The single-minded drive of Wes Anderson’s latest protagonist, Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), will be familiar to fans of the director, although “The Phoenician Scheme” robber baron’s ambitions outstrip even those of explorer Steve Zissou and the wily Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Zsa Zsa’s quest to complete the Korda Land and Sea Phoenician Infrastructure Scheme has meant putting his fortune and life at risk, leading him to the unexpected move of making his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) his successor. Entrusting the 20-year-old would-be nun, who doesn’t hold her father nor business in high regard, starts as a strategic decision, but over the course of the film (and numerous near-death experiences), Zsa Zsa’s business ambitions morph into wanting to become a father.

While on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Anderson acknowledged that the father-daughter theme taking center stage likely stemmed, in part, from the director now having his own daughter, Freya, who was born in 2016.

“Your entire life is different once you have a child,” said Anderson. “You’re watching with different eyes with a kid.”

Anderson also indicated that Freya has been a far bigger influence on his other great passion, movie-watching, more than even his movie-making. It’s a passion Anderson has made an effort to cultivate in his daughter, which ended up changing the renowned cinephile’s own viewing habits.

“I started trying to find movies that she would like. She likes old movies, she’ll watch a black and white movie, she’ll watch all variety of things, but she doesn’t like ’em all,” said Anderson.

Anderson admitted he has trouble predicting what movies his daughter would like, but there is little doubt about her favorite genre. “With her, I’ve seen a lot of musicals that I had never [seen],” said Anderson. “I never got that into musicals, and now some of my favorite movies are musicals — ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ for instance, I didn’t know this movie, maybe I’d seen it on TV when I was 12 years old or something. It was not a movie I focused on, or ‘The Pajama Game’ for instance, ‘The King and I,’ there’s a whole range of musicals that I got into because of her, because she likes them and we’ve watched them again and again, and some of these are masterpieces.”

And there’s one musical director above all others that has risen to the top, explained Anderson, “This name ‘Vincente Minnelli’ spoke to her because she loved ‘Kismet,’ which is, to me, not one of the greatest of the Vincente Minnelli’s, but it has some great scenes, and some of those great scenes are really great. Having this daughter has expanded my movie knowledge.”

Anderson’s daughter’s tastes were equally hard for him to predict when it came to his own films, for which she can be a particularly tough critic.

“She doesn’t necessarily like my movies,” said Anderson. “ I’ve noticed she loved ‘Isle of Dogs,’ she did not love ‘Fantastic. Mr. Fox,’ for instance. ‘French Dispatch’ she says is the most boring movie ever made, with the exception of the animated car chase at the end of the film, which she thinks is a masterpiece.”

For a cinephile director who draws so much inspiration from his immersion in the great works of cinema, his daughter’s influence on his filmmaking may be most profoundly felt in not simply what he now watches, but seeing movies through her eyes.

Focus Features’ “The Phoenician Scheme” opens in select theaters today, May 30, and will be released nationwide Friday, June 6.

To hear Wes Anderson‘s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.