Wes Anderson's Next Movie Will Star Tilda Swinton, Films In Spain Later This Year

Wes Anderson's latest film, The French Dispatch, will soon have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on July 6. The general moviegoing public won't be able to see it until October 22, but even before Searchlight Pictures carries out its theatrical distribution, Anderson has already started lining up his next project. The as-yet-untitled film will reportedly go into production in Spain this September and it will bring back Anderson's frequent collaborator, Tilda Swinton, for a starring role.

Quentin Tarantino may be looking to retire after 10 films, but his '90s indie filmmaking contemporary, Wes Anderson, has his sights set on an eleventh movie already. Variety (by way of Indiewire) reports that Anderson's untitled follow-up to The French Dispatch will shoot in Spain beginning this September.

Call it The Spanish Dispatch. Not much of the film's plot is known at this point, though Swinton has said that "it's not about Spain" and according to Variety, it "isn't believed to necessarily be a western"—even though it's recreating a desert landscape in a town called Chinchón, southeast of the capital of the Madrid. Hollywood trades, don't tease us with the idea of a Wes Anderson western.

The French Dispatch is set in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, which sounds like a tongue-in-cheek label that a critic or viewer bored by Anderson's work could apply to it. If you're the kind of heretic who would fall asleep during a screening of Fantastic Mr. Fox at your local dollar theater back in 2009, then you might not be all that pumped about the eleventh Wes Anderson movie. His work is an acquired taste for some people; they don't call it "dry humor" for nothing.

Whether you're a fan or not, Anderson is a writer-director who has managed to carve out his own unique style and keep crafting auteurist films a full 25 years after Bottle Rocket, his 1996 debut feature. In 2021, he continues to attract top-of-the-line acting talent, rather like refugees from the sea of superhero films. Over the last quarter-century, he's worked with many of the same collaborators again and again, enough that you could almost say he has his own dedicated troupe now.

Swinton herself has appeared in his last three films: Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Isle of Dogs. She's also in The French Dispatch and now, we have this news of their upcoming fifth collaboration. Other recognizable faces who have popped up multiple times in Anderson's filmography include Bill Murray, Owen and Luke Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston, Adrien Brody, Harvey Keitel, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe, and Edward Norton, to name but a few.

This year, Bob Yeoman — who has served as the cinematographer on all nine of Anderson's films to date — appeared on the Team Deakins podcast and talked about their creative process and some of the experiences they have had working abroad in India and other places on The Darjeeling Limited and other films. It's worth a listen, and for anyone still on the fence about Anderson in the year of our Lord 2021, films like The Royal Tenenbaums are definitely worth a watch or maybe a revisit.