Photography by Angelo Pennetta for WSJ. MagazineGUESTS CAME BY funicular, ascending into the foothills above the fictional European spa town of Nebelsbad in the imagined nation of Zubrowka. They were greeted—the rich, the old, the insecure; the vain, the entitled and the needy—at the Grand Budapest Hotel by its heroic, mustachioed concierge, Gustave H, dressed in a purple tailcoat, perpetually perfumed with L'Air de Panache. Inside, the floors were covered with custom Art Nouveau carpets. Vaulted staircases led up toward magnificent panels of stained glass. H instructed his staff to keep the hotel "spotless and glorified." He deemed it "a great and noble house," before having his porters and waiters consider 46 stanzas of didactic, romantic poetry.
This is hospitality Wes Anderson –style and it took almost a decade to configure. The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson's eighth feature, out this month, began as a character sketch about a longtime friend. "The main thing," says Anderson by phone from London's Home House—not exactly a hotel but, rather, a private club with bedrooms upstairs and the director's base for a press day in Marylebone—"is he knows everything. And he's good with people. My friend is not a concierge, but would have been the greatest concierge had he fallen into it—and if he'd been born about a century earlier. I don't think concierges do quite the same things as they used to."
What they used to do—and, more importantly, what they've never done—is central to Grand Budapest, the entry point into yet another of Anderson's fully formed, meticulously researched and wholly original worlds. With each new film, Anderson, now 44, has honed a visual language all his own, refining his signature aesthetic in a way that enriches the emotional lives of his characters. To be sure, there's repetition across Anderson's cinematic landscape—of behavior and design—but the result is a richness few other filmmakers have consistently delivered. From 1996's Bottle Rocket, written with University of Texas classmate Owen Wilson in their Austin apartment (Anderson grew up in Houston), to 1998's Rushmore; from 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums to 2004's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou; from 2007's The Darjeeling Limited to 2012's luminous Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson's worlds now form their own galaxy.
Obsessively curious—compensating, perhaps, for not living in the gilded era of Gustave H himself, between the World Wars—Anderson acquired as much knowledge as possible about his concierge's world before he got to work designing it. Prompted by postcard-like photographs he found in the Library of Congress's Photochrom Print Collection, he set off for Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany. "Before we went looking at all these old hotels, we looked at thousands of pictures—landscapes and cityscapes," says Anderson. "It was like having Google Earth for the Austro-Hungarian Empire." When Anderson's own Grand Budapest Hotel needed a pastry program, he turned to inspiration from the legendary Viennese bakery Demel. "They have sachertorte, and a friend told us it would always be Billy Wilder's first stop in Vienna. You have to respect pastry from this era, so I thought we should do a Demel for our own little made-up country."
Cake aside, Anderson was having trouble finding a structure that would properly house his own Grand Budapest until he arrived in the Saxon town of Görlitz and discovered the vacated Görlitzer Warenhaus department store. Constructed in 1912, the building appealed to Anderson for both its sizable atrium (it would become his hotel's lobby) and its ability to house his production offices, art department and workshop (bottles of L'Air de Panache and other objects had to be made) all under one roof. "I don't like things that remind me too much of traditional movie sets, where everyone's always getting in and out of vans," says Anderson.
"Wes works hard at creating an atmosphere of closeness," says Ralph Fiennes, a newcomer to the director's ensemble (regulars include Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman and Wilson, all of whom appear in the film) and the man who breathes comedy and gravitas into Gustave H. "There are no trailers for individual actors," says Fiennes. "We all live in the same hotel, eat dinner together every night, get in costume in our rooms and just go downstairs for hair and makeup."
Though Anderson's movies often highlight the dysfunction of families, his sets celebrate their intimacy. Anderson likes to point out that his cinematic tribe isn't exclusively made up of actors. He's worked with illustrator Hugo Guinness, who has a story credit on Grand Budapest, since 2001. Cinematographer Robert Yeoman has been Anderson's director of photography since Bottle Rocket, almost 20 years ago. Fiennes, for his part, says he'd love to join the troupe again in the future. "Wes has an almost old-world way of considering other people," he says, "a rare kind of courtesy. But he's also very prepared, very specific." Case in point: those vans, which remained absent from the film location. "We got a bunch of Danish golf carts to drive around town in," says Anderson. "That's how we did most of our traveling."
There's more to Grand Budapest than reservations and room service. A comedy of manners with an adventurer's heart, the film finds its protagonist accused of murder, stripped of his post, imprisoned, escaped and riding cable cars high into an Alpine monastery in search of answers. (And, typically for this director, it's all very stylish, with costuming that achieves what Matt Zoller Seitz, critic and author of The Wes Anderson Collection, calls "material synecdoche," where "objects, locations or articles of clothing define whole personalities, relationships or conflicts.") It's perhaps the nearest thing to a Wes Anderson action blockbuster—a caper with both suspense and speed—though the director bristles at the description. "It's more us trying to do a Lubitsch-esque type of thing and maybe a '30s type of Hitchcock movie," he muses. "The cable car stuff, especially, was me trying to think of a scene that might have been a Hitchcock scene that never happened."
Anderson could cite references all day, footnoting his cinematic vision endlessly. There's no pithy response to questions regarding aesthetics. He'd never say he's going for neo-baroque with undertones of Americana. Instead, a painting made expressly for the movie—by the fictional Johannes Van Hoytl The Younger, and in real life by the artist Michael Taylor—triggers a riff on Old Masters. "Our reference was kind of Flemish painters. And Hans Holbein; I don't know if it's the younger or the elder. I like Brueghel, and another one that's maybe connected to this is a Bronzino at the Frick. We were trying to suggest that it wasn't an Italian Renaissance painting. That it was more northern." And then there's the matter of another early inspiration for the script, the work of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), whose temperament calls out to both Gustave H's fictional life and to Anderson's actual one.
Like H, Zweig was both a grandiloquent dandy and a moralist force. He owned Beethoven's writing desk, hung out with Rilke in Paris and even looked a little like Fiennes's character. ("The mustache and the big nose," says the actor. "I suppose that's right.") Like Anderson, Zweig mourned the end of a certain European era (titles, thermal baths) in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, which would be an apt subtitle for Grand Budapest. "Wes has his own unusual nostalgia for a world he was never part of but would like to be," says Fiennes. He also has the kind of wanderlust exhibited by Zweig, who regularly found himself far from home in Zurich, Calcutta, London and Moscow.
The invented world of Wes Anderson depends very much on travel and real immersion (The director and his longtime girlfriend, the writer Juman Malouf, call New York home, though Anderson also owns an apartment in Paris and will gladly stay on set abroad for long stretches. "I never actually know how long I'm there for," he says, "time just becomes meaningless to me in that situation.") Anderson shot The Darjeeling Limited on a moving train in India. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou features scenes filmed on a World War II–era minesweeper off the Italian coast. And Grand Budapest could not be completed without footage from inside a fin de siècle bathhouse (amazingly, one was discovered in Görlitz during production).
"I tend to want to make a movie some place because I want to know about that place," says Anderson, before hanging up to watch a final print prior to submitting Grand Budapest to the Berlin International Film Festival. "There's something to do with the characters and with the story, but there's something that has to do with the world they live in.
"I'm not quite sure where the next one will be," he says. "I will say I'm interested in Japan."
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