Bringing Wes Anderson’s vision for The Grand Budapest Hotel to life seems to have been a labour of love for all involved. For none more so, perhaps, than props designer Annie Atkins, for whom the shoot involved conjuring up the visual infrastructure of an entire fictional nation – flags and coats of arms, banknotes and postage stamps, police reports and newspapers – from scratch. Now a book (Fake Love Letters, Forged Telegrams & Prison Escape Maps) allows Atkins to share, among other things, how she created the film’s sweetly sinister, somewhere-in-time, somewhere-in-Europe wonderland; an aesthetic remixed from the vintage passports and tattered train tickets, Stasi stationery and children’s diaries that she found during her research.
It’s a long way to Zubrowka from the small village of Dolwyddelan, in north Wales, where Atkins was raised by her artist mother and graphic designer father. The nearest cinema was 25 miles away; her exposure to movies came through her neighbour’s VCR. Her early career veered from Ravensbourne to a stint at a Reykjavík advertising agency, followed by a course in production design in Dublin.
She got her first break in Ireland, crafting death warrants and tear-streaked love letters for the Showtime series The Tudors. And it’s where she’s still based today, making work that ranges from the minute (take the set of tiny Japanese maps, hand-painted for Anderson’s Isle of Dogs) to the vast (1,200 sq ft of geometric patterned floor tiles for Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck) to the entirely unseen – the meticulously designed food packaging that never made it to the final cut of Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies.
There’s little sign of a letup anytime soon: 2020 will see Atkins’ work in Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, and in Anderson’s The French Dispatch. In the meantime, there’s her book, which is as much a love letter to the magic of movie-making as it is a showcase for Atkins herself. She’s passionate about the tiny, telling details; Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket, the fortune teller machine’s card in Big, Jack Torrance’s piles of typewritten paper in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
And she’s just as passionate about the graft of her craft: there are spreads in her book devoted to everything from her collections of ephemera (cardboard bottle tops, Egyptian cinema tickets) to recipes for ageing paper (tea, Brasso, balsamic vinegar and potassium permanganate all make the cut).
To top it off, the book opens with a love letter to Atkins from none other than Jeff Goldblum. “Annie makes the unreal seem hyper real,” he writes, “and the real more supremely alive and utterly magical.”
Fake Love Letters, Forged Telegrams & Prison Escape Maps: Designing Graphic Props for Filmmaking is published in February (Phaidon, £24.95)
