Main article Actor, cowriter Jason Schwartzman Actor Adrien Brody Actress Amara Karan Director Wes Anderson

My relationship with Wes goes pretty far back. I saw the short of his first film, Bottle Rocket; it was shown to me by Kit Carson, the writer. He's an old friend of mine and a friend of Wes's and he was connected with that movie. Wes and I did meet around that time, so it was I guess '92, and we got together once in a while. And then Bob Yeoman, who has shot most all of Wes's work, worked with me on the second unit for The Rainmaker, and then he shot my film, CQ. And so through Bob, we were kind of in touch and stayed connected. [My sister] Sofia, of course, was very instrumental in introducing Jason — Jason's our cousin — to Wes, and they made Rushmore together; one more connection there. And then I did second unit on Life Aquatic.

Sofia was doing Marie Antoinette with Jason as Louis VI, and I was helping her doing second unit. Wes was visiting Paris, and Jason was hosting Wes at his apartment. And Jason said, "Wes has an idea for something, wants to talk to you about it." And so I was very intrigued and curious. And that was really the beginning, during Marie Antoinette. We got together and Wes described kind of what was on his mind. He had a few clues, these brothers traveling on a train and India, and that was the beginning. And he actually had composed the opening sequence, which he read to us. And when he read it of course I was excited 'cause I thought it was very interesting, but also it was very clear to me — "Oh, I know what this movie is." And so I felt like yeah, I want to be part of this. There was sort of a familiarity that I connected with. I knew what we were talking about. I wanted to be part of it.

Wes Anderson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, and Owen Wilson in The Darjeeling Limited James Hamilton/Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

As for why Wes asked me, well of course you'd have to ask Wes that question. But my sense of it is that, of course Jason and I are cousins, and have known each other forever, and Wes and I had a long-standing relationship. Jason and Wes had another kind of relationship. So there were all these dynamics between us that were quite extended. When I pursue a project there's always a kind of curiosity factor of what is it, I think I know what this is, I want to learn more about it, and the way that the writing process can really end up reflecting the content of the movie… I don't know if I'm making sense here, but the idea of spending time with one another and writing it and going on this adventure and learning about India and defining it, I think was interesting to me. And I think for Wes, the first act of putting together your team, who you're going to collaborate with, obviously defines a lot about how it's going to unfold. We felt that we had the right ingredients. And Wes has been very nice to say that he wanted to work with Jason and myself 'cause we had this connection and knew that the process of writing would relate to whatever characteristic he was interested in following.

The writing process was pretty extended. It was well over a year of real genuine effort. Initially we started in Paris, 'cause that's where we all were. And we would write in a cafe or in Jason's apartment or Wes's apartment, when he had that. And then I had some other obligations. I worked on my dad's movie in Romania, so I was there, and we would do conference calls, and sometimes the iChat video thing; basically we just kept at it. A week didn't go by that we didn't have several sessions talking and trying to scratch away at it. We worked in New York, we worked in Europe, we worked over the phone in all sorts of different configurations. And then of course we worked in India on a sort of a research trip, when we had a significant amount of the script together, I'd say more than half. And there was that whole process of comparing what we had cooked up and conceived with what we saw there. And in India we traveled by train. But more than just for writing, that trip became the beginnings of the production. Things were bubbling up and we found a lot of people that we ended up casting in the movie and we found a lot of locations that we shot at. And so the writing experience just sort of led into the shooting experience in a kind of overlapping way.