Wes Anderson’s whimsical wheeze, The Darjeeling Limited, is out this week, and to celebrate, D+CFilm has a week’s worth of interviews and features for your delectation. Click here to watch the trailer.

Today, we have a yap with star, Jason Schwartzman.

You are credited as one of the writers of the film with Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola. How did the idea come about and how did the collaboration work?

Jason Schwartzman: Wes had the initial idea, which was to do a movie about three brothers on a train in India and when he first brought it up to me, I didn’t think it was an invitation to co-write the movie. I was in Paris at the time and was just finishing up on Marie Antoinette and I had a spare room, so Wes was staying with me for a while. We would go for these late night walks and tell stories about the girls that we knew, things they had said, things we’d said back, and go off on all kinds of tangents from there. Wes would always be writing stuff down and after about three weeks he suddenly said, “You know this movie we’re writing, we should bring Roman in on this.” I hadn’t realised we were writing a movie together till then.

How long did it take to come up with the finished script?

We wrote it over the course of two years. Once Marie Antoinette was over I went home, but Wes stayed on so Roman and I would fly to Paris for three weeks at a time and basically we would sit in a room all day from ten in the morning until two or three the next night. When I write I tend to do things in short little chunks, like three hours and then a break, three hours and then a break. But that’s not their style. They just keep going and don’t really eat or anything like that.

Your character in the film is a rather cheerless womaniser. Did you base him on yourself?

In a weird way I would say my character is equally Wes, Roman and I, and the same for the Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody characters. I think each character is a fragment and a blend of the three of us. Okay, maybe I’m two-thirds of my character….

You, Owen and Adrien seem like a visual mismatch as brothers yet you pull it off. Did you have any initial doubts about the casting?

When we all stood next to each other for the first time I really wondered if it would work. But I think that it does and I think it comes across that they love each other, or at least that they have the potential to love each other, and to me that seems like family or brothers.

Did the three of you like each other in real life?

Yes, we were fortunate that the three of us got all along because if we hadn’t, it could have gone horribly and it would have been miserable being in India for three months, away from home and in such an unfamiliar environment. As it was, all the actors had to look out for each other. There was nowhere to hide either. We had a communal green room on the train and not our own dressing rooms, except maybe just this little sliver of space where you could decompress or blow your nose or something. And I think that proximity helped us create this feeling of us being brothers.

You shot on a real train…

I don’t know why, but for a while I was lying and telling people the whole movie was shot on location in Los Angeles, but the truth is that we found an old broken down train in Rajasthan and rented it and the production designer completely rebuilt and remade it to become the one you see in the film. We also got permission to use the tracks. So every morning at 7am we would all get on the train and ride to different locations and shoot while we rode, which was insane in a great way. We had to yield to more official trains, to commuter trains, to cows or any other sort of animal that might decide to cross the tracks, so at any moment the train could suddenly grind to a halt and the scene would be ruined. It created this odd tension.

Wes seems to be such a precise director and his films are built around seemingly very carefully composed images and scenes. How did he deal with the unpredictability of a cow on the tracks?

He just basically said, India is unpredictable and we can’t control it, so if we ask for a red car and they bring us a blue truck, let’s just go with it and start shooting.

Was this your first time in India? What impression did it make on you?

We all went to India while we were writing the script. About halfway through we thought, maybe we should actually go there and make sure we aren’t way off the mark. Oddly enough, when we got there I think it was what we had imagined to a large extent, especially the kinetic energy of the place. I suppose we’ve seen it our whole lives on TV and in movies and stuff. Many things were surprising too.

Such as?

Many of the things you see are normal for India I suppose but they were totally bizarre to me. One day I was in the car on the way to work and I looked out the window and there was a baby elephant in a pickup truck in front of us.

The three brothers in the film are on a supposed spiritual journey that seems pretty misguided, yet their trip ends up being enlightening in all sorts of ways. Did that match your experience in India?

Well, people keep saying to me, do you feel like you went on a spiritual journey? I’d feel like a bit of a jerk if I said yes. Spiritual is so hard to define. But I know that I was initially really nervous to go to such a faraway place and it still feels very distant to me, very exotic. At the same time, there is something magical about the place, which was overwhelming and impossible to escape. While I there I just kept thinking, I want to come back here, I want my mom to be here, I want my brothers to experience this place. And seeing the film for the first time, I got very sentimental.

Posted by Thin White Duke

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 6:31 pm and is filed under National, News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.