Wes Anderson’s ‘The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar’ is 100 Minutes, A “Radical” Stage Play

We can confirm that, if all four films were to be put together, Wes Anderson’s “The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar” is around 100 minutes long. It also turns out to be a little more complicated as a film .

Anderson told The Daily Beast that the upcoming anthology was “not quite a movie” and that “they’re separate from each other; they’re not one thing”.

It’s kind of an unusual form for the storytelling that we do, because my way into it was that I realized that what I liked were his words. The way the stories are told in Roald Dahl’s words. Just turning it into a movie, you can lose his words, by and large. We decided not to lose his words. When you see it, you’ll see what I mean. We use the words.”

So, in essence, ‘Henry Sugar’ is split into four different films. The first one, titled ‘Henry Sugar,’ is 37 minutes and will premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

Here’s that fest’s programmer explaining the way Anderson conceived the first short:

So, he took some Roald Dahl stories and made 4 short/medium films, we’re showing one of them, ‘Henry Sugar,’ the rest will be seen on Netflix this fall. What I can say about it is that it’s an absolutely extreme and radical literature adaptation. It’s Anderson’s cinema, with Dahl’s words done via the most accurately refined images, as meticulously as possible. The story is not adapted through a screenplay, it is chosen by the characters. The actors in it act almost as if they are in a stage play, the cast reads out the story, sometimes to the camera which reminded me of the theatre.[…] However it is not just a theater reading, inside of it can be found cinema. I love it, I love it very much. It’s only 37 minutes but is beautifully staged with these extraordinary images and visual scenographic gimmicks.

It does sound like something that Anderson has not really attempted before, stylistically speaking. We should hopefully be getting a clip of the movie in the next few weeks as Venice tends to release first looks of its lineup in late August.

The film is based on four short stories penned by author Dahl and was shot on a stage in 16mm. There’s also stop motion animation. It does sound very different to previous Andersons.

Anderson’s last film was this summer’s “Asteroid City,” which again split Anderson fans and non-fans in opinion. You can stream it now on VOD. It will also be available to stream on Peacock August 11.