DEEP FOCUS: The Darjeeling Limited

Three estranged, white, well dressed brothers travel by train across India with custom designed luggage in search of enlightenment, or at least a moral compass—all set to a graceful blend of Satyajit Ray and the Kinks. You’ve got one guess who made the film.

Right-o folks! It’s the “The Darjeeling Limited,” and it has Wes Anderson’s thumbprints all over it.

Along with writer-producer Roman Coppola and actor Waris Ahluwalia, the director spoke this week with reporters at Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel about his approach to filmmaking, skiing in India, and—oh, yeah—his latest flick.

LAISSEZ-FAIRE FILMING?

Most scenes in “Darjeeling” stem from real events, said Anderson. For him, it marks a great departure from his previous films, which rely on fantastic constructions more than actual experiences.

“We had decided that we wanted to make this movie very, very personal,” said Anderson, wearing a well-tailored suit worthy of one of his characters. “We were very conscious about trying to use our own experiences as much as we could, and then we found that we were asking the question that we’re always asking ourselves which is, ‘What happens next?’”

What happens next, Anderson explained, was often worthy of filming. According to him, much of the film came from entirely unexpected events that occurred during the shoot.

“When the blue car turns out to be a red truck when it arrives with flowers painted all over it,” he said, referencing a memorable setpiece, “we’re gonna shoot that, because that’s gonna be part of the way that we’re going to be able to keep moving forward…and to experience India.”

Anderson’s claims of a laissez-faire filming ethic are suspect though. His previous films (“Rushmore,” “The Royal Tennenbaums,” and “The Life Aquatic,” namely) are notorious for their meticulously crafted mise-en-scène—a quality not absent from “Darjeeling.”

For example, some reporters at the event questioned the degree to which the appearance of the considerable moustache sported by Jason Schwartzman’s character, whose look seems to have roots in George Harrison circa 1974, was just an accident. Coppola and Anderson struggled to find a consensus.

“Hmmm… Ummm,” mumbled Coppola, before Anderson clarified, “Uhhh… actually in the script I think it actually says ‘a Beatles-type mustache’. So, yeah, a check on that one.”

And what about the seemingly arbitrary decision of Ahluwalia’s character, The Chief Steward on the Darjeeling Limited, to capture a cobra using a spatula when a bevy of deadlier tools were at his fingertips?

“That was in the script,” said Ahluwalia.

DETAILS, DETAILS, DETAILS

When so much energy is clearly devoted to details, how, then, can Anderson maintain a sense of the big picture?

From early on, the director has been criticized for inconsistently reconciling his love of detail-oriented cinema with his job of macro-managing the creative reins. In short, the Texas native can sometimes get lost in own head. But he said he has no problem with that dilemma.

“I like to embrace the idea of filling the movie with ideas,” he said, after having removed his right moccasin. “In the end, if that means that my movies, they share some similarities, well, that’s OK with me…I kind of like that.”

As for his critics, Anderson suggested a different way of analyzing his films.

“See it again, because I believe that a movie can contain a lot,” he said. “Everybody makes movies in a different way, and I’d rather have it be as dense as it could be.”

COLLECTIVE CINEMA

The director moves in a pack. Both Coppola and Schwartzman traveled with him across India to do background work for “Darjeeling.” And if Anderson can’t always make his films in a group, then he at least makes them with a group.

Bill Murray has appeared in four out of five of Anderson’s major releases, and is set to do voiceover work for Anderson’s upcoming stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s story “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Angelica Huston, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Ahluwalia have played multiple roles in Anderson films as well. One might call it collective cinema. He calls it friendship.

“I enjoy working with my friends, and in the case of [“Darjeeling”], the script really came from the combination of Roman, Jason, and my points of view,” the directed explained. “The movie has so much of Roman’s experience, so much of Jason’s experience, so much of my experience in it, that it would never be the same with a different collaboration.”

Entire scenes, according to Anderson, would not exist without such collaboration.

“Jason, Roman and I were on a location scout, and we found a high sand dune, and we climbed up the top of it. And as it happened there were these burrs under the sand,” he recalled. “By the time we were up there, our fingers were all bleeding and we could barely take a step, but then we got up there and it’s amazing up there. It was really just unbelievable.”

He continued, “Roman just suddenly disappeared off the edge and I say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa’—and then I look over and Roman’s kind of just skiing down the mountain. He couldn’t have stopped, but he had this controlled descent. And then we said, ‘Well, that’s gonna go in it.’”

Collective cinema or not, Anderson has certainly established his own style of movie making—the pre-planned details, the free-formed production style, the collaborative process, the fictional realism. We know what it ends up looking like on film, but do the many parts of the Anderson machine build towards making or spreading a bigger message? Perhaps.

He used the example of sand dunes that he saw in India. “Sometimes,” Anderson explained, “it’s something just as simple as them. We just film something interesting. I don’t know what it means, but I like it.”

—Staff writer Ruben L. Davis can be reached at rldavis@fas.harvrd.edu.