The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, the new movie from Wes Anderson, will be released on Netflix on October 13th.
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, Sir Ben Kingsley, Richard Ayoade, Rupert Friend and Asa Jennings, the 37-minute-long film is an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1977 book of short stories. The film will follow several stories about how Dahl became a writer, whilst others infuse reality with the imagination of the British novelist’s magical mind, taking the audience to extraordinary places.
Anderson and Dahl have already proven to be a good mix, releasing Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009, starring George Clooney, Bill Murray and Meryl Streep.
Speaking about the new project with IndieWire, Anderson stated: “I knew Roald Dahl since before we made Fantastic Mr. Fox. I met Lindsay Dahl, his widow, when we were shooting The Royal Tenenbaums like 20 years ago. For years I wanted to do Henry Sugar…It’s not a feature film. It’s like 37 minutes or something. But by the time I was ready to do it, the Dahl family no longer had the rights at all. They had sold the whole deal to Netflix”.
Continuing, he added: “Suddenly, in essence, there was nowhere else you could do it since they own it. But beyond it, because it’s a 37-minute movie, it was the perfect place to do it because it’s not really a movie. You know they used to do these BBC things called Play for Today directed by people like Steven Frears and John Schlesinger and Alan Clarke. They were one hour programs or even less. I kind of envisioned something like that”.
Anderson released Asteroid City earlier this year, a fabulous piece of cinema that continued the director’s extraordinary filmography.
Check out the trailer for Asteroid City below ahead of the release of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar on October 23th.
