Jason Schwartzman had no idea how he was going to play his character in Wes Anderson's newest film, "The Darjeeling Limited." He was so unsure, in fact, that he flew to India, where Anderson was in the process of preproduction, nearly two months before the shoot was to take place.
"I've never felt more unsure about how to do a performance ... in my life," Schwartzman said in an interview at the Park Hyatt hotel in Georgetown. "[Anderson] said, 'But we've been writing this character for two years.'"
It's true. Completing the script for "Darjeeling Limited" was a long and complex endeavor. It began when Anderson pitched the story to Schwartzman. The director said he wanted to write a story about three brothers and that he wanted Schwartzman and Roman Coppola to be a part of the writing process. They would gather inspiration for the script's sequences from their own previous experiences.
"[Anderson, Coppola and I] were shooting to write something very much - I hate the word 'raw' - but that type of word," Schwartzman said. "Something that was not invented or built. Something that was only culled from our experiences - kind of like the character in the movie I play, who writes short stories based on things that have happened to him."
What came from their creative minds was a tale of lost brotherly love. Schwartzman's character, along with those characters portrayed by Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody, copes with the recent death of his father. Wilson's character decides that the best thing for the three estranged brothers is a spiritual journey through India. Needless to say, the change of atmosphere doesn't exactly solve their problems.
The change in atmosphere did, however, solve Schwartzman's problems. After flying to India, he began to recognize why he couldn't understand his character. He had helped write a story where most of the history doesn't happen on screen. Characters are seen in the moment. Their pasts are left to the viewers' imaginations.
"I realized that all the things we took out of the script were still real to my character," Schwartzman said. "That sounds like something that might be kind of obvious ... [but] that really became helpful to me."
Then, one night over dinner, Bill Murray gave Schwartzman the piece of advice that crystallized the entire role for him. Murray had watched Schwartzman work that day, and unbeknownst to him, the veteran comedian was particularly impressed with what he saw.
"[Murray] goes, 'I like the way you're [playing your character]. He's sharp; he cuts like glass,'" Schwartzman said. "I played it off like, 'Well, of course. That's what I'm doing here.' But really I was like, 'That's such a great piece of advice.' Don't dilly-dally with this character. Just know these feelings. Just say them."
If there was a central theme to the entire, behind-the-scenes process of making "Darjeeling Limited," it seemed to be this unlikely undercurrent of unpredictability. Even Anderson, who normally stages his films with such determined precision, opened himself to the unpredictable charm of shooting in a foreign country. What Schwartzman didn't expect, however, was his brother's reaction to the film.
"[He] called me up [after seeing the film], and he goes 'I want us to go on a trip,'" Schwartzman said. "He was like, 'I don't want to let us get fucked up like that. I don't want to let us get that disassociated from one another. Let's go away and get to know each other again.'"
Schwartzman soon discovered that his brother wasn't the only person reacting this way after seeing "Darjeeling Limited." It turned out that many other moviegoers were expressing the very same feelings.
"My friends told me that a bunch of people they know have reacted that way to the movie," Schwartzman said. "The idea that, without knowing it, we could have made something that's positive about family without trying to be sappy makes me happy"
