As a musician, how do you find the soundtrack?

Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it. I know that it seems to be a little bit of a shock right in the beginning, when the ‘Gang of Four’ comes in.

But I think that there’s a spirit to the music and there’s a rhythm of the music that feels youthful. And I think that was what Sofia was saying, was just that the music reminds her of a fastness and of a youth that she feels is in the same spirit of Marie Antoinette or what she interprets Marie Antoinette to be.

You read Louis’ diaries. Could you tell us about them?

Well, I read his, there were those hunting logs, you know. And the most striking thing about them is just kind of how sparse they are even to himself. He’s sparse to himself sometimes. You know, he didn’t write much but, yeah, they were, they were like hunting logs about what he had done that day.

Were they the originals?

Oh, I didn’t to get anywhere near anything original. They were copies.

Is there mention of his love life?

No. Well, he does write... and I might be paraphrasing because of the translation... but he wrote when he met her, you know, when he met Marie on the hugest day of probably his youth to that point, meeting his future wife and then possible queen, he wrote, “I met the Dauphine today.”

That was it?

That was it.

What were the opposing views for the whole-

Sex thing?  Well, the two, there are two major camps. One is that he has this medical, he had an actual medical condition called thymosis.

I read that he had surgery.

But that’s a debate. But there’s a debate because according to Antonia Fraser, she says that there, that it would be impossible that he would have had that because he'd never made a... he never missed a day of writing really, and he would have had to have missed a lot of days of writing after that surgery. 

And he never wrote about it. He personally never wrote about the surgery. So there’s, but, and which is interesting, and I'm, like, it's interesting how mysterious history is to me, even, even, like, written history- huh?

What is your take on the-

On the sex?

You gained about forty pounds for the film?

Forty-five, yeah.

What was your peak weight for the film?

I was around one-eighty, yeah.

How did you feel?

I just felt strange in the beginning because I wasn’t used to it, because I gained it really quickly, and I stopped doing any kind of exercise at all.

So in the beginning I felt crummy just because I was very conscious of how unhealthy it was. But I came to love it, you know what I mean? Because I came to just, it just became, it’s so natural. I just had to, it took me a second to catch up with myself.

Your insecurity must have been terrible when you did Rushmore.

Different, well, different because I didn’t know, like, that was an interesting situation on Rushmore because, do you know when you're so afraid that you’re brave?

That’s, like, what happened on that one because, like, I just, nothing was, that was not supposed to be happening. So it never was.

Are you working with Wes Anderson?

Huh? Yeah, I’m going to start making it in, like, I’m leaving here in six weeks, yeah. It’s a fact. It’s a fact.

To do what?

Huh?  To go do the new Wes Anderson movie, yeah.

What's the name?

It's called The Darjeeling Limited

Is this the one you co-wrote with him?

Yeah. That’s exciting. I guess. I hope it’s good. No. It's good. Yeah, I love- I’m very proud, I’m very honoured to have been included in the writing process.