ARTVOICE (vol 8, no 47) – December 3-9, 1997
by M Faust
Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch first met Neil Young during the shooting of his last film, “Dead Man,” which Young agreed to score. When Young later asked him to shoot a video for his song “Big Time,” Jarmusch used a Super-8 camera to capture the rough edge of Young and his long-time band Crazy Horse. The band liked the look of the video so much that Young asked Jarmusch to do a feature film in the same style. The result is “Year of the Horse,” now playing at the Amherst Theater, the best concert film since the Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense.”
The benefit of shooting in Super-8 is that it allowed Jarmusch and producer/co-cameraman L.A. Johnson to film the band up close, spontaneously and without a cumbersome crew. Although “Year of the Horse” also used video and 16mm, it’s the Super-8 flavor that captures the band so perfectly. I had the pleasure of speaking with Jarmusch, one of the most distinctive young American directors (“Stranger than Paradise”, “Down by Law”, “Night on Earth”) at the Toronto Film Festival in September.
MF: Was it tough to whittle your footage down to nine songs for the finished film?
JJ: Yeah, it was! We had a few more in the earlier cut, but it was like three hours long. Neil was totally cool. He let me pick the songs. We took out “Pocahontas,” “Danger Bird,” some other stuff. But I got two in there from “Zuma”!. (laughts)
MF: Some of the songs you might be expecting to hear aren’t there, like “Cinnamon Girl”…
JJ: There’s no “Cortez,” “Down by the River” either. You’ve heard those enough. (laughs)
MF: Given the way it was filmed, this probably wasn’t a very expensive film.
JJ: Well, there were a lot of expenses – there’s the 40-track recording in Dolby digital. And it was expensive because we shot Super-8, 16 and Hi-8 video, then made a digital video out of that, and from that they made three 16mm strands, like the old three-color process, and from that they made the color 35mm negative. So technically it was a little trickier.
MF: Do you think this could start a trend for using Super-8 in feature films?
JJ: It’s already a trend. I just don’t like the hierarchy of technology. People said that when photography was invented, that was the death of painting. But painting just got more interesting in a lot of ways. Sometimes you need a hammer and a chisel instead of a chainsaw. Just because there are computers doesn’t mean you can’t write with a pen. It depends on what material suits what you need. I like technology – I use Avids and Lightworks to edit, I love all that stuff. But that doesn’t mean that everything predating that is dead. It depends on what you need to use. I’m not a Luddite. I find a lot of uses of technology highly suspicious, but it’s not the fault of the technology.
MF: Where did the title come from?
JJ: It’s something Neil’s longtime producer David Briggs, who died last year, said to him about this tour. Our working title was “Horseshit,” and the band wanted “Smell the Horse,” after Spinal Tap’s “Smell the Glove.” I liked “Horseshit,” but…
MF: You’ve done small roles in a number of films, like “Sling Blade” and “Blue in the Face.” Do you enjoy acting?
JJ: I do those movies if they’re friends of mine and I think it might be fun. I’m not an actor, and it helps me as a director to know what it’s like on the other side. But mostly I just do it cause it’s people I know, like Billy Bob Thornton and the Kaurismaki Brothers and Paul Auster, something for Alex Cox.
MF: How about “Tigrero,” the semi-documentary in which you and Sam Fuller revisit the South American location of a John Wayne film he planned but never got to make in the 1950s? You were in every scene. Was that uncomfortable?
JJ: No, because I was with Sam Fuller, who I love, and [director] Mika Kaurismaki is a good friend of mine. IT was also real interesting to be with the Karaja people in the Amazon. So that was just selfishly having a great experience with those people. And I’d be with Sam anywhere in the world. He was the only guy who didn’t get sick and he’s like 84-years-old. There’s one scene where he’s explaining to me how to kill a jaguar, and I say, why don’t you just shoot it, and he’s (imitates Fuller’s gruff back), “Ya can’t just shoot it, ya gotta use a spear! Don’t ya unnerstan the concept of the whole thing? We’re in the Amazon, they don’t have guns here!” [Note: Fuller died a few weeks ago, after this interview was conducted. Rent one of his movies today.]
MF: Have you seen “Gummo” [the much-touted debut film from screenwriter of “Kids”]?
JJ: No. I don’t have much desire to. I didn’t like “Kids” – I thought it was phony. I thought it was trying so hard to be “real” that it was fake.
MF: During the Oscar season last year, the media decided it was in love with “independent” movies. Do you think anything useful can come of that for filmmakers like you?
JJ: It’s just a load of shit, another brand slapped on something to market it. I don’t know what it means anymore. It’s like “alternative” music. It’s just a phrase to make music mainstream. I never liked titles slapped on things anyway. So I’m getting really annoyed at even hearing it. When I hear the word independent I reach for my revolver. “The English Patient” is an independent film? What the hell does that even mean? I don’t know. I’m getting annoyed, though. (Imitating Fuller again) Independent indeshmendent. If Hootie and the Blowfish are alternative music then I’m the Queen of Denmark.
MF: So what it the state of independent filmmaking?
JJ: There are real problems. People go to Sundance because they want to get a studio deal. I know of a few cases where distributors paid more for a film than it was worth, and then when they didn’t get their money back it was the filmmaker’s fault the film was a failure. So maybe it was a really great film, but now the filmmaker is struggling to get another one. The failure was because of a system that wanted to eat them alive and make them a product without being sensitive to what it really was. The problems run deep. Things have changed a lot since I started out. But I always have hope for people who love movies, because of what they can do with them.