Wes Anderson skewered Donald Trump’s proposed foreign film tariff at a Cannes press conference for his new film “The Phoenician Scheme,” questioning how it will work.
“Can you hold up the movie in customs? It doesn’t ship that way,” the director said, evoking a chorus of laughter.
“The Phoenician Scheme,” which features a sprawling cast of Anderson regulars, shot in Germany. When asked about the tariffs, Anderson initially replied: “I thought you said he was giving us a plug or something. Did Trump see it?”
But he then went on to mock the idea: “The tariff is interesting because I’ve never heard of a 100% tariff before. I’m not an expert in that area of economics, but I feel that means he’s saying he’s going to take all the money. And then what do we what do we get? So it’s complicated to me. Can you hold up the movie in customs? It doesn’t ship that way.”
The film is a droll three-hander, starring Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera and breakout Mia Threapleton, who is the daughter of Kate Winslet. Del Toro plays business magnate Zsa-zsa Korda, one of the richest men in Europe and subject of repeated assassination attempts, while Threapleton portrays his estranged daughter, a smoking and alcohol-swilling nun named Sister Liesel. Like Threapleton, Cera is a newcomer to the Anderson troop, playing a duplicitous tutor named Bjorn Lund.
Speaking about the inception of the idea for the film, Anderson said he and co-writer Roman Coppola were at first intending to pen something “very dark” about a business magnate who is “not really concerned with how the big decisions he has empowered himself to make for the world are affecting populations of workforces and landscapes.”
Anderson added that there was “the darkness of a certain kind of capitalist that we were building this on, but it took us somewhere else. We need a psychiatrist’s couch to really answer it properly, and even then I don’t know. But it’s in the DNA, somehow.”
He then revealed his next project, which he said he’s co-writing with Coppola and Richard Ayoade, who is also in “The Phoenician Scheme” cast. “Roman and Richard and I are working on a script together for a movie, and I think it does have a darkness,” Anderson said, but added that he’s “not going to say anything about it.”
Rounding out the “Phoenician Scheme” cast is Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Riz Ahmed, Scarlett Johansson, Richard Ayoade, Mathieu Amalric, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis and Benedict Cumberbatch, all of whom have starred in at least one previous Anderson feature.
“The Phoenician Scheme” will have a limited theatrical release from Focus Features starting May 30. The film will expand wider June 6.
