Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Seitz Matt Zoller

Description

This companion to the New York Times bestselling bookThe Wes Anderson Collectiontakes readers behind the scenes of the Oscar(R)-winning filmThe Grand Budapest Hotelwith a series of interviews between writer/director Wes Anderson and movie/television critic Matt Zoller Seitz. Learn all about the films conception, hear personal anecdotes from the set, and explore the wide variety of sources that inspired the screenplay and imageryfrom author Stefan Zweig to filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch to photochrom landscapes of turn-of-the-century Middle Europe. Also inside are interviews with costume designer Milena Canonero, composer Alexandre Desplat, lead actor Ralph Fiennes, production designer Adam Stockhausen, and cinematographer Robert Yeoman;essays by film critics Ali Arikan and Steven Boone, film theorist and historian David Bordwell, music critic Olivia Collette, and style and costume consultant Christopher Laverty; and an introduction by playwright Anne Washburn.Previously unpublished production photos, artwork, and ephemera illustrate each essay and interview.The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel stays true to Seitzs previous book on Andersons first seven feature films,The Wes Anderson Collection,with an artful, meticulous design and playful, original illustrations that capture the spirit of Andersons inimitable aesthetic. Together, they offer a complete overview of Andersons filmography to date.Praise for the film,The Grand Budapest Hotel: Four Academy Awards(R), including Costume Design, Music - Original Score, and Production Design;Nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Directing, and Writing - Original Screenplay; Best Film - Musical or Comedy, Golden Globe Awards; Best Original Screenplay, BAFTA, WGA, NYFCC, and LAFCA AwardsPraise for the book,The Wes Anderson Collection: ';The Wes Anderson Collectioncomes as close as a book can to reading like a Wes Anderson film. The design is meticulously crafted, with gorgeous full-page photos and touches . . .' Eric Thurm,The A.V. Club Also available from Matt Zoller Seitz: Mad Men Carousel, The Oliver Stone Experience, The Wes Anderson Collection: Bad Dads, andThe Wes Anderson Collection.

Sujets

• Cinematography

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 10 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 6
• EAN13: 9781613128770
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 13 Mo

Extrait

by MATT ZOLLER SEITZ with an introduction by ANNE WASHBURN
featuring interviews with Writer and director WES ANDERSON Actor RALPH FIENNES Costume designer MILENA CANONERO Score composer ALEXANDRE DESPLAT Production designer ADAM STOCKHAUSEN and Cinematographer ROBERT YEOMAN
Critical essays by members of the Society of the Crossed Pens ALI ARIKAN STEVEN BOONE DAVID BORDWELL OLIVIA COLLETTE and CHRISTOPHER LAVERTY
ABRAMS, NEW YORK
To
DAVID PIERCE ZOLLER
,
the author s father, friend, and
inspiration.
A 1,418-WORD INTRODUCTION BY ANNE WASHBURN (p. 9 ) A 384-WORD PREFACE BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ (p. 13 ) A 1,751-WORD CRITICAL ESSAY BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ (p. 19 )
THE 7,269-WORD First Interview (p. 31 ) Proper Exploring: AN INTERVIEW WITH RALPH FIENNES (p. 65 ) They Wear What They Are: The Grand Budapest Hotel and the Art of Movie Costumes BY CHRISTOPHER LAVERTY (p. 77 ) The Wes Anderson Style: AN INTERVIEW WITH MILENA CANONERO (p. 85 )
THE SOCIETY OF THE CROSSED PENS (p. 251 ) THE INDEX (p. 252 ) THE IMAGE CREDITS (p. 254 ) THE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (p. 255 )
THE 5,069-WORD Second Interview (p. 101 ) The Music of The Grand Budapest Hotel: A Place, Its People, and Their Story BY OLIVIA COLLETTE (p. 121 ) Intimate Sound: AN INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDRE DESPLAT (p. 131 ) A Grand Stage: The Production Design of The Grand Budapest Hotel BY STEVEN BOONE (p. 141 ) Keeping the Trains Running: AN INTERVIEW WITH ADAM STOCKHAUSEN (p. 149 )
THE 8,838-WORD Third Interview (p. 175 ) Worlds of Yesterday BY ALI ARIKAN (p. 207 ) Stefan Zweig EXCERPTS (p. 215 ) A Whole Different Element: AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT YEOMAN (p. 227 ) Wes Anderson Takes the 4:3 Challenge BY DAVID BORDWELL (p. 235 )
PAGE 23
PAGE 93
PAGE 167
The
CONTENTS

Mendl s pastel, cream-puff tower, tottering and a little slapdash, is less culinary master-piece than an institution; those pink boxes passports more reliable than any set of trav-el documents.
With The Grand Budapest Hotel , Wes Anderson has created a confection of curi-ous depth and substance-the lightest, airi-est movie about cataclysm, and one of the more moving.
Anderson s movies deliberately recall the childhood pleasures of world-making, and a childlike sense of conviction and focus. You won t see hands reaching into the frame, shifting the characters, and you can t hear the muttering of dialogue and the special-effect plosives, but you can feel the traces of those hands, those lips, in the devoted way _________________
E LIKE TO THINK THAT CIVILIZATIONS are solid, foundational creations, but they are generally confections: concocted as much from color and air and spun sugar as they are from butter, cream, flour. Half vital force, half uninterrogated tradition, they become more glorious, as they grow in confi-dence, and more unstable-not so very unlike the Courtesan au Chocolat offered by Mendl s, the revered bakery in Wes Anderson s fictional Mitteleuropean town of Nebelsbad, Zubrowka.
in which every frame is handled, in the per-formance idiom he has created, and in the physical and emotional worlds that are par-ticularly his own.
His movies are not only about the love of the tale, but always, also, about the love of telling it. His characters are often engaged in the act of making stories; if they aren t actual artists, they are deeply and consciously involved in crafting the stories of their own lives through adventures, escapes, and escapades. The physical life of Anderson s films-the miniatures, painted backdrops, annotations, and stop-motion animation-is as much a part of the tale as the telling of it, the detail and precision and visual conviction an important offset to the carefully offhand tone he employs.
A
1,418-Word
INTRODUC
TION
by Anne Washburn
10
Uncharacteristically , Anderson doesn t attempt to seduce us with the big pink pastry box that is the Grand Budapest Hotel in its heyday. It is persuasive and im-pressive, and nicely ridiculous, but it isn t the fully articulated playscape in which so many of his movies are set. The Grand Budapest Hotel is, as Zero the lobby boy notes rever-ently, an institution tirelessly upheld by M. Gustave, himself either sharp tool or cream filling, nestled in the center of the confection.
Most of Anderson s dreamers are created-and shown actively creating -in contradiction to an established order they both crave and fiercely despise. His charac-ters are rascals, pitting themselves against a status quo they wish they could respect enough to obey. M. Gustave s passion for the hotel, however, is reciprocated-he doesn t merely serve the institution; he defines it. Zero s fierce dedication to M. Gustave, to his own role as lobby boy, to the Grand Buda-pest itself, is clearly comic; is not fealty to a commercial establishment, traditionally, the sign of an immature protagonist, or one with a lack of scope, whom we are free to mock? Over the course of the movie, we learn what Zero has lost; what an institution can mean.
In The Grand Budapest Hotel , a fic-tional hotel is represented by a miniature against a painted backdrop in an imaginary nation populated with a delightful but im-probable secret society of concierges, the made-up masterpiece Boy with Apple , an al-ternate version of European history, an ab-surd cologne. It is a movie that continually signals it s a comedy, until it confounds us, and it isn t. The horrible is delightfully cartoonish (Willem Dafoe in black leather and sharpened teeth-perfect; may he never appear to us in any other guise), until it is not. Anderson s films are always shades darker and grimmer than they seem to be, but in _____________________________
no other movie of his is the gulf between the tone and weight so large. Made-up worlds, in the current aesthetic fashion, are for com-edies, or fantasies, seldom a place to explore the consequential.
M. Gustave is the possessor of a more contradictory set of characteristics than are generally felt to be plausible in art (and re-ally only allowed in comedy), perhaps an ex-ample of the dictum that the best art is made by disobeying its principles. In a movie full of capers and menace and plot gimcracks, the largest point of suspense-and one not resolved until toward the very end-is the question of M. Gustave s integrity, its capacities and limits. His last act, the one that decides him for us, is a brave miscalculation in which he stakes everything on the existence of a set of assumptions that have evaporated; a culture has ended. A completely different way of life has begun.
The dilapidation of the Grand Buda-pest in its 1968 incarnation, a shabby resort in a Soviet satellite state, is rendered with disconcerting beauty and clarity, its ugliness described with a loving exactitude. History here is a twilight world where old gossip slowly becomes legend.
In drawing inspiration for the movie from the luminous, essential work of Stefan Zweig, the renowned, forgotten, now-revived Austrian memoirist and fiction writer, Anderson utilizes more than a milieu and a series of fun, nested storytelling devices; he inherits the loss of a world. Anderson s movies are always about the loss of a world, often childhood, sometimes family, sometimes the world we ve created out of our own self-identity. But this is the first time he has concerned himself with the destruction of a civilization, the end of an era, and the ter-rible ways in which our lives-our own per-sonal and super-absorbing dramas-are _________________
11
deformed by the larger histories we are em-bedded within.
Reality , in a Wes Anderson film, is a vulgarity, a cruelty, and a necessity-for al-though his films are populated with people trying as best they can to create a superior cubbyhole of an illusion to live in, and for all that he adores and glorifies this effort, stub-bornly, still, he always allows his beautiful worlds to be shattered. Like kids on the beach after a wave has sluiced through their sandcastles, Anderson s protagonists are left working up the will to rebuild again. We have faith that they will rebuild, perhaps less am-bitiously but with more success. In The Grand Budapest Hotel , however, after the loss of illu-sion, only death remains. In the character of Zero Moustafa, we see a man who has adapted to his losses but has never rebuilt his life, choosing instead to enshrine his past; he is a testament, rather than a true survivor.
Moustafa s one real legacy is his story, and in the first and final framing device-that of a young girl offering homage to the Author who made Moustafa s life a revered fiction-it is suggested that although some stories are too terrible for an individual to move through and past, perhaps these are the stories that have the most meaning for the rest of us.
There s a wonderful quote from The World of Yesterday , Zweig s memoir, which he completed and mailed to his editor in ____________________________
1942, two days before he and his wife took their own lives in Brazil:
The generation of my parents and grandparents was better off, they lived their lives from one end to the other quietly in a straight, clear line. All the same, I do not know whether I envy them. For they drowsed their lives away remote from all true bitter-ness, from the malice and force of destiny. . . . We . . . for whom comfort has become an old legend and security, a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always new in every fiber. Every hour of our years was linked to the fate of the world. In sorrow and in joy we have lived through time and history far be-yond our own small lives, while they knew nothing beyond themselves. . . . Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full.
Anderson has taken the dark sorrow of Stefan Zweig and joined it to his own sly melanchol