Pages tagged “jim jarmusch”

When we last left him, Jim Jarmusch was readying his first feature in years. Called The Limits of Control, the film is a road movie being shot by Jarmusch and Christopher Doyle about a mysterious protagonist traveling across Spain. And now, less than a month before shooting is set to begin, more casting announcements have started coming in about the film.

While Isaach De Bankole will be playing the film's lead, Jarmusch is enlisting the help of many past contributors. First and foremost of these is Bill Murray, who worked with Jarmusch previously in Broken Flowers and Coffee and Cigarettes. Tilda Swinton (also featured in Broken Flowers) and Gael Garcia Bernal round out the main cast, with Roman Polanski and Javier Bardem suspected for cameos. What their parts in the film will be is anyone's guest, but just the fact that Murray and Garcia Bernal will be working together with Jarmusch is quite an announcement.

Other than this, there isn't much new information about the film, which is characteristic for Jarmusch. It is nice to see, though, that despite his semi-retirement, Murray is still willing to work on projects that are worthwhile. While it's unfortunate that his clients GZA and RZA haven't also been announced as actors in the project, we're still willing to hold out some hope until the film's actually out.

Related links:
Paste: Jim Jarmusch working on The Limits of Control
Paste: Jim Jarmusch - The Clever is in the Details
Paste: Broken Flowers

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

Jim Jarmusch's next project, tentatively called The Limits of Control, has been acquired by Focus Features for worldwide distribution. Jarmusch will start shooting the feature this February in Spain. It looks like Focus was happy with the reception of Jarmusch's last feature, Broken Flowers, so they're hoping for a similar success this time out. It's good news for Jarmusch, whose films have sometimes had a difficult time finding distribution, or at least advertised distribution, in the past.

Focus' CEO James Schamus remarked in a statement, "Jim Jarmusch defines what it means to be an independent filmmaker for audiences all over the world, and we're delighted to rejoin with him following our success together with Broken Flowers." That's only partially PR speak, since Jarmusch probably did as much for the creation of contemporary independent film as John Cassavetes.

According to the film's press release, The Limits of Control is "the story of a mysterious loner, a stronger, whose activities remain meticulously outside of the law." Which makes him sound like nearly every other Jarmusch protagonist, but that's probably a good thing. He's played by Isaach De Bankolé (Raymond in Ghost Dog), and is completing an unexplained job that causes him to travel across Spain. The eminent Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love, Hero) will be working as cinematographer while Eugenio Caballero (Pan's Labyrinth) is production designer.

Nothing else is known about the film. All we can say here at Paste is that it's about time.

Related links:
Jim Jarmusch on IMDB
Paste with Jim Jarmusch
Paste's review of Broken Flowers

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

Paste film writer Robert Davis sat down with Jim Jarmusch at the San Fransisco International Film Festival to discuss the indie legend’s new movie Coffee and Cigarettes, and much more. Here are some exclusive, unpublished excerpts from the interview:

Paste: So from what I understand Coffee and Cigarettes was shot over a long period of time... in order to capture the natural aging process…

Jim Jarmusch: [laughs] Yeah.

P: …of Tom Waits and Iggy Pop.

J: [laughs] Yes, exactly my intention.

P: Actually it's surprising to me how rich the themes are given how it was made and how you didn't start with these ideas necessarily, but they do resonate.

J: Well, yeah, it's just an organic thing. It just starts growing and you try to pay a little attention to which way it's leaning.

P: "Twins," the segment with Steve Buscemi and the Lee twins—that short predates The White Stripes, I'm sure.

J: Yes.

P: And yet it sort of echoes this joke in the media about the White Stripes…

J: Are they brother and sister?

P: Yeah, it's implied in this weird way, in this short that existed before the band.

J: In the script for Meg & Jack, we take the tack that they are brother and sister, in a way. Cause it's like, "Remember when we were little and you had the Barbie thing." And he says, "Are you going bowling tomorrow night?" And then the cousins...

P: Are Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan cousins?

J: Right. And GZA and RZA are cousins, too.

P: That's interesting how those things recur. The opening short with Steven Wright and Roberto Benigni—they switch seats, and they also switch places at the dentist. It's a gag, and it's funny, but it does sort of blossom into something later where people are mistaken for each other or they switch places.

J: Hmm…

P: I think it shows up after you've seen a bunch of them.

J: Yeah, I never really thought of that, even, the switching and that resonating.

P: Elvis and his evil twin switch places.

J: Yeah. Hmm…

P: At the festival screening you said you felt like you finally had enough shorts for a record album. The movie does feel like a mix tape in a way, and your conversation with Harvey Keitel in Blue in the Face could almost be a bonus track on the album. You've been thinking about cigarettes for a long time.

J: [laughs] Yeah, although that wasn't my idea. That was Paul Auster’s. But he gave me some subjects, some ideas, and I made some more, and then I went in and Harvey was like, "Hey I'm half asleep today, man. I hope you got something, cause I got nothin'." I was like, uh oh, and I wrote a list and I made them put it right outside the camera so I could have a list of subjects to ramble on about.

P: I don't remember all of the details, but I know that every time I see a Nazi smoking a cigarette—which isn't that often, actually—I think of how you mention they hold them in that funny way.

J: Yeah, and I still am obsessed with people throwing guns away. Like they run out of ammo and they throw the gun away. Wha? Wha? That still astounds me.

P: Was it Top Secret or one of the Naked Gun movies where they start throwing the guns at each other?

J: Yeah. [laughs] It was one of those Naked Guns.

P: Another thing I like about Coffee and Cigarettes—it's cool that it's kind of a trip through your body of work. It has familiar faces from the past, and familiar locations like Memphis. But I wondered—I read somewhere that you don't like to look back at your movies

J: No, I don't.

P: But this project sort of requires it, at least with these little snippets. Did you see new things when you went back to look at the shorts?

J: I don't know if I saw new things, but when you put them together it becomes a whole new thing, with the echoes, so that allowed me to not have that stigma for myself, of looking back. Instead it was like, “I'm going forward by constructing something out of elements, some of which were filmed a long time ago.” So it wasn't so painful in that way for me. It was kind of fun, actually, to see how they interrelated.

P: I don't know if you've seen this thing that Chantal Akerman did. It was for a French TV show, just an hour. She was supposed to do a portrait of herself, and instead of doing that she took clips from her movies and just assembled them.

J: Really?

P: And they were—yeah— it's kind of mysterious because it's not clear what a given clip says about her, but she feels it says something about her. There's no commentary about any of them, you just see a series of clips. It seems like Coffee and Cigarettes may not be personal in that way, but it's still a cool summation of sorts.

J: Yeah, wow that's a beautiful idea. She always has some really beautiful ideas. Do you know a film she made called Toute Une Nuit? it all takes places in one night and keeps jumping from different characters and back around. It's really a beautiful film. It's one of my favorites of hers. She's pretty amazing.

P: Are you going to get to see much of the festival?

J: No, I usually don't at festivals any more. I get kind of burned out and then I want to kind of distance myself a little and go off and check out other things. But it's sort of a drag, though. Because I do see films at festivals but not as many as I would like to. I'd like to go to some when I don't have a film there, you know, and just be there for the films, but...

P: Well it's unfortunate that in most places you can't see these movies anywhere else.

J: I know.

P: So you end up packing them into two weeks but, if you had the opportunity, you'd spread it out.

J: Yeah, it can be rough, seeing like 3 a day.

P: But I really feel like there's pressure building on the wall around the American multiplex. I mean, Paste is out there looking for signs of life, and DVD distributors are figuring out that there's interest in things like Tokyo Story, and the Internet has all this information. Do you think that's true?

J: Yeah, I love the idea. I mean, I have an "illegal" multi-system DVD player and it's so great, man, you can buy them anywhere. I get all regions.

P: Yeah, and you can place the order over the Internet and it takes just a few days longer to get it from France.

J: I know. I just ordered the box set of Feuillade's Fantômas from France. It's a beautiful set. A friend of mine had it and I saw it. It's really cool, I can't wait ’till I get it.

P: Does that include Les Vampires? Or that was already on DVD?

J: No that's a separate box that came out, wow, maybe four years ago. I have that actually on videotape, not on DVD.

P: Speaking of box sets, this Chaplin box set MK2 put together recently—I saw your comments on A King in New York. Did you choose that movie to comment on?

J: I did.

P: That's an interesting choice…

J: They first wanted me to do Modern Times, which seems so obvious and really is his great film, probably. But I just thought [A King in New York] was an overlooked film that kind of resonates with the world now. But, you know, it has some really great things in it. It's not a masterpiece of cinema, but it's a pretty fascinating artifact and an interesting film. I mean, I'm a Keaton fan, myself. I have the Keaton box set. Oh man, that's very precious to me. But I did it because I thought that film was kind of overlooked.

P: Yeah, it's gotta be his least remembered movie, of the ones he starred in.

J: But it has some incredible insights into commercial American culture, you know? Even rock ’n’ roll. It's quite amazing. And I love it when he hoses down the House Un-American Activities Committee. That's really good [laughs]. Or that thing in the restaurant, where he’s doing like—he wants a lobster and he does all these pantomimes…

P: A turtle or something…

J: Yeah, turtle soup! Oh that's great. He always comes up with some incredible shit.

P: You know, I was watching Dead Man again recently—which is such a beautiful film in so many ways…

J: Oh, thanks.

P: And I hadn't noticed before, this scene when William Blake is still in [the town of] Machine. I guess it's his only night there. He's outside the saloon, and a couple of minutes are really Chaplinesque, the way he pulls the coins out of his pocket and shakes them out in his palm. Johnny Depp is even dressed a little like him, with the hat—not a bowler, but more upscale…

J: Yeah, it is Chaplinesque. There are some Keatonesque things in that film, too, hopefully, but I know what you mean about that section.

P: He even meets the girl who sells flowers shortly after, which reminds me of City Lights.

J: Hmm, yeah. And he has the quintessential Chaplin chivalrous scene when the girl gets pushed in the mud. It is very Chaplin-like more than Keaton for sure. I don't know how conscious we were of it.

P: Referring to Coffee and Cigarettes like it’s a record album seems fitting since music is so important to a lot of your characters. From the beginning, I think, from Permanent Vacation all the way through. People listen to music in your movies, which is rarely seen. And it's hard to imagine Ghost Dog without hip-hop or Mystery Train without Memphis—it just wouldn't make any sense. Are you a musician?

J: Well, I used to be in a band in the early ’80s. I worked for a few years. I actually don't play music any more, although on my birthday in January I made a resolution that I'm going to get a guitar again before the summer, so time is running out. I might get one of those resonator guitars and try to learn some kind of finger picking, you know, rural slide kind of stuff, but I'm not sure yet what I'll get. I haven't played music in so long but I figure, well, I know some chords. I used to play keyboards and oddly tuned guitars in the band I was in, and some vocals. I wasn't really a guitarist although I played guitar on some things. But I figure, well, God, if kids start when they're 15 and by the time they're 17 they're playing well, I can learn in a couple of years. Hell, man. I gotta go back to it, but not to be a musician. Just for myself, purely for my own soul, you know? And I love guitars. I just love the sound of guitars, the idea of guitars. They're like their own little orchestra. I think guitars are such beautiful instruments. And visually they're beautiful. I saw that last Rodriguez film with Johnny Depp [Once Upon a Time in Mexico]. The guitar fetishism in the movie was, I thought, beautiful. It's not a great movie, but there's great guitar fetishism in it, man. All these guitar makers, these old Mexican guys with unfinished guitars and some mariachi guys and one guitar that's black with beautiful flowers painted on it, and they wear those suits and shit. And you see them ride through a town and there are all these guys making guitars, guitars half-made hanging up. There are some great things in it. I was more interested in the guitars than the plot.

P: I think it was John Waters who said that when he's watching a movie he doesn't like he just focuses on some detail like the elbows, and he decides it's a movie about elbows and it becomes a lot more interesting. You do the same thing with guitars…

J: Yeah, although I do it more often with background action. I get really obsessed with the background actors and how they were directed, you know? The people crossing the street and the crowd scenes. Who directed them? Is it realistic? Is it good? And then I miss the whole scene that's going on in the foreground because I'm like, "That guy wasn't real, look, he takes his hat off, he's looking for attention. Get him out of there." I get obsessed with the background action.

P: Have you seen any other movies lately?

J: Not a lot of new films. I'll probably go see Hellboy because it's got a Tom Waits song in it. They used "Heart Attack and Vine". Oh, I got all the shorts that Kiarostami ever made from these guys in Texas, Cinema Texas. There are some amazing films, shorts that you can't see. He made some really beautiful ones. And I was in Paris recently and I was really astounded to find that no films by Jean Eustache or Jean Rouch are available on DVD. I couldn't believe it. I was so disappointed, because I had this list, and I was going to get these DVDs, and they said, "They're not available," and I was like, “oh man.”

P: Maybe they will be eventually, now that Rouch has passed away.

J: I'm also really into Jacque Becker—French director, ’40s and ’50s, maybe his greatest film is a precursor to Bob Le Flambeur, the Melville film. It's called Touchez Pas Au Grisbi. I love that film. Or he makes a lot of films about working class people, like there’s a beautiful one Antoine et Antoinette. He's a great director that seems not so known here, you know? I'm trying to get my hands on all his stuff lately. I mean, not to own, but just to see them.

P: There's this movie, I don't think it has distribution, by this guy Aza Jacobs in New York—I don't know if you know him—but he did this small movie called Nobody Needs to Know. I happened to see it at an indie fest here. Tricia Vessey [from Ghost Dog] is the lead in it, actually.

J: Ahh, yes, because they're showing it I think at Gen Art, this little festival in New York. It's showing while I'm here [in San Francisco].

P: It's kind of a rough first feature, but there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on. It's black and white, with great images of New York and life and appearances.

J: Really? Cause Tricia told me about it. I'll find out if there's any way I can see it.

P: It reminds me of Stranger Than Paradise a little. It’s not really like that at all, but… it has some interesting rhythms and observations about how people sometimes want to appear like drop-outs but can't actually leave the structure of life behind. It's hard to tear down walls that you've spent your life building. Something you said about learning the guitar being something even kids can do. As you get older, as an adult, you build up these barriers to things. Every kid can paint and draw, but you ask an adult, "Can you paint?" and they say, "Oh I can't do that." It's like you have to relearn things, to break out.

J: Well, I think we're just conditioned that way. They don't want us to live in a world of ideas and imagination. We're supposed to worry about our f---in’ taxes and insurance and rent money and all of this nonsense that, really, when you're on your deathbed is going to mean nothing to you. But it takes up so much of your life. I don't mean the evil “they.” But, I mean, we can make our own choices. We have to attend to some of that stuff, but how much value we give it us up to us. So ... I think people need to be opened up again. I don't know how it's going to happen in this culture, but I'm always hopeful.

P: Well, I hope you get to keep making your movies.

J: Thanks, me too. If not, I don't know what I'll do. Write bad poetry for the rest of my life, I guess.

To read Paste’s full-length feature “Jim Jarmusch: The Clever Is In The Details,” click here.

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.

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.

In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jarmusch puts hip-hop gangstas and Italian-American mobsters in the same world. It’s a humorous, inspired depiction of how knowledge and culture get transmitted from person to person. Sometimes ideas blend, and sometimes they butt heads. It’s an intriguing picture of America at a crossroads, a transitional melting pot, a single society of varying codes, languages, races and genders.

Jarmusch’s style is recognizably his own, but his work has sometimes been overly identified with the films of Yasujiro Ozu, the Japanese filmmaker whose style became simpler and yet more profound as his career advanced. But he and Ozu clearly share many of the same interests, both stylistically and in the way they observe human behavior, and nowhere are those interests more apparent than in Coffee and Cigarettes.

“I love Ozu. What a master. I’m not really able to analyze my films. I mean there are no quotes from Ozu in this film, although the camera doesn’t move, which is Ozu-like, but I do that in a lot of other films, too. So in this particular film, I don’t know what’s directly Ozu-like about it except that it’s kind of static and minimal. And also, I visited his grave in Kamakura outside Tokyo where he lived and filmed. And there’s a single Chinese character on his gravestone that’s called ‘mu’ which is a philosophical concept that you can’t really translate into English, but an approximation would be ‘the space between all things’. And I think of Coffee and Cigarettes like that. It’s made up of these little spaces in the day, little free zones where you’re not doing what your structured day is supposed to be.”

Jarmusch highlights the interstitial nature of the segments not only with dialog—characters talk about where they’ve been or where they’re going—but also with sounds that hint at a world outside of the camera’s narrow focus: music plays from a jukebox; Iggy Pop’s motorcycle rumbles softly in the background as he pulls away, off-screen; and Taylor Mead cups his hand around his ear when he thinks he hears Mahler resonating through the hallways. If you asked these characters later to describe their day, the part we’re seeing wouldn’t likely be mentioned. “No, I hope it wouldn’t,” Jarmusch agrees. “Because this isn’t their dramatic thing.”

It’s easy for those of us who grew up in the United States to spot the ritual and ceremony in Japanese movies. It stands out because it’s foreign. But we don’t often notice the patterns that we follow in our own culture. In Coffee and Cigarettes, the rhythms of people lighting cigarettes, pouring coffee, adding sugar, adding cream, stirring, sipping, clinking cups, blowing smoke become almost abstract.

“Even in the one where they drink tea, they’re like, ‘Shall I be mother? No, I’ll be my own mother’—you know, negotiating who’s gonna pour. Or the one with Renée French, it’s like her little chemistry set. She had the right milk, the right sugar; the waiter f---ed it up. Then you see her adding sugar but it’s so little. She’s so meticulous about how she wants it that it is ceremonial, in a way. Or the fact that people laugh when Shelly—Cate [Blanchett]’s cousin—stirs with her finger, because that’s sort of a ceremonial taboo. But really, why? If you saw that in some other culture, I don’t think people would laugh. Here people laugh because it’s not acceptable ceremonially. They’re kind of weird, these little things we do. … All the tiny nuances of human expression are incredible to me. I really value people who are just amazed by their own consciousness. They’re like my new heroes.”

In Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld, a priest asks his young student to name the parts of his shoe. The boy hesitates but eventually identifies the sole and the laces. After some prompting he locates the tongue, but there he stops. The priest goes on to name all the other parts of the shoe, pointing them out: the eyelets, the grommet, the welt, the cuff, the counter, the vamp, the aglet. Once you know their names, the details that surround you every day become visible.

“Yeah, it’s the same thing,” Jarmusch says. “Exactly. An appreciation of the ideas and expression and all the strange little details. If you just take a walk, you can ignore it or your head can swim in the fascination of it all.”

An appreciation of the quiet details is exactly why an off-beat comedy like Coffee and Cigarettes resonates with such interesting patterns, interlocking like puzzle pieces on a checkerboard tablecloth. And it’s why Jim Jarmusch, even when he’s just having fun, remains one of the most fascinating directors working today.

To read unpublished excerpts from Paste's interview with Jim Jarmusch, click here.