How Wes Anderson Turned The New Yorker Into “The French Dispatch”

On October 2nd, Wes Anderson’s new movie, “The French Dispatch,” will make its American début at the fifty-ninth New York Film Festival. It’s an anthology film, portraying the goings on at a fictional weekly magazine that looks an awful lot like—and was, in fact, inspired by—The New Yorker. The staff of the fictional weekly, and the stories it publishes—four of which are dramatized in the film—are also inspired by The New Yorker. To portray these characters, American expatriates in a made-up French city, Ennui-sur-Blasé, Anderson has drawn from his regular posse—Bill Murray (who plays a vinegary character based on The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross), Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Frances McDormand—and on some first-timers, including Timothée Chalamet, Elisabeth Moss, Benicio del Toro, and Jeffrey Wright. Anderson is something of a New Yorker nut, having discovered the magazine in his high-school library, in Texas, and later collecting hundreds of bound copies and gaining a deep familiarity with many of its writers. In conjunction with the film’s release, the director—a seven-time Oscar nominee, for movies including “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Moonrise Kingdom”—has published “An Editor’s Burial,” an anthology of writings that inspired the movie, many originally published in The New Yorker. For the book’s introduction, he spoke to me about his longtime relationship with The New Yorker and how it influenced the new film. “The French Dispatch” will open to the general public on October 22nd.

Your movie “The French Dispatch” is a series of stories that are meant to be the articles in one issue of a magazine published by an American in France. When you were dreaming up the film, did you start with the character of Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the editor, or did you start with the stories?

I read an interview with Tom Stoppard once where he said he began to realize—as people asked him over the years where the idea for one play or another came from—that it seems to have always been two different ideas for two different plays that he sort of smooshed together. It’s never one idea. It’s two. “The French Dispatch” might be three.

The first idea: I wanted to do an anthology movie. Just in general, an omnibus-type collection, without any specific stories in mind. (The two I love maybe the most: “The Gold of Naples,” by De Sica, and “Le Plaisir,” by Max Ophüls.)

The second idea: I always wanted to make a movie about The New Yorker. The French magazine in the film obviously is not The New Yorker—but it was, I think, totally inspired by it. When I was in eleventh grade, my homeroom was in the school library, and I sat in a chair where I had my back to everybody else, and I faced a wooden rack of what they labelled “periodicals.” One had drawings on the cover. That was unusual. I think the first story I read was by Ved Mehta, a “Letter from [New] Delhi.” I thought, I have no idea what this is, but I’m interested. But what I was most interested in were the short stories, because back then I thought that was what I wanted to do—fiction. Write stories and novels and so on. When I went to the University of Texas in Austin, I used to look at old bound volumes of The New Yorker in the library, because you could find things like a J. D. Salinger story that had never been collected. Then I somehow managed to find out that U.C. Berkeley was getting rid of a set, forty years of bound New Yorkers, and I bought them for six hundred dollars. I would also have my own new subscription copies bound (which is actually not a good way to preserve them). When the magazine put the whole archive online, I stopped paying to bind mine. But I still keep them. I have almost every issue, starting in the nineteen-forties. Later, I found myself reading various writers’ accounts of life at The New Yorker—Brendan Gill, James Thurber, Ben Yagoda—and I got caught up in the whole aura of the thing. I also met Lillian Ross (with you), who, as we know, wrote about Truffaut and Hemingway and Chaplin for the magazine and was very close to Salinger, and so on and so forth.

The third idea: a French movie. I want to do one of those. An anthology, The New Yorker, and French. Three very broad notions. I think it sort of turned into a movie about what my friend and co-writer Hugo Guinness calls reverse emigration. He thinks Americans who go to Europe are reverse-emigrating.

When I saw the movie, I told you how much Lillian Ross, who died a few years ago, would have liked it. You said that Lillian’s first reaction would have been to demand, “Why France?”

Well, I’ve had an apartment in Paris for I don’t know how many years. I’ve reverse-emigrated. And, in Paris, anytime I walk down a street I don’t know well, it’s like going to the movies. It’s just entertaining. There’s also a sort of isolation living abroad, which can be good, or it can be bad. It can be lonely, certainly. But you’re also always on a kind of adventure, which can be inspiring.

Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s founding editor, was famous for saying that the history of New York is always written by out-of-towners. When you’re out of your element, or in another country, you have a different perspective. It’s as if a pilot light is always on.

Yes! The pilot light is always on.

In a foreign country, even just going into a hardware store can be like going to a museum.

Buying a light bulb.

Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the editor played by Bill Murray, gathers the best writers of his generation to staff his magazine, in France. They’re all expatriates, like you. In this book, you’ve gathered the best New Yorker writers, many of whom lived as expatriates in Paris. There is a line in the movie: “He received an editor’s burial,” and several of the pieces in this book are obituaries of Harold Ross.

Howitzer is based on Harold Ross, with a little bit of William Shawn, the magazine’s second editor, thrown in. Although they don’t really go together particularly. Ross had a great feeling for writers. It isn’t exactly respect. He values them, but he also thinks they’re lunatic children who have to be sort of manipulated or coddled, whereas Shawn seems to have been the most gentle, respectful, encouraging master you could ever wish to have. We tried to mix in some of that.

Ross was from Colorado and Shawn came from the Midwest; Howitzer is from Liberty, Kansas, right in the middle of America. He moves to France to find himself, in a way, and he ends up creating a magazine that brings the world to Kansas.

Originally, we were calling the editor character Liebling, not Howitzer, because the face I always pictured was A. J. Liebling’s. We tried to make Bill Murray sort of look like him, I think. Remember, he says he tricked his father into paying for his early sojourn in Paris by telling him he was thinking of marrying a good woman who was ten years older than he, although “Mother might think she is a bit fast.”

There are lots of similarities between your Howitzer and Ross. Howitzer has a sign in his office that says “No crying.” Ross made sure that there was no humming or singing or whistling in the office.

They share a general grumpiness. What Thurber called Ross’s “God, how I pity me!” moods.

But you see a little bit of Shawn in Howitzer, as you mentioned. Shawn was formal and decorous, in contrast to Ross’s bluster. In the movie, when Howitzer tells the writer Herbsaint Sazerac, whom Owen Wilson plays, that his article is “almost too seedy this time for decent people,” that’s very Shawn.

I think that might be Ross, too! He was a prude, they say. For someone who could be extremely vulgar.

In Thurber’s book “The Years with Ross,” which is excerpted in “An Editor’s Burial,” there’s a funny part where Ross complains about almost accidentally publishing the phrase “falling off the roof,” a coded reference to menstruation. I’d never heard that euphemism! I had to look it up.

“We can’t have that in the magazine.”

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