Wes Anderson and the cast of The Phoenician Scheme tell the BBC about how they made the film, and about its formidable young star, and daughter of Kate Winslet, who plays a pipe-smoking trainee nun.

One of the trademarks of a Wes Anderson film is the guaranteed tranche of famous faces that always appear. But the charismatic actor set to be the biggest talking point in Anderson's latest feature, The Phoenician Scheme, is practically unknown. Twenty-four-year-old Mia Threapleton, whose mother is the actor Kate Winslet, has been described by critics as "sensational" in her first leading role, following the film's world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this week.

Threapleton plays Liesl, a red-lipped, pipe-smoking, alcohol-drinking noviciate nun, whose withering put-downs turn her father Zsa Zsa Korda, a wealthy tycoon embarking on a questionable multi-national infrastructure project (aka "The Phoenician Scheme"), into putty. She is ordered out of her convent to go on a trip with him, as he tries to groom her, comedy Don Corleone-style, for the family business.

"When we auditioned her, I remember there was this moment that we locked eyes and she didn't blink," Benicio del Toro, who plays Korda, tells the BBC about his first encounter with Threapleton. "When she walked out, I remember telling Wes, 'I think she can go toe to toe; she might be short, but she's terrific,'" he says.

Threapleton also impressed Wes Anderson, who calls her performance in the film "electric". "Mia's not a towering person physically," Anderson tells the BBC. "She's much littler than Benicio. He looms over her. And the thing with her character is she had to be able to intimidate Benicio del Toro, who's playing somebody who's going to walk out of a cornfield with blood all over his face and keep going, and that's not necessarily an easy thing to do.

"And there's never a second to me in the movie where you feel that he dominates her. If anybody is in command of this relationship, it's her. Benicio is more experienced, more famous, more everything and a great big guy. But the way [Mia] occupies the space in these scenes, she has just this presence and solidity. And that was nothing to do with anything I asked for or discussed with her."

Threapleton made her acting debut as a young teenager in 2014, playing a role in the period drama A Little Chaos, which her mother starred in. She has been in TV series such as Dangerous Liaisons and The Buccaneers, but playing Liesel is her first major film role in Hollywood.

"I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to work with Wes at such an early point in my career," she tells the BBC. "And not just him, but Benicio and the rest of the cast. I remember being about 12 years old and watching Moonrise Kingdom and thinking, 'I really, really, really want to work with Wes Anderson one day' – and then I was 23, and I got to do that."

But she isn't the only newcomer to the Anderson film universe; another of her co-leads, Michael Cera, also finally realised his – and his fans' – ambition by starring in one of the director's films, as Bjorn, a bug-obsessed Norwegian tutor who is in love with Liesl. At the film's Cannes press conference, Benedict Cumberbatch (who........

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