Entertainment

The Wes Anderson Book Every ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’ Fan Needs Is Here

If you want to see the all moodboard inspirations, set and costume treatments, and behind-the-scenes photos for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel then this is the book for you. Written by Matt Zoller Seitz an American film and television critic, author, and filmmaker. Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel published by Abrams consists of a series of interviews between Anderson and Seitz and almost every other person directly involved in this particular movie-making process.

“What we are trying to do here is create a portrait of a director’s aesthetic in book form,” Seitz explains. The book consists of different aspects of the filmmaking process. The acting section has a lengthy interview with Ralph Fiennes,while other sections include cinematography with an interview with director of photography Robert D. Yeoman and a costume design section with an interview from on-set costume designer Milena Canonero.

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“The end goal of all this is to create a book that has a sense of architecture” adds Seitz. 

See Seitz’s book trailer: 

Illustration by Max Dalton
 

Wes Anderson and Tom Wilkinson in the Author’s study during the shooting of the film’s 1985 scenes. The patterns on the wallpaper and curtains faintly evoke the paintings of Gustav Klimt, as well as carpets in the hallways of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). The painting of woolly mammoths suffering through the Ice Age connects the film’s themes of eras passing and ways of life becoming extinct. Photo by Martin Scali

Tony Revolori as Zero, standing in front of a green screen, Mendl’s box in hand. Photo by Martin Scali

Ralph Fiennes, Wes Anderson and Tony Revolori on location, shooting the scene from the 1932 sequence in which M. Gustave begins mentoring Zero Moustafa. Photo by Martin Scali.

Production sketches by The Grand Budapest Hotel costume department, a mix of illustration and Photoshop. Early treatment of Dmitri.

Photocrom image of the Grandhotel Pupp in the spa town of Karlovy Vary (then Carlsbad), Czech Republic. This hotel inspired the Grand Budapest, and this town inspired Nebelsbad, Zubrowka, where the story is set. 
Courtesy of the Library of Congress Photochrom Print Collection. 

Still-frames from the film showing the slow, left-to-right pan that takes viewers from Stag’s Leap to the hotel itself. Everything in this shot is a miniature or a digital matte painting, composited during post-production. As executed by production designer Adam Stockhausen and his team, this and many other outdoor panoramas aim for a more figurative than photo-realistic feeling, in the manner of 1930s and ‘40s movies. Grand Budapest Hotel © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

To learn more about Abram’s Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel visit here. 

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