20 facts you might not know about 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'

When Wes Anderson started working on what would become The Grand Budapest Hotel, he was collaborating with Hugo Guinness, an artist who has done illustrations for Anderson’s films and The New York Times. They put together a script, and a short film, about a character in modern England and France, told in fragments. At this point, the two couldn’t agree on where the project should go. Guinness left the project but still got a “story by” credit.

The Grand Budapest Hotel primarily takes place in 1930s Europe, though in the fictional country of Zubrowka. A lot of Anderson’s inspiration for the movie came from the works of novelist Stefan Zweig, an Austrian who wrote the novels Beware of Pity and The World of Yesterday during World War II.

Bill Murray is notoriously flaky and difficult to get to show up to work on a film. He reportedly has a message service you call, and maybe he will call you back. And yet, he’s in basically every Wes Anderson movie, which speaks to the fact actors like to work with him. That made casting this film easy, as Anderson reportedly got his first choice for every role except one.

Angela Lansbury was going to play the role of Madame D., the mysterious dowager who dies during the film. However, she ended up having to drop out so that she could keep commitments to star in a stage version of Driving Miss Daisy . Anderson was then able to turn to another previous collaborator, Tilda Swinton.

Casting was smooth sailing for all the roles where Anderson knew what he wanted. For the key role of Zero, Anderson wanted an unknown teenage actor of Arabic descent. Casting went worldwide, but they were having trouble filling the role. They looked for actors who weren’t Arabic and found the brothers Tony and Mario Revolori, who had Guatemalan ancestry. Tony beat his older brother for a role.

If you’ve seen Lady Bird, you know Saoirse Ronan can do a respectable American accent. She’s Irish, though, and has an Irish brogue when she speaks in her natural voice. When figuring out the character of Agatha, Anderson had Ronan try German, French, and American accents. They decided to let her speak in her Irish accent.

Ronan has a key role in the movie, but she’s not the only Lady Bird cast member to make an appearance. Lucas Hedges, who has a supporting role in Lady Bird as an early boyfriend of Ronan’s character (with a secret), has a small role in The Grand Budapest Hotel as a pump attendant.

Anderson's movie has a vintage European vibe, and the man is dedicated to aesthetics. He decided to go to Europe to film, primarily in Germany. For the hotel's atrium, they used the Gorlitzer Warenhaus, a defunct department store. Additionally, for the Schloss Lutz estate, they used the exterior of the Hainewalde Manor. For the interior, they used Schloss Waldenburg.

A Renaissance painting called “Boy with Apple” plays a key role in the action of the film. However, it’s not an actual painting. Instead, it was concocted for the film. It took painter Michael Taylor four months to create “Boy with Apple.”

In some circles, Anderson is an adored filmmaker, but he’s not exactly been a guy who churns out blockbusters. The Grand Budapest Hotel managed to break through a bit. It made $59.3 million in the United States and Canada and $172.9 million worldwide. That makes it Anderson’s highest-grossing movie on both fronts.

Relatively speaking, there is one market that stands out among the rest. That would be Germany, where The Grand Budapest Hotel was a big hit. It made over $8 million there and was the highest-grossing country for the movie outside of the United States. That likely owes to the fact it was filmed there.

The Academy Awards hasn’t shown Anderson’s movies a lot of love, and not much was expected from The Grand Budapest Hotel on that front. After all, it was released in March, which is not exactly Oscar season. Then, the movie ended with nine Oscar nominations, tied with Birdman for most of any film that year.

Despite the impressive ensemble, The Grand Budapest Hotel did not get any acting nominations. However, it was up for some big awards, like Best Director and Best Picture. It didn’t win either of those, but it did win four Oscars. They were for Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Original Score, and Best Production Design.

Alexandre Desplat was the most venerated member of the film’s crew. His score won many awards, including the aforementioned Oscar. On top of that, Desplat also won the Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. He later won his second Oscar for The Shape of Water.

Anderson is a meticulous director with an eye for detail and wasn’t the only one on the set. Ralph Fiennes was given a prop notebook for his character Monsieur Gustave. However, they had gotten him a notebook without lines in it. Fiennes argued that Gustave was too organized and meticulous for that and asked for a lined notebook. He got it, adding to the attentiveness inherent to an Anderson movie.

Wes Anderson films don’t tend to have huge budgets, and this movie was made for $25 million. He’s used to trying to make a buck stretch. Once Swinton was cast in the film instead of Lansbury, some changes were necessary. Anderson decided to get the best makeup people he could, and they spent five hours a day transforming Swinton. Hey, they won an Oscar, so it all panned out.

Anderson is a fan of callbacks to earlier films and homages to classic movies that he is a fan of. Sometimes, references can be pretty obscure. For example, Harvey Keitel’s character, the prisoner Ludwig, has tattoos taken from a 1934 French movie called L’Atalante.

Clooney voiced the titular Mr. Fox in Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animation movie Fantastic Mr. Fox. Is he also in The Grand Budapest Hotel? Some argue that you can see him in the shootout scene wearing a white jacket. However, this has not been confirmed by anybody, including Anderson or Clooney. It might just be a guy who looks like him, but you can keep an eye out for Clooney yourself next time you watch.

Anderson has named characters after people in the past. For example, the character of Wolodarsky in The Life Aquatic is named after Wallace Woldarsky, who plays a small role in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Meanwhile, Jeff Goldblum’s character Vilmos Kovacs has a name that is a mashup of two Hungarian cinematographers, Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs.

Monsieur Gustave and all of his fellow concierges are quite formal. They always call people, including other concierges, by the title “Monsieur.” This only stops being the case during the section of the movie where the Secret Society of the Crossed Keys leaps into action. Then, concierges are finally addressed by their first names.