What to know
Wes Anderson wrote and directed The Grand Budapest Hotel from an original screenplay. He began drafting the story in 2006 with his longtime collaborator Hugo Guinness, and his travels around Europe and the books of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, such as Beware of Pity and The World of Yesterday, gave it its final shape. Anderson’s company American Empirical Pictures made the film with Studio Babelsberg, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Indian Paintbrush.
It was shot from January to March 2013 in eastern Germany. The atrium of the empty Görlitzer Warenhaus department store in Görlitz became the hotel lobby, and other scenes were filmed in Dresden, in Saxon castles and at Studio Babelsberg. In the wide shots the hotel is a scale model about three metres tall, and the frame format tells the three time periods apart: 1932 is shown in the nearly square 1.37:1 Academy ratio, 1968 in widescreen.
The film premiered on 6 February 2014 at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival and opened in Ukraine on 15 May 2014, dubbed into Ukrainian by the Postmodern studio. Besides its Oscars it won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and five BAFTA Awards, and in 2025 it became the youngest film in the US National Film Registry. Afterwards, try Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and The French Dispatch.
