Wes Ander­son: ​‘I don’t think Zubrov­ka peo­ple would speak like Jeff Goldblum’

There are few direc­tors who make more instant­ly iden­ti­fi­able films than Wes Ander­son. If you don’t twig on to the fas­tid­i­ous fram­ing, the car­toon-styled action, the droll dia­logue, the reg­u­lar rota­tion of bit-play­ing Hol­ly­wood char­ac­ter lumi­nar­ies or the sub­tle under­tow of regret and melan­choly, then you’re either blind, or haven’t seen any of his pre­vi­ous movies, which include Rush­more, The Roy­al Tenen­baums and, most recent­ly, Moon­rise Kingdom.

His lat­est is a ​’30s-set, mit­tel-Euro­pean com­ic caper named The Grand Budapest Hotel which was inspired by the writ­ings of Vien­nese author, Ste­fan Zweig. The film sees Ralph Fiennes plays M Gus­tave, a hotel concierge who becomes embroiled in the theft of a price­less paint­ing named ​‘Boy With Apple’ along with his loy­al lob­by boy, Zero (new­com­er Tony Revolori).

LWLies: Do peo­ple send you doo­dles and illus­tra­tions that have been inspired by your movies?

Ander­son: There are a few things, but not that much. There’s one Tum­blr site in par­tic­u­lar that’s filled with dif­fer­ent things that kids have done. For this new movie, there’s an Egon Schiele-type paint­ing of some les­bians. That was made by some­one who we’d seen some draw­ings he’d done of one of my movies. So we set his stuff aside and said, well we might need him in the future. So we found this guy through his fan art. Then we had him do the Schiele, which is total­ly dif­fer­ent from his oth­er stuff, but we looked at his port­fo­lio and saw that he’d gone this route before.

So you do remem­ber the things that you like?

There’s anoth­er instance in which a guy pro­duced a set of play­ing cards with char­ac­ters from all my movies. I thought they were great. For me they weren’t so much char­ac­ters from movies, but friends, so here’s Kumar and here’s Waris. Matt Zoller Seitz then used him to illus­trate and design his book, ​‘The Wes Ander­son Col­lec­tion’. It was that same process of dis­cov­ery. On the oth­er hand, we have a new Blu-ray of Fan­tas­tic Mr Fox com­ing out on Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion. For that, we got this guy called Tur­lo Grif­fin who had done all kinds of paint­ings that were actu­al­ly in the movie. The moth­er in the sto­ry paints, and Tur­lo did all her paint­ings, includ­ing a great big mur­al. He also did paint­ings that worked as con­cept art for sets.

Each frame of The Grand Budapest Hotel is like a fres­co of tiny details. Do you have a note­book that you car­ry around with you to remem­ber everything?

In the case of this… I’m sure there’s not an answer to that ques­tion. First we fig­ure out the cast, as the biggest amount of frame space is tak­en up with these faces and bod­ies. We fig­ure out who they are and what they’re going to look like. Then I spent a lot of time on the The Unit­ed States Library of Con­gress web­site. They have this thing called the Pho­tochrom Col­lec­tion and it’s won­der­ful. It’s these black-and-white images that have been colourised from between 1895 to about 1905, maybe 1910. They’re cityscapes and land­scapes and there are just thou­sands of them. And they were made to be com­mer­cial­ly available.

Do you feel that your movies are becom­ing some­thing akin to ani­mat­ed photographs?

That’s fun­ny, because at one point we thought we might make a black-and-white movie and colourise it. We did all kinds of tests. I guess what hap­pened in the end was that we start­ed mak­ing sets and I love select­ing colours. And I thought, well I don’t want to turn this black and white. So we end­ed up not doing it. Once we knew all these places we want­ed to vis­it, we trav­elled for a long time and we were learn­ing all kinds of things. Lots of things went into the movie that came from us just wan­der­ing around. In the Jude Law and F Mur­ray Abra­ham part of the movie [who nar­rate M Gustave’s sto­ry] it’s com­mu­nism. The hotel has changed in a way that reflects polit­i­cal real­i­ty. Which wasn’t in the script at all. You wan­der around Hun­gary and the Czech Repub­lic and you see this hap­pen­ing to all these old places. We want­ed to find these clas­si­cal old towns, then we’d get there and think, look what they’ve done to it! But then we thought we should absorb what hap­pens to these places. It went from being about a decay­ing hotel, to revis­it­ing that hotel at an ear­li­er time and under a dif­fer­ent régime.

When you were writ­ing this movie, did you always have Ralph Fiennes in mind for the role of M Gustave?

He’s based on a real per­son. I thought of Ralph ear­ly on because I knew him a lit­tle bit and I’d seen him in a play that he was very fun­ny in and I was just a fan. I also want­ed to work with one of these actors who… takes over a bit and is a real force on set. Like Sean Penn. I thought Ralph was going to be one of those, and he is. But, dur­ing the writ­ing, I was pic­tur­ing him as my friend who he’s based on. But I will say, once I saw Ralph get­ting into the role, my friend kind of disappeared.

You have this reg­u­lar troupe of actors who all appear in small roles here. Was it a sim­i­lar thing for them? Are the roles writ­ten for the actors or is it vice versa?

Most of these parts were quite abstract. I don’t know that I had so much of a visu­al feel for these char­ac­ters. I was more inter­est­ed in what they sound­ed like. What I think usu­al­ly hap­pens that when I’m in the mid­dle of writ­ing it, I start to make lit­tle lists of things – just to take a break from try­ing to fig­ure out what hap­pens next. I usu­al­ly have ideas of which actors might work in cer­tain parts. Most of the actors here are peo­ple I’ve worked with before, and I made these ini­tial con­nec­tions because they are just my favourite actors. And not only are they my favourite, but I have all their email addresses.

Do they ever say no?

Oh yes, def­i­nite­ly. I will say, the peo­ple who I’ve worked with before say no less often. Usu­al­ly we can sort some­thing out. If it’s a friend, they prob­a­bly don’t want to say no. Who have I not worked with apart from Ralph? Well there’s Jeff Gold­blum, who I’ve known for years. Edward Nor­ton and I are friends. Adrien Brody, we’ve been friends since Dar­jeel­ing. We’ve got Jason Schwartz­man and Owen and Til­da and Bill; Bob Balaban.

Are you inter­est­ed in con­form­ing to any kind of realism?

The writ­ten dia­logue is nev­er what you’d call real­is­tic. The syn­tax is con­vo­lut­ed, and that’s the point. I made a spe­cif­ic deci­sion to have every­one speak­ing in their nat­ur­al tongue. Saoirse Ronan is Irish, and she’s nev­er spo­ken in Irish in a movie before. I don’t know how peo­ple would talk in Zubrov­ka. I don’t think they’d speak like Jeff Gold­blum. This also led to some­thing else, as the one part that peo­ple audi­tioned for was the role of the young Zero. And I’d seen it per­formed with a Tunisian accent, an Israeli accent and a Lebanese accent. Then when I saw it done with an Orange Coun­ty accent, I thought – that’s bet­ter! This kid real­ly jumped off the screen in his audition.

How ear­ly in the writ­ing process did you decide to fil­ter the sto­ry through mul­ti­ple nar­ra­tors and time­frames? Is the style of the film a reflec­tion of how details are being remem­bered and reformulated?

That I actu­al­ly know the answer to. The process of mak­ing the movie com­prised of two steps. First, you have the idea of this char­ac­ter who has these rela­tion­ships with old­er women and his friend dies and he inher­its this paint­ing and this fam­i­ly is against him and so on… My friend [and co-writer] Hugo Guin­ness and I had all these scenes in a kind of rough form and he wasn’t a hotel concierge and it wasn’t set in the past. Then, I start­ed read­ing these books by Ste­fan Zweig. At the time I thought I’d like to adapt one of these Zweig books, per­haps ​‘Beware of Pity’, but real­ly what I want­ed was to try and do my own ver­sion of one of these. Many of them have this form of one per­son telling some­one else a sto­ry. ​‘Beware of Pity’ begins with the author deliv­er­ing a mes­sage to the read­er. Then it goes to the author some years before and he meets this mys­te­ri­ous char­ac­ter who he knows is a writer and then he tells him the whole nov­el. While I was read­ing that book, I was in Paris and I vis­it­ed the Jardin du Lux­em­bourg and I saw in the cor­ner of the park, all by itself, a bronze bust of Zweig. I just stum­bled across it.

What’s his rela­tion­ship to Paris?

He’s Vien­nese, so I think his rela­tion­ship with France was sim­ply that his books were pop­u­lar there. He did write about Marie Antoni­ette, and I’m sure he spent quite a bit of time in Paris. He lived in Switzer­land, Bel­gium and Lon­don. In Amer­i­ca he was out of print for a long time. Pushkin Press have now released them.

Did some­one rec­om­mend Zweig to you originally?

I’m quite a slow read­er. We watch a movie ever night, which we usu­al­ly fall asleep to. I buy a lot of books. But I don’t read a lot of books. My aver­age is about 30 pages. I can’t think of any­one else who I’d nev­er heard of, and now I’ve read every­thing they’ve writ­ten. I think that the way I heard of Zweig was that I was in the Vil­lage Voice book store in Paris and I saw this book with a Klimt on the cov­er and I just read the back of it and was drawn in that way. It was a nice edi­tion of it too.

Can you still enjoy some­thing with­out think­ing how it could be made into a movie?

Yes, a bit. I like to trav­el, but it helps me if I’m trav­el­ling with a goal and there might be a movie at the end of it. I love Ray­mond Chan­dler and Dashiell Ham­mett, and I was read­ing some of their books on a train recent­ly. I just couldn’t stop think­ing: there have been so many screen ver­sions of these sto­ries, there is absolute­ly no room for me to do one more. But, while I’m read­ing them, I can’t help but try and come up with ways to make just one more. But you have to recog­nise that, as books, they have found their per­fect form already, so you don’t need to do anything.