Ralph Fiennes recreated Roald Dahl’s “little rituals” before shooting his scenes in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.

Wes Anderson’s latest Dahl adaptation, which tells the story of a guru who can see without his eyes, stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Sir Ben Kingsley, and Fiennes as the famed author himself.

In an interview with Deadline, The Grand Budapest Hotel filmmaker revealed that Fiennes mimicked Dahl’s preparations on set to get himself ready for a take and they decided to put them into the short film.

“When we started filming Henry Sugar, Ralph was on set, in the little space that’s a recreation of Dahl’s workspace, and I could hear him talking to himself. I said, ‘Tell me what you’re saying,'” he recalled. “It turned out that he’d been observing Dahl from the archival stuff I’d sent him, and he knew Dahl’s little rituals. He was acting them out on his own, just in preparation. And I was like, ‘Start over, start over! We’ll film this!'”

He added, “And so, the movie begins with Ralph completely improvising. Every take was a bit different, because it’s Ralph just sort of channeling Dahl getting ready to write. Ralph is so interesting and authentic.”

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is now streaming on Netflix alongside Anderson’s three other short adaptations of Dahl’s works – Poison, The Rat Catcher and The Swan.

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