US director gives hotel caper his five-star treatment
US director Wes Anderson's quirky vision is beautifully rendered in his hotel caper, writes Stephen Applebaum
Wes Anderson's meticulously designed films heighten and twist reality, creating worlds that look like ours, but different. When I meet the 44-year-old Texan at the 64th Berlin Film Festival, the day after his dazzling The Grand Budapest Hotel opens the event, the tall and wiry auteur looks as if he has just stepped out of one of his own creations.
The illusion is reinforced by the retro brown suit Anderson is wearing, which looks suspiciously like the one worn by Tom Wilkinson in the film. "It seemed so warm and comfortable that I got one, too," the filmmaker says, smiling.
I don't know if I've had a movie before where so many characters die and kill each other
Anderson's life and work likewise seem cut from the same cloth. He broke into the mainstream in 2001 with his third feature film, The Royal Tenenbaums, which he set in a version of New York informed by impressions of the city he'd gathered from books, movies and issues of The New Yorker magazine while growing up. Later, he took to the railways of India, with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, and lived 2007's The Darjeeling Limited before shooting a frame.
The Grand Budapest Hotel - his Lubitsch-like eighth film - is set in a fictional eastern European country, Zubrowka, in the early 1930s, but nonetheless reflects Anderson's reality. "The way I decide this is the thing I'm going to do is because that is where all my thoughts are going, and what I'm reading and what I'm interested in is funnelling in that direction. It's always a response to what's happening in my life."
Having spent much time in Europe over the past 15 years, he wanted to make a movie set there. The problem was coming up with a screenplay. Close to a decade ago, Anderson and co-screenwriter friend Hugo Guinness wrote about 20 minutes' worth of story, set in present-day England and France, featuring a character inspired by a mutual friend. But they couldn't figure out what happened next.
Years later, Anderson stumbled across the 1939 novel Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig in a Paris book shop. Around the same time, he strolled through the French capital's Jardin du Luxembourg "and there", he recalls, "was a bronze of Zweig, which I never noticed until I read this book. Suddenly he was looking at me, right there in the park."
Perhaps it was destiny. In any event, he "got kind of hooked" on the Viennese author's work so he and Guinness decided to relocate the story about their friend to the 1930s, and try to make it their take on a Zweig book. "And somewhere in the midst of that," says Anderson, "we had the idea to make him a hotel concierge [Gustave H, played by Ralph Fiennes] because the real person would actually be the greatest hotel concierge, if he were one. But he isn't."