Wes Anderson: interview

Dave Calhoun meets Wes Anderson, one of the few directors to gain credibility by making an advert and the director of ’The Darjeeling Limited‘, which closes the LFF

We all know that filmmakers make adverts on the side – Shane Meadows, for example, once made commercials for McDonald’s to keep the wolves from the door and even Ken Loach lent his services to Tennent’s lager during the lean 1980s – but it’s rare for critics to discuss these activities, unless, of course, it’s for disparaging reasons.

Wes Anderson, however – the 38-year-old director of ‘Rushmore’, ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ and now ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ – invited a different approach when he agreed to make an advert for American Express back in 2005. Instead of hiding behind the camera and hoping for the twin gifts of anonymity and a big cheque, he put himself in the commercial and opted for self-parody by tackling the popular and not-wholly-unfounded impression of him as a director who is a control freak down to the last tiny detail.

‘The thing I end up getting criticism for from people who hate my movies is that there’s too much control, too much that’s precious in them,’ says Anderson during our interview in Paris. The Texas-born director divides his time between New York and the French capital. ‘What can I do? My instinct is always to try to think of things to add to the film. I’ve got less and less minimalist as I’ve gone along, and I’d hate to think: Well, I’ve got all these ideas but I’m not going to put them in there.’

The two-minute commercial plays as one take: we see Anderson on a film-set in the grounds of a French chateau. He calls ‘Cut!’ after a car explodes and marches – ‘Not enough smoke and the snow was too loud. . . Can I get my snack?’ – towards his actors, Jason Schwartzman and Waris Ahluwalia. He walks through the set, checking props and barking orders in a hilarious expression of the megalomania of filmmaking.

The music is from Georges Delerue’s score to Truffaut’s 1973 film, ‘La Nuit Américaine’, while the tracking shot, which exposes and mocks the machinery behind filmmaking, is surely a nod to the opening-shot of Godard’s ‘Le Mépris’ (1963), which shows Raoul Coutard travelling along on a dolly.
It’s not often you get references to French new-wave directors, cinematographers and composers in an advert. All of which says something crucial about Anderson’s filmmaking, which from his first film, ‘Bottle Rocket’, to his last, ‘The Life Aquatic’, has always been knowing, daring, amusing, thoughtful and steeped in irony. There’s something old-fashioned – pleasingly so – about his cinephilia and willingness to wear his knowledge on his sleeve and build on past masters in popular work within the bounds of the studios. No wonder he counts Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich as friends.

His latest film is ‘The Darjeeling Limited’, co-written with Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, and featuring Adrien Brody, Schwartzman (familiar from ‘Rushmore’) and Owen Wilson, who has acted in all of his films, as well as co-writing the first three. Anderson is a well-connected, hip director (never out of good suit in most photos), who has gathered a regular troupe of collaborators. He’s also an honorary member of the Coppola clan: Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford, was second- unit director on ‘The Life Aquatic’ and Schwartzman is Roman’s cousin.

‘The Darjeeling Limited’ is a road movie – or, specifically, a train movie – shot entirely in India. We see Brody, Schwartzman and Wilson darting along a railway station platform. Brothers, they haven’t met since their father’s death a year earlier. Anderson pulls all the sights and sounds of India into the film, which is funny and meditative and avoids the usual life-lessons of road-trip movies. ‘I’d never actually been to India when we started writing the movie,’ Anderson says. ‘But I saw Renoir’s “The River”. Scorsese had a new print of it, and I loved that movie, it began to intrigue me.’ With India on the brain, he watched or re-watched old Merchant-Ivory films, movies by Satyajit Ray and documentaries by Louis Malle. Then he travelled to India with his fellow writers, Coppola and Schwartzman.

‘We took this train around Rajasthan and were scouting for locations and writing. We finished it in the highest elevation you can go to, a hill-station in the Himalayas. We were using every type of transportation; we were on planes, trains and even chartered a helicopter.’ The ghost of his last film, ‘The Life Aquatic’, loomed large. That earlier work – shot in Italy in 2004 – was complicated to make, with underwater shots and elaborate sets. The film bemused many, especially those who were looking for immediate laughs and a quicker pace. It took Anderson’s style of melancholia somewhere even more melancholic. It was also expensive (the estimated budget was $50 million).

‘I didn’t like the process,’ Anderson admits. ‘The actors found it difficult. Bill Murray was frustrated because of how slowly we were working. I walked away from it with the feeling that I wanted my process to be different. For such a strange movie, it’s too expensive. We made this new movie for a third of that.’

‘The Darjeeling Limited’ is a lighter affair but it’s hardly a complete break with the past. Both Anjelica Huston and Ahluwalia are back on board. The music is as judiciously chosen as ever; the visual uniforms that defined ‘Rushmore’, ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ and ‘The Life Aquatic’ are back in place, and the mellifluous camerawork has Anderson’s paws on all over it. So, why do actors keep running back to work with him?‘Actors like to make a movie that’s different to what they’ve been doing,’ he suggests. ‘They know that if they make a film with me, then at least it’s going to be a change of pace. Also, I think that often they know that they’re going to work in exciting circumstances and that they’re going to be in some place where they can be inspired by what’s around them.’

‘The Darjeeling Limited’ closes the London Film Festival on Nov 1 and opens on Nov 23. For full coverage of the LFF,

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