Using remarkable films as inspiration for literary design explorations can coalesce into brand elevating content and entertaining reads. I’m a movie lover so I’m always excited when I hit upon an idea that intermingles films, design and literature.

One of my all-time favorite films for the quirkiness of its set is The Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson. It just so happens, it is also the favorite movie of a young writer, Miles Stephenson, who did a guest blog post for me after a trip we’d spent stalking the Lost Generation in Paris. His brilliant idea was to contrast and compare the writing of Ernest Hemingway and Anderson. Guess who we happened to bump into one evening at Chez Georges? The movie director himself, whose pictured in the post with Miles, a beaming fan!

I used a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, The Panther, as inspiration for an exploration of the film Assassination Tango coupled with a trip to the zoo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which Robert Duvall’s character in the film visits in order to see the black panther there. Titled Ode to the Panther, the diary entry finds me reading Rilke’s poem to the lethargic panther who is languishing in the summer heat. It was one of my strangest literary adventures to date!

I’m also in Argentina when I channel Sally Potter and her film The Tango Lesson, traipsing around town photographing a young Argentine woman whose narrative I’ve invented finds her searching for her milonguero who has cut out on her! Potter’s film remains one of my favorites about this remarkable dance and its ability to break hearts, which I explore in The Architecture of Tango. There are many more posts in my repertoire that explore film. I hope you enjoy my quirky point of view as I’m looking at them from a cultural perspective.