The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson

Development

Drafting of The Grand Budapest Hotel story began in 2006, when Wes Anderson produced an 18-page script with longtime collaborator Hugo Guinness.[10] They imagined a fragmented tale of a character inspired by a mutual friend, based in modern France and the United Kingdom.[11][12] Though their work yielded a 12-minute-long cut,[13] collaboration stalled when the two men were unable to coalesce a uniform sequence of events to advance their story.[12] By this time, Anderson had begun researching the work of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, with whom he was vaguely familiar. He became fascinated with Zweig, gravitating to Beware of Pity (1939), The World of Yesterday (1942), and The Post Office Girl (1982) for their fatalist mythos and Zweig's portrait of early twentieth-century Vienna.[14][15] Anderson also used period images and urbane Europe-set mid-century Hollywood comedies as references.[16][17] He ultimately pursued a historical pastiche with an alternate timeline, disillusioned with popular media's romanticism of pre-World War II European history.[18] Once The Grand Budapest Hotel took definite form, Anderson resumed the scriptwriting, finishing the screenplay in six weeks.[13] The producers tapped Jay Clarke to supervise production of the film's animatics, with voiceovers by Anderson.[19][13]

Anderson's sightseeing in Europe was another source of inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel's visual motifs.[20] The writer-director visited Vienna, Munich, and other major cities before the project's conception, but most location scouting began after the Cannes premiere of his coming-of-age drama Moonrise Kingdom (2012). He and the producers toured Budapest, small Italian spa towns, and the Czech resort Karlovy Vary before a final stop in Germany,[20] consulting hotel staff to develop an accurate idea of a real-life concierge's work.[13]

Casting

A seventeen-actor ensemble received star billing in The Grand Budapest Hotel.[21] Anderson customarily employs a troupe of longtime collaborators—Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton, Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, and Jason Schwartzman have worked on one or more of his projects.[22] Norton and Murray immediately signed when sent the script.[23][24] The Grand Budapest Hotel ensemble comprised mostly bit cameos.[25] Because of the limitations of such roles, Brody said that the most significant challenge was balancing the film's comedy with the otherwise solemn subject matter.[26] All were the filmmakers' first casting choices save for Swinton, whom they pursued for Madame D. when Angela Lansbury dropped out as a result of a prior commitment to a Driving Miss Daisy theater production.[27][28] Once hired, actors were encouraged to study the source material to prepare.[29] Dafoe and Fiennes in particular found the animatics helpful in conceptualizing The Grand Budapest Hotel from Anderson's perspective,[29][30] though Fiennes did not refer to them too often as he wanted his acting to be spontaneous.[29]

Anderson desired an English actor to play Gustave, and Fiennes was an actor he sought to work with for several years.[13] Fiennes, surprised by the offer, was eager to depart from his famously villainous roles and found Gustave's panache compelling.[29] Fiennes said he was initially unsure how to approach his character because the extent of Anderson's oversight meant actors could not improvise on set, inhibiting his usually spontaneous performing style.[30] The direction of Gustave's persona then became another question of tone, whether the portrayal be hyper-camp or understated.[29][31] Fiennes drew on several sources to shape his character's persona,[32] among them his triple role as Hungarian-Jewish men escaping fascist persecution in the István Szabó-directed drama Sunshine (1999), his brief stint as a young porter at Brown's Hotel in London,[33] and the experience reading The World of Yesterday.[33] Johnny Depp was reported as an early candidate in the press, claims which Anderson denied,[34] despite later reports that scheduling conflicts had halted negotiations.[28]

Casting director Douglas Aibel was responsible for hiring a suitable actor to play young Zero. Aibel's months-long search for prospective actors proved troublesome as he was unable to fulfill the specifications for an unknown teenage actor of Arabic descent.[13] "We were just trying to leave no stone unturned in the process."[35] Filmmakers held auditions in Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, France, England, and the United States before revising the role's ethnic criterion.[36][35] Eventually the filmmakers narrowed their search to Tony Revolori and his older brother Mario, novices of Guatemalan descent, and Tony landed the part after one taped audition.[35] He and Anderson rehearsed together for over four months before the start of filming to build a rapport.[37] Abraham spent about a week on set filming his scenes as the elderly Zero.[38]

Saoirse Ronan joined The Grand Budapest Hotel in November 2012.[39] Though a longtime Anderson fan, Ronan feared the deadpan, theatrical acting style characteristic of Anderson's films would be too difficult to master.[40] She was reassured by the director's conviction, "He guides everyone extremely well. He is very secure in his vision and he is very comfortable with everything he does. He knows it is going to work."[40] The decision to have Ronan play Agatha in her native Irish accent was Anderson's idea, after experimenting with German, English, and American accents; they felt an Irish accent projected a warm, feisty spirit into Agatha.[41]

Filming

The project was director of photography Robert Yeoman's eighth film with Anderson. Yeoman participated in an early scouting session with Anderson, recording footage with stand-in film crew to assess how certain scenes would unfold.[42] Yeoman drew on Vittorio Storaro's dramatic lighting techniques in the romantic musical One From the Heart (1982).[16][43] Filmmakers shot The Grand Budapest Hotel in ten weeks,[13] from January to March 2013 in eastern Germany,[44][45] where it qualified for a tax rebate financed by the German government's Federal Film Fund and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.[44][46][47] They also found Germany attractive because the production base was geographically confined, facilitating efficient logistics,[48] but the frigid weather and reduced daylight of early winter disrupted the shooting schedule, compounded by the slow film stock used for the camerawork. To rectify the issue, the producers used artificial lighting, expedited the daytime work schedule, and filmed night scenes at dusk.[16]

Principal photography took place at the Babelsberg Studio in suburban Berlin and in Görlitz, a mid-sized border town on the Lusatian Neisse on Germany's eastern frontier.[49] The filmmakers staged their largest interior sets at the vacant twentieth-century Görlitzer Warenhaus, whose atrium doubled for the Grand Budapest Hotel lobby. The top two floors housed production offices and storage space for cameras and wardrobe.[49][50] Anderson at one point considered buying the Warenhaus to save it from demolition.[51] He and the producers eyed vacant buildings because they could exercise full artistic control, and scouting active hotels that often enforce heavy shooting restrictions would call into question The Grand Budapest Hotel's integrity.[16] Exterior shots of the eighteenth-century estate Hainewalde Manor and interior shots of Schloss Waldenburg stood in for the Schloss Lutz estate.[52] Elsewhere in Saxony, production moved to Zwickau—shooting at the Osterstein Castle—and the state capital Dresden, where scenes were filmed at the Zwinger and the Pfunds Molkerei creamery.[49]

Cinematography

Yeoman shot The Grand Budapest Hotel on 35 mm film using Kodak Vision3 200T 5213 film stock from a single Arricam Studio camera provided by Arri's Berlin office.[42] His approach entailed the use of a Chapman-Leonard Hybrid III camera dolly for tracking shots and a geared head to achieve most of the film's rapid whip pans. For whip pans greater than 90 degrees, the filmmakers installed a fluid head from Mitchell Camera Corporation's OConnor Ultimate product line for greater fidelity.[42] Anderson requested Yeoman and project key grip Sanjay Sami focus on new methods for shooting the scenes.[42] Thus they used the Mad About Technology Towercam Twin Peek,[53] a telescoping camera platform, to traverse between floors, sometimes in lieu of a camera crane. For example, when a lantern drops to the basement from a hole in the cell floor in the Checkpoint Nineteen jailbreak scene, the filmmakers suspended the towercam upside-down, a setup which allowed the camera to descend to the ground.[42]

The Grand Budapest Hotel uses three aspect ratios as framing devices which streamline the film's story, evoking the aesthetic of the corresponding periods.[54][55] The multifarious structure of The Grand Budapest Hotel emerged from Anderson's desire to shoot in 1.37:1 format, also known as Academy ratio.[56] Production used Academy ratio for scenes set in 1932, which, according to Yeoman, provided the filmmakers with greater-than-routine headroom. He and the producers referred to the work of Ernst Lubitsch and other directors of the period to acclimate to the compositions produced from said format.[42] Filmmakers formatted modern scenes in standard 1.85:1 ratio, and the 1968 scenes were captured in widescreen 2.40:1 ratio with Technovision Cooke anamorphic lenses. These lenses produced a certain texture, one that lacked the sharpness of Panavision's Primo anamorphic lenses.[42]

Yeoman lit interior shots with tungsten incandescent fixtures and DMX-dimmer-controlled lighting. The crew made the Warenhaus ceiling from stretched muslin rigged with twenty 4K HMI lamps, an arrangement wherein the reflected light penetrated the skylight, accentuating the set's daylighting. Yeoman preferred the lighting choice because the warm tungsten fixtures contrasted with the coolish daylight.[42] When shooting deliberately less inviting hotel sets, such as Zero and Gustave's small bedrooms and the Grand Budapest's servants' quarters, the filmmakers combined fluorescent lighting, paper lanterns, and bare incandescent lights for historical accuracy.[42]

The Stuttgart-based LUXX Studios and Look Effects' German branch (also in Stuttgart) managed most of The Grand Budapest Hotel's visual effects, under the supervision of Gabriel Sanchez.[42][57] Their work for the film comprised 300 shots, created by a small cadre of specialized artists.[57] The development of the film's effects was swift, but at times difficult. Sanchez did not work on set with Anderson as Look Effects opened their Stuttgart headquarters after The Grand Budapest Hotel filming wrapped, and therefore was only able to reference his prior experience with the director. The California-based artist also became homesick working his first international assignment.[57] Only four artists from the newly assembled team had experience working on a multi-million dollar studio set.[57]

Creation of the effects was daunting because of their technical demands. The filmmakers camouflaged some of the stop-motion and matte effects in the forest-set chase scene to convey the desired intensity, and enhancing the snowscape with particle effects posed another challenge.[57] Sanchez cites the observatory and hotel shots as work that best demonstrate his special effects team's ingenuity. To achieve the aging brutalist design of the 1968 Grand Budapest, they generated computer models supplemented with detailed lighting, matte effects and shadowy expanses.[57] The crew used a similar technique in developing digital shots of the observatory; unlike the hotel, the observatory's base miniature was presented in pieces. They rendered the observatory with 20 different elements, data furthermore enhanced at Anderson's request. It took about one hour per shot to complete the final digital rendering.[57]

Set design

Adam Stockhausen—another Anderson associate—was responsible for The Grand Budapest Hotel's production design. He and Anderson collaborated previously on The Darjeeling Limited (2007) and Moonrise Kingdom.[58] Stockhausen researched the United States Library of Congress's photochrom print collection of alpine resorts to source ideas for the film's visual palette. These images showcased little of recognizable Europe, instead cataloging obscure historical landmarks unknown to the general public.[59][60] The resulting stylistic choice is a warm, bright visual palette pronounced by soft pastel tonalities. Some of The Grand Budapest Hotel interior sets contrast this look in interior shots, primarily Schloss Lutz and the Checkpoint Nineteen prison: the imposing hardwoods, intense greens and golds of the Schloss Lutz evoke oppressive wealth, and the derelict Checkpoint Nineteen decays in a cool bluish-gray tint.[52]

The filmmakers relied on matte paintings and miniature effect techniques to play on perspective for elaborate scenes, creating the illusion of size and grandeur. Under the leadership of Simon Weisse, scale models of structures were constructed by a Berlin-based propmaking team at Studio Babelsberg in tandem with the Görlitz shoot.[61][62] Weisse joined The Grand Budapest Hotel's design staff after coming to the attention of production manager Miki Emmrich, with whom he worked on Cloud Atlas (2012).[61] Anderson liked the novelty of miniatures, having used them in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and more extensively in Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).[62]

Weisse and his propmakers built three major miniature models: the 1⁄8-scale forest set, the 1⁄12-scale observatory, and the 1⁄18-scale Grand Budapest Hotel set, based on art director Carl Sprague's conceptual renderings. The Grand Budapest Hotel set comprised the hotel building atop a wooded ledge with a funicular, bound by a Friedrichian landscape painting superimposed with green-screen technology.[62] Designers sculpted the 3-meter-high (9.8 ft) hotel with silicone resin molds and etched brass embellishment. Photos of the Warenhaus set were then glued in boxes installed to each window to convey the illusion of light.[61] The funicular's 35-degree slope required a separate, lateral model.[61][63][64] Timber, soldered brass, fine powdered sugar, and styrofoam were used to construct the observatory set, and polyester fiberfill was the forest model's snow.[61]

The creation of Boy with Apple was a four-month-long process by English painter Michael Taylor, who was inspired by Renaissance portraiture.[65][66] Taylor had been approached by one of the producers before receiving the script and source material, and the film's artistic direction piqued his interest. The painter originally worked alone before deferring to Anderson for input when certain aspects of the painting did not match the writer-director's vision.[65] Taylor found the initial process difficult, struggling to be true to Boy with Apple's eclectic sources.[66] He said that while he had been unfamiliar with Anderson's work, that unfamiliarity enabled him to imbue the painting with a unique identity.[65] The producers' casting choice for Boy with Apple's subject was contingent on the character description of a blond-haired boy with the slender, athletic frame of a ballet dancer. They signed Ed Munro, an actor with a theater background, the day after his audition.[65] The filmmakers staged the painting sessions at a Jacobean boarding school, then empty for summer holiday, near Taylor's home in Dorset. Filmmakers dressed Munro in about 50 ornate costumes with velvet cloaks, codpieces and furs, photographed each one, and submitted them to Anderson for approval. Munro, who maintained the same posture and facial expression for several hours, found the costuming uncomfortable.[65]

Ann Atkins was The Grand Budapest Hotel's lead graphic designer.[67] She devised Zubrowkan objects—newspapers, banknotes, police reports and passports—from reference material gathered from the location scouting. Atkins was a novice in film but had valuable expertise in advertising design to reference, producing 20 sketches of a single artifact per day when the on-set shooting peaked.[68] She used an antique typewriter for the mock documents with a dip pen for the embellished handwriting.[67] Among her early tasks was the creation of weathered, worn props for fidelity to the film's timeline. To achieve the appearance of prolonged exposure to air, Atkins blow dried paper dipped in tea.[68] She said, "The beautiful thing about period filmmaking is that you're creating graphic design for a time before graphic designers existed, per se. It was really the craftsmen who were the designers: the blacksmith designed the lettering in the cast iron gates; the glazier sculpted the lettering in the stained glass; the sign-painter drew the lettering for the shopfronts; the printer chose the type blocks for the stationery."[67]

Pastries are an important motif in The Grand Budapest Hotel story.[69] The signature courtesan au chocolat from Mendl's mirrors the French dessert religieuse, a choux-based pastry with a mocha (or chocolate) glaze and vanilla custard filling.[69] A Görlitz pastry chef crafted the courtesan before working with Anderson on the final design.[70]

Costumes

Veteran costume designer Milena Canonero endeavored to capture the essence of the film's characters.[71] Canonero researched 1930s uniform design and period artwork by photographers George Hurrell and Man Ray and painters Kees van Dongen, Gustav Klimt, George Grosz and Tamara de Lempicka.[72] Canonero was also influenced by non-period literature and art.[71] Specialized artists then realized her designs in Photoshop, allowing them to work closely to the actors' likenesses.[72] The filmmakers assembled most of the basic costumes in their Görlitz workshop, others from the Berlin-based Theaterkunst, and the uniforms came from a Polish workshop. They rented vintagewear for extras in crowd shots.[72] Canonero used dense mauve and deep-purple AW Hainsworth facecloth for the Grand Budapest uniforms instead of the more subdued colors typical of hospitality uniforms.[72] She researched diverse ideas for the gray-and-black military uniforms, in accordance with script specifications that they not be green or too historically identifiable.[73] Anderson did most of the insignia, occasionally approving designs from Canonero's workshop in Rome.[73]

The filmmakers gave the characters distinct looks. They distinguished men with facial hair to augment their dapper style.[72] Gustave's wardrobe was intended to evoke "a sense of perfection and control" even in his collapsing livelihood.[74] Anderson and Canonero visualized Agatha with a Mexico-shaped facial birthmark and a wheat blade in her hair, costumed to reflect her working-class stature and the brightness of her pastries.[73] Madame was dressed in a silk velvet coat-and-gown-ensemble with Klimtesque handprint patterns and mink trim by Fendi, from a previous professional relationship with Anderson and Canonero. Fendi developed the gray astrakhan fur overcoat for Norton's Albert, and loaned other furs to assist the needs of the shoot.[73][74] To age Swinton, makeup artist Mark Coulier applied soft silicone rubber prosthetics encapsulated in dissolvable plastic molding on her face.[75] Dafoe's Jopling wore a Prada leather coat inspired by outerwear for military dispatch riders, adorned with custom silver knuckle pieces from jeweler Waris Ahluwalia (a close friend of Anderson's).[74] Canonero modified the coat with fine red-wool stitching and a weapons compartment inside the front lapel.[74]

Music

Anderson recruited Alexandre Desplat to compose the film's Russian folk-influenced score encompassing symphonic compositions and background drones;[76] the balalaika formed the score's musical core.[77] The instrument gave Anderson and music supervisor Randall Poster a chance to immerse themselves in an unfamiliar genre, and they spent about six months consulting experts to hone their vision.[78] Its score's classical roots make The Grand Budapest Hotel unique among Anderson-directed projects, forgoing the writer-director's usual practice of employing a selection of contemporary pop music.[78] Desplat felt his exposure to Anderson's idiosyncratic filmmaking style was integral to articulating an Eastern European musical approach for the film's score.[79] His direction expanded on some of the sounds and instrumentation of Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom. As well, the scope of Desplat's responsibilities entailed differentiating The Grand Budapest Hotel's sprawling cast of characters with distinctive melodic themes and motifs.[80] ABKCO Records released the 32-track score digitally on March 4, 2014.[81] It featured sampled recordings[82] and contributions from orchestras such as the Osipov State Russian Folk Orchestra and a 50-person ensemble of French and Russian balalaika players.[78][83]