The Wes Anderson Collection

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This book stressed that The Grand Budapest Hotel is more than just a movie. Its has roots in Stefan Zweig's works and Ernst Lubitsch's films. The ratios it is shot in, the set, and the musical score are symbolic or have some greater meaning. It stressed that this a movie about stories and storytelling, not just about the tragedy of a hotel lobby boy. It exhibits all the great symbolism of classic literature and the intertextuality across differing mediums of storytelling. While this book's predecessor was a bit of a fluff piece on Wes Anderson, this book is more like a mini-crash course in filmmaking. It could even function as a decent text book. While we still get the quirky one-on-ones with Wes Anderson, we also get thoughtful and in-depth interviews with actors and important members of the production team. I was particularly interested in what Anderson's cinematographer had to say about the assorted aspect ratios they worked with for each time period presented in the film. The text even goes so far as to excerpt relevant passages from the works of Stefan Zweig that inspired the film. There is also a tremendous amount of insight from other people involved in the making of the film, including actor Ralph Fiennes, the costume designer, the score's composer, the production designer, and the cinematographer. These interviews are interesting and informative, even for readers who are not very familiar with film making. It's amazing the detail that goes into making a film, and quite often I was surprised how the combination of costumes, the score, and especially film angles and aspect ratios play a large part in making an Anderson film so "Andersonian". Wes Anderson’s new quartet of films, based on stories by Roald Dahl, which dropped on Netflix last week, may be brief—three are seventeen minutes long, one runs thirty-nine—but there’s nothing minor about them. They make even clearer what his features have long shown: Anderson is one of the two most original inventors of cinematic forms since the heyday of the late Jean-Luc Godard. The other is the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Where Kiarostami undermined the artifices of fiction with documentary elements, Anderson overmines fiction by overloading it with intricate artifices that nonetheless have a quasi-documentary aspect—in that they reveal the contrivances on which filmed fictions depend. Anderson’s Dahl shorts go further than ever in foregrounding his conceptual work, but the results are more than just theoretical; they embody a vision of human relations, of society at large, that is properly understood to be political.

This New York Times bestselling overview of Wes Anderson’s filmography features previously unpublished behind-the-scenes photos, artwork, and ephemera. PLUS: An essay by critic Erica Wagner and a 2002 article on Dahl’s Gipsy House by Anderson; White Cape, a comic book used as a prop in the film; and drawings, original paintings, and other ephemera I agree with some of the other comments that the author/interviewer can be a little bit much at times but overall this book was amazing to read and flip through! I cannot wait to watch this movie again and I eagerly await the book for The French Dispatch even if it wasn't my favourite.Matt Zoller Seitz also talks with Anderson at length about how Stefan Zwieg influenced the making of The Grand Budapest Hotel, and there are even some articles about the author, as well as excerpts from some of his most notable works. Essays and interviews by Mark Zoller Seitz, amazing illustrations by Max Dalton and endless fascinating stills from all the films plus a potpourri of relevant items from old films, books, magazines, catalogs and advertisements that will have you intrigued and wanting to keep returning again and again to marvel at all this content. There are influences I could spot a million miles away. But it's those others that have showed me something I missed before. Something new to explore. I learned some things, have been inspired by others...even found out one of my favorite movies was an Anderson film. (When I first watched it, I had no idea...not until I had my hands on this book all these years later...TOTAL DUH MOMENT) A Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker, Seitz has written, narrated, edited, or produced more than a hundred hours’worth of video essays about cinema history and style for the Museum of the Moving Image and The L Magazine, among other outlets. His five-part 2009 video essay, “ Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style,” was later spun off into a New York Times bestselling hardcover book series: The Wes Anderson Collection (Abrams, 2013) and The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel (Abrams, 2015). This companion to the New York Times bestselling book The Wes Anderson Collection takes readers behind the scenes of the Oscar®-winning film The Grand Budapest Hotel with a series of interviews between writer/director Wes Anderson and movie/television critic Matt Zoller Seitz.

And what are we even watching, anyway? Here we have one of the most distinctive auteurs of 21st-century cinema, adapting short stories into a series of filmed plays for a streaming service, and somehow it makes perfect sense. Netflix seemed not to remotely know how to handle what I’ll call the Henry Sugar Quartet: I had to search for the four shorts individually to watch them, even though Ralph Fiennes, playing Dahl, appears in each one, part avuncular host, part ferryman into the underworld of the author’s macabre imagination. These are easily the least twee works Anderson has ever made—there are no banjos, no pastel colors, scarcely a shred of disaffected existentialist whimsy. But there is a point behind the series, not unrelated to the foregrounding of Dahl. Throughout, Anderson jolts us in and out of the story, encouraging us to think actively and even skeptically about what it’s telling us.

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This book, part of the New York Times bestselling The Wes Anderson Collection series, takes readers behind the scenes of the Oscar®-winning film The Grand Budapest Hotel with a series of interviews between writer/director Wes Anderson and movie/television critic Matt Zoller Seitz. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” which Dahl published in a 1977 short-story collection, has been cited by Anderson as one of the early inspirations for his habit of nesting narratives inside one another. The tale is about a wealthy, narcissistic man (played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the Netflix version) who stumbles upon a handwritten notebook in the library of a friend’s country house and has the course of his life drastically rerouted. The story that Henry reads is a first-person account of an encounter with a performer, who in turn relays his own strange biography. Add to this Dahl’s own narration, as Anderson does, and suddenly you’re several layers deep into a grand metafictional mille-feuille. Henry Sugar, without spoiling too much, is an optimistic tale: A man is irrevocably changed by a book. The other three Dahl stories in the series are much darker. In The Swan, a man played by Rupert Friend recounts how, as a child, he was bullied almost to death one day by two casually cruel older boys (also played by Friend). The Rat Catcher uses Friend and Ayoade again as two men in a village plagued by rats, who have a deeply disturbing encounter with a rodentlike exterminator played by Fiennes. In Poison, Cumberbatch, Patel, and Kingsley reunite for a story about a man threatened by a lethal snake who reveals some of his own venom. Animalistic imagery abounds: People, all three stories suggest, sacrifice something profound when they lose their humanity. Of these, The Swan departs furthest from the source material, which is to say, not very much, because Anderson has characters in each short read the text virtually verbatim. Still, the fact that Friend recounts what happened to his younger self affirms that he does actually survive, a reassurance that Dahl’s original story withholds until the end. Reading the book, you feel as if you’re disappearing into the miniature world of Anderson’s movies, like you’re playing around in the files and fastidiously kept dossiers assembled for each project. In this way, the book mimics the work.”

Seitz is the founder and original editor of the House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine, and the publisher of Press Play, a blog of film and TV criticism and video essays. He is the director of the 2005 romantic comedy Home. That would all be topped with his arguable masterpiece, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a dizzying trip through alternate history, meta-fiction, shootouts, and Renaissance paintings, and one very pretty building. It earned Anderson another Best Screenplay Oscar nomination, his first nomination for Best Director, and the film won for Original Score, Editing, Production, and Costume. After four years, his longest gap between films, he put out another stop-motion film, the dystopian, Japan-set Isle of Dogs, which was nominated for Best Animated Feature. As far as coffee-table books go, this is one of my personal favorites. It works in every way it is supposed to. On a purely visual level, it is full of beautiful stills and production materials from Wes Anderson's most visually stunning movie to date. It pairs those visuals with some charming and quirky original illustrations....but that's not what makes the book special. It's the content. I really enjoyed the first Wes Anderson Collection, but this book, which covers only The Grand Budapest Hotel, is nearly the same size as the initial collection (which discusses his first 6 films), and goes into much greater detail. Almost immediately I could see the differences between the two books, especially how flawed the first collection is in comparison. Wes Anderson’s recent collection of Roald Dahl adaptations for Netflix is so specifically theatrical that you could replicate each one on virtually any stage armed with just a small troupe of repertory actors and a meager budget. Characters narrate what’s happening while staring directly at us, the implied audience; obliging stagehands shift scenery and assist with costume changes and makeup right in front of our eyes. The action is so resolutely analog that it feels like a manifesto for good old-fashioned stagecraft in a cinematic era steamrolled by CGI—our imaginations are forced to fill in the gaps when, say, a train rushes right over a character, or a man appears to levitate several feet off the ground. This is storytelling that shows you all of its seams. The question is: Why?I read The Wes Anderson Collection before reading this book, simply because it was published first. Get ready for a very Wes Anderson autumn. This September, four new short films from the celebrated filmmaker are hitting Netflix, and we’ve got all the details, only on Tudum. An absolutely fantastic look into Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel ! I love Anderson's movies, especially this movie, so this book brought my appreciation for the complexity of them to a whole new level.