Wes Anderson is a tireless filmmaker. After presenting Asteroid City, a film full of Hollywood stars, at the Cannes Film Festival, now he is taking the medium-length film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, based on the book by Roald Dahl, an author he admires and from which he also adapted, to Venice out of competition. Fantastic Mr. Fox in animated version in 2009. The tape will land on Netflix on September 27.
For this occasion, he has surrounded himself with a team of British actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes and Dev Patel to shape a story about a very rich and greedy man who hears about a guru who can see without opening his eyes. and decides to learn his technique to cheat at the game.
Anderson, honored today at the Mostra with the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker award in recognition of his entire career, assures that he wanted to adapt this story, one of his favorites, for twenty years, but “didn’t know how”. After the death of the writer, in 1990, his grandson Luke Kelly took over the management of his rights and decided to reserve the story for the Texan director.
Asked about the recent revisionism of Dahl’s work, Anderson has lamented the decision: “If you ask me if one of Renoir’s paintings should be corrected, I would immediately say no. Because it’s already done. I don’t even want the artist to modify his works , as much as he understands the reasons. When a work of art is done, the public also participates in it, and they know it.”
Creator of universal characters such as Willy Wonka, Dahl has focused the debate on revisionism in art after the publishing house Puffin warned in February that it would change some of its classics by eliminating adjectives and references to violence, gender or race. For the author of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the only one who can modify a work at most is his own author and, in this case, Roald Dahl “is dead”, he has sentenced.
The 40-minute medium-length film was shot over two and a half weeks and has resulted in “a small theatrical performance” with the characteristic Anderson style: characters that speak to the camera, sets that change and precision in detail. In fact, in this story all the characters talk a lot and very fast. “I wanted to capture Dahl’s language and all the reality that happens on camera.”
Anderson maintains that the medium-length format, just as Almodóvar presented in Cannes with his Strange way of life, “allows you to go to the movies and have dinner on the same evening,” he commented in a relaxed and relaxed tone before the press. Regarding the strike in Hollywood, she points out that “all parties should reach an agreement because there are people who are suffering”, and has pointed out that the eventual problems of the directors are “different”.
During the tribute in the large room of the Palazzo del Cinema, Anderson received an ovation and was surrounded by collaborators such as Roman Polanski and Alexandre Desplat and the actor Benicio del Toro, who participated in The French Chronicle.
