Cannes 2025: Wes Anderson is writing a new movie with Richard Ayoade and Roman Coppola
Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19th, following the premiere of The Phoenician Scheme, director Wes Anderson confirmed he is writing a new movie with Richard Ayoade and Roman Coppola.
Coppola has long collaborated with the director, and they share a strong working relationship. In addition to The Phoenician Scheme, they have previously collaborated on Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City.
Meanwhile, with Ayoade, his first taste of working with Anderson came with The Phoenician Scheme, which is set to be released in cinemas on May 23rd.
At the press conference for The Phoenician Scheme, Ayoade said that he initially believed his casting to be a “clerical error”. He added: “When I found out it wasn’t a mistake, I was more than happy to show up.”
Later, during the same press conference, Anderson shared his plans to work with Ayoade again on his next project but remained tight-lipped about the plot. The director told those in attendance, “Roman, Richard, and I are working on a script together for a movie, and it does have a darkness. But yes, we’re gonna write a movie together, and I’m not going to tell you anything.”
The filmmaker also explained his creative process, sharing, “Every movie is different with all the things that I feel. But when someone watches a trailer and says in five seconds they can tell it’s my movie, I can’t pretend we don’t know what they’re talking about. But each movie is a completely separate, different thing. It was intended to be a very dark movie, but it took us somewhere else.”
In a full-circle moment, Anderson revealed that he first spoke with Benicio del Toro about The Phoenician Scheme at Cannes in 2021, long before he had a full picture of what the movie would entail. “I’m lucky so far that when I finish a movie I feel that something is waiting and about to take shape. I brought this one up to Benicio four years ago in Cannes and said, “Benicio, theres’s something that’s going to come your way’.”
He continued: “And the beginning of the movie was just the image of him as his character. Ididn’t know him or what was going to happen, but I knew he was moving relentlessly through this story, and you can’t kill him.”
The Phoenician Scheme stars del Toro as Zsa-zsa Korda, one of Europe’s wealthiest men. It will be released on May 30th, 2025.
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