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January 2015

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www.postmagazine.com 17 POST JANUARY 2015 relative newcomers as (and SHOCK! They're both women!) Angelina Jolie with Unbroken and Ava DuVernay with Selma. But will it be the Oscars of the duelling Andersons this year? Paul Thomas Ander- son, whose 2012 The Master was nomi- nated for three golden boys, is back with his '70s noir crime thriller Inherent Vice, edited by previous collaborators Leslie Jones and Peter McNulty, and with VFX by Method Studios. And then there's the other Anderson Oscar fave — Wes Ander- son (he's been nominated three times), who has been getting a lot of Oscar buzz for The Grand Budapest Hotel. The latter says the extensive planning of the fi lm began with fi nding just the right location for the Grand Budapest. Since the hotel goes through several shifts, from its heyday as a celebrated spa resort in the early '30s, to falling under fascist control, to an almost uninhabit- ed Communist-era construction in its decline, Anderson and his team hunted for a location rich with both the character of Europe and also a good deal of visual fl exibility. The result? He settled on a vast, turn-of-the-century department store on the borders of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, in the UNESCO World Heritage town of Gorlitz, which also off ered architectural infl uences from the Gothic and Baroque periods to Art Nou- veau. Anderson and his team built their sets inside the empty department store, and also set up their offi ces and work- shops there, forging an entirely self-con- tained world that kept cast and crew inside the fi ctional universe of Zubrowka. The design of the fi lm emerged from the collaboration between Anderson and his production designer, Adam Stockhau- sen, who previously worked on Ander- son's The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom, and last year's Oscar winner, 12 Years a Slave. They ultimately decided to create the hotel exterior as a beautifully elaborate miniature in the workshops at Babelsberg Studios, where they built and fi lmed much of the cable-car and ski-chase sequences, building minia- ture models in the workshop and then moving them outdoors to be shot under natural light, often pushing a camera on wheels through real miniature trees, allowing a greater feeling of naturalism than normally achieved with a model. For the widest shots in the ski chase, the characters themselves were created using stop-motion animation. As Stockhausen notes, "very often a scene that you would assume is all pieces of the same location actually gets broken apart into one main location, a bit of stop-motion animation, a matte-painting, a piece of a miniature, and some other location." The fi lm was shot by another long-time Anderson collaborator, cinematographer Robert Yeoman, who has shot all of An- derson's live-action features. They decid- ed to shoot the diff erent time periods in diff erent aspect ratios, using anamorphic widescreen for the 1960s, then switching to a more square 1.37:1 format for the 1930s, typical of that time period, and moving to 1.85:1 for the scenes closest to the present-day. Anderson cut the fi lm with editor Bar- ney Pilling (Quartet and An Education), who comments, "To me, it's about the fi lmmaker's memories of classic movies of that time, and it's amazing how beauti- fully planned it all is. Very little is left to chance in terms of the shots, and Wes also creates an animatic of the entire fi lm, so he comes to the editing room with in- credible preparation." Pilling sees the fi lm The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Guardians of the Galaxy Noah Gone Girl

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