When Barney Pilling answered the phone, you could hear the smile in his voice. The editor recently won an ACE Eddie Award and landed his first BAFTA and Oscar nominations for The Grand Budapest Hotel. “Everything has been wholly unexpected,” says Pilling. It was the first time the English editor worked with director Wes Anderson, but for Pilling, it was ultimately about doing good work. “Wes is very meticulous and demanding, and to do a good job for him and get this kind of recognition – let’s just say I never had to talk about myself this much before in my entire life.”
The Grand Budapest Hotel recalls the escapades of Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), the titular hotel’s devoted concierge and Zero (Tony Revolori), a lobby boy who becomes his most trusted sidekick. The two set off on a wild adventure that mixes mystery, murder, and action with comedy and intrigue.
Production shot mostly in Görlitz, Germany, with cinematographer Robert Yeoman using 35mm to capture the director’s vision. Pilling set up shop in London and Paris, where the edit centered on capturing the humor with pace and sound. “I’m a self-confessed Anderson fan,” says Pilling. “I have kids at home and Fantastic Mr. Fox is on loop, so his style wasn’t surprising to me. Wes did point me to Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner for the feel and Jacques Tati more for the sound effects. Jacques was light years ahead of everyone and placed interesting instrumentals in the storytelling to give humor to his films. It’s definitely how Wes wanted to approach the sounds for The Grand Budapest Hotel.”
To create those magnetic scenes, Anderson provided Pilling with numerous takes to piece together the best possible performances. “Wes and Robert are so well prepared. They’ve been working together since Bottle Rocket and have such a shorthand in what they do,” notes Pilling. In order to piece together the performances Anderson wanted, the editor took elements from various takes and sped them up or slowed them down to match. “Wes didn’t want to do ADR. We had to use stuff from the day and sometimes it became a feisty challenge,” mentions Pilling. “There was a scene where Gustav H. and Madame D. [Tilda Swinton] are sitting in the window and we see the vista of the hotel. Wes wanted to have photographs projected behind them on the day of shooting and the projector sounded like a jet taking off over the dialogue. So we had to go through all the various shots to re-voice the actors. It was a hurdle, but there isn’t one line of rerecorded dialogue in the film.”
Pace also became a major time consumer. “It had to stay just underneath the ridiculousness for us,” says Pilling. “There’s so much color and vibrancy in everything that Wes does from a visual standpoint. If the comedic pauses are a little too much, too far into the farcical, the whole illusion falls down like a house of cards.” One of those humorous sequences was the prison break escapade. “There is a lot going on in that scene. The very wide shot that shows the exterior, you can catch a glimpse of them in the moonlight. We had elements of that we needed to mock up in order to find the rhythm for everything else. It ended up being one of those sequences [where]Wes let me have at it after awhile in order to cut some of the time off it,” says Pilling.
Overcutting was something the editor didn’t want to do either. In the same prison break scene Gustav H. ends up meeting with Zero outside to finalize his getaway. The two end up arguing and the scene is played strictly on a two-shot, except for one single when Zero talks about the war. “We wanted to save coverage for the moment that had the most impact. There’s so much madcap humor going on, we wanted our singles to punch through and make sure the feelings were not lost in those moments,” Pilling explains.
The editor admitted he got immense personal satisfaction from the project. “I’m very proud of what we did and technically, I pushed my limits to solve sound and dialogue problems much further than I’ve ever done before. I’ve worked on one more film since The Grand Budapest Hotel called Suffragette, and I felt much more capable solving what could have been insurmountable problems since working with Wes, and for that I am truly grateful.”
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