HE to Wes Anderson, early this morning…
I quickly realized that the teaser poster for American Empirical’s Heidegger and Arendt was AI bullshit, but for a half-minute or so I was hugely impressed that you were apparently stepping outside the WesWorld realm by tackling an odd relationship story that has real political-cultural teeth…a real grabber of a story about two politically incorrect thinkers.
I was saying to myself “whoa!…Wes is going to make a film that’s actually about something substantial this time…no more Jacques Tati influences!…a film that the woke community will utterly despise, of course, but man, Wes has grown a serious pair of balls!…”
For less than a minute I was envisioning a real-deal romantic and philosophical bond between a pair of big-league 20th Century philosophers and outside-the-box minds. A brief love affair between a Nazi apologist philosopher in his mid to late 30s (Bill Murray would be roughly 40 years too old), and a younger Jewish intellectual who testified at Adolf Eichmann’s trial and allegedly coined the phrase “the banality of evil”. (The 55-year-old Winona Ryder Is 35 years too old as Hannah Arendt’s affair with Martin Heidegger began in 1925, when she was 19 or 20.)
The fantasy of you actually making this film evaporated in less than 40 or 45 seconds (I was drowsy, wasn’t sipping coffee), but I was hugely impressed before it dissolved. I really was.
