All aboard the Anderson express
There was a bit of a pall over the recent
premiere of The Darjeeling Limited at the Venice Film
Festival. It was the 75th anniversary of the world's oldest festival,
and what should have been a joyous moment was clouded with the
knowledge that good friend Owen Wilson had tried to commit suicide
a week earlier. He survived and director Wes Anderson told the
assembled press that his friend "was doing well". Ironically enough,
Wilson, who has collaborated on all of Anderson's five films to
date, plays a guy who tries to commit suicide in The Darjeeling
Limited. It's the catalyst for the story. Francis (Wilson)
decides its time to reunite with his two estranged brothers (Adrien
Brody and Jason Schwartzman) and so the three embark on a 'spiritual'
train trip across India. Gaynor Flynn caught up with Wes Anderson
and Jason Schwartzman at the Italian festival, and here's what
they had to say.
What
made you decide to make a film in India?
Wes Anderson: I like so much about India and it's
a place that I have so much affection for. It gets under your
skin and that's what happened to me. I feel it's a place where
I feel like a real foreigner and I feel like a very odd person.
My experience there is that you're stared at all the time. People
just look at you as if you're the craziest thing they've ever
seen and yet at the same time there's a feeling of being welcomed,
which is not my experience of America at all. I think that they're
much more inviting to visitors and outsiders in India.
It's amazing how easy it fits into your particular
universe.
Wes Anderson: Well you know it's a very vibrant
place and one thing in India is that you're never really alone
and part of our policy with the movie was that we weren't going
to try and control what we found there. We weren't going to build
sets I mean it's a place where you just need to pick which direction
to look in and there's something interesting [going on] so we
were just going to see what we discovered there. In the finished
movie, if we freeze frame on a shot we would always be surprised
at all the people in the shot that we didn't realise were in there,
but we didn't try to control it and India became the subject matter
of the movie just because of its incredibly strong presence.
Did you write the script in India?
Wes Anderson: Well I went to India with Jason and
Roman (Coppola) and we sort of tried to recreate the idea of the
movie which had not been fully written. We'd written half of and
we went on a train and we travelled all over India and I was basically
playing the Francis character and I had us doing every possible
thing that could be considered spiritual or ritualistic in any
way we would do. And I really did have stickers on our foreheads
all the time and things wrapped around our arms and waving our
hands through smoke and doing anything and participating in things
we didn't understand.
How long did you go for?
Wes Anderson: A month and we wrote and we had a
printer with us on the train and we'd print out our pages and
I plugged it into the wrong socket and it short circuited everything
and that all went into the script and then we went back and wrote
more in Paris and New York. We wove in a lot of things we found
out there and that all became a part of the story and we looked
for more locations in India, we went back and spent more time
in India and we kept putting it all in the script.
Why set it on a train?
Wes Anderson: I like the idea of a movie where
you have a set and you have your character and they're playing
their scenes but the set is moving across the country. Just the
idea of that is appealing to me. I've always liked train movies,
for that reason I think.
Did you know the short, Hotel Chevalier, was
going to be the prologue to the movie?
Wes Anderson: Well by the time we shot the short
I had figured that the 
two
went together but when we first started it [the short], it was
it's own separate thing. It's only as we continued to work on
the movie and got ready to shoot the short which we shot sometime
before the movie that we started incorporating things from the
short into the movie so the two kind of grew together but were
separate films. It really wasn't that preconceived which is why
its ended up being this strange situation where there's two completely
separate films but if you hadn't seen the short you really don't
know what Natalie Portman is doing in that shot at the end of
the movie.
You said when you went to India you liked being
in an environment you couldn't control. Why?
Wes Anderson: I just liked the idea of doing this
movie in circumstances I could not control because it helps me
be not too controlling. I decided beforehand if we're going to
do this, if we're going to go to India and make a movie I didn't
want it to be a big continual struggle and be fighting against
something that's impossible to master. Instead I wanted to embrace
whatever comes our way and incorporate it into the movie and that's
what we tried to do. We tried to work with the surprises.
It's a very positive movie, was that your intent?
Wes Anderson: I feel like it was a very positive
experience for me mostly because of the people that I worked with
who went I went through all this with and together.
The scene with Adrien Brody and the child is
quite daring. It's a comedy essentially, yet you show the death
of this child.
Wes Anderson: Right especially in comedies it kills
a few of the laughs. It was one of the basic ideas of the movie
that at a certain point that was going to happen and it was going
to take something like that to turn the movie 180 degrees and
basically what happens at that point is in the story nobody says
anything for like 10 minutes. There's a long stretch where they
stop talking and not very much happens, they just sit there in
that village and for me that's sort of what the movies about.
The whole point of the movie really is to make something people
are going to want to see and that they see something that is a
positive experience for them. So I don't have any interest in
shocking the audience or being cruel to them but I do feel that
it is a scene that needs to come on strong if its going to do
what its meant to do dramatically.
Why is that the turning point?
Wes Anderson: for me the story is these guys who
have this idea of this enlightening experience they want to go
through and in fact not only are they not in touch and open to
the place that they're visiting, they're not even really listening
to each other. They're not even open to each other and they're
trying to do something that's very controlled and what unexpectedly
happens to them throws everything out the window and the plan
upside down and they end up unable to stay focused on themselves.
They have no choice. And I'm no expert on this but my experience
of India is that people's approach and ideas about death are so
radically different to the western ones, and it really is quite
surprising in some ways and that really fascinated me about India.
Jason,
had you been to India before?
Jason Schwartzman: No my only knowledge of India
before going there was the Beatles documentary footage of them
in Rishikesh and the whole White Album period and most of the
things I knew were from stories from like George Harrison and
Ghandi the film. But Wes, Roman and I went there for 4 weeks and
that's like almost a year in the writing of the movie and then
we went back to shoot it.
Was it a cultural shock for you?
Jason Schwartzman: I think the cultural shock happens
when you return from India. I think going there I was so excited
and trying to understand the environment and trying to understand
Wes in the environment because he really loves it there. He'd
been there before so he was our defacto leader even though he
didn't know it very well and he'd be like we've got to go to this
temple. And we'd follow him and he was very excited about India
and so were we but it was exciting for me to see Wes throw himself
so wholeheartedly into the place. But when I got back to Los Angeles
that was the shock because it felt empty or something, it seemed
not populated.
When you went on the train trip, did you become
like the mediator like your character does in the film?
Jason Schwartzman: No we pretty naturally would
fall into a certain dynamic but it's not identical to the movie
at all. We don't fight first of all, we talk about things, and
we don't yell and throw belts at each other. I don't even wear
a belt. But when we act out a scene Wes would always play Francis
character and Roman would play Peter and I'd play Jack but on
the train I wasn't the mediator.
Do you enjoy working in this community with
friends?
Jason Schwartzman: In terms of working with your
friends, Wes told me he just wants to make films with the people
he likes and that are his friends and that's the way he'd like
to make films. As an actor you don't have as much control over
that. Wes can because of his role on a film set, cast people he
wants and hire the people he wants but as an actor I can't hire
you know the crew that I think are the nicest. And I've worked
with people I don't know and I love all experiences. I love all
atmospheres of working as long as they try to stay positive; I'm
up for anything. I don't like overtly negative working environments
so much.
What to you is appealing about this story?
Jason Schwartzman: I would be interested in seeing
a movie about three brothers, I come from three brothers so I
get that dynamic but these three guys going on a train ride through
India where anything can happen, where it's very unpredictable
and just the idea of them trying to have a spiritual experience
is funny. The idea that you would force that, that you think you
can control something so powerful is hysterical to me. And the
idea that Owen's character brought these guys together and he
says lets have a spiritual experience, and within the first 20
minutes of the movie they're all taking drugs and telling each
other secrets and telling them not to tell the other one and I
love that kind of set up and I think they get to a point where
they try to control it so much they can't control it and the second
they get off the train, the second they really go off the spiritual
itinerary the real trip happens. And I think that's just unexpected
fun.
Gaynor Flynn
