Die Tischrede is a book made for excess love for cinema. This self-initiated project, made just for fun, contains 80 pages with dialogues from the history of cult movies. Just as Die Tischrede (German for “after-dinner speech”) suggests, the book is developed by telling and representing the speeches that best represent films analysed by using the original scripts and frames of individual scenes. The featured films are: Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino, The Lobster, Kynodontas, Alps by Yorgos Lanthimos, and Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson.

In Moonrise Kingdom (2012), preteens Suzy and Sam run away together from their respective homes on their fictional island of New Penzance. To create this book, I gathered three interviews of director Wes Anderson, and integrated different graphic elements of the film, from the gingham cloth to the typeface Tilda created by Jessica Hische for the movie poster, or the watermark from Suzy’s stationery, in order to create a unique editorial design that captures the movie’s 1960s feel that Anderson characterizes as the “Memory of a Fantasy”.

Texts are set in a combination of Compagnon Light (designed by Juliette Duhé and Léa Pradine) and DM Serif Display – a derivative of Frank Grießhammer’s Source Serif by Colophon.

The new special issue of French cinema magazine La Septième Obsession is dedicated to filmmaker Wes Anderson, with a 132-pages focus on the topic.

Naturally, Futura was chosen for this issue (Futura Black was already chosen for the James Bond special issue), in light of Wes Anderson’s frequent use of this typeface. Of the various cover variants, the cover for Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou features a slightly different title, with Futura shown in outline.

Inside this issue, we find other fonts used for Wes Anderson movies such as Tilda and Archer.

Chapter opening featuring exclusive illustration from Charles Berberian (The New Yorker)

Futura contours for Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Stylized Futura for The Darjeeling Limited title.

Tilda for Moonrise Kingdom title – as used in the movie.

Stylized Futura for The Grand Budapest Hotel title.

Stylized Archer font for the upcoming movie The French Dispatch.

The word “PRESS” on the newsstand is written in FF DIN. The two signs below seem to use Toronto Gothic.

This use focuses on the morning edition of the Trans-Alpine Yodel of the October 19th 1932, as featured in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2013) — see also this previous post about the movie poster and some other props used in the film.

We can notice that all the typefaces used in the newspaper from the Republic of Zubrowka have origins that lie before 1932.

For the newspaper’s masthead, Münchner Fraktur is mixed with a T and A from Old English. The main headline uses Cheltenham.

Body copy is typeset in Romana, and Fletcher was picked for the tragic “Dowager Countess Found Dead in Boudoir”. Fletcher is a revival of Lettres Angulaires, a typeface with arrow-like serifs, originally issued in ca. 1865 by the Beaudoire & Cie foundry in Paris.

Flash-based website (archived).

Theatrical release poster, using Archer.

Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel is remarkable for numberous reasons, but the use of typefaces may not have been largely discussed yet. While Anderson has made extensive, and nearly exclusive, use of Futura for all of his movie titles and posters until Moonrise Kingdom (where he opted for a custom typeface, designed by Jessica Hische), he has employed Archer for The Grand Budapest Hotel. The countless number of graphic props that were designed by Annie Atkins include packaging, stationery, banknotes, postage stamps, signage, keychains, gates, flags, shopfronts, menus, passports, books and local newspapers:

The Continental Drift, using Beaufort. Headline using DIN.

The Trans-Alpine Yodel, using Old English and Münchner Fraktur. Headline using a faux-bolded Trajan. The text is set in a Garamond.

The Daily Fact, using a modified Russian. Headlines using an outlined Bebas and DIN.

Another edition of the Trans-Alpine Yodel, this time following The New York Times’ lead with Cheltenham.

Pitch-perfect 1970s props from Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums”.

These book and magazine covers all appear in Wes Anderson’s tale of an extended family with literary distinction (and, in one case, athletic infamy). — Criterion