Wes Anderson on the secrets and struggles behind his impeccably stylish men

By Thomas Page, CNN

(CNN) — Wes Anderson has a message for London’s finest tailors: he’d love a Savile Row suit — if someone will give him a discount.

“Hopefully if we put this out there someone will contact me,” he said on a call from New York. “(They’re) quite a lot of money, but it will see you out, as they say.”

This would be a radical move for the sartorially-minded director. Anderson is loyal to New York tailoring institution Mr. Ned for his custom-made clothes, he said, though has been known to stray to legendary Italian atelier Battistoni when in Rome. But he would be willing to give a London tailor a shot. After all, if they’re good enough for his characters, they should be good enough for him.

Anderson’s latest film, “The Phoenician Scheme,” is bulging at the seams with suits, some crafted by Taillour Ltd., a bespoke tailoring label in East London, founded by Fred Nieddu and Lee Rekert. The movie centers on 1950s business magnate Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), who wheels and deals his way around a fictionalized Middle Eastern country while fending off assassination attempts. In tow is his heir, a novice nun called Leisl (Mia Threapleton), who’s out to save his soul, and bumbling tutor Bjorn (Michael Cera), along for the ride with his employer and his crush. Together they bring an odd thrupple dynamic to what might otherwise have been a series of business meetings with deep-pocketed characters played by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Jeffrey Wright, Benedict Cumberbatch, and more. A crime caper with a smattering of existential angst, it’s the director’s most accessible work in a while.

It’s also, even by Anderson’s standards, a showcase for fine tailoring — marking a new high point for the director whose films often feature impeccable menswear.

A childhood passion

When Anderson was young, he used to play dress up. “There were so many costumes in movies when I was a child that I tried to imitate,” he shared.

How characters presented themselves through their clothes was something he was always conscious of. “From the first moment of the first short film I made, I thought of that,” Anderson recalled.

Making that short film, “Bottle Rocket” (1993), which Anderson turned into his feature debut in 1996, he remembered debating actor Owen Wilson over a shirt. “We’d written it together, and he knew exactly how to inhabit this person,” Anderson said. “But the visual part of the character… I had to sort of coax (Wilson) into something he would never wear.”

Five years and a bigger budget later, Anderson was making “Rushmore” (1998). Jason Schwartzman’s character, the preppy student Max Fischer, dresses beyond his years. Anderson, Schwartzman and the film’s costume designer Karen Patch commissioned a tailor in the director’s native Houston, Texas, to reflect that in the form of a perfectly cut, blue school blazer. “That’s the first time there was a costume that I thought, ‘Let’s make this from scratch. We can make it exactly, 100% right,’” Anderson said.

Then came “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001) — also costumed by Patch — whose sartorial ripples continue to spread today. Anderson turned to Mr. Ned for help with tailoring and liked what they came up with. Years later, he sat for an interview with the New York Times wearing the exact jacket worn by Bill Murray in the film, he told the reporter.

However you look at it, Anderson never stopped playing dress up — including having his characters wear his inspirations on their sleeves. When conceiving the look for Korda in “The Phoenician Scheme,” Anderson said he had in mind the businessmen played by Hollywood’s Golden Age actors William Powell (“The Thin Man”) and Herbert Marshall (“Trouble in Paradise”). Meanwhile, Threapleton’s nun was styled in green tights as a twisted nod to the titular Irma, a sex worker played by Shirley MacLaine, in Billy Wilder’s “Irma la Douce” (1963).

“I think it is probably quite a generous gesture by Wes to be so conspicuous with some of his references,” said Adam Woodward, editor-at-large of Little White Lies magazine and author of “The Worlds of Wes Anderson.”

“That has been the case throughout his career,” Woodward continued, speaking on a video call. “I think he’s adding new layers to that as he continues, and I suppose as he enters this middle period of his career, his work for me feels like it’s getting maybe more mature. He’s hitting a really interesting groove now.”

How to rule the world with clothes

“The Phoenician Scheme” saw Anderson reteam with Italian costume designer Milena Canonero, a four-time Oscar winner who has worked on most of his films since 2004’s “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.” Theirs is the kind of longstanding collaboration that allows for creative disagreement, which was the case when creating the backbone of “The Phoenician Scheme’s” wardrobe: its suits.

“My suggestion in our script is that all the businessmen wear double-breasted gray chalk stripe (or) pinstripe suits in the classic tycoon look,” Anderson recounted. “And Milena’s suggestion is, ‘That’s a terrible idea,” and ‘Why would we have everyone wearing the same thing? It’s been done a thousand times before and it’s a cliché.’”

But Anderson had his reasons: One being that a good piece of clothing, such as tailoring, takes on a protective quality. “If you don’t like what you’re wearing or you’ve got a bad haircut, you don’t feel as strong, you know. It’s all armor,” he said.

Korda (Benicio del Toro’s character), he added, “wants all the armor he can have, because someone’s going to try to kill him at any moment, and he wants to kill them back.”

While Korda’s wardrobe is dominated by gray pinstripes, there’s room for a safari suit and a thobe. The impression is that whether behind a desk or the wheel of a plummeting airplane, Korda is a worldly man of action.

In a video interview with CNN, Del Toro described the film’s costuming as “50% of my performance,” heaping praise on “legend” Canonero. “She does your character from the bottom up,” he added. “She’s super specific. The shoes are from the period, even the underwear.”

Anderson said he felt strongly about giving all the other businessmen suits too because “these tycoons, these very rich men with tremendous ambition, they have symbols of power that they adorn their offices and their residences and their bodies with,” he explained. “This is part of how they say, ‘We’re in the same club, we rule the world, and we are the ones in power.”

The genius of Canonero, the director said, was “how to make the American (suits) a little different from the European ones and how to give them each their own personality — because it is a lot of gray pinstripe suits in one movie.” Take Hanks and Cranston’s West Coast railroad men: They may be holding a Coca-Cola and a Hershey’s bar, but to tell they’re American, one need only look at their sack suits.

There’s also a subtle narrative thread running through the pinstripes and chalk stripes. (As consensus builds among the businessmen who come aboard Korda’s scheme, if they weren’t already, they begin wearing stripes.) Once again, Anderson is playing with the idea of uniform and visual coding; it rears its head in everything from “The Grand Budapest Hotel’s” concierges to “Bottle Rocket’s” boiler-suited robbers and Steve Zissou’s red beanie-sporting explorers. In “The Phoenician Scheme,” by the time we meet Cumberbatch’s character Uncle Nubar, who’s wearing a running stitch-like stripe, his tailoring marks him out as different, even before his nefarious intent is revealed.

This use of costuming is par for the course for the director, said Woodward: “It’s always in service of the story, it is never frivolous.”

Naturally, fashion is not there for window dressing; it advances the plot. Just like Richie Tenenbaum’s sweatband doesn’t just signal his arrested development but signposts his forbidden love for his adopted sister in “The Royal Tenenbaums”; M. Gustave’s Society of the Crossed Keys badge foreshadows his ace-in-the-hole network of concierges when he’s in a pinch in “The Grand Budapest Hotel”; and Mr. Fox’s severed tail, worn by the evil Mr. Bean as a necktie, becomes motivation for a heist in “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

“Everything is about storytelling,” said Anderson. “Movies, as much as they are dialog, and as much as it is all about emotion and energy, the main thing you do with a movie is watch it,” the director said of building his visual language.

“The movie is how do we take all this information, all these ideas, these characters, these observations from lives and bits of imagination, and order them into the shape of a thing we think of as a story,” he continued. “It’s very much a rational, orderly process.”

“The Phoenician Scheme” is currently in US and UK theaters.

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