What They’re Saying About The Grand Budapest Hotel

It’s February, so we can finally say The Grand Budapest Hotel is coming out next month! Although the film’s marketing is still in its early stages, actors Ralph Fiennes and Bill Murray have been talking about it while promoting their other projects. Here are a couple of quotes they offered about what it’s like to make movies with Wes Anderson:

Bill Murray, in an interview with the Philippine Daily Inquirer to promote The Monuments Men, had this to say:

You worked again with Wes Anderson in “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Have you seen it?

It’s going to blow your mind—it’s really impressive. Wes just keeps getting better. I just saw it. I didn’t compose a letter to him yet, but I said to him, “I think you make these movies just to please me,” because I’m so delighted by the way he works. And the way he writes his movies, obviously he has  an idea. But, the dialogue in them he takes from life. I have seen his movies where I go, “Wait a second…” He will say, “Yeah, you said that.”

Like if we were in this room, Wes would take something that someone said, and it would end up in one of his films. He made the making of the movies the way he lives his life. When we made “Moonrise Kingdom,” we worked in Newport (in Rhode Island). He rented a mansion and lived in it, with an editing room, and the cinematographer, myself and a handful of the actors. It was like a dormitory. We had a cook. It sounds like a great deal that we had a private cook, but it  meant that you could work endless hours because you’d say, “We are going to have dinner waiting for us at midnight.”

Wes wanted to live in Paris, so he edits his films in Paris. He wanted to shoot here, he goes there, he does this. We shot ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ in Germany and rented a small hotel. We had the whole place  to ourselves. It was like the actors’ old folks home. We would pad down in the morning in our robes, have coffee, and the make-up room was just in another part of the lobby. We would get made up and go to work. Wes is really having fun! I believe in having all the fun you can have while  working. The more fun you have, the better you do. He’s made the fun of making movies the fun of his life. He’s doing great work!

Meanwhile, while promoting The Invisible Woman, Ralph Fiennes told The Playlist this:

But as an actor, next up is “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” which seems like it was an awful lot of fun to do. Was it? Or is it twice as much work to give the illusion of it being a lot of fun?

It was fun, but it was challenging because Wes is so deliberate, but in a lovely way. We came to a great way of working together; I realized that he would want a certain thing that he’d been hearing. He wrote the script and he hears the rhythms very precisely of speech. I said, “Please can I just do maybe two or three takes when you just let me do my instinctive version, and then please give me all of the things that you want to see and I can attempt to do. And when you’ve got to the place that you are happy, and you’re happy to say you got it, then if there’s time, give me two more.” Then I feel freedom, but obviously I’ve gone through a little training ground to get there… you never know which is the take he’s going to use. But the process feels satisfactory.

So can you tell which were the takes he mostly used?

I can’t really remember the exact takes, but I can tell you… it was always a part that could lend itself to being pushed too far. It was a high-definition role and you could easily make it too flamboyant, too overstated. Yet you didn’t want to deny a little bit of that. But Wes, always seemed to like it when it felt as real as possible, where it wasn’t underlined too much but has a sort of interior reality. He seems to have just chosen those takes.

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