An Interview With
Lead Graphic Designer for THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
Hello Annie, I hope you don’t mind the e-mail, but I read your interview on Creative Review; it was fascinating to hear about the meticulous design details behind The Grand Budapest Hotel.
I was lucky enough to see it on it’s premiere night in the UK, and the attention to detail is so precise I wanted to say how much I liked your work.
My name is Sophie Kirk and I’m a second year Graphic Design student in the UK. I am currently running a research project about the world of Wes Anderson – to create a publication to give an insight into his work and creative style.
I’d really appreciate talking to someone who has worked with him and a more professional insight into his work – I don’t work in film and it would be great to speak to someone from a design point of view.
I wondered if you would spare some time to answer a few questions about what it is like to work with him, and I’d love to hear more about your experience during the creation of The Grand Budapest Hotel.
I’d also love to hear more about your own creative processes and the other projects you work on.
I appreciate that your time is valuable – I have attached some questions and if you had five minutes to talk, that would be so exciting.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Many thanks, in anticipation
Sophie
Hello Sophie, Thank you for your email, I’m so glad you enjoyed the interview and the movie!
It was a long, cold winter in Zubrowka last year and working on the film was extremely demanding, yet also incredibly rewarding. Wes is a genius and an artist, and he was absolutely involved with every aspect of his filmmaking every step of the way. I have answered your questions as best as I can, and you can also read more about my work with Wes by searching for my name on Totally Dublin. Hope this helps!
Wishing you the very best of luck with your course. Work like a dog!
Annie
When did you first meet Wes Anderson? How did working with him come about? I had been working with an American film designer on a different project [Nelson Lowry, who designed Fantastic Mr Fox], when one day he sent me an email that just said: “Something wicked your way comes.” I had no idea what he meant. Was I going to be fired? Then the phone rang and it was Wes’ producer in New York saying they were prepping a film in Germany and would I be interested in joining them? It was a shock. I think I managed to keep it together on the phone and sound at least somewhat professional, but after we hung up there was a lot of jumping up and down. Wes has a very famous and distinct aesthetic.
Wes uses graphics as a storytelling device so there were literally hundreds of pieces to be made for the film. I think my script breakdown was over 20 pages long. We made bloodied ripped up telegrams, pastry boxes, books of poetry, maps, character passports, patterns for carpets, all the signage you see in the film, banknotes, flags, a police report with Jeff Goldblum’s fingerprints on it… so many different things, and from three different time periods, too. And, of course, the book that opens and closes the film itself, with a drawing of the hotel and the title on the front of it. That’s my favourite piece – it’s a simple illustration but I’m so proud to have drawn it for him. I was a fan of his films anyway, and now I feel like I’ve been in one!
Were you ever on the sets while things were being filmed? Usually with construction graphics you work about two to four weeks ahead, and with props and dressing graphics you work a few days ahead. But our offices were in the same building that we were using to shoot the hotel scenes in, so we’d be walking past the set all the time. We’d be designing the newspapers and you could hear the acting going on – gunshots and chase sequences. It was a really fun environment to work in – lots of laughter and action.
Was it a bit intimidating at first? I think after spending years working on pretty varied period shows I can adapt relatively quickly to different styles. But was it intimidating? Oh god, I was so nervous! It was only a week between getting that initial call and packing up and moving over to Germany. As soon as I got there, though, my M.O. was to keep my head down and work like a dog. I showed him the first drafts of some graphics within a few days of landing, and I remember his reaction being pretty good – then we started on the iterations. We made up to 30 different versions of some props! He and his crew are all so lovely, so it didn’t take long to settle in.
Did you get to meet the cast? Ha, yes, that town [Gorlitz, on the German-Polish border] was strangely small for so many actors to be living in at once! It was so odd to be doing your shopping on a Saturday afternoon and stand in line with Bill Murray. He’s charming – of course he is, he’s Bill Murray. And Ralph Fiennes is charming too – he showed a real interest in the graphic props, too, which is always a winner with me! Saoirse Ronan is my favourite though – she’s full of spark and it was great hearing a Dublin accent on set. I didn’t party though, I’m afraid to say, so I have no gossip for you. I was in bed by 9 o’clock every evening with my laptop, organising my font library.
What was your favourite piece that you designed for the film? My absolute favourite piece is the book itself that opens the story (above). It’s a modern pink hardback with a drawing of the hotel on the front, and the name of the movie as the hotel sign. It’s a relatively simple piece, but it’s really special having a prop that you made with the movie’s name on it like that. I remember Wes had sent me a quick sketch showing his idea for the book, and I really loved being able to help make that work for him. I treasure that piece, actually - we made three for the shoot, in case one got dropped in the snow, and so I brought one home with me.
And the most challenging? Probably the hotel’s local newspaper, the Trans-Alpine Yodel (above), as there were so many issues with so many different stories, and each one had to be typeset with new articles and weather reports and dates. It was the first piece I worked on with Wes when I arrived in Germany, so this was the prop that I cut my teeth on. I really got a feeling for his fastidiousness on this one - we must have gone through almost 40 different page layouts until he was happy to shoot it! I also had to think about the aspect ratios he was shooting, too, as they were different for the different time periods in the movie, and he wanted the newspaper columns to fit nicely within the frame of each of them. Wes wrote all the newspaper articles himself - not just articles to accompany the main headlines, but the surrounding ones too. On screen, you only get a chance to read the headlines, of course, but the stories are so Wes and so funny. I think he had fun with this one.
“I’VE BEEN READING YOUR BLOG: MAYBE YOU NEED TO DO SOMETHING MORE EMOTIONAL FOR A WHILE?”
How did your career in design come about? What did you do before? I studied Visual Communication Design at Ravensbourne. My dad is a photographer and designer and my mother is an illustrator, so I’d always been leaning in that direction. I wanted to work in advertising so I went to Reykjavik (to McCann Erickson) and was there for four years. Advertising didn’t quite feel right for me somehow though… when I handed my notice in I remember the director saying “I’ve been reading your blog: maybe you need to do something more emotional for a while?” Emotional?! But that’s when I decided to go and study film.
The first year or so in Iceland was rather difficult. I didn’t have any friends and it was 2003 so I didn’t have a laptop or the internet either. Imagine! I spent a lot of time by myself eating sardines from a can. In my second year things picked up, though. Once you manage to make one friend it’s easier to make more because you can just steal all their friends. By the time I moved to Dublin in 2007 I didn’t want to leave, but I wanted to study in my first language. I still go back to Reykjavik for a month every summer, when it’s daylight all night long. That’s magic.
The film posters are great! What went into the design process? Ahh, I love this poster! It was a real privilege to help Wes execute his idea for this. It’s pretty much how he described it in the first email he sent me about it: a photo of the miniature hotel model, superimposed over a scenic art piece from the set. I drew the lettering for the hotel sign by hand, based on a beautiful old Shepheard’s Hotel [a celebrated hotel in Cairo in the late 19th century] sign from the 1920s that he’d picked out. I like that the letter spacing is slightly off, just like in the reference.
I really enjoy graphic design in the periods before graphic designers existed. The Victorian era is a real favourite of mine. I love that there was no corporate identity. In one institution you can see so many different styles: the blacksmith designed the lettering for the cast iron gates; the sign-painter determined the type style for the shopfront; the glazier shaped the letters for the stained glass; the printer chose the hot-metal font for the stationery. These days we have one font per building and the craftsmen are the manufacturers rather than the designers.
So the poster was based on historical posters and Wes’ idea? Most of my graphic prop and set work for film is based heavily on historical references, so poster design is a chance to do something more original and contemporary. I never look at the history of poster design, to be honest. I like to watch the film and then try to capture the mood by layering up texture. It doesn’t necessarily match the visual aesthetic of the film, rather the tone of the story. I don’t even use a grid for film poster design – it’s probably one of the more intuitive areas of my work. But most of my poster work is for small indie Irish filmmakers, so there’s more freedom in that, than if I were designing for a big distribution company.
“IF IT’S SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE IT WAS DRAWN BY HAND, THEN DRAW IT BY HAND.”
Do you prefer to do digital or hand rendered work? A rule of thumb in graphic prop-making is: if it’s supposed to look like it was drawn by hand, then draw it by hand. You could waste a whole day trying to give things hand-drawn looks in Photoshop, I can’t stand seeing it in films. Especially “handwriting” made with script fonts – argh! Another bugbear is typewriter fonts used for real typewritten letters. Oh my god. Actually, this is one of the reasons I loved working with Wes and Adam so much – they really champion the use of authentic printing / writing / painting methods in film design. And our wonderful propmaster, Robin Miller, gave me an antique 1930s German typewriter to make all the police documents with.
How many of your graphic props do you design, and how many do you source? Well, everything is made in-house, but some are direct copies of historical items and others are created from scratch. The tickets to board the Titanic, for example, are copies of the real things. Sometimes you get clearance for certain brand usage so it’s nice to use old advertising to help a film feel realistic – my favourite is an 1800s poster the size of a building that just says “Bovril Repels Influenza!” For Wes’ film, though, he and the production designer Adam Stockhausen were creating an entirely fictional country, the State of Zubrowka, so everything had to be invented from scratch – banknotes, flags, postage stamps, passports – even if it was just background material. We based everything on real references, though, mostly from ’20s and ’30s Eastern Europe.
Do you always try to stick to historical references or do you prefer using a bit of artistic license? I find the best way to approach period props is to start with a real historical reference and work from there. You have to remember it’s a story you’re creating, not a documentary, so yes, you’ll need to make it cinematic. The most common stretch of truth you see in film graphics is probably 19th century newspapers: large headlines didn’t exist on the covers in ye olden days, it was all small ads. But they’re a strong graphic storytelling device so, hey, we turn a blind eye.
Was there a lot of pressure for you to create such a large amount of perfected pieces? My script breakdown was as long as my arm. We started in Berlin and then after a month the entire cast and crew moved to a little town on the Polish border called Gorlitz, where we all lived together and shot the movie. Adam had designed the hotel set to fit into the bones of a beautiful old Art Nouveau department store, with 6 floors and balconies, and we set up our offices on the top floor. We could look down over the balcony every day and watch the set come to life, which was pretty special. I spent my day having back and forths with Wes over details in graphics, talking their production through with the supporting graphic designer Liliana Lambriev, and then liaising with the designer, set decorator, propmaster, and art directors to make sure they had everything they needed from us.
There’s probably more to graphics in film than is immediately apparent. If a character has a notice board in his office, for example, then you have to fill that board with relevant material, all in the right style for both the period and the director’s vision. You’re not always designing for the camera: much of this work will never be seen by a cinema audience, but still you have to create an atmosphere and a world for the actors to work their magic in.
“THERE’S PROBABLY MORE TO GRAPHICS IN FILMS THAN IS IMMEDIATELY APPARENT.”
“IT WAS A TRICKY TRANSITION FROM ADVERTISING BUT I CAN’T IMAGINE DOING ANYTHING ELSE NOW.”
What’s the difference between design for film making and other studio based design? When I worked in advertising I made absolutely everything digitally. Then when I started in film I had to learn how to physically make three-dimensional pieces with my hands – graphic props like vintage cigarette boxes or royal scrolls – there’s a lot of cutting, sticking, and stitching.With graphic construction pieces — like, for example, the stained glass theatre canopy that we’re shooting on Dame Lane at the moment — I work with the production designer, the art director, and a draughtsman who all design the structure, then I issue my own plan to our construction crew with all the decorative graphic panels that I’ve drawn. I then liaise with the sign-painters and laser-cutters and metalworkers and glaziers who get the piece executed. It’s always so exciting to see a large piece like that go up. It was the same with the sign for the hotel in The Grand Budapest Hotel. The graphics are a real opportunity to set the feel of a show, I have to say I absolutely love it. It was a tricky transition from advertising but I can’t imagine doing anything else now.
What do you do when you’re not working? Oh god, I don’t even know what the line between work stuff and personal stuff is anymore. I work six days a week and when I’m not working I’m at the cinema. Everything is work-related!
What are you working on next? I’m on Sam Mendes and John Logan’s new show Penny Dreadful, which is a horror series set in 1891. I really love the Victorian period for graphic design, and the show has a supernatural element, too, so it’s a fun one. I’ve also written some calligraphy for the titles of the new Darren Aronofsky movie Noah, which is really nice work and probably the most ancient period I’ve worked to so far. I’d like to do something futuristic soon, I think, to take me out of my comfort zone... but you never know what’s going to come up, so I just have to wait and see what happens.
What else does 2014 have in store for you? What else does 2014 have in store for you?A holiday!
This interview has been sourced from first hand
And maybe some science fiction. I haven’t done
conversations, Creative Review and Totally Dublin’s
anything futuristic before so that would be fun.
March 2014 interviews.