Co-star Edward Norton on the making of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel

When I read the script, I thought Gustave [the main character, played by Ralph Fiennes] was one of the best characters Wes had ever written.

I was laughing so hard reading him. His world view is so memorable, and all of his righteous indignation. When Wes said he had Ralph Fiennes in mind, I said if it had been anyone else I would have fought him to play the part.

Gustave has created his world and populated it with people that affirm his world view.

I’ve come to think that Wes’s films are all about the way your real family disappoints you, and so you create the family you need. His films are about people with some sort of an emptiness or loss or a sense of deficit in their lives, trying to create community and family through something else.

We filmed mostly in Gorlitz, a very small town in Germany, in the middle of winter.

Wes and Jeremy [Dawson, producer] picked a very modest little hotel and did a deal with them to make it the Budapest cast and crew central. They created almost a boarding house, with communal dinners. It’s the rhythm of the theatrical repertory company, where everybody lives and eats together. Wes creates a feeling of community that hits a romantic nerve in a lot of actors.

As an actor, you have to surrender to the prison of Wes’s precision.

You have to surrender to the idea that your improvisational capacity to put a twist on something is going to be narrowly restricted to the confines of the rhythm that Wes has written. I watched Ralph Fiennes going against it, at times, feeling hemmed in, but you come to realise: “I have to creatively think about how much diversity of interpretation I can bring, inside the narrow corridor of the way Wes sees it.” Not to get too technical, but it sort of reminds me of Meisner exercises. Sanford Meisner used to say: “Work only with these words, but give me six different intentions, within those words.” And that’s sort of what working with Wes is like. “No, I don’t want you to change a word. I don’t want you to change a comma. I don’t want you to extemporise it. I don’t even want you to put an accent on it. But within that give me everything you’ve got.” It becomes an interesting exercise. I want to hear him give a line reading because it’s so funny, and then you’re going to do it and get the credit.