Wes Anderson’s Characters Are Inspired By Real People — Even The Really Weird Ones

The magazine’s writers and their work were essential to every part of “The French Dispatch.” Frances McDormand’s character covers a youth uprising in the spirit of Mavis Gallant, who covered the Paris student protests in 1968. Anderson even admitted to ripping some of her words directly off the page for the film.

The film’s final tableau follows Roebuck Wright, a writer for the taste and smell section that draws from the writing and personas of James Baldwin and A. J. Liebling. Baldwin is a well-known political journalist and novelist, while Liebling’s work is not as widely remembered. His work spanned a multitude of topics, much like Roebuck’s, but Anderson preferred his writing on that most universal art form, food.

He’s “one of my all-time favorite New Yorker writers,” the acclaimed filmmaker added. “Everything we do in the film where we’re describing different dishes — that all comes from him. He’s like [novelist P.G.] Wodehouse with his metaphors for different plates of food. He sometimes describes servings by their area or volume — like the acreage of a thin steak.”

But it wasn’t just the on-screen characters in the 2021 film that found their sources outside of Anderson’s cinematic universe. The film is also narrated by Anjelica Huston in an apparent nod to notable New Yorker contributors like Katharine S. White and Dorothy Parker, whose voices made the magazine the global force that it is today.

By grounding his unreal worlds in truth, Anderson manages to create quirky characters that are larger than life — but just the right size for his films.