Interview [Written]: Wes Anderson (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”)

A THR interview with writer-director Wes Anderson on the eve of the premiere of his newest movie The Grand Budapest Hotel.

THR: I gather that the first in the series of dots that led to you making your first feature happened at the University of Texas. How did you and Owen Wilson first cross paths? And what was the root of the idea for Bottle Rocket, initially as a short?

Anderson: Well, Owen and I had a mutual friend who had gone to my school in Houston and had subsequently gone to military school with Owen in New Mexico, and we knew about each other through him. We met without him introducing us, because we were in a class together — a playwriting class — and we never spoke during the class, but, at the end of it, we, sort of, realized that we were the people who our friend knew. Somehow, it sort of occurred to us; Owen just walked up to me in the hall one day and started talking to me as if we knew each other. In fact, what he talked to me about was he asked me which creative writing class he ought to take — he was asking about which professor — and I told him the one I thought. We were both writing short stories, and we started showing them to each other and getting help from each other with them. Owen was actually sharing an apartment with the mutual friend, who had moved to Austin, sort of, along the way, after we’d been in this class together. They’d gotten the apartment that we shared together, and we started working on Bottle Rocket as a feature script. You know, we wanted to write a movie script, and that was the script we came up with. We started trying to film it as a feature with some money from our fathers — we each borrowed $2,000 — and we sort of ran out of money, and it became a short.

THR: So I guess you were happy enough with it to submit it to Sundance. Did you ever imagine that it would provoke the sort of response and opportunities that it did?

Anderson: Well, I don’t even think it was a question of whether we were happy with it or not. It was all we had, and I don’t think it would ever have occurred to us to say whether this was any good or not, really. It was more like everything was depending on it. In fact, we didn’t even really submit it to Sundance ourselves. We showed it to a guy who Owen’s father knew named Kit Carson, who became a sort of mentor to us — the first of a few. He had been going to Sundance since it began, and he submitted it to Sundance on our behalf. And, in fact, at Sundance nothing really happened, you know? We were shown in the middle of a long program of shorts, and nothing really occurred at Sundance with it. But they also had us in this workshop there, a writing workshop, and we had a good time there, and it was encouraging. And then, separately, Kit had sent the script to a woman named Barbara Boyle and her partner Michael Taylor, and they had given the script to Polly Platt, and Polly had said, “I want to be a part of this.” Then showed it to Jim Brooks, and he said the same thing. You know, there was no buzz around the thing; there was no one else anywhere in the world who wanted to give us another $500 to make the movie. It just happened because of Polly and Jim.

THR: Wow. And so that’s how the feature version came about?

Anderson: Yeah. It’s entirely because of them that we made that movie at all. There was no backup option.

For the rest of the interview, go here. To see some clips from The Grand Budapest Hotel, click More.

Here are some clips from The Grand Budapest Hotel:

The Grand Budapest Hotel debuts on select screens Friday, March 7th.

UPDATE: Go here to read about how Wes Anderson made an animatic of the entire movie, shot for shot. Also note how he was heavily influenced by the movies of Ernst Lubitsch.
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