Cannes film festival is, in several ways, an appropriate place to meet up with cast members of The Phoenician Scheme. The latest flick from Wes Anderson does not actually touch down in the French city, but it goes everywhere else in its pursuit of an eccentric billionaire intent on developing a matrix of extravagant schemes.
Cannes is, at this time of year, unreal enough to play itself unaltered in an Anderson movie. The people are (nearly) all beautiful and immaculately dressed. Any sense of quotidian grime is absent. One would not be altogether surprised to hear the city was ordered by Anderson’s unseen hand.
Anyway, Benicio Del Toro, burly in a Levi jacket, and Michael Cera, sunglasses concealing jet-lagged eyes, are here to tell me about the film and their wider lives.
Del Toro says in his trademark growl, “1995 I came here first, with The Usual Suspects. It’s important for cinema. It’s incredible. There’s a community of people here that support film. And it’s been amazing for me and for my career. Just to get picked for competition is an accomplishment.”
I imagine they are shuffled around to a rigorous, unyielding schedule. Can they connect with the real city in that position?
“I think that’s pretty impossible,” says Cera. “For me, at least. I glance at the schedule, and then I just get in the car when they tell me to. I go on the tumble-dry schedule and do it the whole day! I find there’s never really an opportunity to do anything aside from the work that you’re here to do.”
From The Royal Tenenbaums up to Grand Budapest Hotel and on through recent films such as The French Dispatch and Asteroid City, Anderson has always demonstrated a gift for casting. The Phoenician Scheme features Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch and another half-dozen A-listers.
Watching the precise framing and cold line delivery in Anderson’s films, one can’t help but assume that the shots are ruthlessly planned. Do I have that right? Or is it more organic than it seems?
“I think it evolves a lot,” says Cera. “Wes has the luxury of doing a lot of takes. You don’t feel any sense of time pressure on his set.”
I wonder if Cera could draw any comparisons with David Lynch. Both have utterly distinct sensibilities. Both have an unmistakable aesthetic. Cera has one hilarious scene in series three of Twin Peaks. Talk to me about that.
“David probably worked in different kinds of ways, depending on the scene and the subject,” he says. “Because I’ve seen a documentary of him making that series, and in very intense scenes he’s insane. ‘Kick his f**king head in!’
“We were doing a night shoot. It was 2am and it was very giggly, and he was so funny. He’s cracking jokes. And I was just happy to be with him.”
I assumed that working for Lynch would be more intense.
“It was just three takes and he was, like, ‘That’s money in the bank.’ Ha ha!”
Where were we? Anderson’s gift for casting is not just about grabbing the biggest stars. Del Toro and Cera offer a perfect complement as, respectively, the scheming magnate Zsa-zsa Korda and his fawning Swedish factotum Bjorn Lund.
They carry that yin-and-yang energy into the interview room. Cera is the gentle-voiced innocent who, after breaking through in Arrested Development, moved on to be the low-key foil in films such as Superbad, This Is the End and Barbie.
Del Toro, an Oscar winner for Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, in 2001, is an old-school movie star of the boldest stripe. He had an early break in 1989 as a henchman in the James Bond film Licence to Kill. That appearance in The Usual Suspects led to a career playing troubled men with gentle souls. He was Che Guevara for Soderberg in the two-part Che. He endured turmoil for Alejandro González Iñárritu in 21 Grams. Cera is from up north, in Canada. Del Toro is from down south, in Puerto Rico. As I say, a neat double act.
Let us talk about how they got into this. The contrasts are equally marked. I noted above that Cera “broke through” in Arrested Development. That is not true for two reasons. First, he already had a career. Second, almost nobody watched the show when it was first on.
“When I was 10 I had a job on a kids’ TV show in Canada,” he says. “We did two long seasons – a whole 22 episodes. There was a bunch of other kids more or less my age. I really felt like I was learning on the job. I didn’t know what to do or when to speak or anything. But I had my hand held through it by gentle adults who were great with kids. And we were just having fun.”
I met Cera a decade and a half ago when he was promoting Superbad in Dublin. I said something about finding fame on Arrested Development, and he politely noted that this was not at all the case. Mitchell Hurwitz’s now legendary sitcom about a wealthy family facing up to criminal humiliation struggled through three sparsely watched series before cancellation in 2006. (It was revived, after cult success, by Netflix a full 12 years later.)
“Nobody was watching it,” says Cera with his polite, diffident smile. “Yeah, when it was airing the audience was very small. We were always gasping for oxygen – about to be cancelled at every moment. The ratings were scaring the shit out of us at the time.”
And now it is the source of endless memes: “Go see a Star War”; “There are dozens of us!”; “It’s one banana. What could it cost? Ten dollars?” If you know, you know.
“It caught on later on DVD, because it was so serialised,” he says. “The network note was always, ‘Make the episode stand-alone.’ But that’s not what Mitch Hurwitz wanted to do with it. If your friends said, ‘This show is funny,’ and you watched episode six with no context, you really couldn’t enjoy half of the humour or the story.”
And now all TV runs on the serial principle.
“That’s right.”
Del Toro took a more old-school route into stardom. Although his grandparents had come from a rural background, his dad was a successful lawyer and expressed himself faintly appalled when, studying business at the University of California San Diego, Benicio got the acting bug and threw in college for the audition mill in New York.
That didn’t initially work out, but later, in Los Angeles, an agent put him up for an audition with the Stella Adler school. The legendary acting coach, who had taught Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen and Robert De Niro, was herself then still around. What did she do for him?
“Huh?” he says, with huge comic exaggeration. “How much time do you have?”
Well, they’ll throw us out in half an hour.
“Going to school with her made me at least able to say to the people around me, ‘I’m studying it.’ There’s a logic to it. There’s a science to it. I’m still learning from her teachings, in a way. One of her things was, as an actor, that you interpret. Another thing about acting in her school was that it was serious. When you were acting, you were saving lives. Ha ha! That was her approach to acting. Even if you’re being funny it’s still important. My background was not in acting. But her thing was: this is serious.”
It looks as if he had steady work after leaving drama school. Do I have that right?
“No, you’re reading it wrong,” he says with amused exasperation. “You’re not seeing the negative wider picture. There is a lot of negative space in between one job and the next. I did the James Bond movie and I didn’t work again for another year.”
Everything makes sense in the warm light of hindsight. I’m not surprised Del Toro’s parents took issue with him running away to join the circus (figuratively speaking). Acting doesn’t work out for most people who try it. We never read the newspaper stories about the dads who were proven right when their son or daughter eventually gave up the dream and went back to quantity surveying or landscape gardening.
“I wasn’t good at anything else,” says Del Toro with a rumbling laugh. “Basketball, maybe? Then I realised I wasn’t getting anywhere with that. A lot of people were much better than me. And then I fell into something and people were saying, ‘You’re good at it. Keep chasing yourself.’ Then you get a job and you get paid. Okay!”
I tentatively ask if he thinks things have got better for Latino actors since he started. It wasn’t just that few of them were getting jobs in Hollywood productions. The jobs they were getting were often in stereotyped roles. They were hoodlums or home help.
The rise of actors such as Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, Eva Longoria and (of course) Jennifer Lopez looks to have changed some of that. There are more Latinos, but are they getting the lead roles? Well, Del Toro is in virtually every scene of a Wes Anderson film premiering at Cannes.
“Wes putting me here breaks the stereotype, in a way,” he says. “Not only of me as being Latino, but also the fact that I do movies that are more than just shooting and killing. He’s pulling me in to carry this. That is a different style. I think that there’s not enough stories that are breaking this stereotype. But there’s more opportunity for actors, and perhaps Latino actors benefit in a way from that.”
He’s not wrong about that general point. We are talking here about the movies as if they are still the largest game in town. That’s too 20th century for words. It is a long time since stars of Del Toro’s calibre shunned the smaller screen.
“There are so many channels, so many shows,” he says. “There is much more opportunity now. When I first started there were three channels and HBO. You had movies. Now there are all these channels. So there are more opportunities, but I don’t think there are more projects that break the stereotype. I don’t see that.”
Of course, it must help that he won an Oscar. When he took the prize in 2001 he became only the second Latino, after Anthony Quinn, to triumph in best supporting actor. Did that change everything?
“On the business side, yeah,” he says. “You can ask for more money, maybe.
“It did change one thing. My family don’t come from the theatre or movies, but they knew what the Oscar was.”
He’s laughing at himself.
“Well, they can’t say anything now.”
The Phoenician Scheme is in cinemas from Friday, May 23rd
