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The Wes Anderson System: The Phoenician Scheme Director and His Team on Going Their Own Way

The Phoenician Scheme director Wes Anderson and his loyal actors and crew have found their own unique way of making films

The Oscar winner is joined onscreen by Michael Cera, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Bill Murray, who has appeared in almost every one of Anderson’s movies. Though the cast includes many veterans of starry Marvel spectaculars, a Wes Anderson movie is the furthest thing from a big-budget epic: His sets are communal, with everyone generally working in the same location — for The Phoenician Scheme it was in Germany — with few frills. Other touchstones include Julien Duvivier’s 1931 film David Golder, about a rags-to-riches Jewish immigrant who reinvents himself as a powerful New York business magnate, and Francesco Rosi’s 1972 The Mattei Affair, about an Italian industrialist whose private plane crashes.

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