When director Wes Anderson and actor Owen Wilson started writing their third screenplay together they wanted it to be exceptional. Their inspiration for the screenplay of the wild and wacky 'The Royal Tenenbaums' was grounded in eccentric profiles in the New Yorker magazine and the literary world of New York, they structured the film like a novel, the larger-than-life characters were based on real people who influenced them, and they wrote the characters exclusively for big stars like Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Anderson and Wilson went to similar schools, "developed a similar sense of humour, went to college together at the University of Texas, and became friends there," says Wilson, who also co-wrote and starred in 'Bottle Rocket", co-wrote and co-produced 'Rushmore', and is the executive producer, co-writer and one of the stars in 'The Royal Tenenbaums'.

For their latest venture they had an idea of a family of geniuses, each member being exceptional and adept at a particular skill.  "But family life was so awful that it left each of the children as they grew older particularly ill-suited to deal with any of the problems that most people are able to handle," says Anderson.

Part of Anderson's inspiration for Tenenbaums stems from his vision of New York. A native of Texas, he grew up reading the 'New Yorker' and has every issue of the magazine from the past 40 years in his office.

"The film is about New York, but from the perspective of someone who has come to the city with enthusiasm, not somebody who has known the city his whole life, " says Anderson. "It is much more of a dream idea of New York."

"New York in a romantic way that doesn't really exist," says Wilson.

"The entire film is steeped in some kind of New York literary history," says Anderson, noting that many of the characters in the movie, their personalities, temperaments, habits and emotional exploits, could have easily come off the pages of the 'New Yorker' magazine as it existed in a bygone era.

"Authors like Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling, Lillian Ross, J.D. Salinger, John O'Hara, E.B. White, James Thurber, all of them provided inspiration for the film, "says Anderson. "In recent years I've read in backdated 'New Yorkers' various profiles of people you have never heard of - intelligent, eccentric, unconventional personalities, the kind of profiles they don't write anymore - and these profiles and personalities have also influenced me."

Anderson also found inspiration reading the works of playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (including their play 'You Can't Take It With You'); Hart's autobiography 'Act One'; stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald; plays and journalism by S.N. Berhman; Louis Malle's 'The Fire Within'; as well as personal inspirations.

In keeping with the inspirations of the world of New York literature, Anderson had an idea that rather than the movie being based on a book, the movie would be the book.

"The novel functions as part of the narrative and the film is structured like a novel, divided into chapters with a narrator leading the audience through the story," says Anderson. Because of the idea of the film as a novel, it was important that story would work as a kind of fable, in a magical, literary, cosmopolitan Manhattan."

"We had a good idea of the characters and who they were long before there was any story, "says Anderson, who wrote and developed the screenplay for "The Royal Tenenbaums" over the course of a year. "I've never had a movie where it started with a plot, but the characters gave us a plot and sort of took over … Royal was not the main character at the beginning, everybody had this malaise and were swirling around each other when that character came in and took over because he made things happen in the story."

"The characters had these terrific accomplishments and a kind of supreme confidence in themselves," says Anderson. "What is interesting to me is how they deal with the fact that it's all behind them, that they must find their self-esteem elsewhere, and that leads them back to their family, where everything begins."

"In our earlier films nothing could be that serious because of the tone. My idea was to make something that was more ambitious on an emotional level. The other films did deal with the issue of family, but they were metaphorical families, groups of friends, someone obsessed with a school and wants to be part of it. This one is more directly connected with issues of family, issues that are deeply personal, emotional and serious."

Anderson was careful however not to abandon his distinctive stylised point of view,  tone and vision, maintaining an appropriate balance between stylisation and naturalism in the film.

"It became something where you had to make a whole world that was heightened so these things could naturally fit in," says Anderson. "The whole goal is for that stylised stuff to help make it exciting to be in the world of these characters, but then to quickly seem natural, and to give you details that you respond to and tell you more about them as you go along."

Creating the characters