The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a 2014 comedy-drama film written, directed, and co-produced by Wes Anderson. Ralph Fiennes leads a seventeen-actor ensemble cast as Monsieur Gustave H., famed concierge of a twentieth-century mountainside resort in the fictional Eastern European country of Zubrowka. When Gustave is framed for the murder of a wealthy dowager (Tilda Swinton), he and his recently befriended protégé Zero (Tony Revolori) embark on a quest for fortune and a priceless Renaissance painting amidst the backdrop of an encroaching fascist regime. Anderson's American Empirical Pictures produced the film in association with Studio Babelsberg, Fox Searchlight Pictures, and Indian Paintbrush's Scott Rudin and Steven Rales. Fox Searchlight supervised the commercial distribution, and The Grand Budapest Hotel's funding was sourced through Indian Paintbrush and German government-funded tax rebates.

Anderson and longtime collaborator Hugo Guinness conceived The Grand Budapest Hotel as a fragmented tale following a character inspired by a friend they shared. They initially struggled in brainstorming, but the experience touring Europe and researching the literature of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig shaped their vision for the film. The Grand Budapest Hotel draws visually from Europe-set mid-century Hollywood films and the United States Library of Congress's photochrom print collection of alpine resorts. Filming took place in eastern Germany from January to March 2013. French composer Alexandre Desplat composed the symphonic, Russian folk-inspired score, which expanded on his early work with Anderson. The film explores themes of fascism, nostalgia, friendship, and loyalty, and further studies analyze the function of color as a storytelling device.

The Grand Budapest Hotel premiered in competition at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival on February 6, 2014. It was released in theaters in March to highly positive reviews, and grossed $174 million at the box office. Critics praised the craftsmanship and actors, though occasionally criticized the film's approach to subject matter, fragmented storytelling, and characterization. It was nominated for nine awards at the 87th Academy Awards including Best Picture, winning four, and received numerous other accolades. The Grand Budapest Hotel is now widely considered Anderson's magnum opus and has been assessed as one of the greatest films of the twenty-first century.

In a cemetery in the former nation of Zubrowka, a woman visits the shrine of a renowned writer, known simply as "Author". She holds a copy of his book The Grand Budapest Hotel. The book, written in 1985, recounts a visit the author made in 1968 to the eponymous hotel, which was once a famous resort but had by then fallen on hard times. During his stay, he struck up a friendship with the hotel's proprietor, Zero Moustafa, who told him his rags to riches story over dinner.

In 1932, Zero, an orphan who has come to Zubrowka to escape his war-torn homeland, is hired as a lobby boy by Monsieur Gustave H., the concierge at the Grand Budapest Hotel. Gustave is a ladykiller who romances old, wealthy residents at the hotel, including dowager Madame Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe-und-Taxis (known as Madame D.), with whom he has had a nearly two-decade affair. Madame D. mysteriously dies a month after her last visit, so Gustave and Zero visit her estate to pay their respects. There, her attorney, Deputy Vilmos Kovacs, announces that she has bequeathed the famous Renaissance painting Boy with Apple to Gustave (much to the chagrin of her son, Dmitri). Gustave and Zero abscond with the painting, hiding it in a safe in the Grand Budapest.

Madame D.'s butler, Serge, makes a deposition implicating Gustave in her death. Gustave is arrested on suspicion of murder, while Serge goes into hiding. During his imprisonment, Gustave earns the trust of a gang of inmates by providing them with pastries from Mendl's, a well-known bakery. The inmates let him in on their escape plan. Gustave has Zero and his fiancée, Agatha (who works at Mendl's), hide hammers, chisels, and sawblades inside the next shipment of pastries. Using these tools, the inmates break free. Meanwhile, Dmitri sends his hitman, J. G. Jopling, to kill Kovacs, whom he suspects of disloyalty, as well as Serge's sister, who refuses to give up her brother's whereabouts.

After Zero and Gustave are reunited, they set out to prove Gustave's innocence with the assistance of a fraternity of concierges known as the Society of the Crossed Keys. The society locates Serge and facilitates a meeting between him, Gustave, and Zero. Serge reveals that he was pressured to implicate Gustave by the real killer, Dmitri, and that Madame D. had a missing second will, which would only take effect should she be murdered. Jopling arrives and kills Serge, leaving Gustave and Zero without a witness, then tries to flee. After a chase through the snow, Gustave is left dangling off a cliff at the mercy of Jopling. Zero rescues Gustave by pushing Jopling off the cliff, and the two men continue their escape, pursued by Inspector Henckels of the Zubrowkan police.

Gustave, Zero, and Agatha return to the Grand Budapest to find it swarming with fascist troops, who have made it their headquarters. Agatha sneaks in to retrieve the painting but is spotted by Dmitri. Gustave and Zero rush in to save her, but Dmitri shoots at them, triggering an all-out firefight. Henckels eventually puts a stop to the chaos. On the back of the painting, the group finds Madame D.'s second will. The will reveals that Madame D. was the owner of the Grand Budapest and names Gustave as her sole beneficiary. He is exonerated in court, while Dmitri (now the prime suspect) flees the country. As a result of the bequest, Gustave becomes one of the wealthiest men in Zubrowka. Zero takes over as concierge and marries Agatha in a ceremony officiated by Gustave. However, while the three are traveling by train, Gustave gets into a quarrel with a group of thuggish soldiers and is killed. His own will bequeaths the hotel and his fortune to Zero. Zero maintains the hotel in memory of Agatha who, like their infant son, died from Prussian grippe.

Other cast members included Larry Pine as Mr. Mosher, Milton Welsh as Franz Müller, Giselda Volodi as Serge's sister, Wolfram Nielacny as Herr Becker, Florian Lukas as Pinky, Karl Markovics as Wolf, Volker Michalowski as Günther, Neal Huff as Lieutenant, Bob Balaban as M. Martin, Fisher Stevens as M. Robin, Wallace Wolodarsky as M. Georges, Waris Ahluwalia as M. Dino, Jella Niemann as the young woman, and Lucas Hedges as a pump attendant.

Drafting of The Grand Budapest Hotel story began in 2006, when Wes Anderson produced an 18-page script with longtime collaborator Hugo Guinness. They imagined a fragmented tale of a character inspired by a mutual friend, based in modern France and the United Kingdom. Though their work yielded a 12-minute-long cut, collaboration stalled when the two men were unable to coalesce a uniform sequence of events to advance their story. By this time, Anderson had begun researching the work of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, with whom he was vaguely familiar. He became fascinated with Zweig, gravitating to Beware of Pity (1939), The World of Yesterday (1942), and The Post Office Girl (1982) for their fatalist mythos and Zweig's portrait of early twentieth-century Vienna. Anderson also used period images and urbane Europe-set mid-century Hollywood comedies as references. He ultimately pursued a historical pastiche with an alternate timeline, disillusioned with popular media's romanticism of pre-World War II European history. Once The Grand Budapest Hotel took definite form, Anderson resumed the scriptwriting, finishing the screenplay in six weeks. The producers tapped Jay Clarke to supervise production of the film's animatics, with voiceovers by Anderson.

Anderson's sightseeing in Europe was another source of inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel's visual motifs. The writer-director visited Vienna, Munich, and other major cities before the project's conception, but most location scouting began after the Cannes premiere of his coming-of-age drama Moonrise Kingdom (2012). He and the producers toured Budapest, small Italian spa towns, and the Czech resort Karlovy Vary before a final stop in Germany, consulting hotel staff to develop an accurate idea of a real-life concierge's work.

A seventeen-actor ensemble received star billing in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson customarily employs a troupe of longtime collaborators—Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton, Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, and Jason Schwartzman have worked on one or more of his projects. Norton and Murray immediately signed when sent the script. The Grand Budapest Hotel ensemble comprised mostly bit cameos. Because of the limitations of such roles, Brody said that the most significant challenge was balancing the film's comedy with the otherwise solemn subject matter. All were the filmmakers' first casting choices save for Swinton, whom they pursued for Madame D. when Angela Lansbury dropped out as a result of a prior commitment to a Driving Miss Daisy theater production. Once hired, actors were encouraged to study the source material to prepare. Dafoe and Fiennes in particular found the animatics helpful in conceptualizing The Grand Budapest Hotel from Anderson's perspective, though Fiennes did not refer to them too often as he wanted his acting to be spontaneous.

Anderson desired an English actor to play Gustave, and Fiennes was an actor he sought to work with for several years. Fiennes, surprised by the offer, was eager to depart from his famously villainous roles and found Gustave's panache compelling. Fiennes said he was initially unsure how to approach his character because the extent of Anderson's oversight meant actors could not improvise on set, inhibiting his usually spontaneous performing style. The direction of Gustave's persona then became another question of tone, whether the portrayal be hyper-camp or understated. Fiennes drew on several sources to shape his character's persona, among them his triple role as Hungarian-Jewish men escaping fascist persecution in the István Szabó-directed drama Sunshine (1999), his brief stint as a young porter at Brown's Hotel in London, and the experience reading The World of Yesterday. Johnny Depp was reported as an early candidate in the press, claims which Anderson denied, despite later reports that scheduling conflicts had halted negotiations.