The Onion's "A.V. Club" asked director and writer Wes Anderson some excellent questions concerning THE DARJEELING LIMITED as well as his body of past work, and I've included some of the highlights below. Even more, they assembled a list of 16 classic films they theorize may have helped shape Wes's unique style today.

Embarrassingly, I've only seen three of them. Time to kick my Netflix account back into gear!

P.S. Video from some of the movies are also provided! Click the title to go directly to it.

 
16 Films Without Which Wes Anderson Couldn't Have Happened (as theorized by The Onion's A.V. Club)

1. The Graduate (1967)
2. Paper Moon (1973)
3. Harold And Maude (1971)
4. Brewster McCloud (1970)
5. Sullivan's Travels (1941)
6. The World Of Henry Orient (1964)
7. The River (1951)
8. Bande À Part (Band Of Outsiders) (1964)
9. A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969)
10. Stolen Kisses (1968)
11. Big Deal On Madonna Street (1958)
12. Local Hero (1983)
13. The King Of Comedy (1983)
14. Metropolitan (1990)
15. A Thousand Clowns (1965)
16. Murmur Of The Heart (1971)

The Onion's AV Club also interviewed Wes, the full text of which you can read here. Some highlights:

AVC: "Bottle Rocket established Anderson's knack for lacing whimsical comedy with a touch of melancholy..."

AVC: "[One would think India] would be a place where a precise itinerary would be impossible to follow."

Wes: "Well, I don't know if it would work anywhere, but India would be the last place in the world it would. India is a place where one of the great pleasures for a foreigner is that you're constantly surprised. Everywhere you look is something that is either funny, or very moving, but there is always so much that is so unexpected. That's part of the reason why people who like it tend to love it."

AVC: Did the film surprise you in how differently it turned out than what was planned?

Wes: "People seem to think that my movies are so carefully coordinated and arranged—and in a lot of ways, they are—but every single time I make a movie, I feel that every director makes these choices... And for me, what ends up happening is, I wind up surprised at the combination of all these ingredients. It never is anything like what I expected. That was certainly the case with this movie. In the end, it doesn't resemble anything like what I had in my mind..."

Wes: "We planned a train journey, because we wanted to see what that was like. But we went there for two main reasons: So I could introduce those guys to India, and because we needed to write somewhere. So I thought this would be a good way to keep us together. Most of our time on that trip was spent writing, sitting in one room or another working on our story."