TELLURIDE – Every major film festival has a specific aesthetic that lets them stand apart from their peers. Sundance has the snowy Main Street of Park City and buzzworthy building public audiences. Cannes has a legendary red carpet and after parties on la Croissette. Toronto has a Midnight Madness selection few of its counterparts can match. And Telluride? The Colorado staple is known for non of the frills (no red carpets, no post screening soirees), Academy members and a festival where you can spot famous faces walking through town like – gasp – real people. It’s the sort of festival where you can conduct an interview with say, Jeffrey Wright, at a picnic table and none other than Barry Jenkins will stop by to say hello to the both of you.
Jenkins wasn’t trying to be rude, he knew both of us, but to just quickly catch up with Wright before moderating a post-screening Q&A for Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” later that day. The film, which debuted at Cannes in July, finds Wright portraying Roebuck Wright, a culinary writer for the famed fictual literary magazine that features the musings of Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) and Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), among others. In a film framed by three different assignments, Roebuck’s centers on Lt. Nescafier (Steve Park), the greatest culinary Police Chef in the world and a kidnapping that goes completely off the rails.
Filmed in 2019 and originally selected for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, Wright volunteers that he sees the film with a different perspective in the current panemic era.
“I think in some ways, the meaning you have of each has changed a little bit post-pandemic,” Wright says. “I think this film or this character in this story within this film is a little more poignant in some ways, for me anyway, now post-pandemic, because it is an examination of aloneness and isolation and an individual’s attempt to find grace within that. And I think that a lot of people can relate to that now, post-pandemic, post-lockdown and all the stuff that we’ve been through. So for me, I don’t know, it was always prior to that, even just this kind of existential thing of one individual person and all the other beings on the planet and then in the new universe. And I think even more so now that there’s something about Roebuck’s little story that speaks to that.”
During the rest of our conversation, Wright touched upon meeting Anderson in Paris to discuss the role (he was conveniently on vacation in France), how he worked “Dispatch,” “No Time To Die” and “The Batman” into his “Westworld” shooting schedule, and more.
This interview has been edited for time and clarity.
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The Playlist: How does getting in a Wes Anderson movie happen? Does he just call? Does he send a script and say, “Check this out.”?
Jeffrey Wright: That’s a very good question because, as you might expect, Wes things happen in Wes ways. So, my agent called and said that Wes had this film that he was doing and he wanted to share the script with me and he’d like to hop on a phone call because he’s in Paris. I said, “Well, actually, I’m going to be in Paris next week.” I was going over with my family and so I can meet him. He said, “Oh great.” So we ended up meeting at a cafe on the Left Bank, Cafe Select. And we sat and had lunch and he described the film and the character.
And as it turned out, it was a very appropriate place to have that first meeting and first talk because the character is kind of a mashup of [James] Baldwin, of Tennessee Williams a bit, and A.J. Liebling, who was this food critic for The New Yorker. And Select was a haunt of James Baldwin when he was in Paris. So, it made good sense. And so we sat and talked and I was intrigued and he said, “Well, I’m not going to show you anything now because I’m still refining the script and I’ll send you something in a couple of weeks.” So I was back in New York then and he sent me the Roebuck Wright side of things. And I was fully there.
Did you feel like you had to do research on the real people that he said he was inspired by? Or did you feel like it was all just on the page?
Well, it was a combination of things. Yeah, it was on the page and it’s a fictional piece. It’s not autobiographical. But of course, I was familiar with Baldwin and Tennessee Williams, and A.J. Liebling to a lesser extent. So I read some of his stuff to understand the kind of quirkiness of his writing, which was cool. And I went back and read a bit of Baldwin’s work, particularly as it related to his ex-pat life. Looked at some interviews and Tennessee Williams and stuff. And I wasn’t trying to really impersonate either of them, but just create some guy who lived somewhere in the midst of all of that stuff with homage to a bit of them and a bit of some other thing that came out of my head. I don’t know. Because it’s not, by any stretch of the imagination, again, biographical.
Right. Of course.
It all exists in Wesland.
Speaking of Wesland, I’ve asked actors this question before, and I think sometimes we’re just being naieve by assuming it, but does he direct the specific style that the actors are performing in? Or is it something where the cast has seen enough Wes movies and you look at the script and you go, “Oh, I know the cadence of this just from the script itself”?
For me, I just immediately heard some iteration of the voice in my head when I first started reading it. And maybe it has to do with having seen some of his films prior, but I think it was more just the kind of fully fleshed out language that was on the page. It was one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve ever been offered to play.
In terms of how he actually writes his prose on the page?
So beautiful. Just the language, the structure, the ideas, it was just something just so very apparent and evident in its beauty, this kind of exploration of a certain type of freedom or a yearning for freedom and the exploration of someone who’s striving to… Or it’s something that he finds to be beautiful in the midst of all of the f**king and all of the bulls**t that exists around him, that he’s still relentlessly searching a place for his own grace. There was just something poetic about it for me that resonated and for me. And it was in the language, in the specificity of his words that he defined himself by language. Not always, but I enjoy playing characters for whom language is a primary tool, and I particularly was drawn to that when I first read it. Not all of it because it’s been happening for a while, but certainly we were at this heightened place in America where language was just being degraded and mauled and disrespected in a way that I thought was pretty obviously disgusting. And so in the midst of that, there’s opportunity to say, “Oh, wow. Wow, let’s celebrate a semi-colon. Yeah. Cool. Sign me up.”
Your role is broken up into the scenes with Liev and then the story Roebuck is telling in that interview. But there are dialogue heavy scenes with Liev, in particular. I’ve spoken to other actors who’ve been in Wes movies and they’re like, “We don’t really do a lot of rehearsal. We just sort of show up and do it.” Was that the case with you and Liev?
No, we didn’t. We just got on set and started talking. I had pretty much the entirety of my part of the story in my head. And it just almost from the first reading, it just stayed with me and I just kept going back to it. So that by the time we got to Angouleme to film I knew all of my lines, which is a real rarity for me. But I just loved hearing that language in my head. And I just loved hearing the story and trying to find a voice. And, anyway, so we just sat down and let him do his lines. Just roll the camera. We just did it. And then Wes would say, “OK, well do. OK now, at one point…” And he reminded me of this the other day. We were on this thing when we shot that [one-shot] scene going through the police station, that was supposed to have been a voiceover.
Meaning in the script, it was written as voiceover?
Yeah. And I’m kind of walking through. And then we did that a couple of times. And then Wes is like, “Well, maybe Jeffrey, maybe you can just do the words as you go.” I’m like, “O.K.” [Laughs.] He said, “Well, do you need a little time?” “O.K., Yeah. Give me a few minutes.” And then I said, “O.K. I think I got it.” And then we shot it.
[The aforementioned arrival and departure of Barry Jenkins occurs]
So you haven’t time see any other movies?
No. I haven’t. My son started college yesterday, so I dropped him off at school and was there for a few hours with him. His mom stayed longer and then I got on a plane and came out here.
Getting back to the movie really quick. So you were talking about that sequence and…
I think we did a few takes. It wasn’t a lot of takes and it’s pretty much one shot, so that’s what we wanted to do because he’s got this really, really intricate, like train track, a whole railroad system of dollies. And it’s just like this long proscenium and we just did the whole thing. But it was because I was so taken by the language that it was just there in my head. It was, “O.K., let’s do it.”
I don’t even know if it would be in your sequence of the film, but was there anything in particular that you had read in the script that you were like, “I just want to see how this comes out in the actual film”?
All the animation, I guess.
Oh yeah.
That, I was intrigued because we filmed in this town that is the animation center of France, Angouleme. And so my kids were there with me for a bit and both are big fans of animation, as you could expect. And my son and my daughter as well draw. My son is particularly intrigued by animation and he had huge Tintin head as he was growing up. And so we were going to the museums there and the Museum of Animation, and then there’s an animation college there that we were exploring and there’s drawings everywhere. I knew that Wes was going to be drawing from the French tradition, other traditions. So, I was really curious to understand how it would present itself in the film. So that was pretty exciting to find myself in a kind of revamped Tintin tale.
Because of the pandemic, this is one of the three projects that you must’ve worked on two years ago that are finally coming out.
Yeah.
Two and a half years ago with “What if…” this, and “No Time to Die.”
Yeah.
Does it feel like ancient history? Does it feel like you made them so long ago or do they feel as relevant as it was when you were working on them?
I think in some ways, the meaning you have of each has changed a little bit post-pandemic. I think this film or this character in this story within this film is a little more poignant in some ways, for me anyway, now post-pandemic, because it is an examination of aloneness and isolation and an individual’s attempt to find grace within that. And I think that a lot of people can relate to that now, post-pandemic, post-lockdown and all the stuff that we’ve been through. So for me, I don’t know, it was always prior to that, even just this kind of existential thing of one individual person and all the other beings on the planet and then in the new universe. And I think even more so now that there’s something about Roebuck’s little story that speaks to that.
So, things change, but it has been a while. We shot this in the beginning of 2019. Right? I think. Yeah. And then I went back to “Westworld” and then in the middle of that went away and did Bond and then finished “Westworld”and then came back to finish up Bond at the end of October 2019.
Wow.
Right. And then been through a lot since then, we all have, but then I came back and my mother passed away within about a month after I got back home and then-
The pandemic began?
And then it was Christmas. And then January, in some ways, somewhat reluctantly after all that had happened, that I went to do “Batman,” and then we got shut down and then the pandemic, and then it’s like, who the hell knows where we are now?
Yeah. I don’t know. I think we’re still in it.
We are in it. For a number of reasons, largely related to the pandemic, there’s been a lot of time and distance that has passed between these pieces, but I still think that they’re meaningful, if not more meaningful now. And the Bond piece as well.
Do you think the movie will now have a different interpretation or people will see it in a different way now because it’s come after the pandemic?
I think we see everything now with a different interpretation post-pandemic, at least I do. I have a different perspective on human beings than I did before the pandemic. Yes.
Well, I wanted to just ask, because I was unaware of this, has “Westworld” always been so easy in terms of being like, “O.K., we can work this schedule out so that you can be gone for four or six weeks on a different project”?
Oh, never six weeks. Never six weeks. No. I wouldn’t say it’s been easy. They’ve certainly been incredibly accommodating. And a lot of this too has been a function of the pandemic as well in terms of my going away now. We were to film Wes’s piece prior to the filming “Westworld.” No. They’ve just been incredibly accommodating. Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy are just wonderful collaborators and bosses.
Are you shooting the latest season of “Westworld” now?
Yeah. We’re on a bit of a hiatus right now.
And is it the last season?
It’s the latest season.
I get that. And then the last thing I just want to ask is, I know you’re big on social media…
Less so than I was some time ago.
But fans are really loving “What If…?” and they love your character, The Watcher, in partcular. For something that you must’ve spent hours in a recording booth for is there satisfaction in that?
Oh yeah, it’s much better that people like something than dislike it.
Yeah, that’s was a stupid question. [Laughs.]
It’s so much better. No, yeah. I’m stoked that people are into it and we’re still midway through the season, so there’s more possibilities to explore. So I’m glad that people even at this point really are digging it and particularly the way they responded to this last episode, the Dr. Strange episode because I was really moved by that one myself. And I’m glad that other people understand to some extent why now.
“The French Dispatch” opens in theaters on Oct. 22
