In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), Bill Murray plays the titular wildlife documentarian in search of the (mythical) ‘jaguar shark’ responsible for the death of his partner, while other characters represent other kinds of longing. Still from the film Moonrise Kingdom, 2012. As if to absolve the graphics team of any remaining guilt, the film went on to win the Oscar for Best Production Design in 2015. Post-production corrected the gaffe and no heads were chopped.
Atkins, who attests to the fact that Anderson is a stickler like no other, certifies that he’s a nice guy, too. Everything was as it should’ve been, but for a not-so-minor detail: the word patisserie was misspelled on each one of them! To make things worse, the boxes were captured in many shots before the error was spotted. Thousands of pink boxes with minute detailing were created for filming. The hotel, set in a fictional town in Eastern Europe, and which we see in the 1930s and the 1960s, memorably featured the patisserie ‘Mendl’s’ in its intricate plot. Image Credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures.Īnne Atkins, lead graphic designer on The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), discovered that one could never be too careful when it comes to detailing. Still from the film The Darjeeling Limited, 2007. And for every set of a compartment, an exact replica was created on the other side of the train so as to give the director multiple filming options. Two trains provided by Indian Railways were stripped down and remodelled to meet the requirements of the film. Wallpaper and washrooms, furniture and embellishments – the right local artisan was found to fabricate each tiny element. Production designer Adam Stockhausen, who first collaborated with Anderson on The Darjeeling Limited (2007), had quite a task on his hands when asked to design the titular train that three siblings journey on, in a film about fractured relationships and processing loss. And much of this attention is lavished on the art direction. But if you had to reduce it to one defining feature, it would be an immaculate attention to detail. Symmetrical frames, striking colour patterns, elaborate costumes, miniature sets and objects – the list of Anderson’s signature style elements is long.
To be a viewer, one needs a bifocal ability to view both, the big unfolding events, and the microscopic details that hold it all together. To be part of the art department of a Wes Anderson film is equal parts exhilarating and traumatic. The genre could be described as ‘sad comedy’, whimsical and eccentric, and where the visual design of the film contributes significantly to the drama. Texas-born Wes Anderson’s films operate in this dimension of hyper-reality – a heavily stylised version of the real world, with distinctive recurring characters and tropes. And then there are filmmakers who offer a painstakingly distilled experience to audiences, so what we see has an internal logic and meaning, which might resemble the real world but is not limited by it. Our experience of the real world guides our reading of a film. Audiences are trained to see a world in a frame of film. Image Credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures.įilmmakers ordinarily don’t have much time to establish the world as they see it, or wish to represent it. Still from the film The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014. Whether it is an artist at a stall outside a Mumbai art gallery peddling the absurd temptation of getting your name inscribed on a grain of rice, or an installation at the Louvre, captivating you with its representation of the French Revolution, small-scale productions are an artist’s pocket-size trick. From dollhouses to miniature paintings, bonsais to toy trains, the fascination with a molecular world is a fascination with subtlety.
They suggest an attention to detail in their making, and demand the same of their audience. Their diminutive size changes the way we see, what we look for, how we process information. There’s something about miniature worlds. The American auteur Wes Anderson’s heavily stylised ‘sad comedies’ have raised tininess to high art Rehana Munir
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