Yesterday, we ran with Wes Anderson’s revelation that “The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar” was 37 minutes long. It turns out to be a little more complicated than that.
Firstly, here’s Anderson explaining the film more thoroughly to The Daily Beast:
“That’s not quite a movie. I did some Roald Dahl short story adaptations. They’re separate from each other; they’re not one thing. But the first one is a longer one, about 36-38 minutes, and so it’s a whole story—it’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. We have Ralph [Fiennes] as Roald Dahl, and Benedict Cumberbatch and Dev Patel and Richard Ayoade and Ben Kingsley, who’s great. It’s kind of an unusual form for the storytelling that we do, because my way into it was that I realized that what I liked were his words. The way the stories are told in Roald Dahl’s words. Just turning it into a movie, you can lose his words, by and large. We decided not to lose his words. When you see it, you’ll see what I mean. We use the words.”
So, in essence, ‘Henry Sugar’ might be split into four different episodes. The first one, titled ‘Henry Sugar,’ is 36-38 minutes. That’s what I gathered from this. When you take into account that Netflix is going to be streaming it then it does make much more sense why Anderson decided to team up with the streaming giant for this one.
Also, Fiennes plays author Roald Dahl, and he appears in all four “episodes”. The other actors pop up in various different roles throughout. We’ll get to know all the details for ourselves when “The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar” shows up on Netflix in November.