INTERVIEW WITH WES ANDERSON

by Terry Gross

ON WHAT IT'S LIKE ON HIS SETS

The editing ... and the construction of the sets and the design of the sets, even if it's on location — this is all carefully planned. ... We gather all of the ingredients and we have it very prepared so that when the day comes to shoot, everything is sort of quite set in that way.

But the actors — I feel like what happens is we all get together, they come on the set and then it’s just chaos, and they take over and it goes one way or another. We tend to do a lot of takes but very, very quickly, one right after another, and anything might happen on the next take. That’s my feeling of what it’s like on the sets of the movies I do. I think there’s choreography, but I always feel like it’s coming from them. Maybe that’s an illusion.

On Shooting On Location

I felt like I [didn’t] want to work in a movie studio. I’ve done it before; I don’t like it. I like to be on location;

I like to have input from the real world that is helping to shape what we’re doing ... For The Grand Budapest Hotel we found this department store in this town called Gorlitz, which is in Saxony. Half of it is in Germany and the other half is in Poland. It’s on the border and it’s about 20 minutes from [the] Czech Republic, so in a way it’s really right where our story would be if there was such a place. ... This department store that we found, we made into our hotel — the big entrance hall of our hotel — and then we found everything else from the movie within a certain radius of that department store, and we discovered all sorts of things and people as we traveled around, figuring it all out. We made a pastiche of the greatest hits of Eastern Europe.

On The Use Of Miniatures For Sets

First, I love miniatures. It’s just an old movie technique, an old-fashioned approach. ... There’s a certain charm to miniatures to me, I just like them. But also, when you’re doing a miniature it means you can make the thing exactly the way you want. You have essentially no limitation. We were quite inspired by these paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and their views. A whole spa town would be presented in a painting, a mural with the miniature in it. And we did it in the style of Caspar David Friedrich, so it became a miniature and a painting.

ON HAVING CHARACTERS SIDE BY SIDE, LOOKING STRAIGHT AT THE CAMERA

I have my own way of blocking things and framing things that’s built into me. I compare it to handwriting. I don’t fully understand it — why my handwriting is like this — but in a way there’s some sort of tonal thing with the kind of stories I do. They tend to have some fable element, and I think my visual predilections are somehow related to trying to make that tone and make my own writing work with performers.