The film’s most dominant musical force is Russian-born composer and conductor Igor Stravinsky. His dramatic ballet scores Petrouchka and L’Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird) (taken from recordings conducted by Stravinsky himself) underpin the characters’ emotional and geographic journeys. In addition to pieces from Stravinsky’s ballets, Anderson and Poster zeroed in on the soaring final movement of Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète. “Apotheosis” plays during the opening credits sequence, a way to introduce Zsa-zsa as “epic.” “Our film is about a man who is like a mountain,” says Anderson. “He is himself of epic scale, his life is on an epic scale.”
“Never buy good pictures. Buy masterpieces.” – Zsa Zsa Korda
The film features very real art pieces. From the New York Times:
“In addition to the cast and crew, the artworks featured in the film are listed, complete with ownership details. That’s because the pieces onscreen are not reproductions. They are in fact the actual masterpieces from Pierre-Auguste Renoir, René Magritte and other well-known artists.”
“We have a character who’s a collector, who’s a possessor; he wants to own things, and we thought because it’s sort of art and commerce mixed together this time we should try to have the real thing.” – Wes Anderson
“Still, even with Sharp’s connections, some of his initial outreach was met with ‘howls’ of laughter and hangups. His search was both creative and practical. After discussing with Anderson what would make sense for Zsa-zsa, a domineering man who prides himself on owning masterpieces, Sharp contacted museums and collectors in the vicinity of the set at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany…
Sharp considers the old master selections from the Kunsthalle more in the ‘best supporting actor’ category of the art in Zsa-zsa’s abode compared with the Renoir or the Magritte, which draw your eye. Anderson said he thought Juriaen Jacobsz’s 1678 painting of dogs fighting over meat was “an encapsulation of part of what our story is about.” (The film is very much Anderson’s exploration of capitalism.)
The loans from Hamburger Kunsthalle remained on set for about a month, but the Magritte was in and out in a day and the Renoir just stayed a night…
The (MPA) Credits blog: interviewed Jasper Sharp of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, who helped Wes bring masterpieces to his picture.
There’ll be a moment of pause from Wes if somebody tells him, ‘That’s not possible.’ He’ll continue to ask the question in a different way until it is possible. Wes might say, ‘Is this a hard no, is it a soft no, and why is it a no?’ So, when Wes invited me to work on this film, I knew I’d learn something from him and this astonishingly quick, efficient, imaginative, and fun group of people. It’s kind of like a circus troupe that he’s gathered over the years. I now understand how Wes has been able to be so prolific with his filmmaking, because everyone is kind of dancing to the same drumbeat. You have to listen to the drum and tune yourself in and go with it. – Jasper Sharp
