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The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
The Grand Budapest Hotel is a 2014 comedy-drama film written and directed by Wes Anderson. The film's seventeen-actor ensemble cast is led by Ralph Fiennes as Monsieur Gustave H., famed concierge of a twentieth-century mountainside resort in the fictional country of Zubrowka. After being framed for the murder of a wealthy dowager, he and his recently befriended protégé Zero embark on a quest for fortune and a…
Directed by Wes Anderson · Shot by Robert Yeoman · Cut by Barney Pilling · Music by Alexandre Desplat · Ratio Academy ratio · 99 min
How it was made
- Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness's original 2006 draft produced only a 12-minute cut before stalling; the project was revived once Anderson discovered the writing of Stefan Zweig and rebuilt the story around it.
- Cinematographer Robert Yeoman used a Chapman-Leonard Hybrid III dolly for tracking shots and, for whip pans greater than 90 degrees, switched to a Mitchell/O'Connor Ultimate fluid head for extra precision.
- Key grip Sanjay Sami rigged a telescoping camera platform called the Towercam Twin Peek, at one point suspending it upside down to follow a lantern falling into a jail cell's basement.
- The production's largest interior sets were built inside the vacant Görlitzer Warenhaus department store in Görlitz, Germany, whose atrium doubled as the hotel lobby while its top floors housed production offices and camera and wardrobe storage.
- The film uses three aspect ratios keyed to its three time periods; scenes set in 1932 were shot in 1.37:1 Academy ratio, which Yeoman said gave extra headroom modelled on the work of director Ernst Lubitsch.
- Yeoman shot on 35mm Kodak Vision3 200T film stock with a single Arricam Studio camera supplied by Arri's Berlin office.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Wes Anderson
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