Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch is a love letter to the type of journalism that he first discovered in the pages of The New Yorker as a high school student. It’s also an homage to his adoptive home of France, and in particular, French cinema. The film follows four storylines centered on the French bureau of a fictional Kansas newspaper as its quirky staff convene after the death of its editor, Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (played by Bill Murray), to write his obituary.

The trailblazing auteur assembled an all-star ensemble cast for the film, including Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Stephen Park and Owen Wilson. The French Dispatch was originally slated to premiere at Cannes 2020, but was bumped to July 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Editor Andrew Weisblum, ACE, whose work with Anderson has earned him three of his five ACE Eddie nominations, including Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and most recently, Isle of Dogs (2018), explains that Anderson was ready to dive right into The French Dispatch “almost immediately after we worked on Isle of Dogs.”

Weisblum, who was also nominated for an Oscar® in 2010 for his work on Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, was involved well in advance of production, when Anderson, along with animatic editor Edward Bursch, were developing an animatic of the film as a shooting aid. “This is something Wes does extensively now. He likes to storyboard and then animate those storyboards basically to figure out a shooting plan,” explains Weisblum. “[Bursch] has been doing it with him, I believe since Moonrise Kingdom. He understands Wes’ tastes and ideas, and he’s able to come up with a good reference point for everything.”

At that point, Weisblum is able to chime in and suggest shots or specific moments that they might need to capture. “It’s a useful discussion tool for us and for production, and Wes uses it as a communication tool for everyone,” he says. “It’s the kind of thing that came out of his stop-motion work where sets were built specifically for shots,” Weisblum elaborates. “In a way, it locks you into a pattern, but at the same time, it allows you to be really precise and efficient about building things, so that if you have a lot of locations, which this film does, you don’t end up going beyond what you need and overspending on specific locations.”

Weisblum was on location with the cast and crew in the city of Angoulême, France, which stood in for the fictional setting of Ennui-sur-Blasé. “We were all there, living in the same hotel, and I had a cutting room off the side of the dining room,” says Weisblum. “So we tended to look at footage and wrap, and then sometimes if there was energy, work on some cuts together.”

He adds that it provided a great opportunity to share updates with another longtime collaborator, cinematographer Robert Yeoman, ASC, and the rest of the crew. The actors could also drop in and see how things were shaping up and get a feel for the film’s eccentric style and voice. Weisblum explains that they also had a little lending library of French films on DVD in the hotel that they could all look to for references. “Because we had such a heavy rotation of actors and crew, anybody could look at anything they wanted, just to get the vibe of things that influenced Wes in the process – mostly a collage of French cinema and French culture.”

For Anderson, 35mm film was definitely the preferred shooting format, and as the director already knew that he wanted to do a 4K DI, Weisblum explains that they worked out a process to go directly to film scans as their dailies. “We wanted to get scans in the dailies process that would carry us through to the end, so that we were always looking at the same grade and I was working with the same files,” Weisblum says.

“So we set up a workflow with our lab in Paris called Hiventy, and our friends at Sixteen19 (now Company 3). They are used to doing mobile daily setups with films shot digitally, but we tasked them with the idea of doing it with 4K scans that we would use later in the DI.” He reports that the main difference was throughput and storage. “We were able to come up with LUTs that made sense later on,” he says. “It allowed us to pull shots for visual effects very quickly.

If I wanted to do effects myself, which I did a number of times, I could take the work that I did with our Avid Media Composer and easily upres 4K files. It didn’t have to go through another process. Once the film was scanned during dailies, we never touched it again.” For Weisblum, 35mm film lent itself to the aesthetic and period of the movie. “We shot with some beautiful 35mm, you know, black-and-white negative and different mixes of formatsthat I think you could only approximate in the digital realm.”

The editor explains that while the animatics provided a very clear blueprint for Anderson’s editorial intention and a lot of sequences were shot to fit the animatic, it didn’t actually cover the entire film. In particular, the middle chapter of the film – titled “Revisions to a Manifesto,” about an anarchist student rebel called Zeffirelli played by Timothée Chalamet, was only partly storyboarded.

“For the Zeffirelli stuff, we felt that out in person much more, where we just watched the footage and then it’s mostly about picking the sparks of spontaneity that we like and building moments around that and just riffing,” Weisblum recalls. While the coverage was very specific, the film called for a lot of ‘internal manipulation,’ – “I could take a shot and do 12 or 15 morphs or speedups or splits inside it and you would never know,” Weisblum recalls. “For example, you have a split screen or shot with six characters. Each character may be from a different take. And we would end up combining them and just kind of tinkering with timing, which is everything in comedy, to find the right rhythm.”

On set in France, the editor was assisted by Tom Lane. After production, post shifted mainly to the U.K. where he worked with associate editor Steve Perkins. In terms of music, Weisblum reports that they didn’t use much temp music. Anderson and his longtime music supervisor, Randall Poster,
worked closely with another longtime collaborator, two-time Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat.

“We will show sections of the film to Alexandre and he’ll go and compose demos, until we hit upon things that Wes is intrigued by. It’s not necessarily stuff that’s tailored to specific scenes. It’s mostly just about vibe and tone and what he thinks will work instrumentally for the film.” From there, Desplat composes music broken down into different elements and variations and works with Anderson and conductor/orchestrator Conrad Pope to tailor the score to the film, the editor says.

Overall, Weisblum says, “There were a lot of moving pieces, a lot of ideas, and every shot kind of became its own construct and its own scene editorially.” And with Anderson’s unique directorial voice, it’s easy to see that his fingerprints are all over it. “What’s not hard is finding his intentions because Wes is very clear about those. We’re able to get at what he wants because he’s very communicative about it. And that’s always a blessing because there’s no guesswork. It’s mostly just about figuring out how to execute and making sure that it carries through to the end, because there are a lot of  potentials for hiccups and errors along the way.”“It’s hard to watch his films and think that there’s anyone else’s signature on [them],” the editor concludes. “At the same time, he’s very open to contributions, which is why so many actors like working with him and the craft is so elevated, because he inspires a lot of people. But he’s involved in every detail because …it’s what makes it his.”