For a director with such an individual style, it’s odd that hipster-fogey visionary Wes Anderson, who’s surprisingly well-travelled, has scarcely visited his adopted home of France on screen – just in 2007 short Hotel Chevalier, filmed in Paris’s Hôtel Raphael. That changes with the long-awaited Friday 22 October 2021 arrival of his new film, The French Dispatch, set in Fifties Paris and the punsomely fictional region of Ennui-sur-Blasé.
A combination of his trademark technicolour pastel and black-and-white sequences, it’s based around the French outpost of a New Yorker-like American magazine, edited by Bill Murray’s Arthur Howitzer Jr, with a raft of other Anderson repertoire players (Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe) and a sprinkling of new stars, including the ubiquitous Timothée Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan.
To film this enticing confection, the team headed to the west of France and Angoulême – small and relatively obscure, but not such a surprising choice for a graphic-arts fan like Anderson. Known as ‘La Ville de l’Image’, the town is a national centre for animation and video games, with more than 30 studios in the area. It also offers a fine selection of winding streets with the ambience of a Nouvelle Vague classic. ‘We really looked hard for a town that could be a Parisian quartier like Ménilmontant, Belleville or Montmartre,’ Anderson told local paper Charente Libre in a rare interview. ‘Angoulême has beautiful architecture. The Old Town with its staircases and bridge and different levels is really well preserved. Also, it’s really quiet here, so it’s ideal for making a movie.’
Anderson spent six months on site and used 900 locals as extras, as well as employing crew from the area. For interiors, the team was based at the disused Cofpa felt factory at nearby Gond-Pontouvre, but also shot all over town. A sequence of riot police lined up on an overhead bridge was on rue du Sauvage; rue de Bélat became the site of an old-school newspaper kiosk; and the square in front of Cathédrale Saint-Pierre was transformed with the use of fake façades and scaffolding into the home of The French Dispatch office. All that was missing, Anderson told Charente Libre, was a prison in which to place Benicio Del Toro’s Moses Rosenthaler – which they found in nearby Ruelle.
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While in town, the cast made Hôtel Le Saint Gelais, on rue du Père Deval in the centre, their second home. And while Anderson expressed a fondness for local landmark Hôtel de Bardines, a pillared mansion on rue de Beaulieu, it seems Bill Murray was the town’s biggest fan. ‘He only had to come once,’ the director told Charente Libre, ‘but he insisted on returning. The second time he stayed a week for a single day’s shooting.’
OTHER WES ANDERSON FILMS:
RUSHMORE
It’s all a long way from Anderson and Murray’s first collaboration, on Rushmore (1998). This, the director’s second movie, was filmed in his hometown of Houston, Texas. Rushmore Academy, the first school attended by the precocious Max (Jason Schwartzman), was in fact Anderson’s own alma mater, St John’s on Claremont Lane (the private Rushmore Academy). Max transfers to Grover Cleveland High, filmed at Lamar High on Westheimer Street, while Murray’s Herman Blume stays at the Warwick Hotel on Main Street in the Museum District, since renamed Hotel ZaZa.
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THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS
For 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums, the team headed to New York. The Tenenbaum family home, supposedly at 111 Archer Avenue, is in Harlem, at 339 Convent Avenue, while a series of city landmarks play host to the characters, including the Waldorf Astoria to Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), and Central Park Zoo and the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hill to Richie’s (Luke Wilson) tennis match. Moonrise Kingdom (2012) took on another great American region, using Rhode Island for its fictional New England town of New Penzance. The Summer’s End lighthouse is at the northern end of Conanicut Island, with the cove at the southern tip, in Jamestown’s Fort Wetherill State Park. The two kids’ camps, meanwhile, are back on the mainland: Camp Ivanhoe is really Bayfield Farm in South Kingstown, and Fort Lebanon, run by the fearsome Commander Pierce (Harvey Keitel), is in Hopkinton.
THE LIFE AQUATIC
Anderson’s first foray abroad came with 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which replicated the ocean travels of its Jacques Cousteau-alike around the coast of Italy. Much of the movie was filmed in the famed Cinecittà studios in Rome, with location shoots mostly taking place within short distances. The Zissou Compound, supposedly on Pescespada Island, was shot at Torre Astura, a medieval tower on the coast next to Anzio. Due south of this is the island of Ponza, which stands in for Port-au-Patois, where Zissou (Bill Murray, naturally) goes to find his wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston).
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THE DARJEELING LIMITED
Though The Life Aquatic was a nightmare to make (and a commercial flop), the director continued his travels with his next picture, 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited. Set aboard a moving train in India, the film takes us through the deserts of Rajasthan with views of Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Udaipur, as well as smaller settlements: we see the railway station at Zawar, south of Udaipur, elephants at Narlai, and there’s an unscheduled stop in Osian, north of Jodhpur.
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
Closest to the world of The French Dispatch is Anderson’s most recent live-action film, 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Set in the imaginary Eastern European land of Zubrowka, it was filmed in Germany, though the set-bound exterior of the titular hotel was consciously modelled on the Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary, also used as the Hotel Splendide in 2006 Bond flick Casino Royale. For the hotel lobby, Anderson took over the Görlitzer Warenhaus, a disused Art Nouveau department store in the town of Görlitz, close to the Polish border – a town with an impressive screen CV, taking in the Nazi film-within-a-film of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), The Reader (2008) and The Book Thief (2013). It also provided the hotel restaurant in the shape of its 1910 city hall.
For the castle home of Madame Desgoffe-und-Taxis (Tilda Swinton), Anderson moved to Schloss Hainewalde (the exterior) and Schloss Waldenburg (interiors), both in Saxony, while M Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) is imprisoned in another castle, the Renaissance-built Osterstein in Zwickau. Finally, the all-important Mendl bakery is, on the outside, back in Görlitz but its interior is in nearby Dresden. The Molkerei Pfund, officially The World’s Most Beautiful Milk Shop, is decorated throughout with handpainted Villeroy & Boch tiles and appears just as in the film – pure Wes Anderson whimsy in actual real life.
The French Dispatch is released in UK and US cinemas on Friday 22 October 2021
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