Movies Casting Shadows on a Fanciful World Wes Anderson Evokes Nostalgia in ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ By DAVE ITZKOFFFEB. 28, 2014 Imagine you could pry off the back of Wes Anderson’s head as if it were a vintage TV set and rummage around inside. What would you find there? A mind like a junk drawer crammed with kite string, Swiss Army knives and remote-controlled toys, or one that springs open as neatly as a well-organized tackle box? A memory palace assembled ad hoc from brownstone apartments, underground caves and submarine compartments, or a diligently designed, continuously flowing and elegant old Alpine resort? It is this mountain getaway structure that is suggested by Mr. Anderson’s new movie, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and not just by its title. Written by Mr. Anderson, the idiosyncratic 44-year-old filmmaker of “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Moonrise Kingdom,” from a story by him and Hugo Guinness, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is the tale of a finicky but charismatic concierge named Gustave H. (played by Ralph Fiennes) in the fictional European nation Zubrowka, and a comic caper he shares with a lobby boy (Tony Revolori) in the early 1930s.Like the hotel of its title, this movie is filled with Mr. Anderson’s distinctive and pored-over touches: pastel color schemes, baroque costumes and delicate pastries that mark it as one of his films. But beyond the archness and deliberation of “The Grand Budapest Hotel” lurks a sense of foreboding and menace uncommon to Mr. Anderson’s work — a feeling that this carefully constructed realm is in danger of slipping away. And while this film, perhaps more so than Mr. Anderson’s seven others, presents a time and place he has never seen nor inhabited, and experiences he has never undergone, it might also offer his most personal invitation yet into his world, and the thoughts and feelings that shape it. In his travels, “I’m a total foreigner, I have a real outsider’s point of view,” Mr. Anderson said last Saturday night in his halting stop-and-start delivery, having just arrived at a downtown New York hotel after a flight from Paris. As he has encountered Europe and its populace, he said: “I don’t share their cynicism. I’m shielded from it, because I’ve been through nothing like any of the things these people went through.” But when he makes his movies, “I’m much more adventurous,” he said, then added, “when I’ve got a reason to be.” Raised in Texas (the setting of his first two features, “Bottle Rocket” and “Rushmore”), Mr. Anderson now lives in New York but has spent much of the last two years in Europe — not only on the “Grand Budapest Hotel” set, in Görlitz, Germany, but also in the head space of Stefan Zweig, the early-20th-century Austrian writer. Zweig, whom Mr. Anderson cites as a crucial inspiration for his new film, cataloged Europe before it was overrun by fascism, in works of fiction and an autobiography, “The World of Yesterday.” “No one thought of wars, of revolutions or revolts,” Zweig wrote in this book. “All that was radical, all violence, seemed impossible in an age of reason.” Mr. Anderson, who was fascinated by Zweig’s psychological insights into his characters and by his elaborate framing devices, said: “They’re not old-fashioned stories in the least. They’re post-Freudian, by a guy who actually knew Freud.” In Mr. Anderson’s hands, this setting becomes the playground for Gustave H., an old-school dandy — part Peter O’Toole, part David Bowie — who keeps the titular hotel running like clockwork. Mr. Fiennes, best known for his coldly villainous performances as Amon Goeth in “Schindler’s List” and Lord Voldemort in the “Harry Potter” series, said in an interview that he was happy to have “exorcised those characters” in “Grand Budapest Hotel.” Continue reading the main story He recalled that when Mr. Anderson offered him the screenplay, “He actually said, ‘Who would you like to play?’ Which was rather odd, because clearly the most prominent role was Gustave. He was an attractive figure on the page, with his fastidiousness and his love of perfume.” For the shoot, which took place largely at a converted department store, Mr. Anderson also had no trouble tapping into the eclectic roster of actors who have become his unofficial repertory company: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman turn up as hotel staffers; Edward Norton plays a police captain and Willem Dafoe a sinister enforcer; and Tilda Swinton, under layers of cosmetics, plays an octogenarian dowager named Madame D. When Mr. Anderson asked if she’d be up for “a bit of hard-core prosthetics work” and the “full-fledged old-age makeup routine,” Ms. Swinton said by email, her reply was “Count me in” (with an X for a kiss). Asked why she made the sacrifice, Ms. Swinton replied, “Because why ever not? And what sacrifice, by the way?” The actors were offered access to a library that included Zweig’s work and films by directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Rouben Mamoulian and Frank Borzage. They also had the option of watching an animatic (a rough film of storyboard images edited together) Mr. Anderson had made of the entire movie, as he envisioned it, with him voicing all the characters. “I thought: ‘This guy doesn’t even need actors. The film is already made,’ ” Mr. Dafoe said. Mr. Dafoe, who first worked with Mr. Anderson on his 2004 film “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” recalled the production of that movie as more haphazard. “I found that he was making the world as we were shooting it,” Mr. Dafoe said. “It wasn’t clear what my character was or was going to do. I was on the set pretty much all the time, and he would fold me into things or invent things.” On “Grand Budapest Hotel,” Mr. Dafoe said, he was glad to have the animatic and other references to ground himself in Mr. Anderson’s domain. But Mr. Fiennes said he preferred not to study Mr. Anderson’s designs too closely. “They were helpful because you thought, ‘O.K., he has his plan,’ ” Mr. Fiennes said. “But you don’t want to act the storyboard. You want to be alive in the present moment.” Mr. Fiennes said that for him and Mr. Anderson, the character of Gustave H. presented a continuing question of tone: Should he be extreme and over the top, or should he be underplayed? “Wes likes to do a lot of takes,” Mr. Fiennes said, “which I like, because you get to play. And in playing, you’re slightly numbed by repetition, and you discover something that hasn’t been thought of.” Mr. Anderson may have come to the interview in a tweed suit, and he casually peppered the conversation with words like “nevertheless,” but he is hardly disconnected from everyday life. He is a fan of mainstream movies like “Inception” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and his peers describe him as a committed friend who has supported them with their own work. The writer-director Noah Baumbach (“Frances Ha”), Mr. Anderson’s co-writer on “Life Aquatic” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” recalled their first meeting in the late 1990s, when both were celebrated young directors, though Mr. Baumbach was struggling to figure out his next project. Though he and Mr. Anderson could have approached each other with “backstabbing jealousy,” Mr. Baumbach said with a laugh, they instead bonded over the similar notebooks they carried and their mutual love of Peter Bogdanovich (whose next film the two are producing). Mr. Anderson let Mr. Baumbach read a draft of the “Royal Tenenbaums” screenplay and asked him to collaborate on later work, invitations that Mr. Baumbach said helped loosen the creative gears for his 2005 film, “The Squid and the Whale.” “Wes came right out of the gate, in real control of what he was doing, and knew very early on how to execute it,” Mr. Baumbach said. To see that in action, he added, “was huge for me.” Yet even as Mr. Anderson has matured, the thread that connects all of his movies is the desire to create “stuff that he wants to experience,” Mr. Schwartzman said. Back when they were shooting a memorable go-cart scene in “Rushmore,” Mr. Schwartzman recalled, “he asked one of the other kids to pull over, and he kind of commandeered his go-cart. And he’s like, ‘Let’s go!’ And we took off into the suburbs of Houston, just smiling and hooting.” “That,” Mr. Schwartzman said, “is still there in every movie.” Mr. Anderson has not completely shaken off all his youthful fixations in “Grand Budapest Hotel.” To the extent that there is any romance in the film, it exists only between two chaste young lovers played by Mr. Revolori and Saoirse Ronan, and between the comically age-inappropriate Gustave H. and Madame D. (“Maybe lovers are always 9 years old at heart,” Ms. Swinton said. “Or 90. Same difference. Wes notices this.”) What is unusual for Mr. Anderson in this film is the feeling of loss that hovers over his characters, as even a made-up version of decadent Europe is forced to give way to the brutal approach of World War II. Mr. Anderson said this was probably his first movie with real villains and real violence, which he said must be an expression — conscious or otherwise — of what history was about to do to these people. “I mutilate somebody about every 10 minutes of the movie,” he said, slightly exaggerating. “I’ve never done that. I’ve never had people getting torn limb from limb.” Beyond its antic comedy, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” portrays Gustave H. as a man seeking to preserve a time and place that is already lost — a description that could as easily apply to Mr. Anderson. Still, some of Mr. Anderson’s actors stopped short of endorsing the idea that Gustave H. was his stand-in. “I’ll pretty much beg off on that,” Mr. Dafoe said with a laugh. “You’re barking up the right tree.” Mr. Fiennes said he believed Mr. Anderson “feels there’s a world that happened before, which he might have been happy in.” He added: “But there’s a bittersweet feeling from the nostalgia for the thing you never actually experienced, the time you never actually lived in. Writers’ and filmmakers’ imaginations absolutely hinge on this.” With “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” Mr. Anderson said, “I wasn’t trying to make a statement: ‘Look out, everybody.’ ” He said he could not reflect on the era of artistic flowering captured in Zweig’s writing without feeling “saddened and some sense of tragic loss, of what we had made.” “It was this culture that was becoming more and more refined,” he said, “and he said nationalism ended it and ruined it, and led to these dogmatic ideologies.” Yet now that Mr. Anderson has confronted evil in one of his movies, he said it had not necessarily altered his approach to filmmaking or sent him looking for new kinds of material to inspire him. With a twinge of envy, he spoke about directors like William Friedkin and David O. Russell, who have used provocative techniques to elicit performances from actors, and are reputed to have even thrown punches when they felt it was necessary. Somehow, Mr. Anderson knows he could never have the same relationship with his actors. “I feel like they would hit me back,” he said, laughing. “It wouldn’t be hit — ‘Action!’ It would be hit and then another hit.” A version of this article appears in print on March 2, 2014, on page AR14 of the New York edition with the headline: Casting Shadows on a Fanciful World. Order Reprints|Todays Paper|Subscribe
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 05:14:36 +0000
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