Wes Anderson and Stefan Zweig

I have read Stefan Zweig's Twenty-Four Hours in the life of a Woman and watched Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. There are a lot of similarities between the two works. 

The two works shared the same theme of telling your story to a stranger. I think it is an interesting concept because in today's society, the thought of telling your whole life story to a stranger is the last thing on your mind. People do it on social media sometimes but it can be deleted from public view or can be denied in person. When you are telling someone in person, it is a lot harder to deny anything. Why a stranger? I think it is because if you were to tell someone you knew, they would be more likely to pity you. The characters in both Stefan Zweig's literature and Wes Anderson's film do not need pity or remorse for the events that affected them. This notion leads to a more romantic way of presenting characters because as a society, we are used to pitying characters like that because it is hard to feel empathy for something that has never happened to you. In movies today, characters like this would cry and seek comfort. In these characters, they only seek understanding and want someone else to know their story. Why? Well, I suppose they figure someone out there should know. 

Wes Anderson's strength as a director is the ability to recreate time periods with more accurate film styles, color palettes, blocking of characters, and not overdoing the use of modern technology. When people create movies now about stories that take place in another time period, they tend to overdo it, and it starts to look less authentic to the time period. An example of that would have to be the newest version of The Great Gatsby. I think he direct influence from Stefan Zweig's story content and the literary devices that he used. Story is really big in the movie and Wes Anderson tends to take on subjects that not a lot of other directors of our time would due to the popular demand of other movie genres. 

After reading the novella and seeing the movie, I have come to the conclusion that the similarities are no accident. He does use what he has taken from the author in a way that he can twist it in his way and create his own worlds. This makes him a good storyteller.