Wes Anderson’s appearance on Amanpour

Jeremy Walker’s personal photo of Wes Anderson’s appearance on Amanpour this morning. The link to Jeremy’s excellent take is here. The piece touched a nerve about otherwise smart journalists being disserved by producers who want to lighten up the show.

By Harlan Jacobson – June 22, 2025

Christiane Amanpour featured Wes Anderson on her CNN hour this morning for a promotional bit for The Phoenician Scheme. And he showed up doing his best Tom Wolf impression, all white suit, white tie and as supercilious as he could possibly be. Cut to Wes after her serious read on Iran and the countdown to war.

The Phoenician Scheme – Directed by Wes Anderson

Her producers obviously must’ve felt they needed a little bit of lighthearted culture. What an absolutely perfect opportunity to talk about the Jafar Panahi movie, It Was Just A Simple Accident, that was also in Cannes in competition with the Anderson. In it, Panahi is working through the problem of whether the population should take personal vengeance for having been brutalized in detention by the mullahs, or whether they should take an institutional view that justice should be done through the court system. Versus the Wes Anderson film, showing at the same festival and made at the same time, in which he does his usual recent American theme, pointless and empty portraits of poodles dancing on the head of a pin. What a lost opportunity a real producer could’ve presented her.

It Was Just An Accident – Jafar Panahi

These News organizations employ producers who have no idea what is going on in a film. They just get the assignment to lighten it up. They get Wes Anderson on—what a score!!— and he does the old soft shoe that you’d think he’d be embarrassed to risk in front of her: the scenes between Benicio Del Toro and Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslets’s daughter —they didn’t know anything about her when she auditioned!— were chemical!! And so on. Asked what he was up to in the film, the man had no idea what the movie was about himself. He didn’t tell her, if he could. And as to his creative process, it was oh, you know the more I got into it the more I discovered new layers to the characters. It’s really kind of how I like to work, he tells her.

Benicio Del Toro and Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslets’s daughter.

Christiane Amanpour, who eats lions for lunch, just smiled and let it go. Maybe she thinks this is the thing you do when you talk about movies — have an idiot on who made a film that is useless that she may or may not have seen. But if it lets her do her real work, so be it. I was in a sick bed, and it made me so goddamn mad I got well. Or well enough to do the crazy thing my father used to do, which is talk back to the TV.