BEHIND THE SCENERY

As Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme’ unfolds amid more meticulously created backdrops, Clarisse Loughrey delves deeper with his longtime set decorator Anna Pinnock

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In The Phoenician Scheme, industrialist Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), one of the richest men in Europe, invites his only daughter, nun Liesl (Mia Threapleton), to become his heir on a trial basis. She arranges quarters for herself as humble as can be acquired within the walls of an Italian palazzo-style manor, with its trompe l’oeil marble walls and stacks of paintings by old masters left to gather dust in the hallways.

She sleeps in a cot bed, below an oil work of a young girl sat curled up in the grass. It’s by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. We’re shown the bed two or three times, and only in passing. But, as the film’s set decorator Anna Pinnock assures me, it was supplied with a “thick mattress with real horsehair”, custommade using traditional techniques, and then fitted with “old linen from French markets that we cut up and remade”.

Welcome to a Wes Anderson set. Here, no detail is insignificant, no corner cut. His worlds are jewellery box-fantasies, with his most recent escapades – The French Dispatch, Asteroid City, and Roald Dahl anthology film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More – leaning only further into the idea of artifice, of revealing to the audience the artist’s touch. In The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, we see stagehands scuttling about, dragging props and scenery in and out of view. Asteroid City is presented to us as a television show about the staging of a play about an alien visitation. At one point, Bryan Cranston’s narrator turns up in the extraterrestrial story only to stop, ask, “Am I not in this?” and then politely retreat.

The Phoenician Scheme is no different. As Pinnock notes, in the main hall where Korda holds court with both family and business associates alike (no difference between the two, in his mind), there’s a single wooden table on a dais, a raised platform, dressed with “the key elements essential for his business work”.