Strangeness on a train

Jason Schwartzman limped around his friend's sun-dappled Nichols Canyon retreat looking highly apologetic. Frowning at his heels was his chubby French bulldog, Arrow. Schwartzman had broken his toe the day before, and as he made his way to a secluded outdoor table, he tried explaining. "It was like that scene in 'Karate Kid,' " he said, presumably casting himself in the Ralph Macchio role. Everyone was kicking soccer balls around like a bunch of Pelés, he said. So, playing barefoot seemed like a good idea.

The actor's solicitous earnestness was palpable. This hesitant, wide-eyed loopy charm, often employed as the comic relief in sensitive, maudlin films, lands him roles among Hollywood's best. But no one, it seems, is as surprised by his celebrity as he is. In some respects, he's at the white-hot center of young arty Hollywood; yet he sees himself more as a struggling musician and improbable interloper.

"The Darjeeling Limited," opening Friday, is his first movie with Wes Anderson since the writer-director helped make the teenage Schwartzman a star in 1998's "Rushmore." And it's Schwartzman's first screenwriting credit. It's a weird road movie with the typical Anderson flourishes -- the Kinks songs, the melancholic tone, all of it awash in color -- that follows three estranged brothers played by Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson on a spiritual quest by train through India. Schwartzman spent about 18 months writing the script with Anderson and Schwartzman's cousin Roman Coppola.

But before his storytelling began, Schwartzman opened with a disclaimer. "My feelings won't be hurt if you cut me off," he said. "I can be slightly long-winded."

And then Schwartzman unspooled a stream-of-conscious recollection of "Darjeeling" from the first moment Anderson approached him with the idea in Paris, while Roman Coppola and Schwartzman were filming "Marie Antoinette," to the exotic experience of shooting in India, much of it in the crowded compartments of a moving train with weekends spent in his pajamas, watching movies in bed with Anderson. At some point, Arrow began snoring loudly under the table. Schwartzman paused to acknowledge his throbbing toe.

"It's like a ticking clock," he said."I've never done an interview in physical pain before, but it's great." And he was off again, remembering his surprise at Anderson's invitation to co-write the film. "Darjeeling" originated with Anderson's idea -- three brothers on a train in India. They worked out the rest together in Parisian hotel rooms and coffeehouses where Anderson sometimes lives, on long distance conference calls and then, finally in India, until they finished the script.