Jim Jarmusch

Roberto Benigni & Steven Wright. Iggy Pop & Tom Waits. Bill Murray & RZA (of the Wu-Tang Clan), Jack & Meg White, Cate Blanchett & Cate Blanchett. These are just some of the delightful onscreen pairings in Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, Coffee and Cigarettes.

Comprised of nothing but coffee breaks, the movie began as an assignment for Saturday Night Live. In 1986, the producers asked Jarmusch to make a short film, and he took the opportunity to create a little black-and-white movie with Wright and Benigni. Playing themselves, or at least versions of their public personae, the two men meet at a café where they drink coffee and smoke, and even though the six-minute short is scripted, their conversation is casually, spontaneously funny. Jarmusch enjoyed the experience so much that for the next 18 years, he continued to make shorts between his feature films, sometimes using the actors from his movies and sometimes roping in musician friends like Waits or actor friends like Steve Buscemi. But he always followed the same structure: two people chatting over coffee and cigarettes.

Having collected “enough songs for a record album,” as Jarmusch likes to say, he recently combined all 11 shorts into a feature-length movie appropriately titled Coffee and Cigarettes. He claims he doesn’t take this “strange little film” very seriously, but it’s clear that even in these quick projects, Jarmusch can’t hide his fascination with human nature. When the shorts are placed back-to-back, subtle themes emerge from this clever amalgam of fragile egos and interchangeable identities. Recently while Jarmusch was in San Francisco for the opening of Coffee and Cigarettes at the city’s film festival, we sat down and I asked him about its surprising cohesiveness.

“Well it’s just an organic thing,” he says. “It just starts growing and you try to pay a little attention to which way it’s leaning. To be honest, I didn’t know whether they would work better as separate shorts or if they would have a cumulative effect that was stronger than the individual things. And when I first started putting them together, I felt very strongly that they did. So I went that way. “But I still don’t know. It’s impossible for anyone who makes a film to see it as a film, because the beauty of seeing a film is seeing something for the first time and entering a world, and you’re robbed of that.”

Despite that lack of gestalt and Beginner’s Mind, Jarmusch has fashioned a wildly idiosyncratic, stylish and coherent body of work. In the early ’80s, right out of film school, Jarmusch inadvertently helped define the American independent movement when his second feature, Stranger Than Paradise, found an audience of people who enjoyed its hip-but-relaxed pace, deadpan humor and apparent awareness of world cinema. The film is stylistically simple, with even fewer shots than the film he made during school, Permanent Vacation, and it seemed to satisfy a hunger for movies that eschew Hollywood formula. That hunger didn’t go unnoticed by the industry, which has since created specialized subsidiaries of major studios, festivals like Sundance and cable channels that champion “independent” filmmakers.