An Interview conducted by Geoff Andrew at the London Film Festival in November 1999, published on guardian.co.uk Nov 15, reprinted in "Jim Jarmusch: Interviews" (ed Ludvig Hertzberg, 2001).
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GA: How did you get into movies as a spectator and when did you decide to become a film-maker?
JJ: Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper - but in Akron, Ohio there wasn't a real variety of films, but when I was a kid, in order to get rid me on Saturday afternoons, my mother would drop me off at a theatre called the State Road theatre that had double and triple features, but usually The Blob, Attack of the Giant Crab Monsters, Creature of the Black Lagoon, so I used to go there a lot and I saw all of those films as a kid, and I really loved it.
When I left Ohio when I was 17 and ended up in New York and realised that not all films had the giant crab monsters in them, it really opened up a lot of things for me. I've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there. I didn't go to classes there, but ended up at the Cinemathèque, and there it opened up even wider because there I saw a variety of films from all over the world.
I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema. I was writing prose poems, but they were starting to echo not film scripts, but descriptions of scenes in a cinematic way. Then I didn't have any money and I didn't know what to do with myself, and I applied to graduate film school at NYU. I'd never made a film, but submitted some writing and I guess to fill in their group of students with some potential writers, I go "financial assistance" and I was accepted there and really it was just a whim that I applied and then studied there for two years. I didn't get my degree there; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.
I didn't get the degree because in my last year, for my thesis film I made a feature called Permanent Vacation and they'd given me a scholarship, the Louis B Mayer fellowship and they made a mistake. Instead of sending it to the school for tuition, they sent it directly to me, so I spent it on the budget of the film. The film school did not like the film, nor did they like the fact that I hadn't paid tuition and used the money for the film and I didn't get a degree, but later they started using my name in ads for the school and I said in an interview, "That's odd, cause they didn't like my film and they didn't give me a degree." And then they sent me a degree. (Laughter) And with that degree and a $1.50, you can buy a coffee in New York.
GA: Permanent Vacation was made for $12,000 and then you made Stranger Than Paradise, which originally was a half-hour short. How much did that cost?
JJ: About $7,000, something like that.
GA: And it got a very enthusiastic reception.
JJ: What I did was I completed the half-hour film, but before really showing it, I wrote two more sections for a potential feature film which I didn't think would really happen, but at least I had it in case. I was very lucky and eventually showed the film, got some good responses, and some people helped to make the longer version of the film.
Wim Wenders gave me some unexposed film material that was left over from - that was actually for the half-hour version - The State of Things - and in the longer version the black sections in-between had to be a certain type of exposed negative to get a true black, and I got a roll of black negative film from Jean-Marie Straub, so I had some help from some pretty amazing people. I don't know why they helped me butƒ (Laughter)
GA: It is entirely made up of discreet shots - every scene consists of one shot interrupted by black film - which is quite a formal or experimental way of telling the story. Why did you decide to do it and what is your interest in those formal things?
JJ: I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it. I was interested formally from literature and musical structures. I don't remember exactly where it came from. At that time, I was also inspired by very formally pure films, films by Carl Dreyer or Bresson.
Those things were very moving to me, especially at a time when MTV was just starting, and there was this barrage of images that was not so interesting to me at the time. It seemed like film-making was starting to imitate advertising. It was something that wasn't my aesthetic at the time. It came from those things.
GA: The film has certainly got a serious side to it, but it is also very full of humour and that's something that's coursed through all of your work. Why is an element of comedy so important to you in your movies?
JJ: Laughter is good for your spirit and Oscar Wilde said: "Life is far too important to be taken seriously," which is a quote I really love and I feel that way about the work as well. In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, there's a quote from Agakurai, a Japanese text, written by an old Samurai, and one of them has to do with how things of great concern should be treated lightly, and things of small concern should be [treated] seriously. That kind of contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.
GA: With Strangers in Paradise and Down By Law, you cast John Lurie and you were quite involved in the music scene before you started making films?
JJ: It was a really interesting time in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn't have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things. That period was really, really important, because there were a lot of different artists - musicians, film-makers - that had this "make-it-in-the-garage" aesthetic that was really inspiring and really good. It was not about trying to be famous or have a career, or be a virtuoso, or be flashy. It was more like having real emotional feelings that you expressed through whatever form, mostly by picking up guitars you didn't really know how to play and bashing away on them.
That gave way to a lot of interesting things. I always think the Sex Pistols and the Ramones as very, very important because they stripped things down. Dogme 95 owes some debt to the purity of so-called punk rock. But I also love The Clash because they were the opposite, they were into synthesis in that they said: "Bring us reggae, rockabilly, R&B, we'll take all that and charge it up with our feelings." Two opposite aesthetics which appealed to me and inspired me. Still do.
GA: You talk about these musicians making music in an emotionally expressive way, but when Strangers in Paradise came out some people didn't quite understand your attitude towards the John Lurie character, who is anything but emotionally expressive; he's very concerned about his own self-image. And also in Down By Law so is Tom Waits. You do seem to have this interest in puncturing their self-image and pretensions to coolness and showing that much more innocent, straightforward people can transform those people. Would you say that's a valid interpretation of those films, and if so what is your interest in that?
JJ: In what? Sorry, I drifted off. (Laughter) To me, John Lurie's character is not non-emotional. He tries to be not emotional, he tries to be cool, but it's transparent. I have to tell everyone that when I finish a film and it goes out and is released, I never look at my films again. I don't like looking back. I don't even like talking about 'em! (Laughter) So I'm really digging back in my memory because I don't like to sit and look at my films again.
But my recollection is that the character of John Lurie is made very human by the fact that he cannot disguise his emotions, and when Eva leaves, he's upset even though he treated her badly. But he didn't want her to leave and that's a contradiction that's very human and flawed, but transparent. I don't think he's able to hide his emotions. Does that have anything to do with the question? (Laughter)
GA: Absolutely. I think it confirms what I said.
JJ: Let's talk about baseball.
GA: I don't know anything about baseball.
JJ: Baseball is one of the most beautiful games. (Laughter) It is. It is a very Zen-like game. I don't like American football. I think it's boring and ridiculous and predictable. But baseball is very beautiful. It's played on a diamond. (Laughter)
GA: I've seen a few movies about it.
JJ: Cricket makes no sense to me. (Laughter) I find it beautiful to watch and I like that they break for tea. (Laughter) That is very cool, but I don't understand. My friends from The Clash tried to explain it years and years ago, but I didn't understand what they were talking about.
GA: From sports to William Blake and Robert Frost, because in Down By Law, you have the Roberto Benigni character frequently quoting from Frost, and in Dead Man, you have references to William Blake. What is your interest in poetry, because it's not very often that we see characters in movies quoting and referring to poetry?
JJ: Yeah, if you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. (Laughter) But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry. I think that Dante was hip-hop culture because he wrote in vernacular Italian, and at the time that was unheard of; people wrote in Latin or Petrach wrote in high Italian, and so Dante was talking street stuff. And so poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.
Language can be abstracted, language can be used as a very beautiful code in poetry, the nuances and the multiple meanings of things, it has a music to it. It has so many things in it. It is also reduced from prose and therefore can be both mathematical, or very, very abstract. A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published. For the rest of his life, he published everything himself and no one had any real interest in it during his lifetime, which is true of many, many poets, so I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way. I don't know. I like poetry. Dammit, I like poetry; anyone got a problem with that?! (Laughter)
GA: I had some idea. (Laughter) Moving on to Mystery Train. It's another three-part feature. But in this one it seems like you've taken three different genres, a romance film, a supernatural and a thriller, and yet your films don't fit easily into any one genre. What is your approach to genre?
JJ: When I was writing Mystery Train, I was not thinking at all about cinematic genres. I was thinking about literary forms and I was very interested in Chaucer, things that have smaller stories within that make up a larger work, and I was playing with the idea of things happening simultaneously, so it's hard for me to answer that because I really wasn't thinking about any of those genres, although I was aware of Italian episodic films that are like romantic comedies; there is a tradition in Japanese cinema of ghost stories that have separate stories together, although I don't think I ever thought of that till just now, or actually he (points to Geoff Andrew and then adopts deep voice of seniority), "Yes, I was referring to the supernatural" (Laughter)
But I like that form very much, and I liked playing with things happening at the same time and characters being in the same place, but not interacting and yet being somehow connected by some little threads, like the bellboy and the night manager of the hotel, the gunshot, the fact that they're in the same hotel, the fact that you see them walking down the same streets. But it really was more from a literary form than from playing with cinematic genres.
GA: It is an incredibly detailed film because we don't actually see Steve Buscemi until the last episode but, he's there in the first one because you see him as the Japanese couple walk past him, he's referred to in the second episode. It must have been a nightmare to put together, how did you do that?
JJ: It was fun. It was fun to write something where you could see a character that you don't know is going to appear later and be a main character. It was a little bit like a puzzle, not a real complicated one, but it was fun trying to make the pieces fit together while writing the thing down.
GA: How did you decide on the cities to use in Night on Earth?
JJ: To be honest I had written a script for another film, but was not able to make it due to things that were very frustrating, and I felt somewhat betrayed due to certain circumstances, so I thought to hell with that then, I'll just write something else real fast. I wrote Night on Earth in about eight days and what I was thinking was, "there's friends I'd like to work with and friends I'd like to see and I'm just going to write something that will get me to work with them and see them," which included Roberto Benigni, Isaach de Bankolé, all the actors in the Finnish section, and Gena Rowlands. The cities were really based on what actors I wanted to work with, or people I wanted to see. It wasn't very calculating, it was just, "I've got to do something" because I was very frustrated by this other project that didn't work out.
GA: But each episode is coloured by the culture in which it is set. With the Finnish, you have the moroseness, with the Italian influence you not only have the influence of the Catholic church, but very broad Italian comedy, in New York you have the cultural mix and the aggression. Was that calculated or did that just come naturally?
JJ: That comes as soon as you decide, "I want to work with these actors in Finland", then my impressions of Helsinki or Finland or their culture certainly filter in, and that is the atmosphere that I'm thinking of while writing. I love cities, they are almost like lovers. I'm attracted to many cities I've been in, often cities other people don't like at all. I like Detroit and Gary, Indiana, cities other people would avoid like the plague. The cities become characters even though they're enclosed in a cab, the atmosphere, the colour, the quality of light in each city is very different and has a different effect on the people who live there and on your emotions when you are there.
GA: Those things do come over, but as you say, shooting virtually within a cab all the time - you get shots looking out of the cab and establishing shots of the cities - it must have been a very difficult film to make given all those constraints you set yourself.
JJ: That was ridiculous. I wrote the film really fast and I was saying to myself, "This will be something real easy to do and I can do it fast" and then I stepped back in pre-production, realising, "Oh man, this is in four different countries in five different cities all inside of cars." Shooting in a car is really, really difficult and anyone who has made a film in a car interior will tell you, "Don't ever do that again."
I had people locked into the cars because there was a speed-rail built on the outside of the car to put the lighting rigs on, and if they had to get out and use the bathroom, it was a big nightmare. We had to roll the windows down and put sandwiches in for them just to keep them alive at times. (Laughter) It's really not fun shooting in a car.
At one point in Helsinki, we were towing a car, a rig broke and the car with the actors in was stopped on the line of the streetcar and a streetcar was coming. And my Finnish actors are, (puts on Finnish accent) "What the bloody hell, are we going to die here in a jam?" on the walkie-talkie. We had to run and get these guys to stop the train. But just physically shooting in a car is really, really hard.
Fred Elmes, the director of photography in some of the shots when we were towing the car, we had taken away the engine out of the engine cavity and mounted the engine in there and he was riding on the car, operating, sometimes holding a diopter - which allows you to have two different focus areas in the frame - and it was 14 degrees below zero. It was really cold and we were out all night and [it was] really not an easy film to make. I was deluded when I said, "This'll be easy, little stories, a few characters." It was hell.
We were stopped in Italy because we drove by the American embassy in a car that looked like some sort of gun mount and we were held there by the police for a long time, asking for our passports. Of course, our passports were all in the hotel, so we each had to tell a young Italian person working on the film, "Okay, there's a shelf in the closet, it's got a green bag, it's not in the green bag, but underneath that is a red bag, if you open that Five hours later the guy comes back (puts on Italian accent), "I have ze passports!"
It was really insane and we were shooting over a holiday and we told this Italian guy, "please make photocopies of this schedule". He came back about nine hours later and had copied them by hand. (Laughter) And I said, "Why?" and he said, (puts on Italian accent) "Because there was no photocopy place to make, its all closed, it's a holiday, now I copy for you the schedule." (Laughter) Lots of absurd things like that going on; and then Fred Elmes is very interested in using silks over the lens for different light diffusion in each city, and he uses very expensive lingerie. In Paris, he'd see a lingerie shop and he'd rush in there and he'd be saying, "Could I see more of these stockings please?" which got a little bit embarrassing. "Jim, do you think that this is nice?"(Laughter) French girls waiting on us looking around thinking, "strange Americans"
GA: Was it difficult working in different languages?
JJ: It's not, surprisingly. I can understand Italian somewhat, French I can understand very well and Finnish I don't understand at all, but I wrote the dialogue and I worked with the actors in advance and with a translator. The actors spoke English in Finland and we were able to discuss the nuances of their translation to make sure it was the right way; for example, working-class guys would speak, and I'd already worked with Japanese actors in Mystery Train. It sounds funny, but it is not difficult at all.
When I came back from Japan, I came back with a load of videotapes of Japanese films that I couldn't find in the States that, of course, had no subtitles. If you watch an Ozu film not subtitled, believe me you understand what the characters are feeling. Nick Ray also compared acting to piano playing and he said, "The dialogue is just the left hand, the melody is in the eyes." Language is very important, but it is not necessarily the primary way of knowing what someone is feeling. Actors are expressing a lot of things through many tiny things, not just the language, so that was not a problem at all for me.
GA: Many people were surprised by Dead Man: it wasn't urban, it was set in an historical era, it had a much more linear structure. Did you feel you were breaking new ground and deliberately trying to do something different?
JJ: I certainly was doing something I had never done before, which was to make a film in a period other than the present. I was also making a film in which natural landscapes were almost like characters in the film. It's very difficult to take trucks with horses and wardrobe and find places to shoot where you can't see a road or a telephone pole or anything, so it was a very physically exhausting film to make.
It was very different, but at the same time everything I do is intuitive and it was still an extension of that. Each film I make I learn a lot from and maybe, some day, I'll learn really how to make films, but probably not. Kurosawa said in his 80s, "I'm still making films because I'm still trying to figure out how to make them." If you ever think you know everything about it you should stop, and that's not why I will stop because I won't learn completely how to make a film.
Dead Man was also dealing with a subject like death and having violence in a film, those things I had not done before.
GA: Which is something you've carried on with in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, in that you're looking at a different belief system and trying to juxtapose that with modern western ideas. What is your fascination with these belief systems?
JJ: I don't subscribe to any organised religions because I think they are often used to control people and I find that very suspicious. At the same time I'm very interested in different religious philosophies and things that are spiritual, because I don't think we know a lot of things about life and there are so many things we just don't understand.
Just to change the subject a little bit, I think it's really funny that they study dolphins, and they're always trying to study the language of dolphins, and you see some guy with all these millions of dollars of computer and they're trying to decode what the dolphins are saying. Meanwhile, the dolphin swims up and says, "I want fish" in English. They can learn our language easily, so it just seems so odd to me.
We don't look in the right places for the answers to things. Some insects can communicate over long distances. It doesn't seem people are interested in understanding those things. Anyway, I don't know what that has to do with the question. "I want fish." (Laughter) And dolphins don't have to pay rent, they don't have to pay insurance. They eat, they play, they have sex, they cruise around, they talk to each other. I think they're more highly evolved.
GA: In Dead Man, the two marshals are called Lee and Marvin. Can you explain that?
JJ: And also two of the killers are called Wilson and Pickett. (Laughter) I'm a huge Lee Marvin fan, You see Lee and Marvin makes Lee Marvin, get it? It's a tribute to Lee.
GA: Aren't you a member of some unofficial group?
JJ: Yes, it's not unofficial, it's a secret organisation. It's called The Sons of Lee Marvin and I'm a card-carrying member, although I don't think I have my card on me. There are a number of us who really admire Lee Marvin. He was just a really great actor and he must have been a really amazing man, too. I never got to meet him, but I've talked to a lot of people that knew him. Sam Foley knew him well, John Boorman, of course.
GA: After Dead Man, you made a concert documentary, Year of the Horse, with Neil Young. How did that happen?
JJ: Neil had done the music for Dead Man and then he asked me to make a video clip for a song called Big Time. I shot that video on Super-8, and Neil loved the fact that it was just me and Larry Johnson shooting with these little cameras, and he liked the way it looked, and even while we were shooting he said, "Why don't people use these to make longer films?" And then he called me up a couple of months later and said, "Do you want to make a film that looks like the video we did?" and I said, "How long a film are you talking about?" to which he said, "Hey man, when I start writing a song I don't think how long it's going to be!" (Laughter)
And then he said, "Look, I'll pay for it, just shoot some stuff and see if you like it and we'll continue if you do, and if you don't, I'll just put it on a shelf somewhere." How could I refuse that? And then I said, "When do you want to start?" and he said, "Well, we're on the road in a week and a half. Meet us in France." So in a week and half, we organised all the equipment, and we shot two or three weeks on the road and it was really a great experience because there was no road map at all and what could be better than Neil Young as the producer of the film who says, "Hey man, I don't know just shoot whatever you want. We'll figure it out later, maybe it'll look cool." (Laughter)
It was my dream. We just went off and shot whatever we wanted and hoped that it looked cool. We took the material back into the editing room, and Jay Rabinowitz, who I work with, played with the footage and allowed it to tell us what it wanted to be. We didn't have a plan or anything we were trying to bludgeon the footage into. We just listened to it and made a film which I don't think of as a documentary as much as a kind of a concert film really.
But it was really a lot of fun and I think that it is successful in capturing a viscerally raw visual style that is somehow closely associated with their style of music. Also, I was having some business problems with my own company at the time, which was sucking a lot of my energy out and I was getting very frustrated, and it was delaying me from making another film, or writing a new script so it saved my soul. It was a nice gift to make.
GA: Going on to Coffee and Cigarettes. You've made five little shorts revolving around this theme of people meeting up in cafes and sharing coffee and experiences.
JJ: Don't talk about my shorts! (Laughter)
GA: You were talking about doing enough so you could eventually put them together to make a feature. Do you still have plans to do that?
JJ: Yeah, I do. In fact, I have plans to shoot some more this coming year. But it's a project that I'm not in any rush to complete. I'm behind my schedule because I wanted to shoot one or two each year, but I haven't shot any for four years now. The intention was to shoot short films that can exist as shorts independently, but when I put them all together, there are things that echo through them like the dialogue repeats; the situation is always the same, the way they're shot is very simple and the same - I have a master shot, if there's two characters, a two shot, singles on each, and an over-the-table overhead shot which I can use to edit their dialogue.
So they're very simple and because the design of how they're shot is worked out already, it gives complete freedom to play; they're like cartoons almost to me. And it's a relief from making a feature film where everything has to be more carefully mapped out. So I like doing them and they're ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don't have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They're really fun, I want to make more of them definitely. Sometime I will release them all together, but I don't know when.
GA: You do seem to have written roles with specific actors in mind and you trade off their personalities a little bit in the film. How do you decide to work with a certain person and do you consult with them about their dialogue?
JJ: I started working with friends of mine and that, to some degree, continues. I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are. I start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities. It's always a real collaboration for me.
What I like to do also is to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting. I'm not a big fan of the theatre because, often, I know what their intention is. They know what the intention of the scene is and they're following a line to achieve that intention, but that's acting, and in real life, if you're at a table with four people, you don't know which one is going to speak next, it's not scripted in that way, so if you can work with the actor to get to a place where they are confident in their character, then you let their character react to the scene that you're filming.
All actors are different. Nicholas Ray said to me: "There is no one way to work with all actors and anyone who tells you that is full of shit" - in his words, 'cause I don't talk like that myself. (Laughter) So what you do is work with each actor individually to find out "How can I work with this person, how can the two of us collaborate?" and it's always that there's a different way. Different actors have different strengths. Some are really brilliant at improvising, others want the dialogue set for them, they want a map.
I love rehearsing because in rehearsals there are no mistakes, nothing is wrong, some things apply or lead you to focus on the character and the things that don't apply are equally valuable because they lead you to towards what does. I'm not a director who says, "Say your line, hit your mark", that's not my style. I want them to work with me and everyone I choose to collaborate with elevates our work above what I could imagine on my own. Hopefully, if not it's not working right. I'm like a navigator and I try to encourage our collaboration and find the best way that will produce fruit. I like fruit. (Laughter) I like cherries, I like bananas. (Laughter) Poor Geoff Andrew didn't know what he was getting himself into. (Laughter)
GA: How did Ghost Dog come about?
JJ: It really came about from wanting to work with Forest Whitaker, who I met when I was going to the Super-8 lab when I was working on Year of the Horse, or maybe on the video. I ran into him a couple of times and we would just start talking and he said to me the first time, "Hey, if you ever think of anything for me, let me know, I'd love to work with you." I couldn't get him out of my head, certain qualities that he has and it was more from talking to him as a person than his work.
I was very, very moved by his portrayal of Charlie Parker in Bird. I thought it was a beautiful performance, although I'm a big be-bop fan and I did not like the movie in terms of its slant on depicting the life of Bird - how can you make a film about Bird in which Miles Davis is never even mentioned? There were a lot of things really odd to me about it. Miles' estate probably refused to let him use his name. With good reason.
They usually use this very soft, gentle, poignant side of Forest and he gets cast as the loveable soft guy. And I'm really attracted to that quality, but there is a whole other side to him, just physically, his presence, there's more there than that and I wanted to get both of those things in a character. So I started thinking how can I do that? He should be a warrior and I thought he should be a hitman, that sort of cliché and then the samurai thing came to me because in eastern-culture warriors, there is a whole spiritual side to their training. If you look at the Shaolin monks in China, they're martial arts experts, but they are priests; they are enlightened religious teachers, but the physical side is also completely intertwined. So that gave me the idea to give him some depth.
Then the book Hagakure, because it's a text from the 1750s written by an old samurai as a guide to samurai life and philosophy. It contains so many things, minor, mundane details about the food you eat, or how your house is built, how often you clean your armour, to incredibly deep Zen philosophy, and it's all in this book and it jumps from one to the next.
Then I just started collecting disparate ideas; I was interested in the decline of organised crime families in New York because I used to live right across from the Gambino family social club in Little Italy, and in the late 70s and early 80s when they were unravelling, and I would always see them on the street - John Gotti and Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano and Neil Belacroche and all those wise guys.
So I collected some ideas about them, and the idea of pigeons came from the fact that on the roof behind me, there was an old Italian guy who had a pigeon coop for years. He died just before we started filming actually, and his birds were moved away, but I used to watch him fly his birds a lot and there was something very beautiful in that movement. Sometimes I'd just look out the window on a Saturday morning and see them moving, and the light would shift and they would go from black to white to black to white to black to white, and that was a detail. I would just collect and collect, and then I sat down and tried to weave all these disparate things into something.
GA: Did the Melville film about the samurai have any shape on the movie?
JJ: Inspiration certainly. Not so much on the shape of the movie, but certain thematic things. Melville always has killers always wear white editor's gloves, which is a private joke between him and his editors, I guess saying his editor kills his films. So Forest wears white editor's gloves in the film. But there are references to other films. My favourite hitman films of all time are The Samurai and Branded to Kill by Suzuki. I made quotations from those films in ways.
But I was also inspired by Don Quixote, which is in some ways a similar situation - an oddball character following a code that the world doesn't really recognise or care about anymore. Also, the books from which Point Blank comes, by Richard Stark with the character of Parker, were favourites of mine when I discovered those books in my late teens.
Of course, Racoon and Kurisawa's depiction of samurai culture in his films. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I think music was really an inspiration because in be-bop and in hip-hop Charlie Parker can play at what was at the time considered an incredibly outside solo, but he will quote a standard within that solo, and he's not playing the standard, but he is referring to it and weaving it into something completely new and his own. And in hip-hop, the backing tracks are made from other things and put together to construct something new out of them. In the past, when I was writing and I thought of a reference to another film or another book, I always pushed it away because it was not original, but this time I just opened that door and I think music convinced me to do that.
GA: Was that partly to do with working with RZA?
JJ: Yes, because even before I started writing, I was just kicking around the disparate ideas that make up the film. RZA was my ideal composer and by luck I got him to do the music. And he got us to work in a hip-hop style with the music. The total opposite was Neil Young in Dead Man, he played the music directly to the film passing in front of him, and reacting to it emotionally himself at the moment, and even when Neil and I together tried moving some of the music and sliding, it lost its magic, something just deflated so it stayed where Neil put it, where he reacted to it.
RZA, on the other hand, would go away for three weeks, having only seen the film only in a rough cut on an Avid editing machine, and then would call me up and say, "Yo, I got some music, I got a tape, meet me in a blacked-out van at 3am on 38th Street in Broadway." So I go there, get in the van, RZA gives me a little DAT tape with nothing written on it and says, "Yo, check this shit out" and I'd say, "Does it go anywhere? Any ideas for a particular place in the film?" "Nah, nah you guys figure that shit out, you gotta use hip-hop style, you can edit it, you can change it, you can put two together, here's some stuff."
So I got three tapes from him over a two-and-a-half-month period and this guy is a genius; I got real respect for him. He gave me so much incredible music by the end that I couldn't use it all, it would have drenched the film in music. But he taught me to adapt to his style in the same way Neil did. Neil said, "I really want to play right to the picture," and RZA style was, "This is the way I work, hip-hop style, you gotta play with them, you gotta play with them how you wanna." So I learned a lot from both of them in different ways. And RZA made beautiful, beautiful music for the film.
Question 1: What was it like working with Robert Mitchum in Dead Man?
JJ: Robert Mitchum is an actor who does not like to improvise, and liked to have all of his dialogue in his hands a few days at least before shooting. I was a little bit intimidated by him because, hell, he's Robert Mitchum, one of my all-time favourite screen actors. But he's a very self-effacing, really funny, intelligent man, and it was a real honour to work with him. But it was also very funny. He has a shotgun which is a prop in the scene. I knew he had some guns and thought he was maybe interested in them, so I got several vintage shotguns form the period for him to choose, put them in my car and drove from LA to Santa Barbara where he lived, and went to his house.
His wife let me in and I laid out the guns on a carpet in the living room to let him come and look at the shotguns. And he came in and said, "What the hell's this?" and I said, "Well, I wanted you to choose the gun that you use in the film," and he said, "Why the hell should I care which one it is, you're the damn director!" I had spent a day going to the place, picking the guns, researching everything and I said, "You don't care which one it is?" and he said, "I gotta hold the damn thing in several scenes, right?" and I said, "Yeah", and he said, "Well, which one's the lightest?" (Laughter)
Also, when we were shooting that scene when he was talking to the three killers, he was basically in two positions: one leaning over the desk and one standing up. I kept shooting it with different lenses and different sizes, and he got confused where we were picking up a certain section from and he said, "Well dammit Jim, was I in the receiving position, or was I fully erect?" and I said, "You were fully erect," and he said, "Goddamn right I was!" (Laughter) What an amazing man I tell you.
Question 2: How were you influenced by Wim Wenders?
JJ: I would not cite Wim Wenders as a particular influence any more than any other film-makers whose work I like. Wim works in a different way and often prefers, I think, not to have a script at all and just start filming and then finding the story that way. That's not the way I work. I like his visual sense and a lot of things about his films, but I would not cite him as a primary influence. But he has inspired me and also helped me personally by giving me film material in the very beginning and being supportive, and I have a lot of respect for him.
Question 3: What do you feel about films, such as Four Rooms, Go and Pulp Fiction, which use the same structure as Mystery Train?
JJ: I've only seen Pulp Fiction out of those three films, but I know that Four Rooms is very similar and people have mentioned Go to me. I guess I'm flattered in some way. I liked Pulp Fiction.
Question 4: What was it like working with Robby Mueller?
JJ: I loved Robby Mueller's work and I asked Wim Wenders in 1980 how I might meet him. I was going to the Rotterdam Film Festival to show my first film, Permanent Vacation, and at that time in Rotterdam the people who visited the festival stayed on a boat that was harboured there, it had a bar in it, and Wim said, "Just go on the boat and in the bar next to the peanut machine, Robby Mueller will be sitting there."
So I went to Rotterdam, I went on the boat, I went in the bar, and next to the peanut machine Robby Mueller was sitting there. (Laughter) Seriously. So I sat down next to him and started talking to him. And we hung out quite a bit at the festival and he saw my first film, and he said to me eventually, "If you ever want to work together man, let me know." That was a big thing for me. I made my next film Stranger Than Paradise with my friend Tom DiCillo, because Tom was working then as a director of photography, but he really wasn't interested in shooting films, so when I wrote Down By Law, I immediately called Robby Mueller.
The beautiful thing about Robby is that he starts the process by talking to you about what the film means, what the story is about, what the characters are about. He starts from the inside out, which is really, really such a great way. I've learned that you find the look of the film later after you've found the essence of the film, what its atmosphere is, what it's about and then you look at locations together, you start talking about light and colour, about what film material to use and the general look of the film, and we've worked together a lot now, so we don't have to discuss as many things as other people might because we understand each other.
He considers himself to be an artisan in a way. I remember, especially in Dead Man, the crew and I were joking a lot by saying, "He's Robby Mueller, but don't tell him that!" He considers he has a lens, he has film material and he has light. Sometimes crew members would mention some modern piece of equipment, "We could do that shot with a lumacrane," and Robbie would say, "What is a lumacrane?" I think he's like a Dutch interior painter, like Vermeer or de Hoeck, who was born in the wrong century.
Question 5: A lot of your characters seemed to be touched by loneliness and melancholy, what draws you to that?
JJ: My own loneliness and melancholy. (Laughter) It's part of life and I've always felt like an outsider in a lot of ways - I'm sure you can't imagine why! But in the same way that I'm drawn to humour, miscommunication and things that arise out of misunderstanding. All those things coexist, so I try to have them coexist in a character or in a film.
Question 6: A lot of characters in your films are foreigners. Do you enjoy seeing films through the eyes of the foreigner?
JJ: It's several things. One is that America is made up of foreigners, and there are indigenous people that lived here for thousands of years, but then white Europeans tried to commit genocide against them all. I'm a mongrel, I have Irish blood, bohemian blood, some German blood, and all of America is a cultural mixture, and although America is very much in denial of this, that's really what America is.
And the other thing that attracts me is that I love to travel and I love to be in places where I don't understand everything culturally, or even linguistically because my imagination opens up, I try to imagine things or understand, but I'm sure that I misinterpret them and misunderstand them. For me, it's imagining things that's a kind of gift I enjoy. You know when dogs don't understand something and they go like that? (cocks head on one side and takes an asking look) I feel sort of like that sometimes.
Question 7: How do you get funding for your films while retaining creative control?
JJ: I'm really stubborn and I started out with an attitude that I was going to make films the way I and those people I chose to collaborate with want to make them and I've just stuck to that. I'm not seduced by money or the things that Hollywood tries to offer you, and in exchange you have to make the film the way some businessmen tell you to, and I just would not be good at that. So I have a system where I try to avoid having American money in my films, because with that comes a lot of strings attached and script meetings and casting consultations, and really I can't work that way because I don't tell the business people who finance the films how to run their business, so why should they tell me how to make a film? I've been very lucky to find people to collaborate with in that way.
Since Mystery Train, JVC in Japan has been very supportive and has invested money in all of my films. Pandora in Germany has done the same. For the last two films, I've worked with BAC films in Paris. All of them, in my contract, I'm not even required to show them a rough cut of the film, I could just deliver them the finished film. But I do show them a rough cut because they respect me, so I respect them. And if they give me comments, I listen to them and sometimes their comments are helpful. But if they're not, I can discard them, I'm not obligated in any way to do anything they suggest.
It comes from stubbornness and I've walked out of a lot of deals where people were offering to finance a film under certain conditions, and the Hollywood people are really, really shocked when you say to them, "I don't do it that way, I'm going to go now," and they think, "Who does he think he is anyway? He doesn't want our money to make a film, people are banging on our doors to get us to do this and he's just going to walk out?" and I do, because I can't do it that way. I would end up in jail for kneecapping some guy in a $4,000 suit. And I'd also make bad movies that way. I'm not saying I don't make bad movies, but I make 'em bad in my own way! And when I get depressed about business things, I get a copy of Sid Vicious's My Way and turn it up to 11, really it does your soul good.
Question 8: Do you have any comedic influences?
JJ: Certainly, many. My favourite director of all time is Buster Keaton, and it goes deeper than just being a comedian, because he is a great director and actor and funny in an extremely human way. I like Charlie Chaplin, but he's not on the same level as Buster Keaton, who is someone really I have a deep respect for.
I love the Marx Brothers very much, although some of their films have shockingly racist things in them and things which disturb me. I know it's a reflection of the period, but their sense of comedy is incredible to me. I read an article about a guy who had cancer, who they said could not be cured, and he watched Marx Brothers movies over and over, and his cancer went into remission and the guy says he owes it to the Marx brothers.
Lennie Bruce is important to me. I like To-To, the Italian comedic actor. I like Chris Rock, sometimes I like George Carlin, sometimes Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor was one of the great comedians. There is a film by Steve Martin called All of Me which is very funny, he can be very funny. There's a lot of funny cats out there. In the days before he was ever in a film, Steve Buscemi and another actor, Mark Boon Jnr, used to perform in little clubs in the lower east side of New York, doing little two-man half -theatre half-comedy sketches that were really, really hilarious.
Question 9: Are you trying to get away from 'The Jim Jarmusch Film'?
JJ: I'm not really very self-analytical. I don't really want to know what a Jim Jarmusch film is. I'm just a guy from Akron trying to learn films and I just move on to the next thing. It's not superstition in that case, it's not feeling comfortable looking backwards and the same in my life as well. I know Robert Altman and I know he likes to watch his old films over and show them to people, and I wish I could be like that because he really loves them, he's proud of them, they're like his children. And my films are like my children, but I send them off to military school. (Laughter)
Question 10: In Blue in the Face, you play a man who is having his last cigarette, were you trying to quit smoking yourself?
JJ: Well, I hope I'm not a notorious smoker. (Laughter) I'm insulted. They approached me, and Paul Auster had an idea about someone quitting smoking, and he asked me, so I wrote most of my dialogue, but it was based on a conversation I had with him. As far as giving up smoking, films aren't really real, it's all set up. (Laughter) There's a camera there, those people aren't really doing those things.
Question 11: What happened to the project which fell through because of Dead Man?
JJ: Parts of it were rewoven into Dead Man, so it's not something that exists that I'm going to do ever.
Question 12: How do you feel about Dead Man being banned in Australia?
JJ: I thought it was very strange because they banned it for the scene where one character is getting a blow job at gunpoint, and I don't know what they thought that meant, because the guy is walking through a town with a lot of skeletons and images of death and very negative examples of this civilisation's effect on the land, and the idea that they might think that the film is condoning that was really strange, strange to me. I never thought that Dead Man was promoting going out and getting blow jobs at gunpoint. (Laughter)
Question 13: Why do you like Aki Kaurismäki so much?
JJ: He's one of my favourite film-makers. I love his films, I love the simplicity of them, I love the dry sense of humour of them, I love the bleakness. Here is a film-maker who uses limitations as a strength, and that's something I've tried to learn to do myself. I get very moved by Kaurismaki's films.
There's a scene in one, Ariel, where the guy meets a girl and they're in bed together having a cigarette after making love and she says, "Does that mean you will love me forever and ever?" and he says, "Yes." (Laughter)
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part 1 of 4 still available at guardian.co.uk