Directed by the elusively funny Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch is a love letter to journalists set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional 20th-century French city that brings to life a collection of stories published in “The French Dispatch” magazine.

The cast is an A-list of Hollywood superstars, including Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, Elisabeth Moss, Billy Murray, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Liev Schreiber, Frances McDormand, Adrien Brody and Benicio Del Toro.

According to IMDB, The New Yorker reported a piece that outlines some characters, subjects, and situations described in this movie, along with the corresponding The New Yorker articles, themes, and writers that Wes Anderson references. These include:

• Arthur Howitzer Jr., played by Bill Murray, inspired by the New Yorker’s founding editor Harold Ross.
• Herbsaint Sazerac, played by Owen Wilson, inspired by the writer Joseph Mitchell
• Julian Cadazio, played by Adrien Brody, inspired by Lord Duveen, the subject of a 1951 six-part New Yorker profile by S. N. Behrman
• Roebuck Wright, played by Jeffrey Wright, inspired by James Baldwin and A. J. Liebling, who were both New Yorker contributors over the years.
• Lucinda Krementz, played by Frances McDormand, inspired by Mavis Gallant, She wrote a two-part 1968 piece on the student uprisings in France. This character also shares a last name with Jill Krementz, a photographer whose work has often appeared in the New Yorker and is the widow of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

The New Yorker also reported in the same piece that the movie takes place in a fictional French town called “Ennui-sur-Blasé.” “Ennui” and “blasé” are both English words, albeit both terms originate from the French, which means roughly the same thing: world-weary boredom, apathy, and sophistication. It is relatively common for French place names to contain the word “sur” (“on”) between two other words as a geographic descriptor. for example, the French Riviera village name “Beaulieu-sur-Mer” translates as “beautiful place on the sea.” So if it were a real place name, “Ennui-sur-Blasé” would mean, more or less, “Boredom-on-Apathy.”

For Anderson, the filmmaking process is 100% organic from start to finish. That begins with the writing. “It’s a real adventure to work on these things,” says longtime collaborator Jason Schwartzman, who co-wrote the story with Anderson and Roman Coppola and plays the role of the magazine’s cartoonist. “The stories are sort of concocted in real-time. There’s not some big outline or something that you’re filling in. You’re literally creating each moment as you get to it. It’s sort of like building a bridge while you’re on the bridge, and that’s what’s really exciting. When you wake up in the morning, you really have no idea what could happen to the story, to the characters, and that is such an exciting place to be. It’s free form but focused, and Wes is the captain of the ship.”

The official name of the New Yorker-inspired magazine is The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, a publication inspired by the history of The New Yorker and the origins of two of the people who made it what it is: Harold Ross, the magazine’s co-founder, and William Shawn, his successor, both inspirations for Bill Murray’s character and both born in the Midwest. “Kansas seems to me like the most American place in America,” says Anderson. “I mean, really, in the end, The French Dispatch isn’t publishing for the people of Kansas. They’re publishing for America.”

Creating the story’s striking still-life passages, Anderson actually asked the actors to freeze in place. “It’s a game I play with my daughter,” says del Toro, “it’s probably one of the earliest things that I remember playing as a kid, and suddenly… we’re doing it, every actor from Tilda Swinton to Henry Winkler, all these legends, all playing the game. And it’s contagious. It’s really nice to see actors going back to their childhood and playing, Simon Says. There’s something very freeing about it. And I felt like it added to the film in another way. Wes could have frozen the action digitally, but there’s something about the actors actually freezing that makes it… you can feel it, you can touch it, and the audience can feel the joy behind it.”