Written by on Jan 9, 2015. Posted in General Interest

Wes Anderson movie The Grand Budapest Hotel leads 2015 BAFTA nominations

Wes Anderson’s quirky comedy The Grand Budapest Hotel has landed 11 nominations for the 2015 BAFTAs. Stephen Hawking romance The Theory of Everything and Alejandro G Iñárritu’s Birdman are among the other leading contenders, with ten nominations each.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (right) stars Ralph Fiennes as the eccentric manager of a hotel in a fictional Eastern European country between the first and second World Wars. It was largely filmed in the city of Görlitz on the border between Germany and Poland.

“They were looking for a non-descriptive, fairy-tale-like town,” said Markus Bensch, production executive in charge of locations at Studio Babelsberg near Berlin, in comments to The Location Guide: “The key location – a disused art nouveau department store – was shown to Wes Anderson by the location scout and later the Location Manager Klaus Darrelmann [and this] was the game changer.”

Among the nominations for Best Film is The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the British mathematics genius Alan Turing, who successfully decoded the German Enigma machine in World War Two.

The films nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay award include Clint Eastwood’s true-life drama American Sniper, recounting the life and military career of renowned soldier Chris Kyle. Eastwood and his star and producer Bradley Cooper doubled Morocco for Iraq and also used a standing set of a Middle Eastern village in California, recreating scenes from Kyle’s multiple tours of duty.

“We made significant upgrades to the village set, changing the architecture to more reflect Iraq,” Location Manager Patrick Mignano told The Location Guide.

The BAFTAs will take place in London on Sunday 8 February 2015.

Report: The Grand Budapest Hotel on location in Germany.

Report: American Sniper on location in Morocco and California.

(Image: Fox Searchlight)