The New Yorker Radio Hour - Wes Anderson and Jeffrey Wright on “The French Dispatch”

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

“I wanted to do a French movie, and I had this idea of wanting to do a New Yorker movie,” Wes Anderson explains. “Somehow, I also wanted to do one of those omnibus-type things where it was a collection of short stories.” The result is the new film “The French Dispatch.” Anderson describes his interest in The New Yorker as “almost fetishistic.” Each of the movie’s four story lines was inspired by a work from the magazine or by one of its writers, though Anderson has played freely with biography. Jeffrey Wright, for example, plays Roebuck Wright, an amalgam of James Baldwin, a Black American expatriate in provincial France, and A. J. Liebling, a beloved writer on food and much else from The New Yorker’s early years. “Even in exile,” the actor says, his character “realizes that he’s only at home within himself, that there is no home for him. And maybe there is no home for anyone, really, other than within one’s own body and one’s own soul.” Anderson and Wright join David Remnick to discuss “The French Dispatch” and the classic New Yorker essays that inspired it. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Wes Anderson is the director of some of my favorite movies of recent years. The Grand Budapest Hotel, the Royal Tenenbaum, and Rushmore. So imagine how I felt when I learned that the subject of his new movie was a very familiar magazine. It began as a holiday. Arthur Howitzer Jr., college freshman, eager to escape a bright future on the Great Plains, convinced his father, proprietor of the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun,

to fund his transatlantic passage as an educational opportunity to learn the family business through the production of a series of Trave-Log columns to be published for local readers in the Sunday Picnic Magazine. The magazine in this film and the title of the film itself is the French Dispatch, And it bears a very striking resemblance to the New Yorker in its earliest days. Over the next ten years, he assembled a team of the best expatriate journalists of his time and transformed picnic into the French dispatch. A factual weekly report on the subjects of world politics, the arts high and low, fashion, fancy cuisine, fine drink,

and diverse stories of human interests set in faraway Cartier's. He brought the world to Kansas. The film presents four distinct stories from this fictional publication, and each is inspired in one way or another by a classic essay from The New Yorker. And the cast of the French dispatch is pretty amazing. It's a movie where even the small parts are played by the likes of Sir Sharonin and Willem Defoe. So I was eager to sit down with Wes Anderson, along with one of the film's real stars, Jeffrey Wright. Now, you have to imagine when I'm...

I heard that this movie was being made. I don't know how many years ago it was. I was filled with, I was both, well, I was terrified. You know, my beloved New Yorker is going to be made into a movie. I didn't know what it was going to be about. And then I heard that it was Wes Sanderson making it. And I was pretty thrilled. I just want to know about the origin of this film.

Why you decided to make a movie about a magazine that I think we can agree is kind of like the early New Yorker. Yes, it's true. I always wanted to do a movie about The New Yorker, but the thing that always happens to me is I have one idea I'm sort of tinkering with over the years, and then I have another idea, and then somehow I just mix them together,

and I combine them. They tend to be suited to each other, but I don't know why. And in this case, it was I wanted to do a French movie, and I had this idea of wanting to do a New Yorker movie. And somehow I also had to thought I wanted to do a movie that was one of those omnibus type things where it was a collection of short stories. And they all got brought together in this.

And, you know, I've had this almost fetishistic interest in the New Yorker since I was 17 years old or so. I have UC Berkeley when they sold off their hard copies, you know, the bound ones that you used to find in the libraries, we bought them. So I have hundreds of issues. from Berkeley and then from some other sources. Yeah, and I'd love to go back and, you know,

now there's the digital archive, which is utterly complete, but I still like to go look at the old issues. It doesn't smell the same, does it? Not at all. Not even remotely. So in the movie, the magazine is the French Dispatch, which isn't exactly the New Yorker. How would you describe the relationship

between the two magazines, the one that you conceived and the real thing? Well, ours is a sort of expatriate magazine, maybe like a bit of Paris review mixed into it. And the writers are all American writers who've gone to live in France, and there are a lot of inspirations for that from the New Yorker. It's those New Yorker writers in particular who were sending their dispatches from France at different periods of the magazine that ended up kind of being the sum of the models for our main characters who are all writers. Now, Jeffrey, your character, Robuck Wright, seems to be kind of an amalgam of figures.

I think you can pretty clearly see James Baldwin in there. And there's also notes of A.J. Liebling, who's known as one of the great food writers of that era or any era at all. Yeah, a bit of those, you know, West talked about, you know, a bit of Tennessee Williams thrown in, you know, just a kind of... of gumbo of certain characters. And in this case, yeah, I did go back

and read, you know, Baldwin, read, you know, old New Yorker food reviews, you know, read, you know, a bit. But it's, it's, he's not Baldwin. We borrow from. But he's, he's something, he's something else. There are characteristics that are similar. He's black.

He's gay. He's, he's, he's searching for a type of freedom at a time when those things can be inhibitors to his freedom in America, certainly. Baldwin was not one who devoted, you know, the majority of his later years, at least, to writing on food. So that's a major departure. He does have a history that we touch on of writing about civil rights and race. but he finds himself in the corner of a restaurant, you know, alone. And I think this story becomes in some ways, or his story,

becomes more of a portrait of kind of his existential relationship to aloneness. It becomes something else. And so a part of the research was about understanding the expatriate, journey at that time to a place like provincial France or like our town en we. So I will try to understand how this amalgam of these ideas might find his way there. Yeah, I don't think we could presume to give him the gravity of Baldwin. It was always more a bit of of homage, but there's this piece equal in Paris, which is an inspiration. Jeffrey, you were kind enough to record an excerpt from that Baldwin essay, Equal in Paris.

The very word institutions from my side of the ocean where it seemed to me we suffered so cruelly from the lack of them had a pleasant ring as of safety and order and common sense. One had to come into contact with these institutions in order to understand that they were also outmoded, exasperating, completely impersonal, and very often cruel. Similarly, the personality, which it seemed from a distance to be so large and free, had to be dealt with before one could see that if it was large, it was also inflexible and, for the foreigner, full of strange, high, dusty rooms, which could not be inhabited. one had in short to come in contact with an alien culture in order to understand that a culture was not a community basket weaving project nor yet an act of God was something neither desirable nor undesirable in itself being inevitable being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissitudes with which they had been forced to deal. Jeffrey, what do you make of that passage? As it relates to our story, it speaks to, I think, Robux' desire for a room of his own, for a table of his own. Even in exile, he realizes that he's only at home within himself, that there is no home for him.

And maybe there is no home for anyone, really. than within one's own body and one's own soul. Maybe that is his ultimate political act, is to, at least in some small space, be himself and be pleased with it. Yeah. Wes, you know, there are some writers that you read who change their approach and their style

from novel to novel. Same with filmmakers. And then there are filmmakers and novels who have a very recognizable, rhythm, style, look, cast of characters. And I, you know, I don't mean to be presumptuous. I think you fit in the latter category. I've been told that. And the visual style of a Wes Anderson movie is so recognizable, so quickly, and also on the page as well. And I think to some extent the way you're telling the actors to approach that, how did you invent that? Well, I would say, I, first of all,

I don't tell the actors much of anything. I mean, I'm scared. Can I jump in there? Yeah, please do. Because I only know what it's like on my movies. So maybe it's better if Jeffrey gives a little perspective. Wes is wonderfully reserved, sometimes a bit hesitant, you know.

Sometimes he's a gentle guy. On set, he's a gentle guy. general. There's a clarity and a purpose that comes out of him and a sense of belonging that is really, really wonderful to behold. And he's exacting and he's a taskmaster in the best way. So yeah, Wes, you offer a lot of very useful input, and particularly here because obviously he's got this, you know, this very specific vision in his head, and he wants that to be realized. So, yeah, you offer a bit here and there, Wes. This is interesting fact-checking to finally because Harold Brodke, the late writer Harold Brockie, once described William Sean, who was the second

and very long-time editor of The New Yorker as a combination of St. Francis Assisi and Napoleon Bonaparte. So it sounds like a little bit like what you're describing here in the nicest terms. But West, Go back to the Wes Anderson nests of every Wes Anderson movie. Where does that come from, or does it just emanate from you the way, you know, sweat would? Well, possibly something like the sweat, I think. I think it's like, I mean, for me, every movie I feel I'm doing something completely new. We're starting from scratch. We're in a new nation.

And I never think about what might make the... movie like other movies I've done except to say this is too close I can't I'm repeating myself too much here but I never make any effort to have a style that unifies my my movies I think it's so it's more of something that I'm stuck with I think so you write and that's done in solitude with some collaboration but and you you're directing but it's a communal enterprise finally you have you're handing over this script to a lot of different and disparate talents whether it's set directors or actors or whomever. I mean, it's a big operation, and you've got to trust other people.

I have to do that all the time, and I, you know, I talk to a writer. We settle on a subject, on a project, but finally, that writer goes off, and it's up to his or her imagination and efforts and energies and, you know, whatever the hell is going to happen, happens. It's an odd combination of individual and communal. Well, there are so many ways that that sort of comparison applies to directing movies, but maybe the biggest one is when I have a tendency to very carefully plan everything. When it comes to the day that we're filming,

I've sort of got everything well figured out and everybody knows. But the biggest thing to me that's like how each writer has a voice at the magazine is ultimately there are these. guys who are going to be in the movie. These men and women are going to play these parts. And, you know, I mean, I was thinking of this. Like, you know, this character, Roboac Wright was written for Jeffrey Wright. But there was one day where we had a scene where he's walking through this whole police station and it's a long, long take. It's a big shot that goes from room to room with hundreds of extras and so on. And it's supposed to be a voiceover. And we shot it

a bunch of times because, you know, it was complicated. And after, and we say, okay, well, that's it. We've got, you know, it can't be done any better than this. And then I say, well, the only way it could be done better would be if Jeffrey said it all on camera. So rather than it being a scene where there's a voiceover as he travels through this place, he actually tells the story as he walks through and interacts with all these dozens of people. And that's not really something you're meant to spring on. and something.

That was news to me. And it sounds hard. Morning. Yeah. And, yeah, but you were like a ball player saying, give me the ball coach and I'll just take it over.

I mean, that's pretty impressive. It was pages. But, Jeffrey, okay, I think if you give me a few minutes, uh,

yes, I think I can do it. Yeah, just kind of, like, you know, launched into my hard drive and was there. And just,

you know, I just sang it. And we started doing it. And as soon as we did the, first bit of it, I was like, we're not leaving here until we make this happen because this completely transforms it. And it was, you know, it was nothing, I hadn't planned any of it. It just was me knowing him and seeing what was happening in the moment and it changed the scene completely. Still, it was tricky though, but we got there. That was great.

I'm talking with Wes Anderson, whose new film is called The French Dispatch, and with Jeffrey Wright, one of its stars. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The French Dispatch is the new film written and directed by Wes Anderson. It's his 10th feature. The film stars Jeffrey Wright, Francis McDormon, Tilda Swin, and Owen Wilson, as writers in a magazine that's very similar to the New Yorker, except in St. France. And I've been speaking with Jeffrey Wright and Wes Anderson. So there's another character played by Francis McDormand, Lucinda Kremens, who seems to have bits of Mavis Golan, Janet Flanner, maybe a little Lillian Ross.

How do you build a character like that out of the raw materials? What was the story of the conception there? You know, Mavis Gallon, I knew her stories, some of the stories. There's so many. But I read this piece, her pieces on May 68, maybe it's two articles on May 68, her journal about it. Reading it, I realized where we live in Paris. We live near Boulevard-Mamparnasse,

and I sort of got that this was where she was, I think when she says she's going home, that's right down around the corner. I kind of got hooked by this idea that she was in the neighborhood, and I never met her. She died before I met her, But I kind of figured out what her table was at La Dome down the street. And I just became kind of fixated on her.

And so the character we rode is not Mavis Galan. It's a mixture. But yeah, it was Mavis Galant was the first impulse for it. And then also the idea of it being somebody who's observing what's going on in her very unusual perspective on it. And we quote her in it, actually. Well, we've got a recording of Francis McDormant reading from Galant's essay. So let's listen to a little bit of that. May 4th, H.T. Cotton Traffic Jam around San Germain, San Michel in midst of student disorders,

says this is different. They all seem very young. He sees a barricade made apart cars they have moved away from the curb, is very impatient, hates disorder. Talk with M.B., she saw the police charge outside the bazaar brazeri, says their apartment full of tear gas. They live on the fifth floor. wouldn't let her daughter talk on the telephone inside of windows. Police think nothing of throwing grenades into houses. I doubt if they could throw one up to the fifth floor. Says gas makes it impossible to sleep at night. Crowds, traffic jams, see a crowd. I feel the mixture of tension and curiosity that is always a signal of something happening.

And I hear shouting and see police cars. I duck into Saint-Germain Metro. I hate these things. See more pictures and papers and accounts, surprising of how the students far from fleeing regroup and charge. Now, there's a certain resonance of what's been going on more lately, and your treatment of it, abstracted and remixed as it is, still has this legitimate undercurrent about disaffected young people striking back at the status quo.

Wes, I don't normally think of you as a distinctly political filmmaker, but was it interesting to you to have this kind of thing come into your work here? Well, one thing I love about the way she talks about them, which you start to get for that, but she expands on this. You know, it's natural to her and not unexpected that she finds the things that are ridiculous in what the kids are saying. But she does not identify with her peers, with the people her age who are actually against them. she's very sensitive to how brave they are. And it's interesting. She's a great character in it.

And you get the feeling she's not really like anybody else among her group of friends and the people she knows well in Paris then. Jeffrey, as we were talking about before, your character too, although is a gourmand, but also touches on issues of race, homophobia, policing, the experience of immigrants abroad. do you find the picture the French dispatch to be political and if so to what degree how? I'm not sure if it, well, let me back up. I tend to think everything's political. So yes, so yes in certain ways. But as far as this story, that was a question that I tried to answer is, is a black. man and a gay man who has left segregated America, you know, pre, you know, Civil Rights Act,

Voting Rights Act, America, America that's, you know, emerging into this new conversation about race, is that man writing in a, you know, an ennui France about food, is that a political decision? I think for him it is. It's a political act. But it's a poetic one. Some might argue that those are equally powerful as the legislative acts or the more militant acts. But it's a question that the story raises, you know, in the midst of all of the, you know, the varieties of dissent, you know, where does he find himself? Do you think of your own work as an actor as a actor?

an artist as political, maybe not in a primary way, but in an important way? Well, I think that the images that we put out, the stories that we put out have impact, and they have impact on a political level. Yes, they inform people's thinking about themselves, about those around them, community and society, and so they are, they're powerful, yes. Even the most kind of banal Hollywood film is political and the choices that are made about, you know, who is defined as heroic, who's villainous, who's marginalized, who's powerful. Yeah, all of these things have implicit or sometimes explicit political overtones. So it's, I just, maybe that's the filter that I view the world through and view these things through, but I think it's inevitable. It's inevitable. I mean, it's, the movies reflect and they actually.

influence. I mean, I'm not saying one movie has a great influence, but you know, I was just why, who has seen the celluloid closet? Do you know this film? Yes. Sure. The cellular closet is a

documentary about the image of gay people in movies, in the history of movies. I mean, this movie makes it really shows you how these images, the way people are imaged in the course of time, it tells you a lot about the time they were living in the time when these movies are made,

which in a kind of unusual way because you're looking right at them and there they are speaking and here they are behaving and it's something a bit different from writing. And then you can see how this evolves and how significant the change is in the course of time. Anyway, I recommend this movie to people who haven't seen it as I just saw it. Yeah. So the editor is played by Bill Murray, and the editor's name is Arthur Howitzer Jr. I love Howitzer for an editor, just a kind of big gun. Is it fair to say that that's based, at least in part, on Harold Ross? Yeah, well, I guess it was a bit of Ross and a bit of Sean. William Sean, his successor. Yeah. But, you know, Ross, we have this thing where the relationship with the writers is love, hate, and he's.

He's tearing his hair out. And Sean, it's, you really only feel that it's the love side of it. Our guy is somebody who's devoted to his writers and to him there, the center of his life. We've got a clip from Bill Murray who plays Arthur Howitzer in the movie, and he's reading a letter from the real-life Harold Ross, the co-founder of the New Yorker. This is the most difficult magazine in the world to get out, and it involves I think more people in contact with them than any other. It's appalling. When you count up the people in the office, artists, humorous, fiction writers, idea men, agents, fact writers,

you have a total of two or three hundred. Moreover, the turnover is heavy. A lot of promising young people around here are gone. after a fairly short while writing for the movies or other magazines or somewhere, you do me only one injustice. I don't try to scare anyone, although I don't give a damn if I do, probably. I didn't try to scare you. The profanity was natural.

Now, the film starts with Howitzer's death, and he puts it in his will that the magazine should stop publication when he dies. The real guy, Harold Ross, made a very different choice. He was very ill in the early 50s, and he handed the New Yorker over to his deputy at that time, William Sean. Why kill off the French dispatch, along with its editor, he said defensively. It just seemed like the thing to do at the time.

I don't really know. Don't kill us off, for God's sake. Well, I have been asked the question before by Bill Murray, who said, why am I doing, why would I do this? And I didn't really have an answer for them. I mean, to me, to me, it's, you know, it's selfish, I guess. But, you know, it's just a made-up story. Oh, I've heard that. Now, this film has been delayed in its release for quite a long time, right? Yes. It must be a strange thing to have something submerged for so long.

You know, it was strange for a while, and then the strangeness sort of became irrelevant. Got overrun by other strangenesses. Yes. Much larger and maybe slightly more important. Yes, the world really kept up its end of the bargain. Were the two of you able to work during the pandemic? Jeffrey? I was working on Batman.

until March 13th of 2020. Then we went on a two-week hiatus that extended until September. And so went back early September and finished March 13th, I believe, of 2021. For me, the timing was we couldn't release our movie, so I started writing the next thing. So I'm about to go to work on a new movie. Jeffrey's in this movie. And, but I have not emerged.

It's the answer. Well, come out, come out wherever you are. Have you worked from home mostly? Or have you been going into the magazine every day? No, no, no. I'm at my desk in my apartment where I've been working and doing this show for now, what, a year in two-thirds or something like that? Anyway, but more important, the French dispatch comes out next month.

And I really look forward to it. It's a brilliant movie. Thank you so much, Jeffrey Wright and Wes Anderson. Thank you, thank you, David. Thanks, Jeffrey. Now, we have a special French Dispatch bonus for you on our podcast. Some of the actors from the film reading classic essays from The New Yorker, Elizabeth Moss reads E.B. White.

Owen Wilson reads a terrifying piece about rats by Joseph Mitchell, and Tilda Swinton reads Calvin Tompkins. And there's more. To listen, search for the New Yorker Radio. Our wherever you get your podcast. That's our show for today. Thanks so much for joining us. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Kauri, Cala, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.