In the Company of Wes Anderson

What is it about the director that draws stars like Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton again and again? There are many reasons, but the nightly feasts don’t hurt.

It’s his first film set in France, and the first done as an anthology. But Wes Anderson’s 10th movie, “The French Dispatch,” was made in much the same way, and with much the same cast, as many of the features that preceded it. Along with his fastidious and vibrant visual sense and staccato pacing, his company of free spirits has become his signature.

“I don’t know who gravitated toward whom,” Anderson said, in a voice message sent from the production of his 11th film, outside Madrid. “But as soon as Owen Wilson and I started making a movie, well, I wanted Owen to be involved with the other movies I would do. As soon as I had Bill Murray, I wanted him on the next one. I wanted Jason Schwartzman. It was natural to me.”

“The French Dispatch,” about writers at a midcentury magazine based on The New Yorker, is set in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé and was filmed in Angoulême, France. “What I like to do is go to a place and have us all live there and become a real local sort of production, like a little theater company — everything works better for me that way,” said Anderson, who lives in Paris. He even likes verisimilitude in the extras: “I often employ people with their own pets in the background.”