Fifteen years ago, while director Wes Anderson was adapting
Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” into a stop-motion animated film, the author’s
widow, Felicity, asked whether he saw cinematic potential in any of Dahl’s
other tales. One came immediately to Anderson’s mind: “The Wonderful Story of
Henry Sugar,” a short Dahl published in 1977 about a wealthy gambler who learns
a secret meditation technique that allows him to see through playing cards.
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Many filmmakers had inquired about adapting “Henry Sugar”
over the years, but Dahl’s family was happy to set it aside for Anderson. There
was just one problem.
“I never knew how to do it,” he said.
The 54-year-old filmmaker typically works at a prodigious
pace, putting out distinctive comedies like the recent “Asteroid City” and “The
French Dispatch” (2021) every two or three years. But he has spent nearly half
his career trying to crack “Henry Sugar.” The breakthrough finally came when
Anderson decided to use more than just Dahl’s dialogue and plotting: He would
also lift the author’s descriptive prose and put it in the mouths of the
characters, allowing them to narrate their own actions into the camera as they
happen.
“I just didn’t see a way for me to do it that isn’t in his
personal voice,” Anderson explained. “The way he tells the story is part of
what I like about it.”
The result is a 40-minute short starring Benedict Cumberbatch,
Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley and Richard Ayoade, with a delicious assist from Ralph
Fiennes as Dahl. After premiering at the Venice Film Festival this month,
“Henry Sugar” was released Wednesday on Netflix, followed by three more
Anderson-helmed Dahl shorts — “The Swan,” “The Rat Catcher” and “Poison” — that
employ the same actors and meta conceit of using Dahl’s prose in dialogue.
(That prose has been under a microscope of late because of a
plan by Dahl’s publisher to remove language that was deemed offensive, some of
which reflected the author’s racist views. “I don’t want even the artist to
modify their work,” Anderson said when asked about it at a Venice news
conference. “I understand the motivation for it, but I sort of am in the school
where when the piece of work is done and the audience participates in it, I
sort of think what’s done is done. And certainly, no one besides the author
should be modifying the work — he’s dead.”)
I spoke to Anderson about his Dahl projects in Venice. Here
are edited excerpts from our conversation.
When you read Dahl as
a child, you feel like he’s telling you things another adult wouldn’t. While
watching your characters say Dahl’s prose directly into the camera, I felt that
same conspiratorial connection again.
Oh, that’s good. And yeah, every kid who experiences it has
that same thing. There’s mischief in every Dahl story, and the voice of the
writer is very strong.
Also, there was always a picture of him in these books,
so I was very aware of him and the list of all his children: He lives in a
place called Gipsy House, and he’s got Ophelia and Lucy and Theo.
Do you know
about his writing hut?
I didn’t until I
watched “Henry Sugar,” but it looks like you recreated part of Dahl’s house for
the scenes in which Ralph Fiennes plays him.
When I made “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and I was working on the
script, we stayed at the house for some time. In those days, that writing hut
was still filled with his things and left the way he had it. [Dahl died in
1990.] There was a table with all these sort of talismans, little items laid
out, which I think he just liked to have next to him when he was writing. He
had this ball that looks like a shot put, made of the foil wrappers of these
chocolates he would eat every day. He’d had a hip replacement, and one of the
talismans was his original hip bone. And there was a hole cut in the back of
his armchair because he had a bad back. It is odd to have somebody write in a
way that’s sort of cinematic.
You grew up imagining
Dahl and the place he lived. How did it feel to stay there?It was a dazzling thing. It’s the house of somebody who has
a very strong sense of how he wants things to be.
Something I’m sure
you can’t relate to it all as a director.
No. [Laughs] I remember the dinner table, a great big table
with normal chairs, but at the end of it is an armchair — not a normal thing at
a dinner table — with a telephone, a little cart with pencils and notebooks,
some stacked books. Essentially, “You can all eat here, and this is where I sit
and have everything I want.” Also, he bought art and he had a good eye. I
remember there’s a portrait of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon next to a portrait
of Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud. The place is filled with interesting things
to look at.
It sounds like the
kind of set I might expect to see in a Wes Anderson film, filled with these
totems and details.
Things that are about a character. Yeah, and he’s quite a
character.
As you thought about
adapting “Henry Sugar” over the last decade and a half, did that give you time
to figure out why you were so drawn to it?
I always loved the nested aspect of it. I do these nested
things in my movies starting with “Grand Budapest,” but I think it possibly
comes from “Henry Sugar.”
In your recent
movies, you’ve had very large ensemble casts.
Why did you decide to tackle all
these Dahl stories with such a small troupe?I thought we’ll do just English actors, and I had people in
mind who I already knew and some people who I wanted to work with, so it’s not
an unfamiliar group. But the idea of doing it as a little theater company, in
the writing part of it I started thinking, “Maybe we’ll do the thing they do on
the stage sometimes, where someone’s playing this role, but also this and
this.”
You’ve said that you
tried to work with Dev Patel in the past, and this is the first time he said
yes. What had you offered him before?Well, I don’t like to say, because then the actor who was in
it says, “Oh, I wasn’t the first choice?” But I love Dev, and in this thing,
Dev is the youngest of them, so he has an advantage when it comes to paragraphs
or pages of text. If you work with people at different ages and you’re giving
them a lot to do, you can see how it really is so much easier when you’re
young: On “Moonrise Kingdom,” we had a lot of people who were 12 and they knew
every word of the whole script. It was like we had 11 script supervisors on
set.
As a precocious
American kid reading Dahl, you might wonder what it would be like to live
overseas. Now that you’re based in Paris, have you become the person that you
imagined in your mind’s eye?My experience is you stay yourself and you realize, “Oh, I
guess I will always be a foreigner.” Which is not a bad thing, but I can’t say
I’ve ever felt like now I pass. I am a Texan. Even if I’m living in New York or
in Los Angeles, where I’m from is Houston. It’s built into my identity. I think
if you’re from a city where you might want to live, or near it, then you have a
different thing: Like Noah Baumbach, he has a deep life in New York that goes
back all the way to the beginning of his life and generations of family
connections and all that stuff. For me, New York is just the friends I made.
Growing up within a small perimeter is probably quite
different from growing up with a big, big view of the world. I hadn’t really
spent much time outside of my little territory until I was in my 20s.
Is it gratifying to
have your perimeter so much larger now?
Yes. It’s an adventure to be able to say, “Well, I’m going
to have breakfast in the cafe over here that I just know from movies up until a
certain age.” That is fun. It’s definitely entertaining to live abroad, even if
it is a bit isolating.
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