Here, production designer Adam Stockhausen recalls the process of building the intricate sets for 2014’sThe Grand Budapest Hotel.
The Grand Budapest Hotelis about a place moving through time.
“It’s a really complicated puzzle and a different puzzle than you get working with anybody else.
Wes Anderson and Jude Law on the set of ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’.Martin Scali/Searchlight Pictures
Stage 3 is only this big.'
“We weren’t shooting this story about Eastern Europe in California, we were shooting there.
So the process of going to scout these kinds of places revealed all these really interesting stories.
F. Murray Abraham and Jude Law in ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’.Searchlight Pictures
We kind of collected some architecture as we went.
It hit you in the face.
It was just such a great thing that we just decided to lift that idea completely.
Tony Revolori and Ralph Fiennes in ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’.Searchlight Pictures
Then we decided we liked them so much that we went and actually got those chairs.
We convinced them to let us unbolt them from the wall and put them in our place.”
The filmmaker’s innovative approach to problem-solving extended beyond the titular hotel itself.
Tony Revolori and Ralph Fiennes in the ski chase sequence from ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’.Searchlight Pictures
The only problem was that the train scenes felt impossible to shoot.
Eventually, they found a creative workaround.
We’ll just look at the platform.'
It was an inside-out way of solving the problem.”
The answer was emphatically ‘no.’
We didn’t want to shoot it like that," Stockhausen says.
“Wes decided to make it with stop-motion and miniature work.
This kind of innovation has stayed with Stockhausen in the years afterThe Grand Budapest Hotel.
