“It’s never about one thing in particular…”

Well, I just was listening to an interview with Tom Stoppard. Charlie Rose asked him what the germ of the idea for one of his plays—or, The Coast of Utopia—was, and he said something like, “I never have a germ. I always have various things on my mind, and they start to intersect with one another. And that’s what I like about my work. It’s never about one thing in particular. It’s always about at least two…”

And you know—I’m paraphrasing, and not really representing him probably to his satisfaction—I sort of feel that way, too.

The Darjeeling Limited. Well, it’s in India. I wanted to do a movie about brothers and some of the peculiarities that define brother relationships. And I wanted to do a movie on a train…And I wanted to make a movie in India. I had all those things in mind, but none of those things sparked the other, and none of them was the beginning. It was sort of, here’s all this stuff, and it started to fuse together. It didn’t happen all at once, you know?

—Wes Anderson, quoted in The Wes Anderson Collection by Matt Zoller Seitz