Jason Schwartzman
I had only been in Paris for a couple weeks actually. Marie Antoinette hadn't begun shooting yet, and Wes had ended a press tour for The Life Aquatic in Paris. It was all soon to be over. But it seemed kind of like one of these things where like, well, if you don't have to be home and you need a place to stay, if you want to stay, you can, you know, stay with me because I have a little room over there and you can just stay. He said, "Great." So he moved in. And Wes and I have been great friends since Rushmore, and when we're together, we always go walk around, tell stories to each other, and talk. It's just part of our relationship, I think, just kind of reflecting on things, and trying to make those things entertaining in some way to the other person and make them memorable. Anyways, he had said to me, like, almost immediately upon arriving in Paris, "I want to do a movie with you as one of three brothers on a train in India." I was so happy because — though like I say we've been such great friends for ten years — it had been ten years since Rushmore, and I'd been wanting to work with him again and hoping that he would invite that type of professional collaboration again. And so when he finally did, I was really happy. But I didn't think anything of the "writing" while we were walking around and talking, because it seemed like that was not unusual for our relationship. It's our bond, it's one of our things. But then after about three weeks of it, he said — "Let's bring Roman in on this" were his exact words. And I said, in on — ? And he goes, "On this movie that we're writing." And that's when I realized that now we were collaborating on writing the film. And I didn't shrug it off, but I tried to make look like I had known that all along. "Oh, yeah, I'll ask him." Wes read the opening that he had already written. He goes, you know, "Exterior, India, day." And then he read the thing and Roman was laughing, he said, "This is great, what is it?" "This is this movie that I want to write, and Jason's writing it with me, and you're going to write it with me if you want to." And we kind of had a toast or ghost toast — I don't think we had anything — but it was like, "Here we go!"
Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson, and Jason Schwartzman in The Darjeeling Limited
James Hamilton/Courtesy of Fox Searchlight
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The writing process always kept that spirit of talking as the main form of creating. That seemed to be the main thing — like three guys spending all day together for years just always talking about things in our lives and trying to see if there was something in them that could be whittled and fashioned to make sense into this movie. And eventually you have to be unselfish about your stuff and his stuff and you just have to say, "Okay, it's beginning to take shape, and what is the excess baggage on this thing? Like, what's too much weight? When we were writing it, it always felt to me that it was less like the three of us saying, "And then they'll do this and then they're going to do that and then this will happen." It always seemed like it had already happened; it always felt past tense and we were trying to like investigate it, or put it together like a puzzle. As if somewhere in time these three brothers have gone on this trip and parts of their trip are missing and we've got to fill in the blanks. The truth always seemed to be in something personal, like something that had happened somewhere.
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