Wes Anderson and Jeffrey Wright on “The French Dispatch”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.5	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Wes Anderson is the director of some of my
0:16.1	favorite movies of recent years, the Grand Budapest Hotel, the Royal Tenenbaum, and Rushmore.
0:22.8	So imagine how I felt when I learned that the subject of his new movie was a very familiar
0:28.1	magazine.
0:30.4	It began as a holiday.
0:36.8	Arthur Howitzer Jr., college freshman, eager to escape a bright future on the Great Plains,
0:42.5	convinced his father, proprietor of the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun,
0:46.2	to fund his transatlantic passage as an educational opportunity to learn the family business
0:51.2	through the production of a series of Travelog columns,
0:55.7	to be published for local readers in the Sunday Picnic magazine.
0:58.0	The magazine in this film
0:59.6	and the title of the film itself
1:01.3	is the French Dispatch,
1:03.5	and it bears a very striking resemblance
1:06.0	to the New Yorker in its earliest days.
1:10.5	Over the next 10 years, he assembled a team of the best expatriate journalists of his time,
1:15.6	and transformed picnic into the French dispatch,
1:19.6	a factual weekly report on the subjects of world politics, the arts high and low,
1:25.6	fashion, fancy cuisine, fine drink, and diverse
1:29.5	stories of human interests set in faraway Cartieres.
1:34.7	He brought the world to Kansas.
	...

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