Wes Anderson on the set of The Darjeeling Limited Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

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(posted 10/19/07)
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, among others, three appealing, idiosyncratic young actors (including one Oscar winner) and set the train rolling — that's how director Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) shot his new picture The Darjeeling Limited. Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody (the Oscar winner — for The Pianist), 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 — literally — still carry with them). Francis calls them together to the title train in hopes 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.

Click for interviews with Darjeeling Limited's Brody, Schwartzman, more

Anderson cowrote the picture with costar Schwartzman (who was, of course, so memorable as Max Fisher in Rushmore) and Roman Coppola (son of Francis, brother of Sofia), who was a second unit director on Anderson's last feature, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. At festival and press screenings the film is prefaced by a short, Hotel Chevalier, featuring Schwartzman playing Jack Whitman and Natalie Portman as a particularly troublesome and troubled paramour. The movie is available for download from iTunes. When Premiere sat down to talk with Anderson recently, it seemed proper to start with the short, and then the process via which Anderson, Schwartzman, and Coppola dreamed up the Whitman brothers.

I'm glad that Hotel Chevalier, the short film that's "Part One" 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 just about these three brothers and their relationships, but it's 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 their relationship with his dad.
It's thematically related, yes, but in fact the movie itself, in particular the short, had that quality you're talking about — it was exactly that for me, a way to cope and deal with certain… just whatever, just whatever was happening in my life. 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.

This film comes some time after another project was announced, an animated film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. What's happening with that?
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 now we only got really green lit in the last couple of months. So we've started designing the characters.