Seen and unherd5/7/2023 But what I was most interested in were the short stories, because back then I thought that was what I wanted to do-fiction. I think the first story I read was by Ved Mehta, a “Letter from Delhi.” I thought, I have no idea what this is, but I’m interested. When I was in eleventh grade, my homeroom was in the school library, and I sat in a chair where I had my back to everybody else, and I faced a wooden rack of what they labelled “periodicals.” One had drawings on the cover. The French magazine in the film obviously is not The New Yorker-but it was, I think, totally inspired by it. The second idea: I always wanted to make a movie about The New Yorker. (The two I love maybe the most: “The Gold of Naples,” by De Sica, and “Le Plaisir,” by Max Ophüls.) Just in general, an omnibus-type collection, without any specific stories in mind. The first idea: I wanted to do an anthology movie. I read an interview with Tom Stoppard once where he said he began to realize-as people asked him over the years where the idea for one play or another came from-that it seems to have always been two different ideas for two different plays that he sort of smooshed together. When you were dreaming up the film, did you start with the character of Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the editor, or did you start with the stories? Your movie “The French Dispatch” is a series of stories that are meant to be the articles in one issue of a magazine published by an American in France. “The French Dispatch” will open to the general public on October 22nd. ![]() For the book’s introduction, he spoke to me about his longtime relationship with The New Yorker and how it influenced the new film. In conjunction with the film’s release, the director-a seven-time Oscar nominee, for movies including “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Moonrise Kingdom”-has published “ An Editor’s Burial,” an anthology of writings that inspired the movie, many originally published in The New Yorker. Anderson is something of a New Yorker nut, having discovered the magazine in his high-school library, in Texas, and later collecting hundreds of bound copies and gaining a deep familiarity with many of its writers. To portray these characters, American expatriates in a made-up French city, Ennui-sur-Blasé, Anderson has drawn from his regular posse-Bill Murray (who plays a vinegary character based on The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross), Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Frances McDormand-and on some first-timers, including Timothée Chalamet, Elisabeth Moss, Benicio del Toro, and Jeffrey Wright. The staff of the fictional weekly, and the stories it publishes-four of which are dramatized in the film-are also inspired by The New Yorker. It’s an anthology film, portraying the goings on at a fictional weekly magazine that looks an awful lot like-and was, in fact, inspired by- The New Yorker. ![]() On October 2nd, Wes Anderson’s new movie, “The French Dispatch,” will make its American début at the fifty-ninth New York Film Festival.
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