In the new Interview, Owen Wilson talks to his friend Woody Harrelson about playing poker and his great new film The Messenger. Read the full interview here, or after the break.

Woody Harrelson could so easily have remained the adorable goof behind America’s favorite bar forever. It’s hard to believe now, but for a while playing Woody Boyd on the sitcom Cheers seemed like the summit of Harrelson’s career. (Is there a quicker way for an actor to become typecast than to share a name with a character?) But the Texas-born yearling made quick work of landing choice film roles in Hollywood after the iconic Boston bar shut down operations in 1993. Harrelson went from starring in one of the most violent, experimental, and relentlessly criticized films of the 1990s (Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, 1994) to starring in one of the most violent, experimental, and universally praised films of the 2000s (the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, 2007), with an Oscar-nominated turn as Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt (in Milos Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt, 1996) in between. The 48-year-old Harrelson has had an unpredictable, brilliantly bipolar career that no one—let alone the actor himself—could have anticipated. A handful of his roles in new films are equally disparate: Harrelson plays a gratuitous, slapstick zombie-slayer in the satirical walking-dead comedy Zombieland; a loose-cannon doomsday prophet in the upcoming disaster epic 2012; and a casualty notification officer in the somber military drama The Messenger. It’s this last film, though, that Harrelson seems to have particularly treated as a labor of love. He talks to his friend and gambling partner Owen Wilson about The Messenger, as well as speeding, losing at poker, jumping out at roommates, and a number of other eccentricities he’s managed to pick up over the years.

OWEN WILSON: Hey, buddy.

WOODY HARRELSON: Hey.

WILSON: Where are you?

HARRELSON: I’m in the beloved state of Hawaii. Maui.

WILSON: Where?

HARRELSON: I’m at your house. [laughs] No, I’m up in my house.

WILSON: Sounds like you’ve had a good run of poker there. Last you said, you won three games in a row?

HARRELSON: Yeah, three times in a row. That never happens. But I’m also managing to pull the chute a little earlier and get the hell out before I give it all back and start writing chits.

WILSON: That’s always been the scouting report on you in poker: Not a lot of discipline. So I’m glad to see that you’re learning how to walk away.

HARRELSON: Yeah, I’ve got to look at your scouting report sometime.

WILSON: We’re probably the two worst players in that Maui poker game.

HARRELSON: It’s not that. We’re just the most trusting.

WILSON: We’re the most optimistic, the most hopeful.

HARRELSON: We believe in our own luck.

WILSON: It’s such a cast of characters that play in that Maui poker game. I remember our one friend saying it looked like the bar scene from Star Wars.

HARRELSON: Those guys are scoundrels, man. They sit there and pick you clean.

WILSON: I’m out in Malibu right now, and I was just thinking that you lived out here when you worked on Cheers, didn’t you?

HARRELSON: Yeah, I was out there until I was about 33.

WILSON: That seems like a long commute from here to Paramount Studios on Melrose.

HARRELSON: I never broke the 25-minute barrier, but I could always make it in under a half hour.

WILSON: Which is insane.

HARRELSON: Well, I had my motorcycle. I took the PCH [Pacific Coast Highway] to [Highway] 10 to Crenshaw [Boulevard], just trying to fight the traffic.

WILSON: Wow, that’s flying. When did you first come to L.A.?

HARRELSON: I came in around ’85.

WILSON: I remember you saying that you had already landed the role on Cheers and that you were rooming with Clem [Franek] and the Farrellys. I also remember you saying that when you first did interviews for Cheers and people asked you who the funniest guys you knew were, you’d say these guys from Rhode Island, the Farrelly brothers . . .

HARRELSON: I was always saying that. Who knew that they’d become these comedy phenoms?

WILSON: I remember Pete Farrelly saying that you guys would do things to try to scare each other.

HARRELSON: Yeah, I’d sometimes hide in his bathroom. . . I might wait an hour or so for him.

WILSON: Pete said that he’d come home and fix himself something to eat, go into his bedroom, start watching TV or reading. Then after an hour or two, he’d finally go into the bathroom to get ready to go to bed, brushing his teeth in the mirror, and suddenly you’d appear from the shower. [both laugh] This means you’d been waiting for two hours. That’s a real commitment to a joke.

HARRELSON: Yeah, it’s a little twisted. He finally put a stop to it. And one time he slapped me because he got so freaked out. He started screaming, “Never do that again! I could have a heart attack!” So that ended the fun of that one.

WILSON: When did you first get interested in acting?

HARRELSON: High school. I heard that if you were a terrific athlete, you could attract girls. So I had to look into some other possibilities. [laughs] I got into theater actually because of this girl, Robin Rogers. After she saw me do an Elvis impersonation in the library, she said I should be in the theater. And I was like, “If Robin Rogers wants me to be in theater, I’m going to be in theater.”

WILSON: You did a good Elvis impersonation?

HARRELSON: [In Elvis voice] Well, I, uh, uh, don’t want to brag, but, uh, uh, I surely did.

WILSON: Obviously you made the transition from doing theater to meet girls to something that you found you were good at.

HARRELSON: It really was specifically so I could hang out with Robin. I started dating her up until my freshman year in college. She came to visit me at college and got really upset because I had a paper that I hadn’t even started and she didn’t want to watch me peck away at my typewriter. She got furious, and our relationship ended. But, yeah, I found out I really liked acting.

WILSON: When did you decide to try to make acting your job?

HARRELSON: Well, I think it was because my buddy Clint Allen, who went to Hanover College with me, said that he was going to try out for Juilliard. And if he got accepted, he asked if I’d move to New York and be his roommate. I said, “Well, sure!” thinking the odds were astronomical that he’d get accepted. But he did. So I went. I was planning to bounce around and do regional theater and summer stock and eventually make my way to New York. But it happened faster that way.

WILSON: I’ve never done any theater acting. What did you like so much about it?

HARRELSON: We’re never going to be rock stars, which is probably everybody’s real dream. So that’s our only chance to get up in front of a live audience.

WILSON: Do people still send you plays or do you look for them?

HARRELSON: Well, mostly it’s been people sending things. But lately I’ve been looking for something to do that’s really cool. Dustin Hoffman said he would love to do a play with me, so I’ve been trying to think of one. Frances McDormand also wanted to do one. They both said this to me casually. But I take it very seriously, so I’ve been looking around. The thought of doing something they could all be in—and maybe Ben Foster as well. That would be pretty cool.

WILSON: You and Ben worked on The Messenger together. It was some of the best work I’ve seen in a long time.

HARRELSON: Thanks, man. This fellow named Oren Moverman co-wrote the script. He’s a fantastic writer and director. When I first read the script, they wanted me to do a small part, and I really didn’t want to, although it was one of the greatest scripts I had read. They wanted me to play the colonel, which was more of a cameo thing. But when I said I couldn’t do it, they said, “What about this other part, Captain Tony Stone.” And I was like, “Ah, yes. I think that one is a fantastic part.”

WILSON: Did you do any research?

HARRELSON: Well, you might remember I was picking your brain, finding out all about your military service. And I got to go meet a lot of soldiers, a lot of people in the Army, which was a great experience for me because I’m not a big lover of these wars we have going on here, which I would consider oil wars. So it was nice to spend some time with the soldiers and realize their part in all this and how truly heroic they are, doing what they’re doing—all this for no money and just for the love of their country and fellow man, really putting their lives on the line. So I really became a fan of the warrior but not the war.

WILSON: Did you speak with anyone who actually had your job? The “messenger” refers to the characters that you and Ben Foster play, who are military officials who give news to the next of kin about a death.

HARRELSON: Casualty notification officers. Yeah, I talked to a few of those guys, and they say it’s the hardest job in the Army. You can imagine it would be pretty tough to have to go and tell people that news. There’s not really that much they can say. It’s incredibly difficult, so painful. What’s cool, though, is that the Army really got behind the film and supported it and let us shoot on the Fort Dix military base. They wanted people to recognize this part of the program. But I don’t want anyone to think this movie is a bummer. It is really quite uplifting. Oren Moverman is an amazing director. He did so many extraordinary things—like letting a scene go for nine minutes long. Your buddy Ben Stiller saw the movie and had lunch with him the next day. He wants to work with him.

WILSON: After the stories you heard from the Army, did you do any improvising?

HARRELSON: The script was pretty polished by the time I read it, but we did do a lot of improvising and we did throw in things, sometimes just spontaneously. Like in one scene I sing an army song . . . .

WILSON: I remember when you were working on No Country for Old Men. I guess you were doing a scene with Javier [Bardem], and you guys just started talking. It was that incredible last scene you were in with all of that tension. I remember you saying that you guys brainstormed dialogue together, and you came up with some ideas and wrote out a couple of pages. And you guys were excited and showed them to the Coens, and they said, “Yeah, this could be good.” But then you ended up doing it the way they had it. [both laugh]

HARRELSON: I actually saw so much good material in Cormac McCarthy’s book. There was cool stuff like “You keep looking at my eyes like you think if you keep looking at my eyes I won’t shoot you.” So I actually rewrote the scene, and Javier and I got together in the evening and memorized it, and then we went in the next day and performed it for those guys, and they were like, “Yeah, you know what? Let’s keep it the way it was.” [laughs] I think they did change one line, which for them is unusual, being such maestros, and I was being presumptuous. But I’m one of those actors who is going to come in with 2,500 ideas. You can shoot down 2,499, but one of them you’re going to like.

WILSON: Your body of work has been amazing. There aren’t many actors who have done so many different things. I mean, to go from Cheers, where the character had your name, and break out of that and then go from Natural Born Killers to The People vs. Larry Flynt and then Kingpin [1996], which you did with the Farrellys—that’s real range.

HARRELSON: You know, I was on Cheers for eight years, and I couldn’t get another job, and I thought, I’m going to be Woody Boyd forever. Which is not bad, but I really thought I was capable of more.

WILSON: What do you think was your real break into movies?

HARRELSON: It was really White Men Can’t Jump [1992]. I guess I probably would’ve just been Woody Boyd but for the fact that Keanu Reeves didn’t play great basketball. [Wilson laughs] That was the only thing that saved me.WILSON: How did you get cast in Natural Born Killers?

HARRELSON: Well, we thought it was kind of weird because when I was cast in Natural Born Killers, the only things Oliver Stone could have seen me in were Cheers and White Men Can’t Jump. Even Indecent Proposal [1993] hadn’t come out. So it was weird that he cast me, but he just said, “I see something in your eyes.” I was glad to work with Oliver because I always thought he was one of the great cinematic geniuses—I still do. And I was really glad to get to do that part, although, ironically, when the movie came out, I thought the big problem would be that people wouldn’t believe my character. But the big fallout actually came from the violence in the movie.

WILSON: That film got a lot of criticism.

HARRELSON: The media rained down negativity on it. At the time, I really thought that was unfair because I saw it as a misunderstood romantic comedy. But if you’ve got to explain that something’s a satire, then I guess it don’t really work. [laughs]

WILSON: I was going to say that I can only think that Oliver Stone must’ve seen something in your eyes that I’ve seen a few times, like when I’m trying to collect from you on a bet that you’ve lost. You do have a kind of crazy gear that you can click into.

HARRELSON: Yeah, you’ll be seeing that in a couple days, don’t worry.

WILSON: Which one of us would you say is the better sport when he loses?

HARRELSON: I think I’m probably a better sport. You tend to really just freak when you lose. You have a real hard time with it.

WILSON: But I think that’s because we’ve always been good friends and love the competition. It’s the same with my brothers. We can just sit there for eight hours throwing pebbles at a tree to see who can hit it the most times and be endlessly entertained by that. You grew up with brothers too. There’s something funny about growing up with a lot of male energy—and now you’re surrounded by four goddesses in this beautiful family that you have.

HARRELSON: It’s the way I like it now. I can’t imagine anything different.

WILSON: Having three daughters must be a change of pace from being around a bunch of guys.

HARRELSON: I don’t know—they’re pretty competitive. [laughs] Well, dude, I know you must have little stand-up paddling in your immediate future.

WILSON: Whoa! Don’t be rushing me off the phone here! I’ve got a page of 47 questions and we’ve covered three of them! We’ve got to keep going. Really, I can do this all day. [laughs] But I was actually having flashbacks to before we were even friends, when I set up a lunch with [film producer] Richard Sakai to pitch you on a script idea or something. I remember, after about, like, five minutes, I just kind of stopped talking, like, I kind of gave up on my idea. You say that you still remember it being one of the worst pitches you ever heard. [laughs]

HARRELSON: It was so funny because you wouldn’t even commit to finishing a sentence. It was like, “Well, I was just thinking, you know . . .  Maybe . . .  You know?”

WILSON: It was definitely the soft-felt approach. I don’t even remember what the idea was that we were pitching you, but I was not P.T. Barnum exactly. [both laugh] All right, buddy. I look forward to seeing you down the road in Maui.

HARRELSON: I’ll see you then, bro. Take care.

WILSON: You bet.

Owen Wilson is an actor and an Academy Award–nominated screenwriter.

Waris Ahluwalia, with co-editors Mortimer Singer and Tina Bhojwani, have put together a beautiful and interesting scrapbook called To India with Love: From New York to Mumbai.

Ask people who have been there, and they will all tell you India is like no other place in the world, a land that stirs every one of the five senses and stays in your heart forever. It is this India that brought together three friends, Waris Ahluwalia, Mortimer Singer and Tina Bhojwani to raise funds, spirits, and awareness for the victims of the attacks in Mumbai in November, 2008.  The editors set out to create a scrapbook collecting personal photos, stories, and memories from people who, like themselves, love India. The contributors include Wes Anderson, Adrien Brody, Francesco Clemente, Anthony Edwards, Jeanine Lobell, Natalie Portman, Yves Carcelle, Jean Touitou, Owen Wilson, Laura Wilson, Cynthia Rowley, James Ivory, Matthew Williamson, Rachel Roy, Tory Burch, Padma Lakshmi and Shobhaa De. This book declares to Mumbai and the whole country that we are all thinking of them and support them: hence To India, with Love: New York to Mumbai. Profits from the sales of the book will go to support families affected by the attacks. This book can truly make a difference, by opening eyes to the wonders of India and by once again letting the pen or a camera dominate the sword.

It is featured in the New York Times “The Moment” blog.

Photo by Wes Anderson

What’s another $4,000 after paying private school tuition? That was probably the pitch made by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson to their fathers, a year after the two met in a playwriting class at the University of Texas at Austin and decided to pen a script together about a trio of unlikely hoodlums. Similar to the clueless would-be criminals they created — Bob (Robert Musgrave), Anthony (Luke Wilson) and Dignan (Owen Wilson) — Anderson and Wilson scored the initial amount of cash that they asked for from their parents, but only wound up shooting eight minutes of 16mm footage before running out of funds. As a result, the Wilsons’ father contacted family friend and “Paris, Texas” screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson to see if the kids’ work had promise, which led to Carson finding enough money to finance the rest of the 13-minute short, as well as producer Barbara Boyle getting in touch with then-Gracie Films vice president Polly Platt. The short got into Sundance in 1993, and though the unusually rhythmic patter of the characters didn’t make much of an impression on audiences in Park City, it got the attention of Platt’s boss, James L. Brooks, who would ultimately bankroll the feature — which ironically was rejected by Sundance, though there’s no question who got the last laugh.

So What’s Different? Beyond an expansion of the plot, not a whole lot is different except for a jazzier score and that it’s shot in black-and-white.

In this month’s Interview, Owen Wilson talks to Stephen Dorff about Dorff’s career and his role in Sofia Coppola’s upcoming film Somewhere. 

DORFF: Her scripts are famously short. She doesn’t write everything down and spell it out for the reader; I think she leaves a lot in private.

WILSON: It’s better. I always think it’s hard to read scripts because, first of all, a lot of the time they’re just boring. It’s hard to read a script from start to finish, like a book, and enjoy it just for itself. The script is supposed to be the blueprint for the movie. So you can read a script and be like, Okay, but then it can turn into a good movie. I feel like I’ve only read a couple scripts ever where I thought, Wow. I remember being in Dallas, and one of the guys who helped us with Bottle Rocket [1996] knew Quentin Tarantino when Reservoir Dogs [1992] was happening. He had a copy of True Romance [1993], and I remember he gave that to me and Wes. That script seemed so great, just so exciting and different from everything. It’s nice to read something that has its own voice, and Sofia’s script obviously does.

Read the full interview in at their website, and here’s the other interview Wilson refers to with Bottle Rocket enthusiast Tony Shafrazi.

hat-tip

These are said to be the press notes and credits for Fantastic Mr. Fox. I cannot absolutely confirm their authenticity at this point but have no reason to believe that they are are a fabrication.

–

Based on the beloved story by Roald Dahl, the film tells the tale of the noble, charming and fantastic Mr. Fox, who uses his wits and cunning to outfox three dimwitted farmers who tire of sharing their chickens with the crafty creature.

“Boggis and Bunce and Bean.  One short, one fat, one lean.  These horrible crooks, so different in looks, were nonetheless equally mean.”

Wes Anderson (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited) directs the stop-motion animation of Roald Dahl’s much loved children’s book. Fantastic Mr. Fox is voiced by George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Michael Gambon, and scheduled for release in the fall of 2009.

VOICES

Mr Fox – GEORGE CLOONEY

Mrs Fox – MERYL STREEP

Ash – JASON SCHWARTZMAN

Badger – BILL MURRAY

Kylie – WALLY WOLODARSKY

Kristofferson – ERIC ANDERSON

Franklin Bean – MICHAEL GAMBON

Rat – WILLEM DAFOE

Petey – JARVIS COCKER

Coach Skip – OWEN WILSON

Weasel – WES ANDERSON

Agnes – JUMAN MALOUF

Beaver’s Son – JEREMY DAWSON

Beaver – STEVEN RALES

Mole – JAMES HAMILTON

Rickity – ADRIEN BRODY

Nathan Bunce – HUGO GUINNESS

Mrs Bean – HELEN McCRORY

Action 13 Reporter – STEVE SMITH

Rabbit – MARIO BATALI

Beans Son – GARTH JENNINGS

Squirrel – ROMAN COPPOLA

CREW

Director / Writer / Producer:

Wes Anderson

Writer

Noah Baumbach

Based on the book by

Roald Dahl

Producers:

Scott Rudin, Allison Abbate

Executive Producers:

Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson

Director of Photography:

Tristan Oliver

Editor:

Andy Weisblum

Animation Director:

Mark Gustafson

Animation Supervisor:

Mark Waring

Animators:

Andy Biddle

Anthony Farquhar-Smith

Brad Schiff

Brian Hansen

Chris Tichbourne

Chuck Duke

Caroline Maure

Daniel Alderson

Elie Chapuis

Jason Stalman

Jeff Riley

Jens Gulliksen

Kim Keukeleire

Leo Nicholson

Malcolm Lamont

Payton Curtis

Tobias Fouracre

Will Hodge

Art Director:

Nelson Lowry

Model Department Supervisor

Roddy Macdonald

Modellers:

Amy Mabire

Angela Kyriacou

Barry Jones

Catherine Stewart

Charles Fletcher

Christine Jones

Clare Kinross

Colin Armitage

Emma Pickard

Gavin Richards

Grant Humberstone

Holly Blenkins

Joe Vettese

Joe Vassallo

John Lee

Jim Barr

Maggie Haden

Marie Parsons

Mark Gunning

Mick Chippington

Paul Marsh

Richard St Claire

Roy Bell

Sam Leake

Sarah Wells

Terry Whitehouse

Thomas Wignall

Tony Travis

William Sumpter

Supervising Modeler

Andy Gent

First, if you live in the Houston area, you can see Rushmore tonight on the big screen!

Discovery Green’s free movie series celebrates Houston on film with a 10th anniversary screening of this indie classic by Houstonian Wes Anderson.

Event times: 5 September 2008 (Friday), 7.30 pm (link)

Andrew Dansby has written a great article about the 10th anniversary of Rushmore for the Houston Chronicle (link):

It takes a special eye to see Houston as the setting for a fairy tale. Wes Anderson thought about shooting his second film, Rushmore, in New England, but he couldn’t find a location that worked for the titular school.

So he asked his mother, real estate agent Texas Anderson, to shoot his alma mater, St. John’s School, “standing in the circle and rotating while shooting one photo after another,” she said. The search ended there.

Having found Rushmore Academy right in his backyard, Wes Anderson’s next task was finding Houston locations for the rest of the film. (By the way, the city is never stated as the setting in the movie.) He shot most of it at St. John’s, but there are also scenes filmed at a home in West University, Lamar High School, a barbershop in the Heights, North Shore High School, the Forest Club on Memorial and a stadium parking lot just outside the Loop (see map on Page E3).

When he needed a school that would allow minor pyro for Max Fischer’s (Jason Schwartzman) play, Anderson found one in North Shore, according to his father, Mel, who works in public relations.
“I was impressed to see the trucks and equipment of thee volunteer fire departmentsinside,” Mel Anderson said. “And there was Wes, calmly directing the whole thing.”

While little clues (police insignias and buses) give away the fact that Anderson’s cult film was shot here, Rushmore, which turns 10 this week and is being screened tonight at Discovery Green, was designed as a tale without region.

That lack of specificity makes Rushmore a refreshing film to watch multiple times. It feels apolitical (especially after the two recent political conventions) and dreamy. It’s an entirely lovable movie about sometimes, but not always, lovable characters. The sweet, sad, charming and irritating ways we regard each other — family, friends, acquaintances and chapel partners — ring true.

Rushmore still lends itself to the practices of cult-movie watching, with its strange quotable bits about how its hero, Max, misses the seasons at his old school, Rushmore, after transferring to one across the street; or how interesting it is that two people could both have dead people in their lives.

Max — played with cuddly complexity by a very young Schwartzman — is too real a dreamer. He’s a quintessential jack of all trades, master of none; a profound underachiever.

He falls in love with things the way he perceives them and crashes hard when they let him down. He’s as hypocritical as the rest of us, lionizing the progress we like and nostalgic for the way some things were.

Anderson’s mother mentioned that the St. John’s of Rushmore is “practically unrecognizable now.”

In a way that underscores the fluid charm that makes Rushmore so satisfying years later: that timelessness and placelessness. It’s something Anderson might have been referencing in the title. Max puts the stone-built school on a pedestal. He romanticizes it and is ruined by it. Maybe it wasn’t the right place for him after all. Or maybe he should have avoided treating it like a monument.

On the subject of monuments, Mount Rushmore is a curious one. The bright idea of blasting presidential likenesses out of a mountain is a peculiar ode to icons and progress. Choosing human iconography over heavenly beauty shows a strong commitment to the modern over the natural.

At the same time, having seen it, it’s a strangely and inexplicably breathtaking landmark.

Was carving up a mountain worth it? I don’t know. If Anderson’s title was a reference to the monument, I haven’t heard him say so. He deftly distances himself from that sort of judgment in his work. His movies indicate he likes to think we can change for the better. That’s his concern. Sometimes it takes a near-death experience, other times it’s losing a loved one, sometimes it’s an absurd spiritual journey on a train.

Anderson has, with his five films, gently tweaked old film forms with his identifiable style. With varying degrees of success, he’s done the heist movie, the fairy tale, the family drama, the adventure and the road movie.

His next movie, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, should come out next year. It’s a stop-motion animation film based on Roald Dahl’s darkly funny tale (did he write any other kind?). Not one to do the same thing twice, Anderson seems to be returning to the fairy tale but with a very different approach on Fox.

There won’t be the charming Houston landmarks that you might pass from time to time. But the other stuff we all have in common should be in there.

andrew.dansby@chron.com

Bravo, Andrew!

(thread at the Yankee Racers)

‘One does feel misunderstood’

For Wes Anderson, real life and films get very mixed up. He talks to Xan Brooks about his Indian odyssey, confusing critics, and the problem with Owen Wilson.

Wes Anderson likes to live his movies before he shoots them. It is a neat way of working, he says; it helps the creative process. So if, for instance, he is making a film about life at a private school, it is only natural to cast his alma mater in the title role. Or if he makes a film about a dysfunctional New York family he’ll have Anjelica Huston wear his mother’s glasses to play the matriarch. His most recent work, The Darjeeling Limited, features a trio of squabbling American brothers on a train ride across India. In preparation, Anderson embarked on the exact same trip alongside his writing partners Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman. The three of them, he explains, were acting out the plot as they went along. They were, in effect, being the movie before the movie existed.

When it comes to Wes Anderson, it is sometimes hard to tell where the facts end and the fictions begin. Here he is, a slender white prince in his London hotel suite, with his feet on the table and his nose in the air. At the age of 38, he has conjured up a bunch of wry, literate tragicomedies (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) that mark him as one of the brightest film-makers of his generation. And yet one can’t shake the sense that in some respects Wes Anderson’s greatest production is Wes Anderson himself, and that his grand body of work might best be read as a kind of romantic reconfiguration of his own life and the people in it. In the case of The Darjeeling Limited, this has rebounded on him in ways he could never have foreseen.

Anderson was born and raised in Houston, though he remains the most unlikely-looking Texan I’ve ever met. “Yeah, I’ve never really seen myself as a Texan,” he says. “I mean, I lived there for the first 20 years of my life and all. But even then I always wanted to live in New York, and probably secretly identified myself as a New Yorker.” As a child he would pretend he was rich, sketching Hampton mansions and European chateaus and then pretending that he lived in them. He is a very Gatsby-esque creature; a callow westerner remade as the classic east-coast sophisticate.

We talk about The Darjeeling Limited, which stars his long-time accomplice Owen Wilson as the older brother who masterminds a “spiritual journey” through the subcontinent. It’s a lush and lovely affair, an oddball picaresque that manages to be at once determinedly inconsequential and weirdly profound. Darjeeling was shot on location, and features a poisonous snake and a man-eating tiger. But the terrain it travels is very much an India of the imagination, and an extension of the man who imagined it. Sometimes that’s part of the problem.

“It’s difficult,” he acknowledges. “I don’t want to repeat myself, but of course I do repeat myself. I have my own personality and some people are going to like that and others are not. I think some people find it very annoying when they feel that a film-maker’s signature is too visible. But without ever quite making that choice, that tends to be the way I make ‘em. You can spot ‘em a mile off.”

Early word on The Darjeeling Limited has been a lot kinder than it was for his previous effort, 2004’s arch, unsatisfying The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. And yet Anderson remains such an acquired taste that the dissenting voices will always have their say. Reviewing the film in the New York Times, AO Scott described it as “precious in both senses of the word”, which sounds about right. Slate critic Jonah Weiner was altogether less impressed. In Weiner’s opinion, “there has always been something obnoxious about Wes Anderson”. For good measure he suggested that the director’s treatment of the peripheral Indian characters in Darjeeling borders on the racist.

“It’s a harsh thing to be accused of, racism,” Anderson says. “It’s hard not to be offended by that. I mean, this is a movie from the point of view of three American tourists, so their window is always going to be pretty narrow. But this notion that we are somehow using India as fodder, that’s just so wrong.” He sighs like an old tragedian. “One does feel misunderstood.”

This leads us, inevitably, to the other area of misunderstanding, the proverbial elephant in the living room. The Darjeeling Limited marks Anderson’s fifth collaboration with Owen Wilson, a man he describes as his best friend. Here Wilson plays a character recovering from a failed suicide attempt. At the end of August, just as the film was about to be unveiled at the Venice film festival, Wilson was admitted to hospital following an apparent attempt to take his own life.

Touring the film on the festival circuit, Anderson has grown used to fending off this subject. Some people, he says, can’t resist the temptation to sift the film for clues to the actor’s mental state, equating the fictional Wilson with the factual one. “You know, I generally just don’t engage in it. The fact is that Owen’s – what do we call it? – experience over the past few months cannot be connected to this film in any way. It’s just bad timing. I mean the whole thing is beyond bad timing. But that character is not based on Owen. Sure, I based him on real-life people, but Owen was never one of them.”

But he is doomed to tackle these questions. It all comes back to that crucial sense of slippage between Anderson’s personality and the personality of his films; the impression that the dramas in one world have echoes in the other. First off, Anderson and Wilson have known each other since they were students. Second, their films invariably feature characters that are much cursed as they are blessed; bright young stars who crash and burn. Small wonder people will add two and two together and come away with five.

Anderson nods. “What you are saying is quite true. And yet no one puts it with that degree of clarity. They just say, ‘Oh, this character tried to kill himself and look, there’s Owen Wilson in real life.’” He shrugs. “Certainly my movies are connected to my real life and the people around me. That’s what confuses people.”

Out of the blue he tells me about his first experience of working with Wilson. This was on Bottle Rocket, a jaunty, freewheeling feature that the pair expanded from a 14-minute short. Bottle Rocket won a powerful champion in Martin Scorsese, established Anderson as an art-house darling and paved Wilson’s ascent to the Hollywood summit. Except it almost didn’t turn out that way. On completion, the film garnered the worst results of any Columbia Pictures test preview, ever, and was widely judged to be a disaster.

“Owen thought we were all washed up,” Anderson recalls. “He thought it was over. I remember him saying that we had to quickly look for work in advertising, which I really did not want to do. He also kept saying that we needed to distance ourselves from the movie.” He chuckles at the memory. “And I’m like, ‘How are we going to do that? We’ve both written it, I’ve directed it and you’re in pretty much every scene. That seems a pretty tall order.’ But no, he was insistent. We had to distance ourselves.”

This question of distance is central to Anderson’s work. Any director worth their salt will inevitably filter their films through their own consciousness, and make the audience see the world as they see it. In the case of Wes Anderson, the fit is snugger than is strictly comfortable. This is what makes the notion that he can somehow disown his own projects so ludicrous (so comical on one occasion; so entangling in another). But it is also what makes him so interesting. Anderson produces movies that are clever and cocksure, fragile and flawed, ephemeral and intense. In person he’s a bit like that himself: a series of successful gestures, at once a self-regarding aesthete and an artist to be cherished. Precious in both senses of the word.

MySpaceTV’s “Artist on Artist” with Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson

(Yankee Racers thread)

Wes’ interview with Charlie Rose from Friday (link):