SFBG: What was the biggest surprise?

WA: I don’t know if I can say what the biggest surprise was. But one thing that I think you observe when you’re in India is how much religion there is. What a huge part of the culture it is. And you learn about different variations on Hinduism, for instance, and where it’s led and where it goes in different regions. You can’t go far without some kind of shrine or temple or some kind of religious icon. I think that starts to kind of sink in.

Jason Schwartzman: I was really taken by the sound of India. There’s always music coming from a speaker, someone singing a song – there’s a lot of audio stimulation that I noticed, that I was so surprised by, that I loved. It was so beautiful.

Roman Coppola: The other thing was, people -- you’d be in the middle of the desert standing there, and then a whole group of people would just kind of appear out of nowhere, and look over your shoulder and be very curious about what you’re doing.

WA: I loved location scouting there, because you might go into a train station with five people, and you’re thinking about it, and you say, “Well, let’s look at the script.” Take out the script, and pretty soon you’re a group of 20. And there’s all these guys standing behind you, like [mimes looking over somebody’s shoulder], looking at your script. My thing eventually was that I would just always kind of go [mimes showing the script to someone standing behind him]. I know he can’t read that, but he’s interested in the way the page looks.

RC: There’s a sense of curiosity and a very strong sense of welcoming strangers. They want to know what you’re doing, what your name is, where you’re from.

SFBG: Did you cast a lot of your extras that way?

WA: I think all of them. And many of the extras weren’t cast, they just went in the shot.

SFBG: Was that a challenge, as a director?

Wes Anderson likes it when people look into the camera.

WA: We usually kind of went with it. There are people looking at the camera in the movie. I don’t really mind it. I like it.

SFBG: Was the whole thing filmed on location?

WA: The whole thing was filmed on location. The biggest location, however, was the train. That’s a real train, and we’re certainly on location – we went out into the desert every day – but we built a set in the train. We built a little studio on wheels, more or less.

SFBG: How was it, filming on that set?

WA: That was fun. We had a great time. It’s a situation where you don’t really quite know exactly what’s gonna happen, or what you’re gonna come across, or what’s gonna appear outside the window, and when you might unexpectedly have to stop. There’s a lot of suprises. And at the same time it’s very intimate and contained and there’s no room for lots of people to gather around, so it creates an intimate environment for the actors to play the scenes.

JS: It was great to work on a movie where there’s no one around you but the closest people to the scenes, and to the job.

Close quarters: the travelling trio prays -- kind of.

WA: Can you relate that to something for the people to understand, in a metaphorical way?

JS: In a metaphorical way, it would be like going on a business retreat and being stuck in traffic with the five people you have to work the most closely with and accomplish something with. Stuck in traffic with them, and having nothing to do really but focus on the work, and talk about it, and not be distracted by anything else.

WA: So you did the retreat while you were in the car.

JS: Exactly. The retreat becomes the traffic.

RC: Can you give us another analogy, like a restaurant or a kind of cooking analogy?

WA: [Aside to SFBG] Jason’s very good with metaphors.

JS: It would be like only having so many ingredients to make a very specific dish.

[All laugh]

JS: I just think that on a typical film set, and this is not to pass judgment on the way that movies are made, but on a normal movie set that isn’t moving, there’s trailers for actors, there’s craft service for actors. There’s places to go, and things to make people scatter. On this film, there was nowhere to go.

WA: Like, what would be a metaphor for how to make people scatter, or places people scatter.

JS: Just that, um…people would rather have their own bed than sleep in a bunk of 20. People want their space and an isolated place to regroup and have their energy preserved. But on this film, there was nowhere to scatter off too. There was nowhere to go, so everyone’s just forced to be in a very small space together in a kind of good and productive claustrophobia. You just spend more minutes with people. I spent more minutes with [co-stars Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody] than I have with any other actor I’ve ever worked with on a film. If you add up the minutes spent, and you live in a house together, I know these people and the people on this crew better than anyone. And I must say, being in India together under these circumstances gives you a whole other texture to your relationships. It’s much like when you wake up from a crazy dream and you try to describe it to someone, but you can’t describe it. And that’s kind of what this experience was – a dream that a bunch of people shared. We all had the same dream.

SFBG: Do you think that comes across on the screen for the audience?

WA: I don’t know.

JS: [Loudly] Yes!

WA: I think it depends. One person gets one thing and somebody else gets something else. The only way they get kind of a unified reaction is to make something that’s so clear and direct and uncomplicated that almost everyone interprets it the same way, which is exactly what we don’t want to do.

SFBG: What were the spontaneous moments that came about as a result of filming on a moving train?

WA: I think what you get is, not necessarily from the train, but from our approach to the movie, which was that we were gonna go with the flow. When there was a surprise or an obstacle, we’d just try to incorporate that. As a result, take three is the take with the cow. Take seven is the one with nine guys standing in the back of the shot, and take 14 is the one that’s in the tunnel. A certain amount of that stuff ends up in the movie, and a certain amount of it’s just part of the process of making the movie. The surprises that found their way into the story and into the film are part of how India became the subject matter of the movie.

SFBG: You all three collaborated on the script. What was that process like?

JS: We started writing before we went there, and then we went there to write as well.

RC: The first chapter was that Wes invited Jason and I to work on this idea that he had the initial concept for, and all our histories and relationships, and that we’re cousins, and that we’re friends, and that these guys are also friends from their time they’ve spent together. Automatically there were these relationships that related to the central relationships between the three brothers. So that was the beginning. And then we would share stories and try to talk about experiences that we had that impressed us in some way and that somehow related to this thing that we all kind of agreed on. We had a consensual sense of what this movie was without knowing all the details. We just kind of shared stories and it would kind of grow from there. When we went to India we had a good chunk of the script already written and then we started to compare notes, and say, “Ok. We’re seeing all these shrines, and we have to put that in.” And we sort of adjusted and compared. Then we took the script and started to improvise – read it in a temple or something like that, and start to test it out, start to improvise and see where else it could lead. There were a lot of different ways and different steps and ultimately through that process we were finding locations and finding people and that’s how it unfolded.

JS: Method.

SFBG: Can you talk about Hotel Chevalier, the short film that serves as a prequel to The Darjeeling Limited? How did it come about, and what you think its purpose is?

WA: I don’t know about the purpose. But the way it came about was, first we’d written the beginning of the feature movie, and then I had this idea to make this short. I thought of this scene that I wanted to do, and said, you know, I think Jason’s gonna play the same character in the feature and the short. As we continued to write the feature, we kept linking it to the short. And in the end, they really became companion pieces. It’s sort of a prologue, almost. But at the same time, the opening scene of the movie was always written to be the opening. So in the end we had the feature and the short, and it was a bit of a puzzle to figure out how they were meant to be shown, or how do we present them. I decided we would release the short on iTunes – the internet has changed the world of shorts. Shorts were kind of a non-existent art form.

Natalie Portman appears in the short in the flesh -- and in the feature, kind of, as Schwartzman's character stalks her answering machine.

SFBG: Is that why you have the iPod in the short?

WA: No. The iPod was in the short just because we wanted the movie to be very personal. Basically everything that’s in the short is just my stuff that I had in France with me.

RC: Also you had said before how the song [“Where Do You Go To (My Lovely), by Peter Sarstedt] was very much a starting point.

WA: Yes, the song that he plays in the short was sort of the inspiration for it. So it was sort of written to the song. Then it just became a part of Jason’s character. In the short he played this song, and so then we thought, in the movie he’ll play more songs, and he’ll be sort of the DJ of the movie for his brothers, as well as the guy who’s recording it. He’s writing about it. Right now the short is available for free on iTunes. But at a certain point we’ll add it in with the movie in theaters, and it’ll be added on to those prints, and it’ll be on the DVD. So different people will see it in different ways.

SFBG: Are the other songs in the movie supposed to be from this character, like all the Kinks songs?

WA: No, I think just the ones that he plays.

SFBG: In the scenes where the songs are such an important part of conveying certain emotions – how do you plan for those? Do you hear a certain song and say, “I could use that”?

WA: Sometimes. And sometimes I have a song that I’ve set aside that I think, at some point I’d like to use this song in a movie. And then sometimes we’re in the editing room and we’ve had maybe one song, and we say we don’t want to use that. Or, you know, we change our minds – it’s not accomplishing what we want in the story, or sometimes, you know, an actor might have done something in a scene where it’s a surprise, and there’s one take where he does it differently. But then with the music, it means something different, so then we have to explore and look for something else. And then sometimes we have the music before, we play it on the set, we put it in the movie, it fits, it’s done. [For Darjeeling], we had a lot of the music figured out because a lot of the music was from scores of films by Satyajit Ray. Those really became the sound of the movie in the most significant way.

The Darjeeling Limited is now playing in Bay Area theaters.