NEW YORK—Director Wes Anderson is sitting in a small conference room at a boutique Tribeca inn, mulling over a long-gone age of travel in great European hotels, when deferential concierges made things run like clockwork.

A version of these concierges indicated where to find the room for my meeting with Anderson, who seemed to be responding to a hint of first spring warmth in New York with his pale lemon-coloured sweater.

But the hipsters in sharp suits displayed the cool politeness of modern hotel staff, content to just point the way rather than escort a guest, unlike the by-the-book Monsieur Gustave H., the central character of Anderson’s new movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

The writer-director of Moonrise Kingdom, Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Royal Tenenbaums introduces audiences to a new and destined-to-be-beloved character with Gustave. An unyielding traditionalist, he is the longtime, dedicated concierge of the titular hotel, played with hugely engaging style by Ralph Fiennes. For him, service is all — and the varied services he provides add heart and humour to the proceedings.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, which has been delighting critics since its premiere at the Berlin film festival, opens March 14. Inspired by the writings of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, whose novels were chronicles of life in pre-war Europe, Anderson created a fictional country for his story of Gustave and his protégé, the lobby boy, Zero (played by newcomer Tony Revolori).

The film opens in more modern times as a young writer (Jude Law) explores the now-shabby, communist-era hotel and tries to delve into its past. I try to recall a line from the film that helps define who Gustave is — and mangle it.

Anderson cheerfully picks it up and continues: “And Murray’s (F. Murray Abraham, who plays Law’s host, Mr. Moustafa) line was: ‘to be frank I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it, but he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvellous grace.’ That’s the line in the movie, I think.”

“The character is partly based on an old friend of mine,” Anderson said of Gustave. “He’s not a hotel concierge; he doesn’t work in a hotel. But yeah, there’s a real person who is the role model for this.”

Like Gustave, the fellow is fond of calling people, male or female, “darling.”

“The main thing is he talks like this (Gustave) character and the character expresses his many ideas and its kind of language and he recites poetry,” said Anderson, who co-wrote the script for The Grand Budapest Hotel with British artist and frequent collaborator, Hugo Guinness. “Ralph Fiennes has made him into something else but Ralph retains something. Ralph knows our friend too, and so anyway he’s definitely in there.”

Anderson found inspiration to have his characters mourn the loss of the gilded age of grand hotels in Zweig’s writings.

“My interest in Stefan Zweig’s work is quite a personal thing to me,” Anderson said. “It’s not about me; it’s about him. It’s still something I’m very invested in.”

He has some knowledge of the hospitality industry, having worked as a busboy, but “I was never in an environment that had these kinds of standards.” For that, Anderson turned to artist and gourmet Ludwig Bemelmans’ 1946 book Hotel Bemelmans for insight.

“That gives a very good description of the world of running a grand hotel and particularly the dining room of a grand hotel and in our movie,” Anderson explained. That’s where he picked up the fact all concierges are called “monsieur so-and-so,” he explained.

Layered among Zweig’s impressions are influences from films that pre-date the American censorship restrictions in the 1930s that embodied “real wild energy and exuberance” and the slapstick sensibilities of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, which surface in a manic Winter Olympic sports-themed chase scene.

“For me, my whole take on this story is it doesn’t come from my own experience. So really I’m parodying Stefan’s (Zweig) vibe and others in their mourning of the disappearance of something they cherish,” Anderson explained. “His whole memoir is really the expression of this great loss of this world that he began to grow up in that began to implode, self-destruct, in 1914.”

As with all Anderson films, there’s a definite look to The Grand Budapest Hotel, a deliberate artfulness spiked with quirkiness that extends to the beautiful pink exterior of the confection-like hotel and the stylish banners with art deco typography unfurled by the fascist troops that take over the hotel.

“We kind of thought for the old hotel, make it like a wedding cake or an ice-cream parlour. Sort of pastel and that sort of thing,” he said. “The communist (modern) version of the hotel is more like what American telephones look like in the ’70s, those kinds of weird colours.”

Anderson, who turns 45 on May 1, said he doesn’t waste time considering the nature of his filmmaking style.

“I don’t think about having a style any more than I do about turning 45,” he said. “It doesn’t do me any good to think about that. What I think about is, what am I going to do now? I want to come up with something — and it’s not like I have 50 different things and I’m going to pick and choose — where do I go?

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“I usually just have one thing I’m lucky enough to think up that I can manage to get going to make my next one,” said Anderson. “Each time I’m doing a movie, to me I’m doing something completely different. I’ve got a new group of characters, a new setting, a new story. A different, oh, let’s say emotion or whatever it is that I have in mind.”

But it’s not an easy sell for those who prefer to pigeonhole the director. Even his agent isn’t immune. He was full of praise for Budapest Hotel after a first screening, but then asked Anderson: “Should we do something different?”

Anderson laughed. “I just did something different, what are you talking about?” I have a new one, this is a totally different movie!”