His recent film, “The Darjeeling Limited,” is absolutely a return to form and another great film in a spectacular year of movies.

The movie is about three American brothers (played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) who have not spoken to each other in a year. They set off on a train voyage across India with a plan to find themselves and bond with each other -- to become brothers again like they used to be. Their "spiritual quest", however, veers rapidly off-course (due to events involving over-the-counter pain killers, Indian cough syrup, and pepper spray), and they eventually find themselves stranded alone in the middle of the desert with eleven suitcases, a printer, and a laminating machine. At this moment, a new, unplanned journey suddenly begins. 

Anyway, during our roundtable discussion both Roman (one of the writers and the producer) and Wes talked about making the film, India, writing in Paris, the new AT&T commercials, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” and a lot more. If you’re a fan of Wes you’ll love the interview.

And while I was at the press junket I was also able to interview Jason Schwartzman and Adrien Brody and those will be posted later tonight.

As always, you can either read the transcript below or listen to the roundtable interview as an MP3 by clicking here. And if you missed the movie clips I posted a week or so ago….click here to watch them.

“The Darjeeling Limited” is currently playing in limited release and it'll be expanding to more theaters next weekend.

Q: So where’s the wine and the face cream?

Roman Coppola: Oh, if I carried around all my props, it would be a problem.

Wes Anderson: What is that?

Q: An energy drink.

Wes Anderson: It looks like beer.

Q: It’s sort of but it tastes nothing like beer.

Wes Anderson: But it’s a beer type of design isn’t it.  The can I mean.

Q: So did you have a great love for India in history reading back or is it just the movies that you’d seen that you sort of said oh God I’d love to do something there and then the 2nd part of that question is when you go there, when you see them on screen it’s one thing and you go to a country and it’s something totally different.  You go wow, that’s not what I saw on screen.  So could you answer either one?

Wes Anderson: Yeah, I’ll try to answer all of it.  The way I became interested in India in the first place was my oldest friend is from what was Madras.  So I grew up and I met him when I was 8 in Texas. I grew up learning about India from him and his family and that was my first exposure to the place. But I have memories from stories he told me from when I was a kid that were so alien to me—just concepts that didn’t exist for me.  Then I read a book by a writer Ved Mada called the Photographs of Chachachi, which made a very strong impression on me and gave me a kind of portrait of India that was very interesting.  In the meantime I was sort of watching Ray’s films… Satyajit Ray films which are quite varied.  He made many films and I began to learn from that and I was also part of my inspiration to want to make movies, then I saw Louis Malle's documentaries about India which are about India in 1968 to 72 whenever he was there—70 or something like that.  Not unlike the India you see today.  I mean, that stuff is the same. As much as India’s changed, it’s very much what you see in those documentaries because the culture is ancient and you know it can’t change just because the arrival of the internet and all that stuff, it’s not going to change that radically… anyway I’m no expert on any of that but what I see is something that there’s so much that runs so deep that I feel like there’s what will stay the same is going to be maybe more powerful than what’s changing.  Then finally I saw this movie by Jean Renoir called The River and when I saw that it made such a strong impression on me that I kind of took all this together and said this is where I want to work next.  Then I went and what I found was that all the things that I picked up over the years were there and were familiar to me and there was so much more and I fell in love with the place.

Q: Your writing of this was a little unconventional I think even for you in terms of the way you did it and also you didn’t actually go to India and do some writing until like until 8 months into the process of writing it, is that correct?

Wes Anderson: I don’t know.  I don’t know how long it was but we had written…

Roman Coppola: It was not quite a year, but it was almost a year.  We started writing in April and we went in March.

Wes Anderson: We went in March is that right?

Roman Coppola: Yeah.

Wes Anderson: So that’s what it was.  I know that we had written most of the train part of the movie before we went on the train and so our train journey ended up being us sort of acting out what we’d written as much as it was us writing…researching what that ought to be like, but I think everything we experienced found its was into the story one way or another.  Primarily I think India went from being a backdrop for the story to the subject matter on some level.

Q: And you brought your printer along with you I understand.

Wes Anderson: Yeah, we had a printer on the train.

Q: Which he had some problems with right?

Wes Anderson: Oh yeah.  You can tell that. It wasn’t my fault really.

Roman Coppola: Yeah, we had a little adapter confusion and we plugged it into the wrong outlet and it blew up. 

Wes Anderson: I mean Roman knew you were supposed to plug it into the one for the shavers but I didn’t know that.  How could I know that?  I don’t understand electricity like that.

Q: Did you guys talk about how can you kind of cooperate that process to write 3 people write one script?  How do you make it?

Roman Coppola: Can I take this one?

Wes Anderson: Sure.

Roman Coppola: It started out just us.  We kind of had a sense of what the spirit of the movie was.  We all kind of understood it and then we just started to tell stories and throw out ideas and we didn’t really get the typewriter out until quite a while into it.  We’d take notes and you know basically make each other laugh and see if the ideas we presented felt appropriate for this thing and it was only after week after week and then keeping notes as soon as we’d kind of get something that felt solid like that we’d start to actually write it out and then it was just sort of a process of over time just looking to our experiences that was sort of our credo to make the movie with personal material. So pretty much every element of the script had some basis of an experience that one of us had or had heard about directly or something that affected us.  So that was always the well that we kind of drew from.  Then it slowly started to build up and we’d have sessions.  Wes was kind of the stenographer of the group and he would type things out and we’d start to block it in but basically it was just a long process of slowly hovering over this territory that we felt we knew but we’re trying to find it again.

Q: Did you have a love affair with India before like Wes did?

Roman Coppola: Not really. I’d never been there so part of the appeal was a sense of curiosity.  What is this place and I’d traveled a bunch and I thought oh, I’ll see what India is like and then we went and it was very impressive.  It’s such a vastly different culture from any other place I’d been and it was very thrilling to experience it.

Q: Can you guys talk about how the short film germinated and you know creating that?

Wes Anderson: Yeah, well let’s see. First we had the very beginning of the movie—just the first scenes of the movie where Bill Murray and then Adrien and then…you know that part of the movie was written.  And then I wrote the short sort of separately.  Initially not meaning it to be part of that just that it was something else.  Then after I kind of had a scene I thought well somewhere along the way I started thinking Jason is going to play the same guy in these and then as we continued to work on the script for the feature movie, we started to link them more and more and more.  And before long they sort of depended on each other.  They were companion pieces.  Then we went ahead and shot the short.  When we were maybe halfway through the script of the feature I shot the short and then eventually we had them both.  Then I had to figure out well, how do I want to present these?  At one point I thought I’d put the short in front of the movie but then I also felt the opening of the movie had been written as an opening scene.  It’s supposed to be the first thing.  You meet Bill Murray.  You don’t know who he is and then you lose him and you go with Adrienne and you don’t know who he is and then you meet the other guy and you don’t know who they are and you’re slowly learning what’s going on in the story.  Eventually what I decided was I’d release the movie by itself.  Release the short on iTunes and then at a certain point in the process we’ll re-introduce the short into the theatres and add it onto the prints of the movie and then we’ll have it on the DVD and it’ll come out with the movie in Europe and so on. 

Music plays a huge part of your movies.  When do you know you’ve found the right song for one of your projects?

Wes Anderson: Well, you know the right song is just whatever I think, whatever we think is the right song and for one person it’s the right song and for somebody else maybe it’s the wrong song but you know it’s just all in kind of your instincts. I don’t know that I could pinpoint when you know it. But I’ll say this for instance, one the song that’s in the short was sort of the inspiration for the short. I’d heard this song and I’d never heard it before and it made a strong impression on me and I related it to this scene I had in my mind and I kind of wrote it to the music.  The 2nd thing was Satyajit Ray’s music—the music he wrote for his own movies—that while we were writing, I started playing some of that and by the time we were shooting the movie, we had it in our vehicles as we went to the set and we played it everyday.  It was like our soundtrack to the making of the movie.  That’s a couple of examples of that.

Q: Hadn’t you originally wanted to use some Beatles tunes? 

Wes Anderson: I don’t remember that do you?  No, not really.

Q: When you say we meaning we decided what the songs were going to be, is that you and Roman, is that you talking to the actor saying hey, what should we put in or how do you determine that?

Wes Anderson: No, not me talking to the actors saying hey, what should we put in?  But Jason and Roman and I were collaborators in a more central way than just writers.  We were writing together but Roman was the producer of the movie.  Roman was on the set every…unless Roman was shooting something else on the movie, he was on the set and we were all in it together.  We spent a lot of time together in the cutting room, etc., so it was a process we went through together.  Also, there are other collaborators like our editor, Andy Weissblum or our music supervisor Randy Poster, Jeremy Dawson who’s another one of our team.  You know, there’s a whole kind of company of people who are all involved in helping to see what else can we do to make it better.

Q: What’s really interesting is people think of you as such a visionary film-maker that they would expect that you just came in and said “I want this song, this song and this song” because your films have such a distinct look, it’s sort of surprising that you would be so…not that you wouldn’t be collaborative but so collaborative in what would be in your movies, how do you think that esthetic comes about in such a collaborative way?  Is it the people you bring around you?

Wes Anderson: I don’t know. What do you think on that one?

Roman Coppola: Well, I mean, I can’t speak for the music but for the writing of the text of the story, Wes’ first choice as the author of this movie is I want to bring these 2 guys in and so that decision and choice was the beginning of the story making.

Wes Anderson: Shapes the whole thing.  It’s a bit of casting almost, you know.  So we mixed a different voices in the process, I guess.

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