WES ANDERSON’S most resonant line of movie dialog has been distilled into its own entry on urbandictionary.com. It arrives in the director’s second film, “Rushmore,” when prep-school freak and geek Max Fischer – Anderson’s alter-ego, played by Jason Schwartzman – tells Bill Murray the secret of life: “I guess you’ve just gotta find something you love to do and then do it for the rest of your life. For me, it’s going to Rushmore.”
Now, for a certain generation of equally nerdy film fans, the phrase “It’s my Rushmore” or “She’s my Rushmore” has taken on grail-like qualities. It is the idealistic, not necessarily romantic, quest that will never have an end.
Anderson’s own Rushmore is to make the same movie over and over again – to the point where his work has been called the “aesthetics of autism.” And in his fifth film, the highly anticipated “Darjeeling Limited,” which arrives in theaters Friday, all of his signature quirks are on full display.
The film is awash with color and starts out with a bang: Bill Murray races to catch a train on time. From then on, the film is in almost constant motion, just like the Indian express at the center of the journey. Anderson’s camera seldom pauses to stop, even while in the Indian railway carriage at the heart of the story.
The film occasionally changes pace with slow-motion shots, which punctuate the film, invariably with acoustic guitar rock playing on the soundtrack. The characters – including three bereaved brothers portrayed by Schwartzman, Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody – wear the exact same outfits for the entire film.
So self-consciously knowing that it seems to be winking to itself every five minutes, the film echoes Anderson’s earlier work, especially since nearly every actor except newcomer Brody has played several roles in his previous films.
“Darjeeling” is also the simplest story Anderson has made yet, harking back to his first film, the very fine “Bottle Rocket,” which he made with Wilson brothers Owen, Andrew and Luke back when all four of the Texas-bred friends were complete unknowns.
Anderson has always written with a partner. Owen Wilson collaborated on his first three films, Noah Baumbach on his last, “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.” On “Darjeeling,” he has two new partners, Schwartzman and Schwartzman’s cousin, Roman Coppola, who directed 2001’s “C.Q.” and has done second-unit director work for Anderson in the past.
“I like working with collaborators and I like writing with my friends,” Anderson, 38, says by phone from his Paris apartment, making the writing of the film sound as much fun as the making of it. “We started writing in cafes in Paris, and then we went to India and we did all the things in the movie – acted the whole movie out together, the three of us.”
This does not mean that he carried a dead child in his arms or bought a deadly snake, had an affair with a train conductor or got kicked off a train. It means that he and his friends “had a lot of trouble with adapters and printers being fried by using the shaving socket.”
Coppola says Anderson “did all the typing and we would sit in all these different settings from Paris to India telling each other stories, and he would take notes. We had the core idea – brothers, train, India – and from there the writing process was the beginning of an adventure.”
One unexpected face in the new film is Oscar winner Brody, who insists “people align me too closely with heavy subject matter.” Brody appreciated the on-set camaraderie and, of course, felt welcome. “On most movies you don’t come into a group of people who are all friends like this, so it was only a matter of me fitting in.”
The theme that pops up in all Wes Anderson’s films is that of disaffected malaise – rich kids dressing well and moping. It’s particularly curious to see Owen Wilson’s character’s head wrapped in bandages, his character talking about the near-fatal accident that drew him to seek reconciliation with his brothers. The joke is more than a little bittersweet given his recent suicide attempt.
“I was just talking to Owen earlier,” Anderson says, broaching the subject carefully, “and he was saying that he had been playing soccer with Jason in Los Angeles last week. Jason broke his toe when they were playing, and Owen was saying that he must have a very high threshold for pain because he was running on gravel and over broken glass for the whole film.”
One of the regular riffs in the film has Schwartzman’s character petulantly insisting that his writing is all fiction. It isn’t hard to see that Schwartzman’s character is Max Fischer not really grown-up at all, especially when you see the short movie, “Hotel Chevalier,” that Anderson made as a prologue to “Darjeeling.”
At the Venice Film Festival, “Hotel Chevalier” preceded “Darjeeling” as a prologue. It has now been cut from the theatrical release, but Anderson plans to post it online and include it with the DVD. In it, a laughably smooth Schwartzman sulks in a Paris hotel room until Nathalie Portman shows up. It comes off like “Beauty and the Geek” as filmed by Truffaut, with Schwartzman improbably making out with a naked Portman between painfully drawn out conversations. It’s Max Fischer finally getting the girl.
Anderson allows that the Schwartzman character is the one he most closely aligns himself to. “In the case of this one, it comes from Jason’s, Roman’s and my experience with our own brothers and with Owen’s brothers. But it isn’t autobiographical. It’s just a lot of material from our lives and the lives of those about us. Which I suppose makes it kind of autobiographical.”
Self-image aside, Anderson is slow with his process. “It takes me a year to write, and then to do a movie like this. You’re shooting on a moving train in India for two months. It’s logistically very complicated. It was a great deal of work just to get this train and to make it function.”
Up next for Anderson is his first adaptation. Working again with Baumbach, he is bringing Roald Dahl’s “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” to the screen as an animated film. “It’s taken a long time to get the project together,” he says. “Usually animated movies are made by companies with systems in place, and we’re just showing up with a script.”
Brody says that for Anderson “the camera is like a character in the film. Wes would do massive moving masters with no cuts. Every focus adjustment has to work for the shot to work.”
Even for people who hate Anderson’s precious glorification of rich-kid ennui, he always comes up with a cool soundtrack. “The Life Aquatic” had Seu Jorge’s David Bowie covers. “The Royal Tennenbaums” was saved by Nico’s “These Days.” “Rushmore” is one of the great ’90s soundtracks.
“Darjeeling” is no exception, allowing Anderson’s teenage-bedroom-bound inner DJ to flourish once more. “I had a couple of Kinks songs waiting in the wings for years,” Anderson says, “and now we have three of them all from the same album. And the songs are at the beginning, the middle and the end of the film.”
One of the familiar jokes in the film has the three main characters wearing gray suits and carrying a dozen suitcases but never changing clothes.
This seems to be the case in most of Anderson’s films: Characters wear the precise same outfit, most notably, Bill Murray’s character in “Rushmore,” who wore one suit (and a pair Budweiser swimming trunks) for the entire film. This seems to mirror Anderson’s own bag of tricks as a filmmaker, carrying more than a dozen Louis Vuitton quality bags of talent around, all for one look.
Anderson chuckles over the phone. “A few times you do see the suitcases open and you see more changes of the exact same outfits. I like to come up with a good costume for a good character. But I don’t like to come up with 10 different looks for actors. That’s always been my approach.”