To hear Wes Anderson describe his new film “The Darjeeling Limited,” which ushers in the 45th New York Film Festival tonight and opens at venues across the city starting Saturday, it’s clear that the cultish director was open to the idea of attempting something considerably different this time around. In writing the script, he said, he was receptive to following his story into darker places and allowing his peculiar comedic approach to wander off in more serious directions.

That may be why Mr. Anderson is bracing himself for a backlash. The director, who has often been criticized for being long on style and short on substance, knows that longtime fans may be turned off by his new film’s unusually gloomy tone and tenor.

“That was really the point of the movie,” Mr. Anderson said in an interview earlier this week, embracing the possibility that a more quietly earnest film may dismay, or even infuriate, lovers of such previous films as “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.” “Well, there weren’t that many people who went to see ‘Life Aquatic’ anyway, so I think it was a small risk.”

In “The Darjeeling Limited,” three bothers — played by Owen Wilson, (a longtime collaborator with Mr. Anderson) Jason Schwartzman (who starred in Mr. Anderson’s 1998 breakthrough, “Rushmore”), and Oscar-winner Adrien Brody (who was handpicked by the director) — travel the world after their father’s funeral on a trip designed by the eldest as a way to bring them closer together. Boarding the Darjeeling Limited, a train that cuts across India, the brothers embark on what they term a “spiritual quest.” They will visit the land’s holiest sites, come to grips with the loss of their father, and find a way to bond while free of the distractions to be found half a world away. Initially, the train ride is tense and glib — and quintessentially Anderson — but things change dramatically for this trio of detached, materialistic Americans when they’re kicked off the Darjeeling and find themselves stranded in rural India.

As the movie opens across the city this weekend and across the nation in the coming weeks, it’s this crisis that will be the focal point of debate for Mr. Anderson’s devoted fans. Even among the gathered members of the press waiting for Mr. Anderson’s arrival at a recent “Darjeeling” press day, there was conjecture as to where this sudden dramatic streak came from. Was it his attempt to spread his wings? Did he run out of comedic material? Was it an impromptu decision, made by a filmmaker who realized mid-shoot that he wanted to take his project down a different course?

But the soft-spoken director, who arrived wearing a white blazer, tentatively picking at a plate of pita bread and hummus while carefully considering each question put to him, said “Darjeeling” was to be a darker and more serious work from the very beginning.

“That was part of the original concept, that at a certain point they were going to get kicked off, and we had written scenes for when they arrive in a [rural] village, but then we ultimately decided to take out that dialogue completely,” he said.

Instead, the latter portions of the film are a near-silent montage — a deliberate attempt to contrast these more profound moments with earlier scenes featuring three Americans gabbing away on a train, paying little mind to the world passing by outside.

“It’s a movie where they’re not all that tuned in to the place they’re visiting,” he said. “They’re not really listening to each other, and then the train leaves.”

From the opening credits, there are two obvious differences between the look and feel of “Darjeeling” and that of Anderson’s most recent film, “The Life Aquatic,” which took place on an ocean vessel: the ravishing cinematography of a picturesque Indian landscape, and the realization that at least half the film’s action is shot on an actual moving train. As to the latter, Mr. Anderson said he always aims for authenticity in his movies, preferring to shoot on location and seeking out unique venues — such as the Manhattan home used for “The Royal Tenenbaums” — that can bring a sense of place to the production. “Life Aquatic,” which made its sound-stage setting a tongue-in-cheek element of the film, was an exception to that rule, he said, because it was nearly impossible to shoot below decks of an actual boat.

For “Darjeeling,” he retrofitted a train car for the shoot, dispensed with most conventional costuming and makeup (the three actors prepared themselves every morning), and took the train back and forth across the country with cameras rolling.

As for the Indian landscape, Mr. Anderson said he has considered India as a setting for years, having grown up with a close friend who hailed from that corner of the globe. But in recent years, as he has taken time to watch the famous Louis Malle documentaries of India, as well as Jean Renoir’s India-based 1951 film “The River,” he became more committed to taking the journey. Shortly after completing the first draft of “Darjeeling,” Mr. Anderson, along with co-writers Roman Coppola and Mr. Schwartzman, visited the country to see if the fictional world they had written meshed with reality. While most script details remained the same, Mr. Anderson said some things were changed — notably removing the dialogue from the film’s later segments and allowing the visual splendor of the place and the people to speak for itself.

All of which lends a healthy dose of realism to “Darjeeling,” countering some of the charges leveled at him by critics who considered “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Life Aquatic” to be too insulated, artificial, or hermetically sealed. Indeed, the characters who inhabited those films, notably Mr. Schwatzman’s Max Fischer in “Rushmore” and Mr. Wilson’s Eli Cash in “Tenenbaums,” seemed more like modish sketches than fully formed human beings.

“I don’t think of this movie as some reaction against the ‘hermetically’ sterile ‘Life Aquatic,'” Mr. Anderson said, discounting the notion of loftier intent. “I’m just trying to use my imagination to make something interesting. I have to get obsessed with something to spend three years making it, and I’m just trying to put all my ideas in and make it as exciting as possible. I don’t mind people recognizing these films as mine, that they can put all the DVDs up on a shelf, and that they go together in some way that hopefully makes sense.”