Never say the MTV Movie Awards are entirely useless: For many, the left-field award given to Wes Anderson's 1996 debut feature Bottle Rocket was a first introduction to one of American film's most distinctive stylists, comic or otherwise. Written with longtime friend and collaborator Owen Wilson, Bottle Rocket established Anderson's knack for lacing whimsical comedy with a touch of melancholy, and launched Wilson's stardom. Anderson's reputation didn't take off until his 1998 follow-up Rushmore; from there, he made two ambitious ensemble pieces about family, the bittersweet New York tale The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, his eccentric first crack at a major studio production.
Anderson has returned to family themes with The Darjeeling Limited, a typically luxuriant travelogue about three estranged brothers (Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Rushmore star Jason Schwartzman, who also co-wrote the script with Anderson and Roman Coppola) crossing India by train. Anderson recently spoke to The A.V. Club about the pleasures of Indian "chaos," his acclaimed commercial work, and why his movies seem to improve on second viewing.
The A.V. Club: Darjeeling Limited's basic premise could be set against any number of backdrops. Why India?
Wes Anderson: In the end, India is really the subject matter of the movie as much as anything else is. I wanted to go to India because of movies I had seen that were set there, which I had watched over the years, and one particular book called The Photographs Of Chachaji by Ved Mehta. He used to write for The New Yorker pretty frequently, and it's a very good book. I sort of developed a fascination with India after reading it.
But along with my own interest in India, and my own affection for the country, the story that Jason, Roman, and I dreamed up together is about these three brothers who want to take a very programmed, spiritual journey of enlightenment, with laminated itineraries. And for somebody who would like to do that, and thinks that that might work, India might be at the top of their list of places to go and try it.
AVC: It would also be a place where a precise itinerary would be impossible to follow.
WA: Well, I don't know if it would work anywhere, but India would be the last place in the world it would. India is a place where one of the great pleasures for a foreigner is that you're constantly surprised. Everywhere you look is something that is either funny, or very moving, but there is always so much that is so unexpected. That's part of the reason why people who like it tend to love it.
AVC: India tends to evoke chaos, but your movies are very orderly. Was there a conflict there?
WA: I love the feeling of chaos that you feel when you are in India, but a lot of making a movie is about order. You make a schedule, and you try to stick to it, and the better you plan, the better off you are in the end, in most cases. But our approach with this movie was very much that whatever went wrong, we were going to make that part of our story. If the hut was brown, and we left for the evening, and when we came back, the hut was painted blue with flowers all over it because somebody thought that it would be a good idea, that's the way we were going to use it in the story. That happened. And that is the sort of thing that happens all the time. The bumps in the road can be so peculiar, and that was what we wanted the movie to be about.
AVC: Did the film surprise you in how differently it turned out than what was planned?
WA: People seem to think that my movies are so carefully coordinated and arranged—and in a lot of ways, they are—but every single time I make a movie, I feel that every director makes these choices. You make choices about your script, you make choices about your actors, and how you're going to stage it, and how you're going to shoot it, and what the costumes are going to be like, and in every single detail, you make that decision. And for me, what ends up happening is, I wind up surprised at the combination of all these ingredients. It never is anything like what I expected. That was certainly the case with this movie. In the end, it doesn't resemble anything like what I had in my mind. And yet, piece by piece, they were all things we chose together along the way.
AVC: How well-schooled were you in Indian culture before embarking on this project? Had you spent much time there?
WA: I think I continue to be not well-schooled at all in Indian culture or history, because there is so much there. I've only been going there for a few years, and I started to go there because I wanted to work there. Satyajit Ray's films are part of what drew me to India, and I've seen and know a lot of his work. I know niches. But the movie's from the point of view of a Western tourist, and that's what I've always felt like there.
AVC: While this film has a luxuriant, exotic look that really isn't like Ray's work, you use a lot of wonderful music from his work. What kind of influence did he have on the film?
WA: For me, Ray was one of the ideal role models for the kind of director I would like to be. He's somebody who wrote his own scripts. He often adapted books, but he also created his own material. He was regional and had his own area in West Bengali, around Calcutta, where he worked. He had his own sources of money. He had a little family operation to make his movies, and he made a lot of movies. And they're often very personal.
Somewhere along the way, he started composing the scores for his movies, which I recently heard was for expediency, because he felt like he could turn them around a lot faster than what he was getting from the people he was working with. He didn't have enough money to wait for them to take longer. Anyway, I loved these movies. Somewhere along the line of writing this movie, I pulled one of Ray's scores I wanted to use at the beginning, and then realized there was a second one I wanted to use later on. We didn't really know how much we were going to use until we were in the cutting room. But the movie is wall to wall with music from Ray's films and from Merchant-Ivory's films up until [the three brothers] are kicked off the train.
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