After the commercial success of Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) starring Ralph Fiennes, which grossed over 175m dollars at the box office, the auteur was seriously in danger of becoming mainstream but his films over the past decade have kept audiences guessing as his quirky style defies any genre.

The Phoenician Scheme, which Anderson cowrote together with Roman Coppola who he also teamed up with for Asteroid City, stars Benicio del Toro who also appeared in his The French Dispatch.   

The story is set in the 1950s. Anatole Zsa-zsa Korda played by Benicio del Toro, is one of the richest men in Europe and he has just survived another attempt on his life. Korda's ruthless business practices have made him many enemies and he is a constant target for assassins. He is in the final stages of his biggest project the Korda Land and Sea Phoenician Infrastructure Scheme, in a fictional land that could roughly stand in for Saudi Arabia. But the threats to his life cause him to decide he needs to appoint an heir to his business interests and he chooses his twenty-year-old estranged daughter Liesl played by Mia Threapleton, who is currently in training to become a nun. But Liesl has issues with her dad, among them the unsolved mystery of what happened to her mother who died many years ago. But she agrees to tour Phoenicia with her dad and they are accompanied by her personal tutor Bjorn played by Michael Cera.  

Anderson said that he only ever had one person he could conceive of playing the character of Zsa-zsa. “The interest for me in writing a story about a character like that was the visual in my mind of Benicio playing the character. The idea for the movie was to write a part specifically for Benicio del Toro” says Wes. “I first brought this up with Benicio in 2021, at Cannes for The French Dispatch. I told him then that something was coming his way if he was interested. Benicio and I started working on it very early. As soon as there were fifteen pages of the script, he’d seen that. There was never a moment in the process when Benicio was not involved.”

The character of Zsa-zsa was supposedly inspired by moguls like J Paul Getty, J P Morgan and Anderson’s late father-in-law, Lebanese construction tycoon Fouad Mikhael Malouf.

A host of celebrity names make small appearances as always keen to enter the fantasy world Anderson creates.  Some like Tom Hanks who plays Leland and Scarlett Johansson who plays Zsa-zsa’s cousin have almost become Anderson regulars.

The Phoenician Scheme (Germany)
Directed by Wes Anderson
Cast: Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, Alex Jennings, Stephen Park, F. Murray Abraham, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe, Beatrice Campbell, Bill Murray, Freya Feyrouz