The precision of the Wes Anderson aesthetic is legend. The costumes, the pans, the delivery of unsmiling characters, and, of course, the sets. Anderson’s newest film, The Phoenician Scheme is no exception.
In Anderson and Roman Coppola’s movie, out May 30, Benicio del Toro plays Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda, a “ruthless, charismatic business tycoon,” according to the production notes, whose magnetism is matched only by his inscrutability. Picture a 20th-century robber baron-slash-visionary. The year is 1950; he is one of Europe’s richest men.
The film opens with Korda on a plane, which promptly crashes. It’s the sixth attempt on his life. It’s also the one that seems to finally give him pause. To recover, he returns to his lavish Italian-style palazzo somewhere in Phoenicia. Inside, a brooding gray and black palette plays off trompe l'oeil wall murals, and masterworks stacked like old magazines in corners. From here, the audience is ushered into his orbit, full of heavy stone bathtubs, Renoirs, and a slew of eccentric characters (Bjorn the tutor, played by Michael Cera, half-brother Nubar, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, and Cousin Hilda, played by Scarlett Johansson, to name just a few). There’s an Egyptian revival set, a Casablanca-like moment (aka “Marseille Bob’s”), and a few scenes on a train (typical of Anderson) as well as aboard a ship. The characters visit the desert and end up in a jungle, with brief but grounding returns to the palazzo.
Related article: Song Ji-hyo Takes The Plunge In BBC Earth Docuseries Deep Dive Korea
ELLE Decor caught up with production designer Adam Stockhausen, who has worked on several other Anderson films including Asteroid City, and set decorator Anna Pinnock, who worked with Stockhausen and Anderson on The Grand Budapest Hotel, for an exclusive look inside the making of Zsa-zsa Korda’s fanciful world.
Related article: Exclusive: Park Eun Bin and Sul Kyunggu On Making The Cut in Hyper Knife
Bathtub Blitz
Viewers first get to know Korda while he’s in his bathroom. There, he recovers from the plane crash, cigar in one hand, wine glass not far from the other. As nurses spin through the room, Korda leans back in a remarkably giant tub made entirely out of stone. It was “incredibly heavy,” says Pinnock, who helped source the tub from Lapicida in Yorkshire, UK. There the staff kindly sat in it to check that the size was right for the very tall del Toro (“quite hilarious, actually,” says Pinnock).
In the background are tiles from European Heritage in London. Also: three sinks. The toilet, a bidet-turned-ice-bucket (the sanitaryware and hardware come from Mongers Architectural Salvage, in Hingham, as well as Stiffkey Bathrooms and Piet Jonker in the Netherlands, says Pinnock), and the stone tub, are all arranged to the symmetry typical of Anderson’s tableaus. These pieces are used, in this case, to describe this new, strange, but actually very likeable character. Immediately one thing is clear: Korda has very good taste.
Related article: Films and TV Shows With Strong Female Leads to Watch
Inside the Palazzo
The team drew inspiration from a few key sources, one being the real-life figure who seems to most closely resembles Korda, Calouste Gulbenkian, a renowned (or infamous) British-Armenian businessman. “We started with the Gulbenkian house and museum,” Stockhausen tells us. “A bit for architectural style and also a bit just as the home of a great collector of art.” From there, “Italian houses became key,” he continued. “We looked at several from Mantua, Venice, and the Villa Farnesina in Rome.”
Besides the bathroom, viewers see Korda’s house through its hallway, his daughter’s room, and the grand entrance gallery. But it’s the gallery that plays the biggest role: A wide rectangular space, it has a grid of stone flooring, high ceilings, and walls painted to look like marble columns.
For the gallery, the crew took inspiration from several locations, including the Marmorpalais in Potsdam. “This palace went hand in hand with the forced perspective wall paintings of the Villa Farnesina we were looking at,” says Stockhausen. The designers brought in a team led by Domenico Reordino “who specialises in trompe l’oeil marble work” to paint the room. “It’s a fascinating process—part faux paint techniques and part collage,” says Stockhausen.
But grandiosity isn’t the palazzo’s only attribute. In one early scene, Korda summons his estranged daughter Leisl and the two sit on a raised platform in the center of the austere gallery, around a large Italian oak table, accompanied by a filing cabinet and office chairs. On the floor is a series of shoeboxes filled with the details of Korda’s scheme (which also comprise the movie’s plot). “Wes wanted that comic juxtaposition between the big, splendid refectory table and these very utilitarian 1930s, ‘40s office chairs,” says Pinnock. “And he wanted the filing cabinet there. A comic device in amongst all this richesse, as it were.”
Museum-Worthy Art
As a man of taste, Korda naturally collects art. Throughout the film, real masterworks show up on set. “We were very lucky, we had a Renoir that came in for a couple days,” says Pinnock. “The painting had to be kept at a certain temperature, there were guards, the whole shebang.” (There’s also a Magritte, from the Pietzsch Collection.)
Though some of these paintings are prominently hung in Korda’s palazzo, others are stacked several deep, as if they’ve just been deposited there by movers. “Wes had the thought that his collection isn’t a finished thing on display, but rather in flux,” says Stockhausen. “Zsa-Zsa has a great assortment of paintings, sculpture, and decorative objects but they are always coming and going.”
Pinnock adds, “The house would be put to bed when he traveled on to the next residence, so we did a lot with dust sheets and furniture covers and crates and stacks of paintings, which was an unusual way to dress a set, really.”
But not all of the paintings are real—some are copies made just for the film. “There were certain paintings that Wes had a certain penchant for,” says Pinnock, “and felt this character would definitely possess.” One of which was a work by Peter Paul Rubens. Making it turned out to be a very involved task. “Rubens is quite a difficult artist to copy, even if you’re a brilliant forger.”
The Soundstage
Most scenes were shot on sets at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, just outside of Berlin, Germany. Called the world’s oldest large-scale film studio, it’s been open since 1912, and is most famous for being where the 1927 movie Metropolis was filmed. “We had it jammed full,” says Stockhausen. “At one point all the component parts of Zsa-Zsa’s house were there side by side.”
It was a surprisingly quick build, according to Stockhausen; construction began in mid January and by March they were shooting. Because the schedule was tight, there were multiple sets standing at the same time. “It really was possible to walk from Zsa-Zsa’s house, past Marseille Bob’s nightclub, and into the Egyptian hotel, and feel a lot of the film at once,” says Stockhausen.
A Final Surprise Set
Slight spoiler alert: While the journey is very much the plot, there is also a destination. Even while attempts are made on Korda’s life, and he's trying to secure funding for his grand scheme, Leisl is probing for information about her mother. At its heart, the movie is about the father-daughter relationship, and how the quality of relationships is more important than the acquisition of great wealth.
One of the final locations in the film was shot on location in Potsdam, in a small “hovel”—part residence, part restaurant (think Orphan Annie meets Amélie). Tonally, it’s a fitting finale: chockfull of bottles, dishes, rags, and furniture. It’s warm, messy, lived-in, and entirely charming. “Usually in sets we do with Wes everything is quite sparse and paired down and every single item is deliberate and selected,” says Pinnock. “But the hovel was a very different kind of set. [Wes] kept saying to me, Put more in, put more in.” She continued: “That clutter gave it a real warmth and intimacy.”
This article was first seen on ELLE Decor.