Wes Anderson’s ticket to

“The Darjeeling Limited”

 

Build a beautiful blue train, with special ceiling tracks to hang a camera from, put it on some rails in the northern regions of India, load it up with three appealing, idiosyncratic young actors, including one Oscar winner, and set the train rolling: That’s how director Wes Anderson shot his new picture “The Darjeeling Limited.”

By: Glenn Kenny*

 

Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman play Francis, Peter and Jack Whitman, three brothers who haven’t spoken to each other for a year since the traumatic death of their father, whose baggage they still literally carry with them. Francis calls his brothers to the title train in hope of making “a spiritual journey,” but, as their often-hilarious squabbles and ad-hoc alliances make clear, there’s a lot of karmic damage that needs clearing here.

 

Anderson co-wrote the picture with co-star Schwartzman, who remains best known as Max Fisher in Anderson’s “Rushmore” (1998), and Roman Coppola, son of Francis and brother of Sofia, who was a second-unit director on Anderson’s last feature, “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” (2004).

At festival and press screenings the film has been prefaced by a short, “Hotel Chevalier,” featuring Schwartzman as Jack Whitman and Natalie Portman as Jack’s particularly troublesome and troubled paramour. The movie is available for download from iTunes.

QUESTION: I’m glad that ‘Hotel Chevalier,’ the short film that’s “Part 1” of “The Darjeeling Limited,” is readily available on iTunes, because I think it means so much to the rest of the movie. The movie’s not only about these three brothers and their relationships, but also about stories and storytelling and the fictions that people create to cope. Youngest brother Jack may be the actual writer of the three, but older brother Francis has this sense of wanting to control life through his itineraries, while Peter is taking on the material things that belonged to his late dad as a way of maintaining the relationship with his dad.

 

WES ANDERSON: Both of these movies, but in particular the short, I felt like, “I want to make this thing right now, and then I think I can move on to the next chapter in what I’m going through personally.” And that was just what it was for me. That’s completely what it’s about. 

 

Q: This film comes some time after another project was announced, an animated film, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” What’s happening with that?

 

ANDERSON: Yeah, well, we’ve just started it. Originally we were going to make that movie a couple of years ago, and it was with Revolution. And then Revolution went out of business, pretty much, and our project went with it. So then we had to get it back and then take it and find another place, which ended up being 20th Century Fox.

And so we only got really green-lit in the last couple of months, so we’ve started designing the characters.

 

Q: This is a return to working with Jason Schwartzman after “Rushmore,” in which he only acted. What was it in your interactions with Jason that made you pick him as a writing collaborator?

 

ANDERSON: Well, Jason has such a unique mind and point of view. And he has a great way with words.

He’ll always surprise you with the metaphor that he’s going to use to communicate what he’s saying to you. He’ll be talking to you about something and he;ll say, “and that was the bungee cord that I needed,” or some weird thing – he’ll compare a bungee cord to somebody saying a kind word to him!

So the originality of his mind, plus that I wanted him to act in this. You know, I had been wanting to do something with Jason for a long time, and I thought of him as I came up with the idea of doing a movie on a train, and then I was thinking of “Hotel Chevalier” and kind of connecting those.

Roman had worked with me on “Life Aquatic,” and was so valuable. And I got to know Roman better during this process, but I’ve known Roman for a long time and he’s such a gentleman that I just thought, “You know, we should just try writing together,” even though we hadn’t done anything like that before.

And then, as soon as it was the three of us sitting together, trying to dream up a story, I was just having fun. And I was writing things down, and we were inventing something. So it was very exciting.

 

Q: Jason said that there was a lot of talk, a lot of time spent in cafes, a lot of i-chatting. But eventually there’s the point where there has to be the distillation process, to create the working script. Where was the line of demarcation when that happened, and who took charge of the actual distilling, as it were?

 

ANDERSON: Well, I’m the guy who writes it down, and I’m the guy who’s in charge of the physical object of the script ... What we would do together was expand on it, and then I would maybe pull it in a little. And then we spent a lot of time rewriting it. There is sort of an epic version of this movie that exists in our heads, because we’ve really written it out much, much further. And it needed to be simplified in a lot of ways.

 

Q: What I found interesting about the characters is the way they come together, their differences and the way they create these affinities between and against each other. Is that something based on your personal experience within your own family, or a common theme for Roman or Jason?

 

ANDERSON: (Laughs) I’ve definitely been in moments with my brothers when suddenly we all seemed to be agreeing on the wrong thing – that it would be a great idea if we could convince our youngest brother to hang onto the bumper of the car while we drive across this ice or something. That I feel like is familiar to me.

 

Q: I enjoyed the way you used Adrien’s physicality, the way he’s dressed. He appears in the frame sometimes almost as a diacritical mark. Also his face, it’s very almost Heckle and Jeckle. He doesn’t do a lot of comedies, but, while he’s very human here, there’s also almost a cartoon-like aspect to him.

 

ANDERSON: I think he’s got a great face. And it’s a face made for the movies – but in the way that Buster Keaton is, not in the way Robert Redford is. And he’s very charismatic.

The other thing is, he has this wonderful voice. There’s so much emotion in his voice. I’ve always admired him in movies. But I did feel like the way he looks is such a strong visual. And I love that.

The first time I saw them together in their costumes, Owen with the bandages and Adrien with his whole thing, I was very excited, because I could tell that they were enjoying seeing each other like that, too, when they were getting into it.

 

Q: And they’ve got this comic timing that’s really unique to them, their modes as performers, that just works so beautifully. Did that emerge very quickly?

 

ANDERSON: Well, they got to know each other quite quickly, because we had it set up where we were all living in a house together, so everybody was with each other all the time, and then the situation where we were working was everybody had to stay on the set all the time.

And they were discovering India together. I mean, Jason had been before, with me and Roman, Adrien had been on a trip before and he had traveled around India a little bit, but nevertheless we were all foreigners. I think that, just being in this place that’s such an overload and so exciting, and experiencing it together, you really become friends fast.