Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” is in wide release this weekend (read our review), and as we’ve noted over the last few weeks, the filmmaker is moving at a quick pace never seen before in his career. 2022 and 2023 saw back-to-back Cannes premieres, “The French Dispatch” and “Asteroid City,” and later this year, he will release yet another film for Netflix, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” which is actually only 37 minutes long. So that’s two films in one year, albeit ‘Henry Sugar’ is maybe more akin to a long-ish short film.
Regardless, that said, Anderson recently confirmed he has yet another movie on the way, and with the French press this week, the filmmaker revealed some details.
For one, it sounds like it’s going to star Benicio Del Toro (who has only worked with Anderson once on “The French Dispatch”), it’s going to be a family-centered spy film, and it’s going to be more straightforward than some of Anderson’s recent films like the portmanteau of ‘French Dispatch’ and the film-within-the-film meta-ness of “Asteroid City.”
My next feature film will be linear, with Benicio Del Toro in every shot,” Anderson explained to LeMonde in France. “I can’t tell you much more than that except that it will be about espionage, a father-daughter relationship, and, let’s say, with a rather dark tone.”
Asked why his films were so complicated of late, Anderson explained why he went with the anthology route of late.
“With ‘The French Dispatch’ (2021), I’d always wanted to do an anthology [film],” he said. “I had certain ones that I loved like Max Ophüls’ ‘La Ronde’ (1950) and ‘Le Plaisir’ (‘House of Pleasure,’ 1952) and Vittorio De Sica’s ‘L’Or de Naples’ (‘The Gold of Naples,’ 1954). ‘Asteroid City,’ I feel it’s all mixed together. The theater and the cinema part of it are meant to communicate, and it is meant to be one thing.
Anderson also revealed that much of ‘Henry Sugar,’ an adaptation of four Roald Dahl shorts stories (so likely a short-form anthology film again), was shot in 16MM.
“Roald Dahl’s widow, she used to be the one in charge of the estate. And we said one day, seven or eight years ago, I would do ‘Henry Sugar,’ he explained. “I compare them to something made for television like BBC or Jonathan Demme’s ‘Swimming to Cambodia’ [the 1987 adaptation of a theatrical monologue by Spalding Gray]. They’re very small scale and, in fact, shot in 16 millimeter.”
In an interview with Cahiers Du Cinema, Anderson said he is currently writing his new film and dialed a little bit back on the idea of a “darker tone.”
“My intention was to make a particularly dark film. But while working on it, I’m heading in another direction, and it will probably be less dark than expected,” he explained. “It will be a lot about family, even more so than in ‘Asteroid City,’”
So semi-dark father/daughter espionage film with Benicio Del Toro at its center? It sounds unique, a little bit of a different flavor of Anderson than we’re used to, and hell, we’ll totally take it.