Rich Tea

How to Make a Wes Anderson Film: A Beginners Guide. Take a handful of oddballs – preferably a kooky Family With Issues – place in a meticulously realised world of whimsy and wackiness and observe with meditative, choreographed tracking shots. Have your Family With Issues make deadpan observations as often as possible, while keeping a wistful, melancholic groove on a low simmer. Pump up a Kinks and/or Bowie number and make your FWI run in slow motion. Add quirk and stir.

Many critics enjoy dismissing Anderson as yesterday's wunderkind, doomed never to fulfil the early promise of his wonderful sophomore flick Rushmore, the success of which had no less than Martin Scorsese heralding the young director as the hope of the future. There's no denying that this Marmite of movie-makers has carved a very specific niche for himself, dividing audiences and critics alike, but does he deserve the accusations of self-indulgent style over substance?

Quirk for quirk's sake is all very well, but it can become formulaic, bland, or just plain annoying. 'Look at us!' cry the quirkites, 'aren't we just soooo weird? Yet sweet and charming, and with ironic facial hair! Now let's all do a funny dance!' Not that I'm some kind of cheerleader for mainstream mediocrity - I'm as alternative as the next pseudo-bohemian liberal arts graduate. But there's only so much pop-culture inflected meta-humour a girl can take. Still, the quirk-noir of Donnie Darko was a kitschy eighties joy, the films of Michel Gondry are a genre unto themselves, and Charlie Kaufman's warped vision of the world is just dark enough to temper any hint of self-indulgent eclecticism. But recent films like Napoleon Dynamite, Eagle vs. Shark, and even Little Miss Sunshine wore their indie-creed wackiness a little too self-consciously. Anderson, though, is a horse of a quite different colour. Or a zebra. A multi-coloured, melancholic zebra with his iPod permanently on shuffle.

In The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson's fifth feature, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and Adrien Brody leave no quirk unturned as the three estranged brothers who reunite for a spiritual journey of sorts on the titular train, a year after their father's death. "I think with this movie the thing that interested me about these brothers was that we find them at a moment when they are all particularly lost," explains Anderson. "Their father has died and their mother has disappeared and they can't seem to form their own families." The three leads work well together and, despite the obvious lack of physical resemblance, they're a viable unit, black sheep triplets united in their disunity. "Something that happens when you try to cast a family," says Anderson "is that you pretty quickly decide to just get the best actors that you can get. If you cast it for resemblance then you end up saying, well, I could get one of my favourite actors in the world to play this part or I could get someone who looks a little more like the other guy. I think great actors work out to be a family and they very quickly started acting like brothers."

Anderson's approach to casting might seem restrictive, his motley troupe of indie-cool collaborators popping up with increasing inevitability, but it's important that the actors are on the same wavelength. And there's a certain droll knowingness to the red herring cameos that the director teases the audience with in Darjeeling. Keeping it in the family is Jason Schwartzman, unforgettable in his break-out role in Rushmore, and equally good here. Or at least I think he was pretty good, it's kind of hard to make him out behind that impressive comedy moustache which makes him look like a sort of composite of all the Beatles in India circa 1968. An understanding of the rather opaque motivation of Schwartzman's character in Darjeeling benefits enormously from a viewing of Anderson's accompanying short Hotel Chevalier, an exquisite thirteen minute prelude to the main attraction available online. See it first if you possibly can.

Schwartzman also co-wrote the script, with his cousin Roman Coppola and Anderson rounding out the real life oddball threesome behind the film. So how did the actor make the move into writing? Schwartzman is quick to credit his debt to Anderson's guidance: "Wes had the initial idea, which was to do a movie about three brothers on a train in India and when he first brought it up to me, I didn't think it was an invitation to co-write the movie," says the actor, "I was in Paris at the time and was just finishing up on Marie Antoinette and I had a spare room, so Wes was staying with me for a while. We would go for these late night walks and tell stories about the girls that we knew, things they had said, things we'd said back, and go on off on all kinds of tangents from there. Wes would always be writing stuff down and after about three weeks he suddenly said, 'You know this movie we're writing, we should bring Roman in on this.' I hadn't realized we were writing a movie together till then."

Notably absent from publicity junkets, and from this interview, is Owen Wilson, Anderson's long-time collaborator and the eldest brother in Darjeeling. It's impossible to watch Wilson's character – bandaged up almost beyond recognition after a self-inflicted accident – and not feel slightly uncomfortable given recent events in the actor's private life, but I can't imagine a single person not wishing him well. Nobody can find a gentle innocence in the idle rich quite like Anderson, and Wilson's quiet, deadpan delivery is a perfect match. As Anderson recently said at a screening: "I've never made a movie without him, and I hope I never have to."

"I always knew there would be Jason," Anderson says of the film's casting, "and Owen is automatic for me. I tend to think of him very early in the process, if not before: Owen is like one of my brothers. And Adrien is somebody who I'd wanted to work with for many years." Adrien Brody fits right into the Anderson milieu, with his Buster Keaton-esque awkwardness and lop-sided, hangdog face, "What can I say?" the actor grins, "I was born to be lanky." So, what was it like to join the cool kids in the indie corner? "I was honoured," Brody admits. "I am a big fan of his work and I was always saying to people that I wished I could be in one of his films. He's a unique filmmaker with a very individual way of looking at the world and it was lovely to get to be a part of the family so to speak. I also thought this script was pretty special."

Brody hasn't done a lot of comedy, which is really quite surprising, considering he's such an expressive, physical actor. But as well as nailing Anderson's off-kilter, so-dry-you'll-need-a-cocktail-olive, unique sense of humour, Brody is masterful at the moments of real, lyrical sadness that characterise the third act of the movie. "What's beautiful about this film as far as I'm concerned is that at its core, as well as being very funny, it's also a very emotional film and something you can really connect to," the actor says. "It deals with family drama, family problems, getting rid of the baggage from the past, and yet it's also very humorous and light. It doesn't weigh you down at all."

"When we were writing we went to India and we tried to imitate the journey, to act it out, which is a bit of a crazy way to go about it," says Anderson. "But I wanted to and they wanted to and that experience fuelled the movie." Anderson's baroque, ornately constructed style is set against the noisy, spicy bustle of rural northern India to great effect; the country's exoticism is a rich, textured tapestry that forms the backdrop for the central trio's working through of those aforementioned Issues. "We tried to make the film about what we discovered in India and it's the most vibrant place I have ever been," Anderson enthuses. "There is colour everywhere and it's just a matter of choosing which direction to point the camera."

The director acknowledges that A Wes Anderson Film is certainly visually distinctive, but he is defensive about charges of repetition: "All my energy goes into what we can do to make this film new and different and how can we tell the story well. Yet somehow I manage to take a movie set in New York or Italy or on a boat or a train in India and people say, it's a lot like your other work. I guess it's just my funny way of seeing things."

When the great silent filmmaker D.W. Griffith made his famous pronouncement: "The task I am trying to achieve above all is to make you see," he recognised that film allows glimpses of that unique, unimaginable thing: to see the world through someone else's eyes. And that's the real delight in a Wes Anderson film, to experience a surreal, vivid, askew way of seeing things, like a trip down the portal in Charlie Kaufman's quirk-tastic Being John Malkovich. Being Wes Anderson for 90-odd minutes can be intoxicating, funny and joyous if you can accept that you're not in Kansas any more.

Quirky he most definitely is, but in locating his latest film in an unfamiliar context, Anderson hints at a compassion for the world beyond all the peacock-bright dolls house dioramas. As Adrien Brody says, "The beauty of India is that you cannot override the chaos, you can't override the spontaneous things that happen and you really have to accept that and roll with it." The same could be said of an Anderson film. Sure, all the beauty, exquisite craftsmanship and emotional depth of a Faberge egg is never going to satisfy some audiences, but after a while you just have to sit back, accept that you're on a train ride that might very well go nowhere at all, and enjoy the view.