The Grand Budapest Hotel


The Grand Budapest Hotel is a 2014 comedy-drama film written and directed by Wes Anderson. The film's seventeen-actor ensemble cast is led by Ralph Fiennes as Monsieur Gustave H., famed concierge of a twentieth-century mountainside resort in the fictional country of Zubrowka. After being framed for the murder of a wealthy dowager, he and his recently befriended protégé Zero embark on a quest for fortune and a priceless Renaissance painting amidst the backdrop of an encroaching fascist regime. Anderson's American Empirical Pictures produced the film in association with Studio Babelsberg, Fox Searchlight Pictures, and Indian Paintbrush's Scott Rudin and Steven Rales. Fox Searchlight supervised the commercial distribution, and The Grand Budapest Hotels funding came from Indian Paintbrush and German government-funded tax rebates.
Anderson and longtime collaborator Hugo Guinness conceived The Grand Budapest Hotel as a fragmented tale following a character inspired by a mutual friend. They initially struggled in brainstorming, but the experience touring Europe and researching the literature of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig shaped their vision for the film. The Grand Budapest Hotel draws visually from Europe-set mid-century Hollywood films and the United States Library of Congress's photochrom print collection of alpine resorts. Filming took place in eastern Germany from January to March 2013. The film's soundtrack was composed by French composer Alexandre Desplat, incorporating symphonic and Russian folk-inspired elements and expanding on his earlier work with Anderson. It explores themes of fascism, nostalgia, friendship, and loyalty, and further discourse analyze the function of color as a storytelling device.
The Grand Budapest Hotel premiered in competition at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival on February 6, 2014. It was released in theaters in March to highly positive reviews, and grossed $174.6 million worldwide at the box office, becoming Anderson's highest-grossing film. It was nominated for nine awards at the 87th Academy Awards including Best Picture, winning four, and received numerous other accolades. Since its release, The Grand Budapest Hotel has been assessed as one of the greatest films of the twenty-first century. In 2025, the film was selected by the United States Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry, becoming the collection's youngest entry.

Plot

In a cemetery in the former nation of Zubrowka, a woman visits the shrine of a renowned writer, known simply as "Author". She holds a copy of his book The Grand Budapest Hotel. The book, written in 1985, recounts a visit the author made in 1968 to the eponymous hotel, which was once a famous resort but had by then fallen on hard times. During his stay, he struck up a friendship with the hotel's proprietor, Zero Moustafa, who told him his rags to riches story over dinner.
In 1932, Zero, an orphan who has come to Zubrowka to escape his war-torn homeland, is hired as a lobby boy by Monsieur Gustave H., the concierge at the Grand Budapest Hotel. Gustave is a ladykiller who romances old, wealthy residents at the hotel, including dowager Madame Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe-und-Taxis, with whom he has had a nearly two-decade affair. Madame D. mysteriously dies a month after her last visit, so Gustave and Zero visit her estate to pay their respects. There, her attorney, Deputy Vilmos Kovacs, announces that she has bequeathed the famous Renaissance painting Boy with Apple to Gustave. Gustave and Zero abscond with the painting, hiding it in a safe in the Grand Budapest.
Madame D.'s butler, Serge, makes a deposition implicating Gustave in her death. Gustave is arrested on suspicion of murder, while Serge goes into hiding. During his imprisonment, Gustave earns the trust of a gang of inmates by providing them with pastries from Mendl's, a well-known bakery. The inmates let him in on their escape plan. Gustave has Zero and his fiancée, Agatha, hide hammers, chisels, and sawblades inside the next shipment of pastries. Using these tools, the inmates break free. Meanwhile, Dmitri sends his hitman, J. G. Jopling, to kill Kovacs, whom he suspects of disloyalty, as well as Serge's sister, who refuses to give up her brother's whereabouts.
After Zero and Gustave are reunited, they set out to prove Gustave's innocence with the assistance of a fraternity of concierges known as the Society of the Crossed Keys. The society locates Serge and facilitates a meeting between him, Gustave, and Zero. Serge reveals that he was pressured to implicate Gustave by the real killer, Dmitri, and that Madame D. had a missing second will, which would only take effect should she be murdered. Jopling arrives and kills Serge, leaving Gustave and Zero without a witness, then tries to flee. After a chase through the snow, Gustave is left dangling off a cliff at the mercy of Jopling. Zero rescues Gustave by pushing Jopling off the cliff, and the two men continue their escape, pursued by Inspector Henckels of the Zubrowkan police.
Gustave, Zero, and Agatha return to the Grand Budapest to find it swarming with fascist troops, who have made it their headquarters. Agatha sneaks in to retrieve the painting but is spotted by Dmitri. Gustave and Zero rush in to save her, but Dmitri shoots at them, triggering an all-out firefight. Henckels eventually puts a stop to the chaos. On the back of the painting, the group finds Madame D.'s second will, revealing that she was the owner of the Grand Budapest, and named Gustave as her sole beneficiary. He is exonerated in court, while Dmitri flees the country. As a result of the bequest, Gustave becomes one of the wealthiest men in Zubrowka. Zero takes over as concierge and marries Agatha in a ceremony officiated by Gustave. However, while the three are traveling by train, Gustave gets into a quarrel with a group of thuggish soldiers and is killed. His own will bequeaths the hotel and his fortune to Zero, who maintains the hotel in memory of Agatha who, like their infant son, died from Prussian grippe.

Cast

  • Ralph Fiennes as Monsieur Gustave H., the Grand Budapest Hotel's renowned concierge
  • Tony Revolori as Zero Moustafa, the newly hired bellhop mentored by Gustave
  • * F. Murray Abraham as the elderly Zero
  • Adrien Brody as Dmitri Desgoffe-und-Taxis, Madame D.'s son
  • Willem Dafoe as J. G. Jopling, a ruthless hitman working for Dmitri
  • Saoirse Ronan as Agatha, an apprentice baker and Zero's love interest
  • Tilda Swinton as Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe-und-Taxis, known as Madame D., a wealthy aristocrat and the secret owner of the hotel
  • Edward Norton as Albert Henckels, the police inspector investigating Madame D.'s murder
  • Mathieu Amalric as Serge X., a shifty butler who works for Madame D.
  • Jeff Goldblum as Deputy Vilmos Kovacs, Madame D.'s lawyer and associate of Gustave
  • Harvey Keitel as Ludwig, the leader of a prison gang at Checkpoint Nineteen that helps Gustave break out.
  • Tom Wilkinson as Author, writer of The Grand Budapest Hotel
  • * Jude Law as the young Author in 1968 who interviews Mr. Moustafa
  • Bill Murray as M. Ivan, Gustave's friend and one of several concierges affiliated with the Society of the Crossed Keys
  • Jason Schwartzman as M. Jean, the Grand Budapest's concierge in 1968 who informs the author about Mr. Moustafa.
  • Owen Wilson as M. Chuck, a Society of the Crossed Keys concierge who briefly replaces Gustave and Zero
  • Léa Seydoux as Clotilde, a maid at Schloss Lutz
Other cast members included Larry Pine as Mr. Mosher, Milton Welsh as Franz Müller, Giselda Volodi as Serge's sister, Wolfram Nielacny as Herr Becker, Florian Lukas as Pinky, Karl Markovics as Wolf, Volker Michalowski as Günther, Neal Huff as Lieutenant, Bob Balaban, Fisher Stevens, Wallace Wolodarsky, and Waris Ahluwalia as M. Martin, M. Robin, M. Georges, and M. Dino, the Society of the Crossed Keys concierges, Jella Niemann as the young woman, and Lucas Hedges as a pump attendant.

Production

Development

Drafting of The Grand Budapest Hotel story began in 2006, when Wes Anderson produced an 18-page script with longtime collaborator Hugo Guinness. They imagined a fragmented tale of a character inspired by a mutual friend, based in modern France and the United Kingdom. Though their work yielded a 12-minute-long cut, collaboration stalled when the two men were unable to coalesce a uniform sequence of events to advance their story. By this time, Anderson had begun researching the work of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, with whom he was vaguely familiar. He became fascinated with Zweig, gravitating to Beware of Pity, The World of Yesterday, and The Post Office Girl for their fatalist mythos and Zweig's portrait of early twentieth-century Vienna. Anderson also used period images and urbane Europe-set mid-century Hollywood comedies as references. He pursued the idea of a historical pastiche out of ambivalence to Hollywood's depiction of pre-World War II European history. Once The Grand Budapest Hotel took definite form, Anderson resumed the scriptwriting, finishing the screenplay in six weeks. The producers tapped Jay Clarke to supervise production of the film's animatics, with voiceovers by Anderson.
Anderson's sightseeing in Europe was another source of inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel visual motifs. The writer-director visited Vienna, Munich, and other major cities before the project's conception, but most location scouting began after the Cannes premiere of his coming-of-age drama Moonrise Kingdom. He and the producers toured Budapest, small Italian spa towns, and the Czech resort Karlovy Vary before a final stop in Germany, consulting hotel staff to develop an accurate idea of a real-life concierge's work.