The Wes Anderson Collection

Product Information

The result is a meticulously designed book that captures and reflects the spirit of Wes Anderson’s movies: melancholy, playful, wise, and wonderfully unique.

PLUS: An essay by critic Erica Wagner and a 2002 article on Dahl’s Gipsy House by Anderson; White Cape, a comic book used as a prop in the film; and drawings, original paintings, and other ephemera While this book's predecessor was a bit of a fluff piece on Wes Anderson, this book is more like a mini-crash course in filmmaking. It could even function as a decent text book. While we still get the quirky one-on-ones with Wes Anderson, we also get thoughtful and in-depth interviews with actors and important members of the production team. I was particularly interested in what Anderson's cinematographer had to say about the assorted aspect ratios they worked with for each time period presented in the film. The text even goes so far as to excerpt relevant passages from the works of Stefan Zweig that inspired the film. I am in no way a student of film, but I have always been drawn to Anderson's movies, and so I am drawn to the man himself. This book has much more informative interviews with Anderson than the previous collection. You get the sense that Matt Zoller Seitz has really honed his interviewing skills since writing the first. Henry Sugar, without spoiling too much, is an optimistic tale: A man is irrevocably changed by a book. The other three Dahl stories in the series are much darker. In The Swan, a man played by Rupert Friend recounts how, as a child, he was bullied almost to death one day by two casually cruel older boys (also played by Friend). The Rat Catcher uses Friend and Ayoade again as two men in a village plagued by rats, who have a deeply disturbing encounter with a rodentlike exterminator played by Fiennes. In Poison, Cumberbatch, Patel, and Kingsley reunite for a story about a man threatened by a lethal snake who reveals some of his own venom. Animalistic imagery abounds: People, all three stories suggest, sacrifice something profound when they lose their humanity. Of these, The Swan departs furthest from the source material, which is to say, not very much, because Anderson has characters in each short read the text virtually verbatim. Still, the fact that Friend recounts what happened to his younger self affirms that he does actually survive, a reassurance that Dahl’s original story withholds until the end. That would all be topped with his arguable masterpiece, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a dizzying trip through alternate history, meta-fiction, shootouts, and Renaissance paintings, and one very pretty building. It earned Anderson another Best Screenplay Oscar nomination, his first nomination for Best Director, and the film won for Original Score, Editing, Production, and Costume. After four years, his longest gap between films, he put out another stop-motion film, the dystopian, Japan-set Isle of Dogs, which was nominated for Best Animated Feature.

Praise

Nine Academy Award® nominations, including Best Picture, Directing, and Writing - Original Screenplay; Best Film - Musical or Comedy, Winner of the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, 5 BAFTA awards, including Best Original Screen Play; Best Production Design, Best Costume Design; Best Make Up & Hair and Best Original Music. There is also a tremendous amount of insight from other people involved in the making of the film, including actor Ralph Fiennes, the costume designer, the score's composer, the production designer, and the cinematographer. These interviews are interesting and informative, even for readers who are not very familiar with film making. It's amazing the detail that goes into making a film, and quite often I was surprised how the combination of costumes, the score, and especially film angles and aspect ratios play a large part in making an Anderson film so "Andersonian". Michael Chabonis the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of many novels, including the recent Telegraph Avenue. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and four children. A Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker, Seitz has written, narrated, edited, or produced more than a hundred hours’worth of video essays about cinema history and style for the Museum of the Moving Image and The L Magazine, among other outlets. His five-part 2009 video essay, “ Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style,” was later spun off into a New York Times bestselling hardcover book series: The Wes Anderson Collection (Abrams, 2013) and The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel (Abrams, 2015). This New York Times bestselling overview of Wes Anderson’s filmography features previously unpublished behind-the-scenes photos, artwork, and ephemera.

Matt Zoller Seitz, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, is the TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, as well as the editor in chief of RogerEbert.com. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine, and the publisher of Press Play, a blog of film and TV criticism and video essays. He is the director of the 2005 romantic comedy Home. I really enjoyed the first Wes Anderson Collection, but this book, which covers only The Grand Budapest Hotel, is nearly the same size as the initial collection (which discusses his first 6 films), and goes into much greater detail. Almost immediately I could see the differences between the two books, especially how flawed the first collection is in comparison. The four short Dahl adaptations are based on stories that, like “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” seethe with cruelty but also more forcefully foreground matters of justice and history. As with Martin Scorsese’s recent films, the Dahl quartet goes beneath the surfaces of society to reveal disturbing truths. Anderson relies on methods of direct, candid, ultimately appalled narration to deliver—as if in his own voice—large-scale tales of empire, extraction, and appropriation, local ones of brutality and hatred and ambient horror. “Henry Sugar” is a story of wide scope. Henry (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a rich fop who becomes obsessed with a magic manual and teaches himself X-ray vision and even clairvoyance; nested within his story is a history of the manual itself—delivered by Dahl (Fiennes), by the doctor (Dev Patel) who wrote the manual, by the magician (Ben Kingsley) whose skills it details, and by Henry himself. This narrative ranges from the late nineteenth century to the nineteen-seventies, it leaps from Calcutta to London to Lausanne, and it’s centered on the British Empire and a special sort of spiritual exploitation, which turns a yogi’s lonely devotions into a white Englishman’s easy and illicit gains.An absolutely fantastic look into Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel ! I love Anderson's movies, especially this movie, so this book brought my appreciation for the complexity of them to a whole new level. And what are we even watching, anyway? Here we have one of the most distinctive auteurs of 21st-century cinema, adapting short stories into a series of filmed plays for a streaming service, and somehow it makes perfect sense. Netflix seemed not to remotely know how to handle what I’ll call the Henry Sugar Quartet: I had to search for the four shorts individually to watch them, even though Ralph Fiennes, playing Dahl, appears in each one, part avuncular host, part ferryman into the underworld of the author’s macabre imagination. These are easily the least twee works Anderson has ever made—there are no banjos, no pastel colors, scarcely a shred of disaffected existentialist whimsy. But there is a point behind the series, not unrelated to the foregrounding of Dahl. Throughout, Anderson jolts us in and out of the story, encouraging us to think actively and even skeptically about what it’s telling us. This book stressed that The Grand Budapest Hotel is more than just a movie. Its has roots in Stefan Zweig's works and Ernst Lubitsch's films. The ratios it is shot in, the set, and the musical score are symbolic or have some greater meaning. It stressed that this a movie about stories and storytelling, not just about the tragedy of a hotel lobby boy. It exhibits all the great symbolism of classic literature and the intertextuality across differing mediums of storytelling. Get ready for a very Wes Anderson autumn. This September, four new short films from the celebrated filmmaker are hitting Netflix, and we’ve got all the details, only on Tudum.

Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Footage of the actors voicing their characters, puppet construction, stop-motion setups, and the recording of the score The essence of a few of his beloved films… is captured in this New York Times bestselling overview.” Four Academy Awards®, including Costume Design, Music - Original Score, and Production Design; Nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Directing, and Writing - Original Screenplay; Best Film - Musical or Comedy, Golden Globe Awards; Best Original Screenplay, BAFTA, WGA, NYFCC, and LAFCA Awards As far as coffee-table books go, this is one of my personal favorites. It works in every way it is supposed to. On a purely visual level, it is full of beautiful stills and production materials from Wes Anderson's most visually stunning movie to date. It pairs those visuals with some charming and quirky original illustrations....but that's not what makes the book special. It's the content.

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This book, part of the New York Times bestselling The Wes Anderson Collection series, takes readers behind the scenes of the Oscar®-winning film The Grand Budapest Hotel with a series of interviews between writer/director Wes Anderson and movie/television critic Matt Zoller Seitz. I read The Wes Anderson Collection before reading this book, simply because it was published first. The Wes Anderson The Grand Budapest Hotel stays true to Seitz’s previous book on Anderson’s first seven feature films, The Wes Anderson Collection , with an artful, meticulous design and playful, original illustrations that capture the spirit of Anderson’s inimitable aesthetic, offering an overview of Anderson’s filmography. Wes Anderson’s recent collection of Roald Dahl adaptations for Netflix is so specifically theatrical that you could replicate each one on virtually any stage armed with just a small troupe of repertory actors and a meager budget. Characters narrate what’s happening while staring directly at us, the implied audience; obliging stagehands shift scenery and assist with costume changes and makeup right in front of our eyes. The action is so resolutely analog that it feels like a manifesto for good old-fashioned stagecraft in a cinematic era steamrolled by CGI—our imaginations are forced to fill in the gaps when, say, a train rushes right over a character, or a man appears to levitate several feet off the ground. This is storytelling that shows you all of its seams. The question is: Why?

There are influences I could spot a million miles away. But it's those others that have showed me something I missed before. Something new to explore. I learned some things, have been inspired by others...even found out one of my favorite movies was an Anderson film. (When I first watched it, I had no idea...not until I had my hands on this book all these years later...TOTAL DUH MOMENT) The best thing about this in depth look at the films of director Wes Anderson is when it focuses in on the details, the minutia, the production design and plotting that Anderson is famous for. For example, I loved seeing the storyboards, the illustrations, the photos from behind the scenes during filming, things like that.You don't have to be a Wes Anderson fan or have seen all his films** to love this beautifully designed Abrams book. A remarkable work but one of those books you have to have to fully appreciate its merits. A scrapbook containing never ending delights! I agree with some of the other comments that the author/interviewer can be a little bit much at times but overall this book was amazing to read and flip through! I cannot wait to watch this movie again and I eagerly await the book for The French Dispatch even if it wasn't my favourite. Essays and interviews by Mark Zoller Seitz, amazing illustrations by Max Dalton and endless fascinating stills from all the films plus a potpourri of relevant items from old films, books, magazines, catalogs and advertisements that will have you intrigued and wanting to keep returning again and again to marvel at all this content. This companion to the New York Times bestselling book The Wes Anderson Collection takes readers behind the scenes of the Oscar®-winning film The Grand Budapest Hotel with a series of interviews between writer/director Wes Anderson and movie/television critic Matt Zoller Seitz. Needless to say, I loved this! I wish all movies did something like this, where you not only have amazing photos of the actors and set, but also interviews with the director, cinematographer, composer, costumer designer, etc. etc. There were so many small details I never noticed that were pointed out in here and I LOVE IT! Finding out little things make it that much more special because 1) it feels like you were let in on a secret 2) it makes you realize just how much thought and attention and careful planning went into making the movie.