At a recent roundtable interview, Anderson and production designer Adam Stockhausen talked about how the project first came together, what inspired the story, the influence
of Viennese writer Stefan Zweig's work on the multi-layered
storytelling approach, their collaboration on the vision for the movie, how they created this rich, lush
cinematic world and brought the audience into it, how Anderson cultivated a communal atmosphere on set and made available a large selection
of books and films to the cast during production, Stockhausen's favorite day
of shooting, and the challenge
of using different
aspect ratios.