The first two scenes of “The Grand Budapest Hotel” are filmed in high quality and realistic format, and as a result, look like any other modern screening. Then, however, after the film cuts to a portrayal of the hotel itself, described as “picturesque” and “elaborate,” the hotel and its surroundings do not look as realistic as the prior scenes. In my opinion, the hotel looked almost like a cartoon and stuck out from the rest of the film. This piqued my interest as the film is named and centered around the hotel, and thus, the decisions of how it would be presented to the viewer must have been very conscious and calculated.

After some research, it turns out that Wes Anderson, the film’s director, has always liked “the charm” of miniatures, a special effect created using scale models to mimic larger images, and chose to use one for the hotel to create the exact appearance he wanted for the hotel. So, as the film was being shot in Görlitz, Germany, the model was being built in Potsdam. Ultimately, the final hotel model that was shown in the film was only 9 feet tall and 14 feet wide, much smaller than the colossal building that we see resting atop the Alpine mountaintops. Below, I have linked an article that dives deeper into Anderson’s thought process behind the miniature and a video in which one of the artists describes the way in which it was built.