Wes Anderson made an entire animated Grand Budapest Hotel, too, according to Jeff Goldblum

The Wrap interviewed Jeff Goldblum (The Fly, Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) recently in advance of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, which will be out in limited release next Friday, March 7. In the interview, Goldblum claimed that Anderson had essentially made an animated version of the entire film before shooting began, and shared it with the actors. Quoth Mr. Goldblum, “It was a beautifully animated version of the whole movie, with all the cuts as they pretty much I think wound up to be. And he voiced all the characters. He called it animatics. I had it on my computer, you could see the whole movie.” While it’s not unusual for directors to use animatics—which are basically crude animations, a step up from storyboards—it is unusual for them to be as detailed as Goldblum describes, and certainly unusual for a director to also act the whole thing out with his voice. Here’s hoping the Criterion Collection—which just released a beautiful, exhaustive Fantastic Mr. Fox disc—will convince Anderson to release this odd bit of history. Trailer below! (Oh, and check out Newswire next week, Chicagoans, as we’ll have some passes to an early screening.)