Director Wes Anderson. (Henny Ray Abrams/Associated Press)
At 38, director Wes Anderson is not a kid. Yet somehow, one expects him to be child-like, perhaps because of the sense of wonder that propels his modish movies like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. Anderson’s latest is The Darjeeling Limited, a gentle, meticulously designed (of course) road movie about three brothers, played by Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson, who travel through India in the wake of their father’s death.
In a blink-it’s-over, six-minute interview in a Toronto boutique hotel, Anderson sat very upright on an awkward chaise longue (“I have to go on that?” he asked quietly to no one in particular as he entered), his shaggy hair framing a slightly pained expression that was alternately wide open — yes, childlike — and hipster wary. Anderson talked to CBCnews.ca about Indian trains, Roald Dahl and not Owen Wilson.
Q: Have you read the reviews of The Darjeeling Limited?
A:I’ve read some. I’m always interested, but there’s not usually that much you can learn from it because there’s never any consensus. Sometimes you can see patterns emerge, but it’s usually so hard to gauge that it’s not useful.
Q: The kind of sensory onslaught of India is something you really capture in the film. Did you have to grow to love its madness?
A: I think it was immediate for me. I also went with the idea that I’d work there, so I was really up for it. I wanted to love the place. For some people, it’s sort of too much, but I was interested in too much. I went once on my own, and then I brought Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola to go work there, to write the script with me. I wanted to make sure that they connected with the place so I was really sort of like a salesman, an Indian tourism promoter. But I’m really suited to being there. I felt really comfortable as soon as I got there, and I always miss it when I’m not there.
Q: The Darjeeling Limited is the train on which the three brothers travel, and you dealt with Indian bureaucracy to procure an actual Indian train, and then decorated it so precisely. Where does this attention to detail come from in you?
A: It seemed like what’s the point of bringing everybody to India and going into a soundstage? We could do that in Burbank [in California]. I thought if we’re going to play a third of the movie in this train compartment, we obviously need something out the window that’s real. I feel like you can probably tell that it’s a real train. The other thing is for the actors: It’s real to them, they’re really doing it. For all of us, every day was an adventure because we all got on this train together in the morning, came back seven hours later. It made it more like the story we were telling.
Wes Anderson, left, speaks with actor Owen Wilson, far right, on the set of The Darjeeling Limited. (Fox Searchlight)
Q: You co-wrote this with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, but I think of writing as such a solitary act. What did it look like when you were writing together?
A: I actually physically write it myself. I think there’s probably quite a difference between writing a novel or an essay and preparing a film. It’s going to be spoken, it’s going to be performed, so when we’re writing, we’re all playing the scenes together. The scenes are meant to be played, and the process for us was figuring out what our story was going to be and what from our personal experience was going to go into it. It’s all built from our lives. We wanted to make this a very personal experience for whatever reason.
Q: What do you mean? What personal experiences of yours are in the film?
A: I don’t really want to go into the details. My way of talking about it is to do the movie. I have two brothers. The other relationships that are in the movie come from me and Roman and Jason’s lives. We had sort of a romanticized idea that we wanted something to happen to us like the transformation that happens to the characters.
Q: And did that happen?
A: The fact that we did have such a romanticized view of it, in the end, that almost guided how it turned out. We went to this place that we didn’t know. We went as tourists and we learned a great deal about this place, and made friends in a place we had never been. Then we got to share some of it. It was moving for us.
Q: I saw this in a theatre soon after Owen Wilson had been hospitalized, and the audience seemed to murmur when he first came on all bandaged.
A: Really? That’s odd, because you’d think people would be used to it. Those posters and that image of the bandages is everywhere.
Q: Well, there’s a lot of affection for him in the public. It was a supportive murmur, I think. Has it changed your experience of promoting this film having that event in the background?
A: No.
Q: Okay, fair enough. What happened to the train with all the beautiful artwork on it?
A: We rented it from the Indian government. Most of the exterior was the way we received it. We had local painters painting the elephants all over it, other guys were painting the walls with these Rajasthani patterns. We built the compartment, but everything we did to it, we had to undo. The train got split up again. Different cars went to different places, and it went back into service somewhere in India. Back to work.
Q: And when do you go back to work? You told a reporter that your next film was going to get away from the theme of family, and into the theme of foxes?
A: An adaptation of a Roald Dahl story, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. We’re doing it in stop motion. I like that technique, it’s kind of old-fashioned. I made a script for this with Noah Baumbach [The Squid and the Whale] and I liked the script we made. George Clooney is going to play the fox.
The Darjeeling Limited opened in select theatres on Oct. 5.
Katrina Onstad writes for CBCnews.ca Arts.
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