thousands of dollars per disc.

• 44:50Amanda Dobbins?

  What? No, no, but there's not like an app? Like, is there a Poshmark?

• 44:53Sean Fennessey?

  There are, there are local video stores you can sell stuff to.

• 44:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, but it's, there's no like the real real, but for, for Blu-rays?

• 45:01Sean Fennessey?

  No, but perhaps.

• 45:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 45:02Sean Fennessey?

  That can be the business for me. To get me out of this fucking podcasting game. What is it? Is it Grail? It's like, how can I get?

• 45:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's, yeah, like, there are many different sites. I started selling things on Poshmark this week, so I'll keep you updated.

• 45:18Sean Fennessey?

  My wife sells Alice's old clothing on Poshmark, so. Yeah, I could do that for, you know, old DVD copies of Danny Boyle movies that are just sitting in my house, rotting away. Uh, what will happen to those 10? I don't know. My, my, my, my thing with this set, which as I said, I will just like, I will spend $400 on it like a schmuck. Is, first of all, Asteroid City is not even in it.

• 45:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. Which, the one thing, when I, when I walked out of Phoenician's Game, which is a movie I really enjoyed and wholeheartedly endorsed, I once again was like, wow, we did Asteroid City dirty. Like, you know, because it is every, it's, it is in, on the same level as Asteroid City, um, in terms of like the tools that he's using and the way he's telling the story. But we, we were both so moved by it and then like never talked about it. I mean, we did, we did one episode and then we didn't put it on our top 10 lists and we just kinda like let it go by.

• 46:15Sean Fennessey?

  I did, I did. So I was thinking about this.

• 46:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Not in your top five.

• 46:17Sean Fennessey?

  It was not in my top five, correct. So.

• 46:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is all we're allowed in the bounds of this podcast, which is my reference, not whatever's going on on Split Infinitives.

• 46:25Sean Fennessey?

  Our opinions are, thank you for acknowledging Split Infinitives, which no longer, we no longer publish to that platform.

• 46:33Sean Fennessey?

  2023.

• 46:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 46:35Sean Fennessey?

  I think we thought of as a good year, maybe not a truly great year.

• 46:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 46:40Sean Fennessey?

  But it was the Barbenheimer year in Killers of the Flower Moon, right?

• 46:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that was a really very, that was a good year.

• 46:45Sean Fennessey?

  So now I look at, I look at my top, I'll read you my top 10 where I left it in December of 2023. Number 10 was Anatomy of a Fall, number nine was John Wick Chapter 4, number eight was Asteroid City, seven was The Killer, six was Zone of Interest,

• 46:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, wow.

• 46:59Sean Fennessey?

  Five was The Taste of Things, four was May/December, three was Oppenheimer, two was Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse, and one was Killers of the Flower Moon. That's a fucking awesome top 10.

• 47:09Amanda Dobbins?

  That is.

• 47:09Sean Fennessey?

  So it was just, it was a great year. I think it kinda got lost in the Barbenheimer shuffle a little bit.

• 47:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 47:15Sean Fennessey?

  And, you know, there's also tons of other stuff that we were, you know, past lives and had to blow up a pipeline. Like that was a good year showing up.

• 47:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Showing up was my top five.

• 47:22Sean Fennessey?

  Iron Claw, you know, tons of good stuff that year.

• 47:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Asteroid City was like my number six.

• 47:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm like, that's dumb, you know?

• 47:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think it's, it's so funny that he won this Academy Award for these shorts that he made, even when we, when he, he brought it up when we were talking and he was like, I don't even know what those were. It wasn't a film, it wasn't a, I don't know, you know, he like is, you know, reluctant to define it. And it just was like your most classic, classic makeup Oscar ever. It's like Wes has got, depending on your, your mileage may vary, but at least three all-time classics, maybe for me, like seven.

• 47:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 47:57Sean Fennessey?

  So to award, you know, to give him a big prize for the shorts, which I thought the shorts were cool and I liked them, but they don't hold a candle to something like Asteroid City. It's a major achievement. And even Phoenician Scheme, which I just think is, is just a really good movie. So. Yeah, I'll buy that stupid box set.

• 48:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 48:15Sean Fennessey?

  You know, of course I'll buy it.

• 48:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 48:16Sean Fennessey?

  And then when they like put Astrid City in 4K, I'm gonna buy that.

• 48:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 48:19Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like, I love Wes.

• 48:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Dude, they don't, when they make, when they make a set.

• 48:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 48:23Amanda Dobbins?

  They don't like leave room for extra things.

• 48:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's a good idea. That, I mean, that's my thing is that Wes is in the middle of his career.

• 48:30Amanda Dobbins?

  I honestly, as you know, I think plastic's ugly and I'm.

• 48:35Sean Fennessey?

  This is not, this is an incumbent plastic.

• 48:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, steel case?

• 48:37Sean Fennessey?

  It comes in a bound, it's almost like a book, uh, like a book collection.

• 48:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that's cool, but how are you gonna fit it on your shelf?

• 48:44Sean Fennessey?

  We'll make it work.

• 48:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 48:46Sean Fennessey?

  You haven't seen it? I mean, let's take a look at it.

• 48:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 48:47Sean Fennessey?

  This is, this is a physical object that you can appreciate, I think.

• 48:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, I'm, I'm sure that I can. I, I love Wes Anderson and I don't think he would be associated with ugly things. My point is just they really haven't, oh, okay, sure, yeah, that looks nice.

• 48:59Sean Fennessey?

  What do you think of that?

• 49:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, and then they look like little books.

• 49:01Sean Fennessey?

  They look like books?

• 49:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, okay, uh, that's nice.

• 49:04Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, great.

• 49:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, there's still like a uniformity to it that stresses me out.

• 49:08Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 49:08Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, that's, um, but, but, but I think that looks nice.

• 49:12Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, it's Criterion, like, nobody does.

• 49:14Amanda Dobbins?

  They haven't really, really juiced you guys marketing wise yet. And like the ti- do you know that they're get-

• 49:19Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean juiced us marketing wise?

• 49:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, that they aren't already selling sets with like extra room for you to add it in and, you know, that there isn't a posh mark for Blu-ray.

• 49:28Sean Fennessey?

  Sounds like you should apply for a position at the Criterion Collection. You have a lot of strong ideas. Now, this may be-

• 49:34Amanda Dobbins?

  You don't know what's coming for you.

• 49:36Sean Fennessey?

  The thing that my sickness is looking at my shelf, like looking at the Steven Soderbergh section of my shelf, right? I own every edition of a Soderbergh movie that exists.

• 49:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, but there are some that don't.

• 49:47Sean Fennessey?

  So there's the, there's the stuff that do- that doesn't exist, which is painful and may never exist, the HBO Max stuff that he's made in the last few years. But then four years ago, he was like, yeah, we're working on a set and it's gonna be like, it's gonna be Kafka and Schittopolis and the Limy and all my early stuff that isn't available like in 4K Blu-ray. And I was like, fucking A, Steve, and that's the, that's the best thing I've ever heard. It's not here. I don't have it.

• 50:12Amanda Dobbins?

  He's busy making two films a year and coming on your podcast.

• 50:17Sean Fennessey?

  He's great.

• 50:17Amanda Dobbins?

  And reading every novel published by a female author in the last 50 years. Okay, he has the, and watching tennis. I'm not, I'm behind on the French Open.

• 50:28Sean Fennessey?

  What season of Below Deck is it?

• 50:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know, but he does, okay? So.

• 50:33Sean Fennessey?

  I know, it's just a pain for me. And it was a pain for me not, not being able to have. These movies in 4K, but now if I want to get them in 4K, I gotta buy this box. But then this box is a finite lifespan. And then 20 years from now, they're gonna be like, just kidding. It's the real Wes Anderson archive with all the movies. And then I'm gonna be dying and I'm gonna have to think about what I'm giving to Alice. Will it be money or will it be the thing that I bought that's in plastic? These are the things that keep me up at night. This is where the life of the mind.

• 50:56Amanda Dobbins?

  What is the shelf value of these things?

• 50:59Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean the shelf value?

• 51:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, like the long term, does that, do they appreciate? Or is it like a car?

• 51:04Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, they're mass produced objects. They probably don't appreciate, right?

• 51:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know, but if you're building a collection, I don't like.

• 51:11Sean Fennessey?

  I think my archive could ultimately have value.

• 51:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, okay. Like, because it's yours or just because you've amassed like?

• 51:17Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not in a position to answer that question. I'll let the public decide.

• 51:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Who will get the rights to your archive?

• 51:24Sean Fennessey?

  Not you.

• 51:29Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know, we're still working on that. I mean, this is the kind of thing that Zsa Zsa Corda is thinking about, you know? Who deserves to have access to the incredible wealth that I've accumulated over the years? And by wealth, I mean plastic.

• 51:41Sean Fennessey?

  Anyway, anything else you want to say about this film or Wes or collecting?

• 51:48Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, oh, there's a, there is, there is to this point.

• 51:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask.

• 51:52Sean Fennessey?

  There is a tidbit in the Wes conversation. That is the most like me grinning so fucking hard. And you'll know exactly what it is.

• 52:00Amanda Dobbins?

  About his collection?

• 52:01Sean Fennessey?

  Sort of, you'll know exactly what it is when you hear it. So I would encourage people to wait for that. I did not remark upon it when he said it, but inside I was like, god damn it, yes, yes. And I know Jack knows what I'm referring to. Okay, anything else?

• 52:15Amanda Dobbins?

  No, let's, let's let Wes Anderson speak.

• 52:17Sean Fennessey?

  Let's go to my conversation with Wes Anderson.

• 52:24Sean Fennessey?

  It is a delight to be joined by the great Wes Anderson here on the show. Wes, I thought we could start with this. I found the choice to center a father daughter relationship to be fascinating in this movie and a little bit unusual. I was wondering why that was right for the Phoenician scheme.

• 52:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, thanks, Sean. Happy to be here. And the, yes, you know, we, this, this story, the Phoenician scheme, it started as.

• 52:52Speaker 05

  The more as a story focused on this ruthless businessman, played by Benicio del Toro. And really, our image, me and Roman Coppola, my co-writer, of what this movie was going to be about was this this unkillable ruthless man on this business mission. And it sort of took us in another direction as we got into it. And, you know, we, it went from being a story focused on this guy appointing his daughter, his successor, and teaching her how to be, how to kind of fight on his behalf.

• 53:32Speaker 05

  And instead became about their, them coming together. And it became, you know, that became really what the whole movie's about. But that sort of surprised us. That happened sort of, whatever organically means. It felt like it happened organically as we were writing the thing.

• 53:53Sean Fennessey?

  Has having a family yourself changed the way you think about writing character?

• 53:57Speaker 05

  Well, it probably is the reason why it did that, why it went this way. You know, I think I have a daughter, she's nine. And Benicio has a daughter, a few years older. Roman Coppola has a daughter in between those two ages. So I think, you know, without those, without these daughters, I don't think the movie would be the story we decided we ended up telling.

• 54:22Sean Fennessey?

  I also have a daughter, so I was touched, I think, in some way by that.

• 54:26Speaker 05

  How old is your daughter?

• 54:27Sean Fennessey?

  She's going to be four shortly.

• 54:29Speaker 05

  You're going to be four, wow.

• 54:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. On the sort of flip side of that concept, I'm interested in the notion of violence in your movies. This might be the most violence that we've ever had. And it's playful, and it's inventive and fun. But there are bombs and dynamite and guns. And can you talk about what role that played in working on this story?

• 54:49Speaker 05

  Yes, I think from the, for me.

• 54:55Speaker 05

  The movie really be, the, the movie begins for me with an image of this character. And the image of the character is he's got blood all, you know, he's, he's, he's being battered. He's surrounded by violence and he causes violence. And that's, that was just a part of the, the mayhem of this guy. Um, but I will say, when we started to get into the specifics of the violence, there's some extreme violence. I mean, you know, there's like, you know, eviscerated people and things. But somehow, for whatever reason, right at the beginning of it, I had this feeling like the violence wanted to be, you know, as odd as this may sound,

• 55:37Speaker 05

  somehow I thought there needed to be some sort of delight to the violence. It shouldn't be any less horrible, but that somehow it should be shocking and maybe be sort of making you laugh a bit. Um, and that there should be some, um, device or idea behind every, uh, every awful thing that happens in this movie. And just in the way we tell it, you know, in the, in the way we get across that next little bit of the story. Um, so it's set a tone for it, I guess.

• 56:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and it happens very early on in the film and you realize we're in a slightly different kind of Wes Anderson film, I think.

• 56:17Speaker 05

  Yes, that's probably true. It doesn't take long.

• 56:20Sean Fennessey?

  Even more so, the violence is serving a story about corporately financed power games on a global stage. I mean, this is a very, uh, wide ranging, globe trotting kind of a story. And even though it's a period piece, did you find that the world's contemporary politics or the kind of mania of the corporate power influencing how you and Roman were writing the story?

• 56:42Speaker 05

  Well, you know, when you're, when you're making up a story, you know, when you're not adapting something, when you're just inventing a story, story from scratch, you have your ideas of your research and your, your, your inspirations that you're conscious of. And then you have your imagination and that, you're not really in control of so much. That's sort of where there's work happening in parts of your brain that, uh, that are hidden from you a bit. And the way though the work of the, of, that your brain is doing is revealed to you is when you say, is when you say, I have an idea. Um, and so all that to say,

• 57:24Speaker 05

  The world is always kind of going into it, you know? I mean, you know, it finds its way into it. And as much as we were writing about tycoons of the middle of the 20th century, we were also inspired by people we know right now and I think people, you know, who we all know from the front page of the newspaper. And it all kind of mixes together.

• 57:51Sean Fennessey?

  I had a question about the art of the title sequence. I love the one in this film. I think it's mesmerizing. But what function do you see it serving?

• 58:00Speaker 05

  I think in the case of this, from the beginning, I thought maybe we want to see this guy, you know, there's something about this character who's, he's being harmed, you know, he's, people are trying to hurt him and they do hurt him. And he's, and we had, we had this sequence where he's, he's, you know, he's being given medicine, he's being stitched up, he's got bandages all over him, he's soaking in a tub, but he's still reading, he's smoking a cigar, he opens a bottle of wine. And this is a guy who's just, he's not good for the world, but he is spectacularly resilient.

• 58:44Speaker 05

  And, and this, and, and there was a musical aspect of this, there's, you know, he's, he's gathering information. I mean, he is always reading, this character, and he's, he's, he's gathering information like it's ammunition for him. And he wants to know about music and he wants to know about art and he's gathering it. And, you know, we have this Stravinsky music that is a part of the story. And I think to me, that's modernist music that he feels is valuable to him and something he wants to know about, for whatever reason. It's something I've seen, you know, in men of this, men like this. But that music itself has a haunting, strange, defiant, particular quality.

• 59:28Speaker 05

  This piece that we play from this ballet, this Stravinsky ballet, to me...

• 59:34Speaker 05

  Says things about the character that words can't. And we made a sort of dance out of, I mean, it is from a ballet and we made a sequence as sort of a dance and it's a dance about just him. And he's surrounded by people tending to him and there's all this activity, but he's this sort of vortex, I think. So that's sort of the various things that were in my mind, I guess.

• 59:57Sean Fennessey?

  That's great. It communicates so much about him without any dialogue whatsoever.

• 1:00:01Speaker 05

  Oh, good, good.

• 1:00:01Sean Fennessey?

  Um, it seems as though you're in a period of rapid creative outburst. This is, I noted, four films in five years and prior to that, it was three films across 12 years. So what, what accounts for the burst for you?

• 1:00:14Speaker 05

  Well, I don't know. You know, one thing is I have a lot of consistency in my group of collaborators and I have a producer, I mean, I have my team of producers with Jeremy Dawson and John Pete, who've worked with me for years, but I have Stephen Rails, who is our sort of supervising producer of our projects. And having that relationship has been tremendously helpful for me in so many ways and his advice is so, is so helpful. But it means when I start a movie, we can go right to it, you know? It's, we work very closely together and we have a whole group of people behind the camera who we kind of go, can start with when we like.

• 1:00:59Speaker 05

  We can start prepping a movie, like for instance, when I'm writing a script now, if I have 10 pages of the script, I start doing this, I have, you know, Jay Clark in England, who starts drawing the storyboards and I have Edward Bersh in Pennsylvania, who starts editing the storyboards together and I start showing that material to Adam Stockhausen, our production designer and he's, and he starts to see, okay, here's what we need to be thinking about in terms of what's going to go in front of the camera. So everything happens at once and it's a little bit more like we have our own tiny, small scale studio system.

• 1:01:37Speaker 05

  We can, we can work efficiently this way and we get more done.

• 1:01:40Sean Fennessey?

  Do you find that you have boundless ideas? Because a lot of times with great filmmakers, it has to be the right thing. And so this outburst that I think is so exciting that you're going through right now, it seems like you just are manifesting a whole new world very quickly. Does it feel that way?

• 1:01:56Speaker 05

  Well, I, I think for me, I've never, I've never had a thing like I've got eight scripts in a drawer somewhere or something. I don't have that. I mean, the first few movies I made, I did have, the first four movies I made, by the time we started the first one, I had, you know, the general idea of four movies. And we made those four movies. But, um, but now, I mean, I do one at a time, you know? I mean, I did have these, uh, a Roald Dahl, um, ones that we did for Netflix that are a peculiar kind of thing. They're not, I don't know if they're, I wouldn't call them movies. They're anyway, they're whatever they are. There's some sort of concoction.

• 1:02:37Speaker 05

  And those I had, you know, it's, it's Roald Dahl's words, uh, um, that, that, he essentially wrote the scripts. But mostly, you know, I mean, like right now, for instance, I have an idea of a thing. I'm working with, with, uh, Richard Iwate and, and Roman Coppola, and we're starting this thing brewing and we have things, we're taking, and you know, will it take us three months? Will it take us six months? Will it take us a year? I have no idea. But, um, you know, but it's brewing. Um, and I figure when, by the time we finish the script, we'll probably be situated to make the movie. You know, I don't think we're gonna have to finish the script and say, now where do we go? Well, we're gonna, well, when we finish the script, I think I'll already have a plan

• 1:03:22Speaker 05

  for how to go about making the movie. And that helps to, helps to make it all happen quicker.

• 1:03:27Sean Fennessey?

  That's great. And I hope it continues apace. It's, you know, speaking of those early films, I went back and looked at a couple and, you know, you sense this real kind of youthful frustration and even kind of rage in some of those stories. And I look at the, the more recent films and I, I sense like a wistfulness and maybe some regret. And I don't know how much consciousness you have of kind of blending in some of those feelings and how they reflect where you're at in your life, or if it's just sort of, I've came up, come up with an idea and I'm writing a character and that character comes from a very pure place.

• 1:04:00Speaker 05

  I mean, I feel like when you're writing something new, you know, you're not adapting something, you're improvising, you know, you're either improvising with a pen or pencil, or if you're working with collaborators like I often do or always do, sometimes you're playing the scenes for each other and it is like it's an improvisation. And the improvisation, you don't know where it's coming from, you know, it comes out of you. But once it starts to go on to the page, then you can say, you know, I see what we're, I see the thing that's starting to take shape and I can, and then you can, you know, follow it more.

• 1:04:43Speaker 05

  And often I feel like it's a, we didn't set out to make a movie about a father and a daughter. We set out to make a movie about a businessman, but we, but it just took over. Yeah, I'm not sure I totally answered the question.

• 1:04:58Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, no, I'm always curious how much intentionality goes into some of those feelings and how much it just kind of naturally occurs. At this stage of your career, how much do you feel that you're experimenting? Like, I wasn't sure if I noticed something in like the aspect ratio of this movie that looked a little bit different and I was trying to figure out if that was the case. Like, do you find that you're still kind of trying to try smaller, new things as you're going through each production?

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  What I want to do is make it fun to make the movie. And it's not fun to, you know, what I, the fun thing to do is to find surprises, to look for surprises, you know, to create situations where there are surprises. My way of making a movie is very planned and we have, it's, you know, we build the sets to the shots and so I kind of create a situation where we know what we're gonna do on the day. And, but in that context, the excitement to me is when something, you know, we try to make a situation where the thing is gonna work and I feel like I can reliably deliver a thing that's gonna work.

• 1:06:03Speaker 05

  But then I look for whatever's unexpected and the detours that are gonna, that are gonna be the surprise. And always I'm looking for what's another way to tell this part of the story that might be, that we haven't done before.

• 1:06:22Sean Fennessey?

  Was there a particular version of that in this movie that you can think of?

• 1:06:25Speaker 05

  We mentioned the violence of it and the way we articulate the violence to me was something different. There's a fight sequence at the end of the movie with Benicio del Toro and Benedict Cumberbatch. And to me, I had an approach to the way that we staged that scene that maybe was different from what I even saw in the script. It became something like magic tricks or something like that. I don't know. I mean, we wanted to communicate the emotion of this conflict. But I was sort of saying, is there a certain voice to how we go about it? That's going to be a surprise.

• 1:07:07Sean Fennessey?

  I'm curious if you think much about the lifespan of your films because they're often issued in these beautiful physical editions and you've got coffee table book companions and they're reviewed and they continue to exist. But I feel like your movies are under a constant reevaluation. Like for me personally, I'm constantly reevaluating Darjeeling Limited, thinking about how I responded to it, maybe some of the things I liked or didn't understand. And then as I get older, do you pay attention to the fact that your movies have this a continuing lifespan unlike other films?

• 1:07:38Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I like to hear that. And I think, for whatever reason, I did always think of my movies as an ongoing, you know, kind of, I don't know what you would say, like an ongoing sort of project. I mean, they're individual stories, but even after I made three movies, I thought these should be able to sit on a shelf together and be connected somehow. And I feel like, you know, that's not necessarily, I mean, I think it would be just as reasonable for somebody to say, no, my movies are in different styles, different things.

• 1:08:22Speaker 05

  They have nothing to do, the only connection is me. I don't think the only connection is me. There are too many connections between them. But, you know, like we have a new thing, this Criterion Collection is doing a box set of the first 10 films I made. And in the process of preparing this, working with them, I know them for years and years and we've done all these things together. But in putting them together, I do feel like I can, what I see is It's, I mean, this is a very narcissistic way to look at it, but I can see the films and say, oh, I'm so different over the course of these. I can see my life, you know, uh, go in, uh, playing out in these films.

• 1:09:05Speaker 05

  And I will say, when we talk about, when was it we met so and so? It was between Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom. Remember we were, we, the movies are how I can tell the passage of time in my, in my life. You know, I have the birth of my daughter. I have, you know, you know, when I met my wife and I have the movies.

• 1:09:26Sean Fennessey?

  Wes, we end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they have seen? You are a tremendous advocate for film history. Is there anything that you've seen lately that you've dug?

• 1:09:37Speaker 05

  You know, it's funny. I, I, um, uh, you know, I'm here in a hotel in New York, but I often travel with a Blu-ray player. Um, and, um, so I, so, you know, I bring, uh, I, I plug it in and, you know, I, sometimes you have to do, you kind of hack the TV a bit to be able to, uh, to get it to work. But, um, what I had, uh, what I brought with me, you know, little stack of movies, some, uh, some westerns, Anthony Mann westerns, um, and, but the one that I put in the machine, uh, it was a movie I've seen many times, but love, uh, that's Saint Jack. Do you know Saint Jack?

• 1:10:17Sean Fennessey?

  I do. I love seeing it. Bogdanovich.

• 1:10:19Speaker 05

  Bogdanovich. And, you know, um, uh, I was, Noah Baumbach was with me last night. We had our premiere here in New York. And Noah and I used to see Peter, uh, you know, we saw a lot of Peter for a long time. Um, and that's one of my favorite of Peter, Peter's movies, maybe sort of less, more known now than it used to be. Um, but, um, but it's, it's, uh, it's such a good one.

• 1:10:43Sean Fennessey?

  Peter loved it too, right? I feel like he thought it was a bit overlooked.

• 1:10:46Speaker 05

  He did. Yeah. He knew, he knew, he knew it was a good one. And, you know, it's the thing where. He made something very good and he was like, what happened? You know, the, the audience failed him. The audience failed him with that one. Um, but you know, that movie, that movie has aspects of it. It feels like it could have been Humphrey Bogart playing that part as much as, as well as Ben Gazzara and Ben Gazzara is great. It's one of, you know, it's one of his best performances.

• 1:11:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's a wonderful recommendation. Wes Anderson, thank you for the time and for all the great films. I really appreciate it.

• 1:11:19Speaker 05

  Thank you, Sean. Thanks so much. So nice to talk with you.

• 1:11:27Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Thank you to Wes Anderson. That was fun. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders for his work on this episode. We'll be back next week to break down full title, From the World of, colon, no, From the World of John Wick, colon, Ballerina. Excited about this?

• 1:11:43Amanda Dobbins?

  I was honestly just Googling to make sure you got that right.

• 1:11:45Sean Fennessey?

  I think I got it right.

• 1:11:46Amanda Dobbins?

  From the world of John. Yes. Good job.

• 1:11:49Sean Fennessey?

  Why didn't they just make it John Wick Presents Ballerina?

• 1:11:52Amanda Dobbins?

  You'll have to ask them.

• 1:11:52Sean Fennessey?

  John Wick's Ballerina or Ballerina, semicolon, John Wick stuff. What else could we have called this movie instead of From the World?

• 1:12:01Amanda Dobbins?

  You gotta get John, you gotta get John Wick before Ballerina because that's awesome.

• 1:12:06Sean Fennessey?

  So John Wick.

• 1:12:09Amanda Dobbins?

  John Wick Presents Ballerina.

• 1:12:11Sean Fennessey?

  With Ballerina.

• 1:12:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, there you go.

• 1:12:13Sean Fennessey?

  John Wick dances with Ballerina.

• 1:12:16Amanda Dobbins?

  We're venturing into territory that I do not think is family.

• 1:12:18Sean Fennessey?

  Let's make it active. You know, John Wick isn't a ballerina, but he could be one day. Like what else? We could do a lot here with this title. And I just feel like From the World of John Wick, colon, Ballerina is not great. I think also we might, we might finally be making a, making a Viewist Universe connection is one thing I'll tease. So it might be time.

• 1:12:38Amanda Dobbins?

  It's happening. That's beautiful.

• 1:12:39Sean Fennessey?

  And I need to put CR at the table with us just so we can talk, you can let us talk a little bit about, about those feelings.

• 1:12:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:12:47Sean Fennessey?

  About those worlds.

• 1:12:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm just going to try to get Chris to tell all the stories about his first personal life related to those films, of which there are many classics.

• 1:12:54Sean Fennessey?

  There are a few good ones. Okay. Well, stay tuned for that and uh, thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.