With only 66 screens to call its own, Wes Anderson’s 1930s-set “The Grand Budapest Hotel” landed in the eighth spot in the box office this past weekend for a solid $55K per screen average. To help broaden the audience of the period film as it expands nationwide over the coming weeks, a pair of featurettes have arrived online to show some familiar faces in the film.
First up, courtesy of The New York Times, is Anderson giving a mini-commentary on a scene during the midpoint of “The Grand Budapest Hotel” where Ralph Fiennes’ Gustave calls upon a guild of concierges known as “The Society of the Crossed Keys” for help in a dire situation. The concierges, of course, are all played by faces that will be familiar to you if you’re fan of Anderson’s films with Bill Murray as the most high profile of the group. As a sort of companion piece to that video is a new featurette released by Fox Searchlight that further illuminates the history of the secret society and is narrated by Tom Wilkinson with a cameo by Murray as himself.
Finally, a supercut has arrived online (via Rope Of Silicon) that was edited by Kogonada (the same editor behind the montage of Stanley Kubrick’s one-point perspective shots) that showcases Anderson’s evolving style, specifically his penchant for symmetrical framing. To illustrate the director’s predilection for this type of framing, Kogonada has superimposed dotted lines down the center of the frame of every shot and the results are uncanny with the majority of the examples culled from Anderson’s past couple of films. Watch the montage below, along with the NY Times “Anatomy of a Scene” and the “Crossed Keys” featurette, followed by a handful of new pics.