Director says experience in India was ‘exciting and kind of scary’

The next project for Wes Anderson will be a stop-motion animation film.

By MILAN PAURICH

VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT

After directing such ambitious, large-scale productions as “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” with their multitude of characters and dueling plotlines, Wes Anderson was consciously looking to scale back and return to the intimacy of his “Bottle Rocket”-“Rushmore” roots.

With only three major characters — Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman as estranged brothers trying to reconnect while taking a magical mystery train ride across India — “The Darjeeling Limited” seemed like the kind of “small” project Anderson was craving. Yet, as Anderson explained in a recent telephone interview, things didn’t turn out exactly as planned.

“It’s funny. I wanted to work faster and with a smaller crew,” Anderson said. “But going to India and shooting principally on a moving train presented me with some giant production choices. It was a weird combination. I wanted the movie to have an almost ‘student film’ feel, yet we were doing things most ‘big’ pictures don’t even want to tackle. It wound up being very exciting, and kind of scary.”

Even more than any of his previous films with their British Invasion-heavy soundtracks, “Darjeeling” has echoes of the playfully inventive movies (“A Hard Day’s Night,” “Help!”) Richard Lester made with The Beatles in the 1960s. Was that deliberate or accidental?

“I can definitely see Lester in there even though I didn’t see ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ until about two months ago. I’d seen ‘Hard Day’s’ clips and images a million times, though, and always felt strongly connected to them somehow. The Beatles and India naturally linked us together somehow, and Jason (Schwartzmann) with a mustache even looks a little like a Beatle. George Harrison, actually,” he said with a laugh.

A less obvious inspiration was “Saint Jack,” a 1979 film by Peter Bogdanovich, one of Anderson’s director-mentors. “When Roman [Coppola], Jason and I sat down to write the script, we were all thinking of books and movies that could serve as cultural touchstones. ‘Saint Jack’ was an obvious reference point. It was made in Singapore and had a sort of documentary feel, but it’s really a traditional ‘Hollywood’ film as well. Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum could have easily played Ben Gazzara’s role 30 years earlier.”

Anderson has gotten a lot of attention for the eclectic musical selections that dominate his soundtracks (the Faces and Cat Stevens in “Rushmore;” calypso-inflected Bowie covers in “The Life Aquatic;” etc.), and “The Darjeeling Limited” is no exception.

“The primary music comes from the films of Satyajit Ray who composed a lot of his own scores, and also from the movies of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant,” he said “There are 25 cuts from those two sources alone.”

Anderson’s next project — a stop-motion animated movie based on the Roald (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”) Dahl children’s book, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” — is certainly unlike any previous Anderson film. “We’re making it in England for Twentieth Century Fox, and the whole animation process should take about two years,” he said. “The characters are really funny, and George Clooney and Cate Blanchett are doing the voices for Mr. and Mrs. Fox.”

Anderson is also in the process of writing a new live-action film that he hopes to get before the cameras within the next year. “Ideally, I’d like to have two movies opening at the same time,” he said optimistically.

Since Anderson is living in France, the incurable cinephile hasn’t been able to keep up with a lot of new films. “All I see these days are old American movies,” he explained. “Paris still has a lot of revival houses, and you can go and see Leo McCarey’s ‘Ruggles of Red Cap’ on a Tuesday night at 7 o’clock and there will be, like, 90 people in the theater. That’s incredible!”

Would Anderson be willing to test the auteur theory by taking on someone else’s script and doing a project strictly for the money?

“I don’t have a high overhead, so money isn’t really an issue for me. And I don’t particularly like the idea of having a ‘boss,’” he confessed with a laugh. “I’ve had offers, and have even thought about directing some big Hollywood tentpole kind of thing, but that’s about as far as it’s gone.”