Jim Jarmusch

But few of those filmmakers, even the most famous ones, have the sort of independence that Jarmusch has enjoyed throughout his career. Since that first burst of success, he’s followed his muse without pressure from studios. He finds financing outside of the Hollywood system and sells the American distribution rights only after his films are completely finished. Even the most powerful distributors have been unable to wrest final cut from his grasp.

“I feel very lucky, but there’s no other way for me to do it. It’s just who I am. It’s not a calculated thing. I don’t want to be a director-for-hire. I’m not attracted by the money, you know, so—I just feel really lucky, and I really love cinema. I love all forms of expression that people leave us and give us and will give us.”

Jarmusch has a voracious appetite for the work of creative people. “I saw this Jafar Panahi film, Crimson Gold. What a jewel. I like filmmakers who do it because they love the form, so I love Aki Kaurismäki and Emir Krusturica and Claire Denis and Wong Kar-Wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien. I think Sofia Coppola is really a poet of cinema. Lost in Translation is a beautiful film. You know, it got over-hyped and too much weight put on it for its own good, because it’s kind of a fragile film, but I liked it a lot.

“I get in certain obsessive states of seeing older films where I have to see all of Budd Boetticher’s Westerns, or I have to see every film Steve McQueen was in, or I have to see all the shorts that Kiarostami ever made. I think good things stay good, you know? And people find them. And now we’re lucky because we have access to DVDs and we have the Internet and you really can find out about something you’re interested in much more easily than you could 10 years ago.”

This broad appreciation of human expression drives Jarmusch’s work. Even in his earliest movies, his characters take time to read and listen to music. In an industry where pop songs are slapped onto film soundtracks just to sell CDs, it’s refreshing to see a love of music so deeply embedded in Jarmusch’s films that many of them make no sense without it.

His characters, in addition to sharing many of his appetites, often seem to exist at a point where cultures collide. This frontier isn’t without its problems—his characters deal with language differences and misunderstandings—but just as often they value the fresh perspectives that someone from another world may have. In 1995, after making a string of light comedies, including Down By Law, Mystery Train and Night On Earth, Jarmusch made Dead Man, a formal, stunningly beautiful, almost experimental Western starring Johnny Depp as the eponymous white man who is befriended by a Native American (played by Gary Farmer) who prefers to be called Nobody. While following the men through a slow, mysterious journey, the movie shows equal reverence for the poetry of William Blake and the culture of indegenous peoples, and approaches death as life’s natural coda, something to anticipate. Jarmusch is careful to respect Nobody without idealizing him—essentially treating him as a human—while vilifying only those characters who seem unwilling to do so.