Wes Anderson is like an architect in a film-maker's chair

No one who has seen a Wes Anderson movie will be surprised to learn he once
wanted to be an architect. Viewers might balk at his fanciful, lightweight, deadpan,
quirk-friendly narratives, but few would deny that the Texan auteur has great style.
Over the course of his eight features, Anderson has marked himself out as a man with a
cultivated design sensibility via his harmonious colour palettes, his consistent
typography and his keen fashion sense.
But beyond all that, Anderson is easily the most architectural film-maker out
there. Virtually all his films revolve around a single, hermetic, highly detailed, often
custom-built location. Often it is a family home, but it could also be a school, or mode of
transport. The structure is self-evident in his 2014 movie “The Grand Budapest Hotel”.
This time round, Anderson vents his architectural frustrations on a scale real-life
architects would die for, or at least open a new eastern European office for. Set in the
fictitious Republic of Zubrowka, it is a veritable masterpiece. Everything is custom-
designed; from flags, banknotes, uniforms, right down to pastry boxes, perfume bottles
and stamps.
Of course, there is a hotel. The Grand Budapest is a lavish, pink-iced Jugendstil
wedding cake, situated atop an alp, accessible by funicular. Its exterior is a 9ft-tall
model, but the interior is real – sort of. The vast atrium lobby, with its stained-glass
ceiling and sweeping staircases, is actually the former department store, designed in
1913 by Austrian architect Carl Schumann. Anderson and his production designer Adam
Stockhausen converted it into a 1930s hotel by researching countless archive photos of
extinct buildings from the era, grabbing an elevator door here, a stairway there. The
result is a meticulously detailed 1:1 model – a vibrant, gilt-edged maelstrom of liveried
staff, delivery men, all revolving around the circular reception desk and Ralph Fiennes’
debonair concierge. This is not the first time Anderson has gone overboard on the set
building. For “Fantastic Mr. Fox’, he modelled details of the foxes’ burrow on Roald
Dahl’s home in Buckinghamshire. In Moonrise Kingdom, he built a full-blown scout
camp. But it is not just the sets that make Anderson such an architectural film-maker; it
is the way he moves around them. Movie space is generally a physical impossibility,
assembled in editing, but Anderson takes pains to show you that he is not cheating –
even though he sometimes does. Instead of edits, he prefers zooms, whip pans and
especially tracking shots. The latter have become his trademark: fast, long, straight and
elaborately choreographed. They are not only demonstrations of his technical virtuosity;
they also reinforce the continuity of his painstakingly constructed filmic space.