Director Wes Anderson “wasn’t quite sure for some time” how to go about adapting Roald Dahl’s short story “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” he explains in a long voicemail message. But then he came upon a realization: If he wasn’t directly adhering to the original text, he didn’t really want to turn the piece into a film at all.
“I realized that it was Roald Dahl’s words that made the stories particularly interesting, that without his language I was not really as interested in adapting them,” he tells THR. “But I found a way to do them where we kept his language at the center of them.”
That strategy involved having his actors narrate the story in direct address to camera, and hiring his The Grand Budapest Hotel star Ralph Fiennes to play Dahl himself. And while Anderson ended up making four shorts out of Dahl’s stories, all of which are out on Netflix, the marquee title, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, is now nominated for an Oscar for best live-action short.
In about 40 minutes, Anderson tells a multilayered tale about the title character (Benedict Cumberbatch), a British gadabout who finds a curious report in a mansion’s grand library. From there, the saga travels back in time to India, where a doctor (Dev Patel) recounts the story of a circus performer, Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley), who claims to be able to see without his eyes. Eventually, we are treated to Imdad’s account of how he learned this from a great yogi (Richard Ayoade). From there, the narrative swings back to Henry Sugar, who trains himself to do the same with the initial idea of using the skill to win at cards — but eventually uses it for more altruistic purposes.
It’s a Russian nesting doll of a story, made all the more intricate by Anderson’s decision to stage it so the audience is treated to seeing how the sets move and slide from one scene to the next. “Pretty early on, I had this thought that we would have a small company that would all play more than one role and there would be stagehands assisting them, and that essentially it would be like a kind of peculiar version of a movie presenting a play,” Anderson explains.
The camera, operated by Anderson’s longtime cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, follows the actors walking through production designer Adam Stockhausen’s sets, which themselves are almost alive in the way they are transmutable. In certain moments, you see the performers putting on Kasia Walicka Maimone’s costumes, transforming into their characters. It results in an experience where you can see the team effort of the production in the final result.
“Wes likes to challenge all of us,” Yeoman says. “It’s always not only a physical but a mental exercise.”
Yeoman explains that he was at first dubious about the decision to have the actors address the camera. “Throughout my relationship with Wes, he’s presented ideas to me that I was initially a little bit skeptical about,” he adds. “And then as we get immersed in it, I realize what he’s going for.”
As with any of Anderson’s intricate projects, there was an extensive period of prep before shooting got underway. Anderson first approached Stockhausen about the Henry Sugar project while they were in the midst of working on Anderson’s 2023 feature, Asteroid City — which also involves an element of stagecraft because it’s a play within a film. For Stockhausen, what “set the tone” for the whole endeavor was when Anderson told him there was a moment when the backstage would be visible to the audience.
“What he’s doing, I think, is incredibly interesting, which is blending the two, of saying: There is this inherent theatricality to the thing where we’re not denying this is on a stage, we’re not denying this is a story being told to you, and we’re illustrating part of the story, but it’s not just illustration,” Stockhausen says. “It’s engaging with me, the narrator; I’m part of it and I can turn around and interact with it because it also has the living quality of that fourth-wall narrative storytelling thing. That’s what’s so cool: You can dive in and out of it.” It is, as Stockhausen describes, like “paging your way through a story.”
Because of the varied locales within Henry Sugar, the research process was vast. The short begins in Dahl’s writing hut at Gipsy House, the Dahl family home in southeast England — a place Anderson knows very well and studied for Fantastic Mr. Fox, his 2009 feature based on a Dahl novel. “We really dove into it in a painstaking way of matching every little scrap of paper,” Stockhausen adds. “Each piece of it was meticulously re-created or borrowed.”
Stockhausen and his researcher looked into the historical versions of all the locations that were to be represented, and those details eventually made their way into Anderson’s storyboards. But in one case, Stockhausen and his team were tasked with pure invention. When Kingsley’s Imdad tells the story of his life, it features a fantastical jungle. “There’s nothing alive in that entire jungle, and the whole thing is like a storybook come to life,” Stockhausen says.
To develop it, the production designer looked at the work of painters including Henri Rousseau and enlisted artists who had previously worked with Anderson on his animated films for what Stockhausen calls a “jungle experimentation lab.”
Creating the costumes also involved fitting historical specificity into Anderson’s creative vision. Walicka Maimone calls the research process an “Olympic version of a ping-pong game,” batting reference images back and forth with Anderson. But while she looked at what real doctors would be wearing in 1930s India, she also knew the outfits had to be quintessentially Andersonian. “We, at the same time, tailored it to the vocabulary of Wes, which is a very controlled humanity,” she says. “In real life, those doctors probably would be really messy and the clothing wouldn’t fit them perfectly. [But] we eliminate the real life, and we apply the aesthetic of this very strictly strategized world that Wes created.”
Every department on Henry Sugar also had to think about how their creations would work within the meticulous structure of Anderson’s vision, which he diagrams with an animatic — essentially an animated storyboard — before production.
Walicka Maimone strategized quick changes the actors could make as if they were in a theatrical production. Stockhausen first built a 3D model of all the sets so he could make sure the pieces slid into place correctly. The jungle sequence, in particular, was very complicated, with Stockhausen comparing it to a game of pick-up sticks. And then Yeoman and his team had to figure out how to light all of it and build a track so the 16mm camera could move fluidly. He says he tried to memorize the script as best as he could so that he was “up to par with everybody else.”
But the result is something truly unique: a mesh of Anderson’s style and Dahl’s words. “It matches so well with the content of the stories and that kind of voice that Dahl has as an author, where you feel his presence very strongly at all times through the reading of the story,” Stockhausen says. “Visually, it matched that very elegantly and very well. So I just found it huge fun to work on this and to be part of that storytelling.”
This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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