page_title: Hotel Chevalier
section_title: Background and production
hierarchical_section_title: Hotel Chevalier / Background and production
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Hôtel Raphaël, à Paris (17, Avenue Kléber, XVIe arr) English: Hotel Raphaël, in Paris
context_page_description: Hotel Chevalier is an American-French short film written and directed by Wes Anderson and released in 2007. Starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman as former lovers who reunite in a Paris hotel room, the 13-minute film acts as a prologue to Anderson's 2007 feature The Darjeeling Limited. It was shot on location in a Parisian hotel by a small crew and self-financed by Anderson, who initially intended it to be a stand-alone work. Its first showing was at the Venice Film Festival première of the feature film on September 2, 2007, and it made its own debut later that month at Apple Stores in four U.S. cities.
  The day after the film's première, it was made freely available from the iTunes Store for one month, during which time it was downloaded more than 500,000 times. The film garnered near universal critical acclaim from reviewers, who compared it favorably to The Darjeeling Limited and praised its richness, poignancy, and careful construction.
context_section_description: Wes Anderson first approached Schwartzman and Portman about Hotel Chevalier in 2005. Schwartzman and Anderson had previously worked on Rushmore (1998), Anderson's cult second feature, and had been living together in Schwartzman's Paris apartment in the months leading up to the shoot. Portman was approached after the director obtained her email address from Scott Rudin, executive producer of 2004's Closer in which she starred. The actors appeared for free, and Anderson financed the remainder of the production himself.
  It was filmed at the Hôtel Raphael in Paris, on Avenue Kléber, two blocks south-southwest of the Arc de Triomphe. The Hôtel Raphael had previously been used as a setting for the films Love in Paris (1996) and Place Vendôme (1998). It was shot by a crew of 15 in Panavision and used props from Anderson's apartment. Filming took two and a half days, and editing (done on Anderson's computer) another week. Despite his use of a wardrobe from prestigious fashion designer Marc Jacobs and a handmade suitcase from Louis Vuitton, the director described the production as "like making a student film".
  Anderson initially intended it to be a stand-alone short film, but shortly before filming commenced, he realized that Schwartzman's character bore a close resemblance to one of the protagonists of a feature film he was writing at the time. That film would begin production a year later as The Darjeeling Limited. Chevalier takes place two weeks before Schwartzman's character (named Jack Whitman in the feature) joins his two older brothers on a journey in India in Darjeeling. The dialogue between the characters at the end of Chevalier is recounted by Schwartzman's character to his brothers at the close of the feature film, in the form of an excerpt from a short story he has composed. Portman's character has a brief cameo in the feature. Fox Searchlight Pictures, the studio that backed Darjeeling, was unaware of the short until the feature had been made and claimed to have no financial interest in it.
caption: The Hôtel Raphaël in Paris, which was used as the Hotel Chevalier of the film's title and where all of the scenes were shot
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