The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

In a 2023 interview with Deadline, Wes Anderson spoke about how Ralph Fiennes got into the character of Roald Dahl: "In our house, we have a recording of Dahl reading Fantastic Mr. Fox. He did record himself doing quite a few of [his books]. There's also a reasonable amount of documentary stuff about Dahl. In fact, when we started filming Henry Sugar, Ralph was on set, in the little space that's a recreation of Dahl's workspace, and I could hear him talking to himself. I said, 'Tell me what you're saying.' It turned out that he'd been observing Dahl from the archival stuff I'd sent him, and he knew Dahl's little rituals. He was acting them out on his own, just in preparation. And I was like, 'Start over, start over! We'll film this!' And so, the movie begins with Ralph completely improvising. Every take was a bit different, because it's Ralph just sort of channeling Dahl getting ready to write. Ralph is so interesting and authentic."

Starting around 22:00 as the cuts go back and forth between front angle cuts and side angle cuts; the orientation of how Roald Dahl is holding the cigarette changes.

Edited into The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2024)