The Grand Budapest Hotel
Short description
The Grand Budapest Hotel is set at a grand European hotel during the years between the two world wars. Its concierge, M. Gustave, takes on a young lobby boy named Zero as his trusted protégé, and the two become caught up in the theft of a valuable Renaissance painting, a dispute over a large family inheritance and the wider changes overtaking Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Wes Anderson directed and wrote the screenplay, and the film stands as the eleventh of the twenty-six features he has directed in chronological order, following Castello Cavalcanti and preceding Isle of Dogs.
Ralph Fiennes plays M. Gustave, with Tony Revolori as Zero and F. Murray Abraham as the older Mr. Moustafa. Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe and Mathieu Amalric appear among the large credited cast, which numbers one hundred performers supported by seventy-five credited crew members. Anderson produced alongside Scott Rudin and Jeremy Dawson for studios including Fox Searchlight Pictures and Studio Babelsberg, with a budget of twenty-three million dollars and a worldwide gross of about one hundred seventy-three million.
Audience response has been strong: on IMDb the film holds 8.1 out of 10 from roughly nine hundred sixty-four thousand votes, and on TMDB 8 out of 10 from over sixteen thousand votes. A critics' rating of 8.5 out of 10 from three hundred fourteen reviews places it somewhat above those audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Johnny Depp was initially cast in the lead role but later dropped out of the project.
- Tilda Swinton was made up for several hours to transform into the image of an 84-year-old widow.
- Angela Lansbury could have played a role in this film, but she declined due to scheduling conflicts, and the role went to Tilda Swinton.
- Wes Anderson shot the film in three different aspect ratios: 1.33, 1.85, and 2.35:1, corresponding to three different time periods. The varying frame proportions cue the audience as to which time period is on screen.
- The snow-covered mountains in the background of the wedding scene are the so-called Saxon Switzerland, the German part of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains.
- In the scene where Agatha is talking to Zero in the bedroom, the strap of her nightgown slips off her shoulder in one shot, but is back on in the next.
- When Henckels gives Gustave a temporary pass for Zero on the train, one edge of the paper is folded in the wide shot, but the sheet is smooth in the close-up.
- The name of Bill Murray's character can be read in Hungarian as “Mi Van?”, which means “What’s happening?”
- Jeff Goldblum plays Kovacs. He previously played the comedian Ernie Kovacs in the film “Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter” (1984).
- Wes Anderson used the old, Art Deco-style Karstadt department store in Görlitz, Saxony, on the border of Germany, Czech Republic, and Poland as the setting for the Grand Budapest Hotel.
- In fact, the painting “Boy with Apple” was not painted by Johann Van Hoytem the Younger, as stated in the film, but by the well-known English portraitist Michael Taylor, commissioned by the director himself, Wes Anderson.
- Ralph Fiennes, Edward Norton, and Harvey Keitel starred together in “Red Dragon” (2002).
- When the heroes begin to pursue Joplin and run out of the temple, there is nothing near the exit. However, in the next scene, after Joplin leaves on skis, sleighs with sculptures appear on both sides of the temple doors, one of which Zero 'borrowed' for the chase.
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