Wes Anderson Royal Tenenbaums" was nominated for an Academy Award and ranked by an "Empire" poll as the 159th greatest film ever made. Anderson's next feature was "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2004) about a Jacques Cousteau-esque documentary filmmaker played by Bill Murray. It serves as a classic example of Anderson's style, but its critical reception was less favorable than his previous films, and its box office did not match the heights of "The Royal Tenenbaums". In September 2006, Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen released a tongue-in-cheek "letter of intervention" for Anderson's artistic "malaise" following the disappointing commercial and
The Grand Budapest Hotel particular brand of artificiality that I like to use is an old-fashioned one." He had previously used miniatures in "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and more extensively in "Fantastic Mr. Fox". In designing the hotel, Anderson and production designer Adam Stockhausen did extensive research, looking at vintage images at the Library of Congress of hotels and European vacation spots. Also visited were existing locales such as the pastel-pink Palace Bristol Hotel and the Grandhotel Pupp, both in the spa town of Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), Czech Republic as well as the Grandhotel Gellért in Budapest, Hungary. The model used was