new york city 1981
Jim Jarmusch is the director of PERMANENT VACATION, starring Christopher Parker. While Jarmusch was putting in time at N.Y. University Film School the late Nicholas Ray became his friend and mentor, and aided Jim in the early work on PERMANENT VACATION. His next film, THE GARDEN OF DIVORCE, is in the works and will be shot in N.Y. this November.
Christopher Parker has acted in numerous films on the N.Y. underground circuit: among them Uli Lommel's BLANK GENERATION starring Richard Hell, but most notable is his alien Aloysius in PERMANENT VACATION. He will feature in Jarmusch's new work, and in Harold Vogel's ONLY YOU, to appear in N.Y. early in 1982. His newest venture is with Andre Degas in the Samuel Beckett-inspired DEAR DADA, also to appear in 1982.
Jarmusch is a cool character. His voice rarely rises above a low, even cadence, and his gestures are few and spare - but he's looking right into you, he hears everything, he takes it all in like a softly whirring camera that absorbs the grey flicker of a street, or a hysterical scream with the same impassive, relentless eye. But you sense he's lacking in contempt; this dispassionate eye is humorous and kind.
Chris Parker's not so calm - he's an itch, some wild spasm of life, an uncontrollable urge. It's not a stupid nervousness, he's just too weedy for the jolts of sheer energy that visibly rush through him; his eyes widen, all pupil, black, and swallow you whole. "I have to wear sunglasses to look at the kid," whined one New Waverer on the N.Y. scene. Chris talks the talk of a street smart angel - mean, with a hard streak of the lyrical.
Terence: Jim, tell us how you met your star Chris Parker and how you came to conceive PERMANENT VACATION. You didn't cast for the lead of Aloysius . . . Chris created the part unwittingly.
Jim: I met Chris though a friend. I was in NYU film school then. I met him when he was fourteen.
Chris: At the time I met Jim . . . through this woman. I was living in her house, and she and Jim were close.
Jim: I had just finished a film for school, and I was trying to get ideas for a new script. I started thinking about Chris' own life and his personality as an actor.
TS: What else got you started on the story, what other influences conspired with this knowledge of Chris as a force and a character?
JJ: It was not from a specific locale, or from watching Chris act in other movies, as much as watching Chris himself. I just decided to construct a story with him as starting point. I knew Chris pretty well and I keep knowing him better, and I had him do a lot of work on tape. I just recorded his talking, wrote some scenes around things he said, things that had happened to him. Other scenes I wrote around things that had happened to me . . . or things I imagined happening to Chris.
TS: Briefly, how would you describe the character then created?
JJ: The character if a young man who is on the border of being still a kid and being an adult - at least physically. He doesn't have a sense of responsibility to anything. He doesn't have the normal ideas of a job, he doesn't go to school, he doesn't live with his parents. He doesn't have any sense of a permanent place. He's on a permanent vacation. He was really like this when he was 15.
TS: What is his role in your next film, The Garden of Divorce?
JJ: The story of the film is when this guy gets out of prison, and New York, or this imaginary city he returns to, is now completely changed to a controlled police state, like an occupied city.
Chris' character in this film is the only person who makes any connections with this guy because he recognizes the guy from somewhere in the past, but he doesn't really know from where. This guy is partially amnesic, but he doesn't want anyone to know he has it, so he plays a cat and mouse game with Chris, trying to get information...
TS: Why did you choose to give your character amnesia?
JJ: It's to further this character's divorce from the outside world. He has been in prison for seven years. His life extends from prison, with its medieval conditions, masses of people within a barely functioning institution, completely cut off... to this newly-ordered world. The amnesia motivates him within the plot to search for elements of his past, personal and otherwise.
TS: Who plays the lead?
JJ: Richard Boes, but there are literally five central characters: Richard, Chris, Maria Duval, John Lurie and I hope Eszter Balint.
TS: So Chris is not the same sort of drifting character, rootless and ready for anything?
JJ: No. He has a job now. (All but Chris break out laughing.) I want to use elements of his personality we never quite got in Permanent Vacation.
TS: So Chris is a sort of mine of raw information, and I am sure you would like him to remain available to you . . .
JJ: It's his ability to talk, to associate in a free way. He talks a lot.
TS: He's a great talker...
CP: I talk a lot, do I?
TS: Yes.
CP: I have a question . . . (Tape gets shut off here for some reason.) .
TS: One aspect of the film I loved was that you give the impression throughout the entire film that New York is uninhabited. You give hundred of images of this abandoned, near-imaginary city. You feel there is no one in it but Christopher running into a series of holdouts in the chaos, totally deranged characters . . .
CP: These fucked up buildings, could be anywhere...
TS: So what I wanted to ask was, How is this solitude of his an essential part of the permanent vacation?
JJ: There are many places in New York that are really unfrequented, there are a lot of alleys in Lower Manhattan where there aren't even derelicts. Chris' character, very early in the film, in discussion with the girl whose house he's living in, talks about being alone: that everyone's always alone, and they deal with it by pretending they aren't, and he refuses to pretend he isn't. We emphasised this visually. We wanted the feeling that there was nobody around, just nobody.
TS: People go on vacations to get away from it all and just run into more crowds of disgusting strangers...
JJ: There's no one to contact. Just bodies, with deranged minds.
TS: Christopher, how do you actually spend your days? Do you spend a lot of time alone?
CP: (Glares at Interviewer)
TS: (To JJ) He's not going to answer my question.
CP: That's a really bad question but maybe I'll answer it for you.
TS: Okay, okay . . . how busy are you?
CP: This girl is looking for trouble.
TS: (Nervously) Ha ... that's right.
CP: Alright. Well . . . (Pauses, then throws microphone at interviewer). I can't answer that question Terry! That's a terrible question! How can you ask me that?
You can answer that already, don't ask me that.
TS: I know I can answer it but so what if I can, maybe I really can't, anyway I want you to answer it, make up anything you want I don't care.
CP: Oh, yeah, make it sound so clever.
TS: Alright, then, what is your favorite scene in the film? And it was not a bad question.
CP: Okay, I'm sorry, it's was really good question, I'm just a bad answerer.
TS: What is your favorite scene in the film? Is that a good question?
CP: Yes, I'm sorry; it's a good question.
TS: Okay.
CP: Okay, well, I actually have two favorite scenes.
TS: Well, tell the other because I'm going to ask about the car later.
CP: Well, everyone who sees the movie likes the part where I'm dancing the best. (Aside: This scene may be used in Martin Scorsese's new film, The King of Comedy, as a scene a character sees on a television monitor.) But it's not my favorite. My favorite is when I'm talking to Lisa Rosen, and I'm eating... (Starts laughing) ... eating... eating... eating (Can't go on)... I'm eating (Laughs and laughs his sexy gravelly laugh.)
TS: Ah, eating, yes...
CP: Popcorn! I think I really like, seeing it later, did that well. It is so funny to me 'cause of the way I really am with her, because I love her alot . . . She was really good as the popcorn girl, selling me popcorn.
TS: She ignores you.
CP: Yes, and she's the popcorn girl, reading, and I ask her questions about the film that's showing, and she won't answer me, and I just stand there wanting to talk to her, I look at her...
JJ: There's something great about your timing there.
CP: Yes, I go like this. (Goes into the scene... eats, gazes at Lisa who's not there . . . All gaze upon Chris' sudden immersion.)
TS: (Coming to herself). This is not videotape Christopher.
CP: And then I go . . . and then it's like . . . (Still doing scene) and then I go like, Awww, that's cool, this chick ain't interested in me. I split.
TS: Now tell us the story of how you actually wrecked the car that you stole in the film.
CP: (Gives a great sigh and looks ruefully at Jim) Well, it wasn't exactly like that, was it, Jim?
JJ: (No response)
CP: WAS it, JIM?
JJ: (Laughs shortly) Um, not exactly.
CP: Okay, well, ah, see, Terry, tell you the truth, I don't know if I ever told Jim this.
TS: Oh.
CP: What happened exactly was that the night before I spent the night with, um, a friend, ah, and sh, I mean they . . .
TS: You can just say "a friend''!
CP: Ah, ah, someone I hadn't seen in a long time. And I just sort of ended up staying with them, which was very unusual, very strange. (Sidelong glance at Jim) So I had been up very late. I slept late, and I jumped out of bed, realizing that I had to be there, doing it, so I like ran to where I had to do it. It was only two blocks away, so I was still foggy, just half awake, and I had this person in my mind, some weird things had happened, ah, I don't know.
Now right before I got to that car, just before we did that scene, I smoked some joint and I had just woken up, and I was thinking about them, and I just got in the car, not even thinking, "Well, I have to drive this car, I have to look good." I just thought This is what I have to do now and I jumped in and drove, which was okay til I was a block away, when I thought that, ah, thought I would
JJ: Back up...
CP: . . . fool around a little bit
JJ: He decided to back up.
CP: Well! Yeah, but it wasn't just that, I wanted to drive the car backwards, I wanted to drive the car, down a one-way street, in reverse, going . . . well, not really fast but . . . a little bit fast, just for a second, you know?
JJ: (Grim) He proceeded to lose control of the car.
CP: And . . . Jim started screaming something and I couldn't hear what he was saying! (A look of innocent astonishment crosses his face) So instead of thinking, Well. I'm driving backwards, sort of fast, down a one-way street, I turn around to the front and look at you, and go, WHAT? What are you saying, anyway? There was this trailer . . . and he said STOP! and I went, Oh! Stop! Okay! and I put my foot on the brake, and missed the trailer by a few inches.
But I don't know what happened, I was right by the trailer, and for some reason (Looks truly mystified) I put my flat on the gas again and backed right into the trailer. It went up on the sidewalk, and then it smashed right into a black Camaro, a new black Camaro, whose owner happened to be standing right there watching me crack up his car.
JJ: (Murmurs indistinctly)
CP: So I looked over at these two girls I was going to do the scene with that day, I looked at their faces and they were like cracking up. I didn't think it was funny, I felt really bad. But I was trying very hard not to laugh. And I didn't laugh, I practically bit my lip off trying not to. Because I knew if I laughed he'd kill me.
JJ: (Maintains stolid silence concerning subsequent financial reparations made.)
TS: Generally, what was your reception at the European film festivals last spring?
JJ: After I was in Mannheim (Edit. aside: where he won the Josef Sternberg Award) I went to the Rotterdam Festival. Then on to Berlin where it got a very good response. It is being distributed on a very minor level, one print subtitled in German and another subtitled in Dutch. And it just won the Critic's Prize at the festival in Lisbon.
TS: Did you like Gary Indiana's mention of it in Art Forum?
JJ: Yes.
TS: But what did you think about Gary's saying Chris was an incompetent actor?
JJ: Well I respect Gary's reviewing because he will compliment a thing one way and the next sentence trash it, it's the way he writes. He always has an honest reaction, not intellectualized. Gary is a director himself, of theatre. He is very interested in camp and transparent acting. I understand what he prefers as an acting style. Chris' acting, at all times, and the acting in the film was intended to be, and successfully so I believe, very close to realistic. The reviews in Europe always referred to this as "fake documentary", which is good, that's what we wanted to get, especially with Chris. So I understand Gary's criticism, it's a difference of opinion.
TS: The person with whom I saw PERMANENT VACATION said afterwards that he thought it was the kind of film that would be perfect for Communists to show their disaffected youth . . . to show them what it was really like to live in the wondrous, free capitalist society . . . because it shows such dismal, unfortunate, almost pathological conditions of life. Of course he said this very ironically.
That's something to do with the documentary aspect of your work.
JJ: It would be very interesting to see how American highschool kids would react to the film. I think that's a very interesting suggestion of his but its a more general disaffection, that relates to more than one political system. Someone else said to me, You should show this film to young guys in the army, right before they're going to get out. Which I thought was really odd . . .
TS: Ugh! How exhilarating.
JJ: It was a guy who was in the Army for quite a while, in Vietnam. He said it could make an incredible impact on them, about to leave the army, probably having no real plans . . .
CP: I think that's a great idea.
TS: So do you really have a dismal view of the future? Or is this view just a condition of being 18 or 19 years old?
JJ: Oh no, I do have a very dismal view of the future. I wouldn't just offhandedly say, Oh, this is just an aesthetic, that's not the case.
TS: If this pessimism is not an aesthetic, and not just a function of adolescence, an idea one outgrows, it's
JJ: It's not an accident that the locations I choose depict the world as post-depression, post-industrial . . . a set of lapsed systems. The new film will be even more intensely atmospheric that way. More desolate, no, not desolate, just more tension.
I liked to think while we wrote Permanent Vacation, while making it, we were influenced by Italian post-war films - their use of non-actors, the actual economic state of Italy at that time . . . the whole country became a location, a critique of Western economics, just by location. So I can't just dismiss this viewpoint as an aesthetic, it is an economic viewpoint and a critique of American capitalism, more than a yes to Soviet socialism. The film could be set in many places, with the same aimless character.
TS: So will you make any films about criminals, about the underworld?
JJ: Yes . . . there are some influences from film noir, particularly Melville's Le Samourai with Alain Delon . . . and certain Japanese Samurai films. The idea of a Samurai character intrigues me now. The Samurai were trained in the military, and their training involved a religious discipline. They learn how to make life and death decisions immediately, because of this central stabilization. I want to transpose that into Western morality.
Their idea is a Zen ideal, that of victory through failure.
TS: What is a victory through failure?
JJ: In Japanese culture of course you have suicide, their tradition of hari-kiri. It is more noble to commit suicide even though it will do nothing to further your cause, than to remain passive, or wait for the next opportunity to further your cause.
TS: So they killed themselves in a kind of ecstasy of seeing their ideal realized.
JJ: They would martyr themselves. Like the kamikaze pilots. They took their own life and in that way furthered the cause of the Royal Imperial Airforce.
TS: I think that really scared Americans to death.
JJ: True. But tactically it's another question. In many cases they even missed the ships they were trying to hit.