Music

Music from the Films of: Satyajit Ray Contribution to The Darjeeling Limited: song list forthcoming Years Active: c. 1947-1992

"[Ray’s] work has been an enormous influence on ["The Darjeeling Limited"]… He was my inspiration for coming to India in the first place,” Anderson said in a January 28, 2007 with a local Rajasthan paper, the Statesman. “He is the reason I came here, but his films have also inspired all my other movies in different ways, and I feel I should dedicate the movie to him.”

While North Americans are often fond of the Bollywood pumped out of Mumbai with rather prodigious aplomb, Anderson admitted he's not very familiar with the genre and again Ray, was his window to India.“My main knowledge of Indian films is Ray’s films, which I learned about from renting "Teen Kanya"(Three Daughters) on Betamax in my video store in Houston, Texas, when I was about 15. I also love Jean Renoir’s film "The River," which was made by a French director, but is a very beautiful Indian film,” he said. “Ray’s films, along with "The River" and Louis Malle’s documentaries, were essentially all I knew about India before coming here. I became somewhat obsessed with the India I learned about from those films.”

Wes was pretty much hooked on Ray ever since and a quick scan of 'Life Aquatic' interviews shows that Wes was already thinking of shooting something in India by the time 'Aquatic' was complete.

"Ray is one of my favourites," Anderson said. "His films (which were usually adapted by him from books) feel like novels to me. He draws you very close to his characters, and his stories are almost always about people going through a major internal transition. My favourites are the Calcutta trilogy of "The Adversary" ("Pratidwandi"), "Company Limited" ("Seemabaddha"), and "The Middleman" ("Jana Aranya"), which are very adventurous and inventive stylistically, and "Days and Nights in the Forest" ("Aranyer Din Ratri"), which I relate to the kind of movies and books that completely captured my attention when I was a teenager, with soulful troublemakers as heroes. I think "Charulata" ("The Lonely Wife") is one of his most beautiful films, and also "Teen Kanya" (especially "The Postmaster") and the Apu films.”

"I listened to Ray’s scores continuously during [the film's writing] process, and I have selected numerous cues that I think are perfect for my story. I would love to hear more however, I would love to listen to the soundtrack from "Kanchenjungha" ” he told the Statesman. "I would like to fill the movie with Ray’s music, and in some places I have ideas to sculpt the scenes around the music rather than vice-versa. I would like to use the Ray scores exactly as I would use an original score written for my own film.”