CANNES - US director Wes Anderson brought his latest A-list cast led by Benicio del Toro to the Cannes film festival on Sunday, ramping up the star power as the competition reaches the halfway mark.
Anderson's typically whimsical "The Phoenician Scheme", which also finds roles for Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson and Kate Winslet's daughter, Mia Threapleton, is in the running for the top prize at Cannes.
It tells the story of risk-taking and accident-prone European tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda, played by del Toro, who looks to bequeath his fictional business empire to his estranged God-fearing daughter.
Del Toro's character is loosely based on Anderson's Lebanese father-in-law.
"He was a completely different sort of person, but he was an engineer and quite alpha," the director told AFP.
"His relationship with my wife is probably the DNA of the movie. He told her one day, 'I need to tell you about how my business works because I won't live forever.'
But "the way he told her about his business was he opened a closet and started taking out shoeboxes and said, 'This is the project that we are doing in Saudi. This is the project we are doing in Gibraltar," Anderson added.
"She came home and she said, 'This is crazy.' So all of that went in the movie," said the maker of such quirky hits as "Asteroid City", "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and "The Darjeeling Limited".
With Anderson's film always thick with stars, the film's red-carpet premiere was packed with celebrities, with Edward Norton, Julianne Moore, Benedict Cumberbatch and Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro also in town.