The Press Box - Jeffrey Wright on ‘The French Dispatch,’ Tweeting the News, and Playing Colin Powell

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

Bryan is joined by actor Jeffrey Wright to discuss his role as journalist Roebuck Wright in ‘The French Dispatch.’ They touch on the details within a Wes Anderson script, finding inspiration in the late James Baldwin, the use of Twitter, and more! Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Jeffrey Wright Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Ringers Charles Holmes and co-host Grace Spellman present the most notorious new podcast in the industry, the Ringer Music Show. Every Tuesday, they'll bring you the latest news, the hottest takes, and the deepest reporting about the wild world of music and the chaotic industry that creates it. Check out the Ringer Music Show exclusively on Spotify. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Friday, Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes. We've got a surprise today. You'll remember that last month we did an episode about West And Anderson's movie, The French Dispatch with Sean Fennessee. We've been trying to get one of the actors from that movie onto our little media podcast, and the actor agreed. So today we've got Jeffrey Wright. In The French Dispatch, Wright plays a magazine writer who has been described by Wes Anderson

as a combination of two people. One is The Fire Next Time author James Baldwin, and the other is New Yorker funny man, A.J. Liebling. Not the kind of journalistic crossover event I ever imagined when I was reading Old New Yorker. collections. In the movie, Roebuck Wright has a typographic memory, which means he can recall his old pieces line by line whenever he's asked to. It's a very funny joke in the French dispatch, but you should also note this applies to every journalist in real life as well. Jeffrey Wright and I talked about him channeling James Baldwin. We talked about what it's like to

act for Wes Anderson. We also discussed being very online and the time he played Colin Powell under the direction of last week's guest, Oliver Stone. Here's Jeffrey Wright on the French Dispatch. All right, Jeffrey, this movie has been accurately described as a love letter to the old New Yorker. Are you a New Yorker reader? I'm an occasional New Yorker reader. I'm not sure if there are many people

who are as devoted to the New Yorker as Wes Anderson, though. As he describes it, he at some point, maybe in his teenage years or maybe a little bit later even, purchased enormous collection of old volume of old New Yorkers from Cal Berkeley when he found out that they were getting rid of them. And I guess, you know, when he was, I don't know, 10 or 11 years old, he became infatuated with the magazine. So he's got a deep kind of encyclopedic knowledge of the current New Yorker and the historical New Yorker. And so, yes, this was very much for him a love letter to it and an homage to its writers and its editors and its purpose.

The rest of us buy the magazine and we read about 50 to 60 percent and then we feel this vague sense of shame when it sits there on the dining room table. Right, right. Thanks a couple weeks. He grabs the, you know, an entire section, entire wing of the Berkeley's library and just like, kind of assembles that in the middle of his table as a setting. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's west though. So I read he took you to a cafe in Paris to tell you about this character he'd written for you, Robuck, right. What was that meeting like? Yeah, it just so happened.

I was going to be in Paris the week after I, you know, I got the, you know, the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. ring from my people, as it said, that he was interested in having me in his next film. And so he was in Paris. And so instead of a phone call, we agreed to get together and over a bite of lunch at a place called the Select in Saint-Germain. And the first time I'd met him. And a very fitting spot, as I would find out, because it was one of the places. in Paris that James Baldwin used to haunt and write in as well. So Baldwin was one, not the only. This is not a biographical portrayal by any stretch,

but was one of the writers that Wes referenced when he described the project to me that day. Baldwin, he mentioned, he mentioned A.J. Leedling, who was a food critic for the New Yorker. And he also mentioned Tennessee Williams, whom I probably added only just like, you know, the tiniest increment of a teaspoon into, that's another discussion for another day that Wes and I have had about me finally figuring out how to do that. But yeah, that was the meeting.

But as I said, it was the first time that we had met. But later, I realized that he, you know, had not only seen. you know, pretty much every movie that I'd done, but he'd seen every play that I'd done in New York. Right. I was like, what you made? You were there. It's like, yeah, yeah.

You know, you didn't. I was like, well, why? You'd come backstage and, you know, say hello. But, yeah, he was, you know, it's really, you know, you, speaking from an actor's perspective, you do this work for a while and you do it. And you don't realize that, you know, there are people in the audience,

and their younger actors and their, you know, writers and directors who are taking interest and feel in whatever way is kind of compelled by what's going on. And Wes was one of those and he'd been thinking about for some time.

And he ultimately after that meeting delivered this script to me. He said he was, you know, in typical West fashion I'm still working on. I'm still tweaking it. But he delivered it to me about two weeks later. And it was one of the most beautiful pieces of writing

that I'd ever been offered. So I was thinking about this when I was watching the movie. What does a Wes Anderson script look like? Because there's the dialogue you deliver, and then there's this amazing thing in almost every scene going on in the background, people arranged in a very specific way. How much of that is on the page when you get it? Hmm.

A fair amount. I mean, they're seriously detailed scripts. And what I appreciated about, the piece was the detail outside of, you know, the monologue or dialogue. But what I was most taken by, or one of the things I was most taken by was the meticulousness of the architecture of the writing. I'm kind of a, I have a thing for syntax and like, it's, like, it's. because it was kind of nailed into my head back in, you know, prep school and all that stuff.

So I really have, I mean, I just have a fondness for a really thoughtfully crafted bit of writing, particularly when it comes to, you know, to, well, to anything that I'm going to perform. And this was, it was just so refined. It was just like, I look at things and I go, maybe I can edge that over, I can swan. And it was just, it was just pristine. And beyond that, there were these ideas and kind of the fluency and poetry of the language just resonated with me. Like, you know, I described it as like a song you hear on the radio that just stays with you immediately.

The melody just like sank into me. And then, you know, these themes of oddness and outsiderness. a loneliness. It was just a kind of, it was a deeper reservoir for me of emotion within it too that it just grabbed me. It just hugged me. But yeah, it's filled with the tail. I don't know if there was mention of like, you know, for example, the old woman, you know, bashing the, the rug, the carpet outside of her window. But it might have been there. Yeah, it's, there's not a lot left a chance with him. He's an incredibly comprehensive thinker and filmmaker. I mean, even much of the kind of ancillary things that come along with his films, like, you know, that are part of the, you know,

promotional side or things that he's come up with. You know, he gives thought to the words that are on the page in a notebook that's featured in, for example, in the Francis McMillman, Timothy Shalameh section, that's not just blank pages there. He's written out, you know, very specific language that, you know, that, you know, young Shalame is going to be scribbling it. It's, you know, his manifesto. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it just, it's, it, it just makes you want to want to be there for him for Wes even more because he's put so much of himself into every aspect of his storytelling. And it's, it's, you know, it's a good, it's a, it's just a good thrill to, you know, to be there along the journey with it.

You mentioned that James Baldwin was one of the writers he referenced when he's creating this character. So as an actor, how much of the real life Baldwin are you obliged to include in your performance? Yeah, what's, what I think is cool about this is that it's, it's, it's an homage and it's an amalgam. of writers, an amalgam of ideas. So for me, the Baldwin side was more about trying to initially justify this character. Who is he, how does he find himself in this place?

Why? And is there perhaps an historical justification for his being there that will allow the audience to take this on board. And Baldwin was obviously one of those historical justifications. So for me, he was a window to view a black, gay man in the late 50s, mid-50s, where we're set, who finds himself on this journey outside of America to a, you know, fictional French quasi-provincial town.

So that window was Baldwin. The narrative window, the language or his focus as a writer, really was more A.J. Liebling and kind of the irony and the humor and the stuff that he spun into his description of, you know, of a plate was clearly Liebling. There was flamboyance that was Baldwin, but also you could, you know, a little. bit of the Williams that I heard at first. And, you know, I, you know, the tiny bit of Southernism here and there, but he's more kind of like Northeast Urbane as, as Baldwin with peace. But I'm, you know, I need to make it perfectly like crystal clear. It's not biographical. Some people have gotten confused. It's not. It's not. It's a fictional character who's borrowing from, from the non-fiction. And, and so,

So as well, these themes of, which I think are for me even more resonant now, for some reason, post or late quarter, we hope, of the pandemic than prior when we filmed this. Because we shot this over, I don't know, about two and a half years ago now, but this idea of unsettledness and of and of the attempt to find dignity in the unsettled. a loneliness and find to find something even outside of the political, but kind of on an existential level, trying to find some type of peace and beauty and grace in the midst of one's own self. That Baldwin speaks very much to that

thematically in his writings, you know, in Paris and his writings on his observations on being, you know, this alien in the midst of this new, new and newly desired home. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a, you know, Roebuck Wright is, is, is a Frankensteinian creation of, you know, both West and mine, I guess. But, um, but, um, but no, it's, it's, it's, um, you know,

doesn't owe, you know, entirely to any one of these, um, references. I saw Anderson said he went back and watched Baldwin's debate with William F. Buckley in 1965 at the Cambridge Union. Did you watch that before you, as you were thinking of this character? I'd seen. that many times before. Yeah. And I think I did go back and watch it and, you know, watch some of the cavit stuff. And, you know, I'd read him. Had the, this is an embarrassing story, but he was actually

in Amherst when I was in college there. I graduated in 1987. If I'm not mistaken, he died in the fall of 87, or perhaps early 88. And I took a class with him that spring semester. And he was not not well. And I think he only made it to two lectures. It was he was paired with Robert Felwell, who wrote the heart of a come. Robert's first name. His wife was referred to. I may be mistaken. But anyway, really interesting thinker, Professor Bellwell. So anyway, James Baldwin was, I didn't make many of the lectures. He was like every Tuesday, and I think it was only two because he wasn't well.

Meanwhile, I was on the other side of town. This was at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I was at Amherst College. I was playing lacrosse. I was doing the play. It was my last semester, my senior year. I got injured a couple of times. I was kind of on crutches.

I never heard him lecture. And it's one of the biggest regrets that I should probably not admit publicly. But so, you know, but we were reading, you know, we were, you know, reading him obviously to that, you know. And it was largely focused on his, on his essays. And, you know, the price of the ticket, you know, which is like just an anthology of essays, his, which is kind of a Bible for me, you know, for many years ago. So, yeah, I did go back and watch that Buckley Baldwin debate, but I'd seen it. times before just because he's just a singular, singular American thinker and mind. And there was such a fierceness and such a clarity to, you know, to his defiance, you know, to

as expressed, you know, either through the, you know, the orally or written or through the written word. So yeah, yeah, yeah, bald on all day. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about it because I went and watched a little bit of a before we talked. And you, Roebuck Wright and Baldwin, there's a certain way of talking and maintaining a very even tone, but landing on words and savoring certain words and making your point without really raising your voice ever, without really changing the tone ever that I thought, I thought was a little bit of a parallel between the two. Well, that, that could be, although I wasn't going for,

may have been going for a style like his, but I was not going for his style. But yeah, he was definitely provided the license to, for that kind of performative language. And as well, it marries nicely with Wes's style of filmmaking, which I absolutely,

grooved to. I think we, cinema has gotten so mired down in, you know, hyper-realism. And, oh, I am, you know, an eggplant now. So I'm going to be the most eggplant, eggplant that you, you know, and it's just like, as opposed to, you know,

all the ranges of performance that are possible. Cinema started in melodrama. Now it's, you know, now it's, you know, it's progressed quote unquote to where it is now. That doesn't mean that melodrama wasn't any more effective as a means of storytelling or a means of conveyance of ideas or emotion than this. It's all an abstract. It's all like, you know, it's all in a sense arbitrary. But we've gotten so conditioned to this idea that it must be, you know, as granularly real as possible.

But Wes is like, fuck that. I'm telling stories. This is a performance and he embraces it in a way that, you know, that's highly theatrical, you know, and he's kind of created his own genre of filmmaking and his own language and signature, which for me as a performer is really super freeing. So, and Baldwin, that, you know, that kind of, you know, that, you know, he was a performer when he, you know, when he was delivering these ideas, whether it be a Cambridge or Dick Cabin or wherever day, you know, he had a, you know, he had a strong sense of the theatrical. And so, yeah, it was a nice little, nice little blend that

we were able to create because of that. Much of your segment of the movie is filmed in black and white, which makes it almost feel like a story that's set in a print magazine as you're performing it. Does black and white make you do anything as an actor that's different from performing in color? No, I wouldn't say that it does. But the thing that I did sense when working on this, because so much of it is narrated as well, was that I was working inside a silent film. And so it allowed as well for different types of gestures and maybe hints of melodrama and this type of stuff. And I just, I mean, I adore that stuff. I adore like, you know, the old chaplain and Bert Williams and Buster Keaton, however complicated they are. But, you know, I love that, you know,

I don't know what it is about it's like, you know, like bluegrass. For some ways, I hear bluegrass and it just like my heart just starts to like, like, they're just certain, like these certain forms that just, I don't know, I just really grew to, and silent film is one of them. And so, you know, from that angle, the kind of black and white, you know, thing, but really it was about the quiet, you know, kind of unspoken quality of some of these sequences because they were, you know, being narrated,

they were being told through his, you know, his remembrance of its writings that did come to mind from time to time. The payoff of your segment's very funny. I don't think we're spoiling anything here, but Arthur Howitzer, played by Bill Murray, who is the editor of the French dispatch, comes in, and he says, do you have any quotes from the character in your story

and you deliver this unbelievable coda for the story? And he says, well, we should put that back in, which for me as a journalist is very funny, because I think we spend half our lives being instructed by editors to do the obvious thing that we should have done from the beginning. Did you ever have the experience of writing something and being edited like that? I've written a few things.

And I have, you know, have been edited. But I think, moreover, we all need a good editor just generally in life at times. You know, put that back in, strip that out. That's, you know, that's way more than you need to say or do right now, you know. So, yeah, and maybe Bill Murray would be an interesting candidate for any of our lives, you know, as an editor. Well, Anderson is shooting a film. The castes go to dinner at the end of the day. What are those dinners like?

Those dinners are, as you might imagine, they are very well-resourced, you know, because we shoot in some places that know food. They know food and wine. At least the last two films, and the only two that I've worked on with West, we shot in Prince Dispatch in Angoulin, which is near, you know, in the Bordeaux. And so, yeah, it was, it was tasty. And we just finished a, oh, a couple months ago now,

his next film, Asteroid City, which we shot in a little town called Chinchon outside of Madrid. surrounded by, it's like a town of 5,000 people surrounded by vineyards and, um, and, uh,

olive groves. So, uh, you know, that's, that's, that's a combination right there for good food. And extreme amounts of,

of, um, of yamone, Iberico, uh, and, uh, yamon croquettas and the like.

Um, but, but, but yeah, just, yeah, dinner is delicious. and it's just full of, you know,

it's full of a lot of story. And, you know, it's a circus. These movies, these movies are inhabited by circus people, you know, and like top tier circus people. So it's good fun. And, you know, West kind of sits relatively quietly as, you know, at the table, you know, ringmaster. But, you know, we all kind of.

And, you know, we enjoy the opportunity to come together. It creates a sense of, you know, community and a sense of cohesion. But being the ringmaster that he is, what it's equally about is about efficiency. It's about creating a space in which everyone who's involved in the film is at work all the time. Right. So dinner, yeah, it's conversations about, you know, many things, but it also might be, okay, by the way, tomorrow we're doing X and we need to, maybe we'll explore this. And oh, yes, today was, you know, that. So you have wardrobe. The wardrobe department is, you know, in the hotel in which we stay, the hair and makeup set up. So you basically have like a, you know, like a three minute commute, you know, from your room. down to work. So it's highly efficient, highly focused,

and also it's a good deal of fun. So it's a very clever construct, as you might imagine, on the part of Mr. Anderson. As I was watching this movie about this older era of magazines, I was also thinking about the era of media we're in right now,

and Twitter, which you are a denizen of. Do you like Twitter as a vehicle for following the news? for following the news it's not bad. It used to be better. I kind of lean toward despising Twitter now. It's just, it's so discordant and, you know,

it's so indulgent and, you know, and nonproductive. For following the news, it was better when you were, when you could use the tool to curate stories and sources. That's no longer the case. Now the algorithm is curating on behalf of your choices. And it's all of this shit flying around that I have no interest in whatsoever. And what I'd really like to do is, okay, I followed X, Y, Z. I followed, you know, these periodicals and these interesting sources.

and I'd like to see, you know, in like, you know, real time what they're offering. That's much clearer. And I think the user is much more, although not entirely, in control of what, you know, they're seeking and consuming. And you get some surprises there as you do when, you know, you're flipping through, you know, an actual newspaper. But it's now there's so much candy and gloss and, you know, popcorn and, you know, Hackerjack that's being, and, you know, and, you know, just like, you know, tabloid feces that that's being

thrown up on your wall. And it's just like, you know, likewise. It's, I mean, it's just like, and to what end, you know, the, you know, the end ultimately is, you know, the, you know, the, the, you know, the disintegration of like kind of the holistic understanding of who and where we are, you know, like kind of a collective, you know, agreement on anything. It's just like it's a tool for the devolution of the species ultimately, but it's making some people very wealthy. But it's I think it's pretty, it's pretty, it's pretty, it's run, runs counter to everything that we were led to believe these tools would be, hey, you're going to have access to every library that was ever created in the history of every,

you know like every uh you know every uh you know every library will be at your fingertips and of course you know you know every lie and piece of this information and every game of you know telephone that was ever played in the history of man is being played on these devices or our devices now um and you know but they're you know kind of on a you know they're they're they're like you know you know nuclear, nuclear levels of disinuclear atomic bomb, you know, empowered, you know, disinformation. And it's just, I think we're in a lot of trouble. And I think the technology is, you know, behind these, you know, that's purported to give us access to information is a big part of the problem.

And we do have to admit, and you've indulged in this once or twice, because I've seen you, Twitter is very, very good for real-time reactions to sporting events that are happening on TV. See, I've seen you. Michigan State beat Michigan the other day. You were up. I'm going to weigh in. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's useful because that's benign.

And everybody, you know, everybody can at least agree. Everybody who has any interest in something like that agrees, okay, I'm watching the game, too. So, you know, we're all here. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I guess on some level, it really should. should be, you know, the rule for social media should be standardized, you know, as the rule is for bars, you know, no discussion of politics and religion, you know, anything by and you're okay.

So you start delving into that on these things, you know, all hell breaks loose. But, yeah, I, you know, talk sports and, and, you know, crack some jokes and, and, you know, crack some jokes. you know, read a few credible articles and, you know, leave it at that. Everybody has an opinion, you know, they say, you know, opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one. And very few of them should be aired in public. I'll end here. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell died last month.

And you played Colin Powell in a movie, W for Oliver Stone. What was it like to play Colin Powell? It was really, to read his story was impactful. His story is an impressive one. He was not just a military man. He was, as many of these senior officers are and senior officers at that level. He was a scholar. He'd been a White House scholar, I think, in the late 70s.

This was like post-Vietnam. mom, you know, he had been ROTC, as I recall me, he'd really come step up the ranks and of the military and by virtue of, you know, his assets, his abilities and his, you know, dedication to the thing. He ascended to, you know, the absolute top. And, you know, he was a son of immigrants and he was a family man and all of these things. I never. really agreed with his politics and obviously I didn't I didn't portray him you know as a hero of that tragic episode you know which the film focused on was our invasion of Iraq but I did try to portray him as someone somewhat vulnerable you know who I

think at the end of the day as indicated by his attempts to kind of deem his political image and make amends for what I clearly perceived to have been missteps. You know, I tried to portray him as, you know, as someone in some ways betrayed, betrayed by some of his colleagues, but I also think betrayed by some of his own choices, betrayed by himself too, because, you know, he was playing the game and the game caught up with him. And it led to just devastation for, you know, the Iraqi people, for many families here in America and for the stability of the region, the stability of our country. It's just, you know, and, you know, he was right at the center of it. I do think he was, you know, like many good soldiers, he became a pawn, despite him being one of the most powerful, or the former, most powerful former soldiers.

He was a good soldier. But I was very good friends with a senior officer who was, I knew for many years. And at one point, you know, we were talking in the midst of everything that was going on with the invasion of Iraq and all that stuff. And I said, man, what's going on with Powell? And he knew him. He was, half the African American as well. And I said, what does he? I said, is this, is he just a good soldier or what?

And he said, you know, I think. This is his idea of a good soldier. And that wasn't something that the gentleman who was speaking to me thought necessarily was the, you know, was the wisest understanding of what it meant to be that. And so I tried to play a lot of things. I tried to do justice to him as a great, with a small G man, but also, you know, you know,

know, a great small G man who was in a great with a large G shit show, and not unentirely of his making. Jeffrey Wright, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Thank you. I appreciate it, man. Thanks again to Jeffrey Wright. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. Here is our Thanksgiving week scheduled media consumers on Monday, David Shoemaker and I are back doing our usual thing.

And then on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, I've got another how-to podcast to get you through the weekend. This time, it's how to write a children's book with Jeff Kinney, the author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Jeff Kinney is the man who makes my children laugh more than I do. And let me tell you, that is incredibly unsettling. I'm going to get some answers. Plus, of course, more lukewarm takes about the media.

Have a great weekend.