[custom_adv] Set between the wars, The Grand Budapest Hotel tells the story of hotel concierge Gustav H and lobby boy Zero Moustafa as they become entangled in a plot to steal a priceless Renaissance painting. [GARD] [custom_adv] Weisse began his career working as a trainee with Richard Conway on Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. He later worked on features including The Never Ending Story II and III, The City of Lost Children and Event Horizon. [GARD] [custom_adv] The production manager, Miki Emmrich,who I’d worked with on Cloud Atlas, came to me and said, “There are some people from America, and they’re wondering if there’s anybody who can still make miniatures.” [GARD] [custom_adv] Wes is really interested in the way models look. They look a bit old-fashioned, a bit artificial, but that works for the artistic look of this film. They did add some visual effects, and I think that’s okay. You shoot models, and then you use the new techniques to make them believable. [GARD] [custom_adv] The building itself is one-eighteenth scale. It’s about four metres wide and three metres high. When we speak about “models”, some people think it’s a tiny little thing. But it’s really quite big. If we’d built the hotel too small, it wouldn’t have worked for the camera. Things just look better if they’re bigger. Also, if they’re too small, they’re harder to build. [GARD] [custom_adv] Mostly wood. It’s very traditional. For the windows, we just made one original, took silicon moulds and cast them in resin. Along the roof, we had very thin decorations made from etched brass. There are also some statues – the only things we did on a 3D printer, using models we found on the internet. [GARD] [custom_adv] About one-eighth scale. But you never know exactly with trees. We made the trunks from turned wood. Then we stuck real tree branches in the trunks. The snow on the trees was done by The Nefzers using snow from Snow Business. The snow on the ground is rolls of fiberfill, just like you’d use for sofa cushions. [GARD]
