The Grand Design Adventure That Created Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme

As a story of a family and a family business, Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme is also a sweeping adventure that follows one of the richest men in Europe, Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), as he travels with his daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), and a tutor (Michael Cera) across the globe to secure his legacy and create a vast project known as The Phoenician Scheme. Along the way, he must wheel and deal his way with princes, business people, terrorists, and even God to get his way. A remarkable supporting cast, including Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, and Hope Davis, among others, populate the many worlds that Korda travels through.

To bring Korda’s luxurious and eclectic world alive, Anderson turned to his longtime collaborator, production designer Adam Stockhausen. Having worked on six previous Anderson films, including Moonrise Kingdom and Asteroid City, the Academy Award®-winning designer keenly understood the director’s unique vision and aesthetic. Inspired by Anderson’s sense of European elegance, Stockhausen incorporated design elements from Egypt to Venice, from Hollywood to Vienna, even using actual art masterpieces in his décor. Rolling Stone writes, “Stockhausen outdoes himself here, creating vivid worlds that run the gamut from exotic, Casablanca-style nightspots to underground-tunnel meeting spaces to treacherous jungle landscapes.”

We spoke with Stockhausen about the film’s grand sweep, the use of original art, and the fascinating journey the production took to get to the final design.

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You've created so many remarkable designs for Wes Anderson’s films. Can you talk about how you started designing The Phoenician Scheme?

It usually starts by going in a couple of different directions at once. First, I start by diving into visual research and sending various images back and forth with the team to establish a vocabulary for what we think things should look like. The second thing is figuring out the shape of the movie depending on where we want to shoot. Once we settled on Potsdam by shooting the film at the Babelsberg studio in Berlin, I knew the entire movie was really within a 25-minute radius of the hotel where we all stayed.

From the start, we talked about how we were going to build a lot of sets. We asked ourselves, “What would be the best place and have the stages available and be the most supportive?” Was it Cinecittà? Babelsberg? Pinewood?

The third part of the puzzle in getting started was thinking about the shots in the film. Wes started right away storyboarding and thumbnailing the shots so we could break things down and figuring out how many pieces we're talking about. For example, in Zsa-zsa’s house, it’s not one set but three different sets for all the rooms and pieces of the house. At that point, we map it all out to figure out what we’ll need.

When did you know you wanted to shoot most of the film on a soundstage?

Right away. From the very first conversations, it was clear that this was going to be a giant movie. We had these giant earthwork pieces but we were not going to be shooting in Jordan or Morocco. And we were not going to the Hoover Dam to shoot. For the tunnel scene, Wes didn’t want us to carve through pieces of Styrofoam to create it. I remembered that there's this one very special stage at Babelsberg in which they used to make rail cars. It's an old factory building and it's incredibly long. It’s a normal stage width by five stages in length. It was the perfect place for the tunnel scene.

In this film, as with Moonrise Kingdom and Asteroid City, you seem not to create sets but entire worlds from scratch. In making these, do you imagine these worlds or do they evolve as you create the movie?

It’s a bit of a cheat to say it just happens, since I have a whole team of people working incredibly hard to create these spaces. But it’s not a question I think about directly since the worlds come from the way that Wes sees the world and tells these stories. Things just coalesce. As we progress, things just seem to mesh. From a design point of view, the Egyptian revival of the hotel works perfectly with the bold graphic nature of the nightclub. But we didn't get there by saying we need this world to be X, Y, and Z. It was just that the design for the hotel was moving in a certain direction and the design for nightclub was moving in a direction, and they just worked really well together. I remember when we were working on Moonrise Kingdom, there were all these racoons everywhere. Wes turned to me and said, “You know, raccoons are really becoming a key thing in this film,” although he said it more eloquently and with more charm. But the point was that it wasn’t planned; it just sort of bubbled up in the process.

How did you approach the design for Zsa-zsa’s enormous house?

The process was really interesting. We had gotten a good way into designing the house, when we were shut down by the SAG strike. During that period, we had time to think about the design, and talk about it, and email about it. During this time period, the design went through this incredible change. We knew about his collections, and we knew about the scale of the place, but we had not finalized what it should look like. We were looking at these wonderful houses, like the Calouste Gulbenkian house and museum in Paris in terms of its scale and style.

We had the architecture of that space in our minds, when Wes called one day and said, “Maybe it should be Italian. Take a look at these pictures from Mantua and from Venice.” He got really excited about these palazzos. And I started emailing back pictures of Villa Farnesina and the perspective rooms. He really liked the painted nature of them and the trompe l'oeil mural work. That direction started to snowball and pretty soon it overtook the entire house to the point where almost every surface is painted and designed that way—which I think links it to the Egyptian revival and the nightclub and all the other pieces of the story. But it was not something that appeared at step one. It really took time to live with it and say that something's right here, but something's not quite finished here. I just loved the way that it made the entire house into a piece of Korda’s artwork. His collection is never quite finished and neither is the house.

How did you arrive at the idea of using original pieces of art?

That was Wes’ idea. It's something he knew he wanted to do in the film. The year before he had curated an art show [“The Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures from the Kunsthistorisches Museum"] in Vienna. I wonder if that had something to do with his decision. To make it happen, he was working with an advisor, Jasper Sharp, and contacted a couple of estates to see if this could be possible and which pieces he could use. Everyone was incredibly helpful and really bent over backwards to make it work.

What difference did it make to have the aura of original masterpieces on the set?

There is an aura to it, isn't there? It was a really special thing for all of us to have the quiet time to be able to study the pieces up close. I would say there's a thing with Wes on every film where the making of the film is a process that informs the final product, Shooting The Darjeeling Limited on a moving train, for example, was something that changed the film. It is not the same film you would make in a studio in California. I think there's an element of that with the art works. The story has a collection of masterpieces and then suddenly having a room full of real masterpieces changed the performances. It changed everything.

Can you talk about building the crash sites, like the one in the cornfield?

The cornfield is actually an outdoor location, but it's wildly curated. First, we'd sketched the entire thing, so we had a very long sketch that covered the entire dolly move. Then we located a cornfield that had just the right horizon for us. We negotiated with the farmer to let us keep a big chunk of the corn and not harvest it. Then we cut into it to make the pieces. We did a lot of model work to figure out the scale we needed to get the right shots of the airplane debris relative to the speed of the dolly move, and relative to the size of the corn, and relative to the actors at the positions they were going to be in. All of these pieces had to work together in something close enough to a believable scale that your brain accepts it even though you know there is some miniaturization going on.

The Egyptian hotel is such a mammoth set. How did that evolve in the film? Was there a real place that inspired it?

It wasn’t based on a single hotel, but there were several Egyptian revival pieces of reference. One of them is a Masonic temple. Another is an old illustration of the Neues Museum in Berlin, which happened to be right by where we were shooting. It had this beautiful Egyptian revival area with an atrium. Of course, there is the Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo. We were looking at all that and then it developed into this huge ballroom set that we made to house Korda's masterwork. We found the central staircase in a derelict, old parliament building which must have been built in Berlin before unification. We thought about using the space for the ballroom, but then a whole wing of it burnt down while we were prepping the movie. But we took the staircase and refitted it for the hotel. We repainted everything and used it in a crucial scene.

How did the use of hieroglyphics as a design element develop?

We knew that was key to the Egyptian revival aesthetic. Graphic designers Erica Dorn and Lucile Gauvain were working for quite a long time to develop all the stencils for the hieroglyphics. But we knew from the start that was going to be the visual language for that section of the movie.

What do you hope audiences take away from the film?

I hope they enjoy the sweep of it. It’s a big adventure and I hope they enjoy the ride.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.