The French Dispatch (2021)

Jeffrey Wright: Roebuck Wright

Photos 

Quotes 

• Roebuck Wright : Maybe with good luck we'll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.

• Nescaffier : Seeking something missing, missing something left behind.

  Roebuck Wright : Maybe with good luck, we'll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.

• Roebuck Wright : I admire your bravery, lieutenant.

  Nescaffier : I'm not brave. I just wasn't in the mood to be a disappointment to everybody. I'm a foreigner you know.

  Roebuck Wright : This city is full of us, isn't it? I'm one myself.

  Nescaffier : Seeking something missing. Missing something left behind.

• Talk Show Host : You've written about the American negro, the French intellectual, the Southern romantic...

  Roebuck Wright : And the anti-negro.

  Talk Show Host : The anti-negro. Scripture, mythology, folklore, true crime, false crime, the ghost story, the picaresque, the bildungsroman. But more than anything, over all these years, you've written about food. Why?

  Roebuck Wright : Who? What? Where? When? How? Valid questions, but I learned as a cub stringer, never, under any circumstance, if it is remotely within your power to resist the impulse, never ask a man why. It - it tightens a fellow up.

  Talk Show Host : I apologize, but I'm going to hold you to it...

  Roebuck Wright : Torture.

  Talk Show Host : ...if you'll agree.

  Roebuck Wright : Self-reflection is a vice best conducted in private or not at all.

• Roebuck Wright : There is a particular sad beauty... well-known to the companionless foreigner as he walks the streets of his adopted preferably moonlit, city. In my case, Ennui, France. I have so often... I have so often shared the day's glittering discoveries with no one at all. But always, somewhere along the avenue or the boulevard there was a table set for me. A cook, a waiter, a bottle, a glass, a fire. I chose this life. It is the solitary feast that has been very much like a comrade... my great comfort and fortification.

• Roebuck Wright : You see, people may or may not be mildly threatened by your anger, your hatred, your pride. But, love the wrong way and you will find yourself in great jeopardy.

• Roebuck Wright : I had arrived insufficiently early. Though the suite of rooms on the penultimate floor of the grand edifice was hypothetically indicated on a floorplan provided on the back of the carte de dégustation - - it was nigh impossible to locate. At least, for this reporter. A weakness in cartography: the curse of the homosexual.

• Talk Show Host : Someone told me you have a photographic memory. Is that true?

  Roebuck Wright : That is false. I have a typographic memory. I recollect the written word with considerable accuracy and detail. In other spheres, my powers of retention are distinctly impressionistic. I'm known to my intimates as a most forgetful man.

  Talk Show Host : Yet you remember every word you ever wrote.

  Roebuck Wright : Hmm.

  Talk Show Host : The novels, the essays, the poems, the plays...

  Roebuck Wright : The unrequited valentines. Sadly, I do.

• [last lines] 

  Roebuck Wright : What happens next?

• Roebuck Wright : Who were they? It was later revealed. A hired crew of bandits and gunmen imported by the ranking bosses of the Ennui rackets and their network of underworld middlemen. Chauffeur Joe Lefevre, a once almost promising instrumentalist. Stetson, Spinster, and Hieronymus Von Altman, Dutch masterminds. Marconi Brutelli, the Mediterranean anarchist. A pair of hooligans, estranged cousins. A trio of showgirls, all junkies. Plus one small, resourceful prisoner, determined to free himself and reduce taxpayer expense.

• Roebuck Wright : Perhaps, you fail to grasp that I was shot at and hand-grenaded against my will.