From "Movies for a Desert Isle: Forty-two Well-Know Film Lovers in Search of Their Favorite Movie," edited by Ellen Oumano (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987). The book features interviews with an eclectic bunch: Marianne Faithful, Akira Kurosawa, Roger Corman, Robert Altman, Wes Craven, John Waters, Paul Morrissey, Frank Zappa, Harry Dean Stanton, Wim Wenders, among others....and, of course...
JIM JARMUSCH:
It's an impossible question. The answer would change every hour. I think I would take Out One: Spectre, a film by Jacques Rivette. The original version, Out One, was made for television and is thirteen hours long. It was made in 1970. I was asked this question before and that's what pops into my head only because it's a film you could watch a hundred times and have a different reaction to every time. The traditional kind of narrative is not of any interest to Rivette and therefore his films make a lot more sense several days after you've seen them, rather than when you've just emerged from the film--for me, anyway. I don't understand exactly what I've seen or what I feel about it; it's something that's an accumulation of thought about his films that makes them interesting for a longer period of time after you've seen them. That's probably what I would take with me, although, as I said, my answer could change every half hour; there are so many people I like.
I like Dreyer's work a lot; I like a lot of Antonioni's films--they're something I could see over and over again, like L'Avventura. There's something similar to Rivette in that for Antonioni often the meaning of a scene is implied more by the way it's photographed than by what actually happens in the scene. What kind of landscape it takes place in will frequently affect the emotional importance of a scene more than the dialogue. I also like Sam Fuller's films, Nick Ray's films, Douglas Sirk's, a lot of Fassbinder's, and most of Godard's, so it's very difficult.
I think another film I'd be tempted to take would be The Mother and the Whore by Jean Eustache, which I like a lot, but I don't want to come off sounding like a Francophile. That film amazed. I wish I could see it again. I've seen it twice, but the last time I saw it was probably six years ago. It's a film I think about a lot, that affected me very deeply both times I saw it, and emotionally, I sort of need to see it again. It's nothing more specific than that. I was involved in different relationships each time I saw it, so it affected me and applied to me differently each time. It's something that's universal--jealousy and love and how we react to people we love. I'm also very interested in it in terms of the way it was scripted and directed and in terms of the acting. It's something I think I could learn a lot about acting from by seeing it again. There a lot of Nick Ray films I also like to watch over and over again, particularly In a Lonely Place and Bigger Than Life. For some reason I see different things in them.
Asking me what films I've seen the most times is probably not a fair question because I was an usher at the St. Mark's Cinema and I had to see a lot of bad films eight or ten times. Oddly enough, I've probably seen L'Atalante by Jean Vigo, Rebel Without a Cause by Nick Ray, and The American Friend by Wim Wenders the most. The American Friend is one I like to see all the time. There's more tension in the acting between Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz than in any of Wenders' other films. Something happens between them. From the point of view of watching the actors work, it's maybe Wenders' most interesting film. There are other films of his that are more interesting for other reasons. I like Kings of the Road.
Yesterday, I finished the script, or the newest draft, for Down by Law, my next film. It will be in some ways a similar style to Stranger Than Paradise. It won't all be in master shots and it won't have a blackout after each scene as in Stranger. Economy and style sort of went hand in hand in determining that style. I thought the style suited both the story and the means in which we were able to make the film. This new film will be similarly austere in certain stylistic ways. Right now I'm planning on everything being in master shots and medium closeups--face and shoulders--with no intermediary shots, no medium shots. A lot of films are told basically in medium shots--TV and most Hollywood films. I want to eliminate what is used most often, but I want to have closeups. The three main actors, Tom Waits, John Lurie, and an Italian actor, Roberto Benigni, have such incredible faces, so I want to have their faces more prominent, but I also like wide shots to play scenes out in. So it will be cutting between those kind of distances from the actors without the intermediary level that most stories are told in. I'm going to eliminate the most frequently used distance, but I will have closeups. That could change next week, but that's the way I'm thinking now. I'm doing it less to make a statement than because I think it's the best way to tell this story. It's also because I think people become too reliant on a certain kind of language, film language; but most importantly, it suits the story. We're shooting it in and around New Orleans. It's also black and white, but it will be very fine-grain film, not open grainy as in Stranger. Robby Mueller will shoot it. I'm real excited. Tom, John, and I were together last night for a while and I got really excited watching them interact with each other.
After Stranger, I had a lot if widely different offers to direct films that were very bad, like teenage sex comedies. It made me wonder whether the people who were offering these films to me had even seen my film. There's no nudity or virginity jokes in it. I tend to be obstinate and avoid certain things just because I think they've become clichés, like virginity jokes in teenage movies. I had offers to produce my own work through studios and also offers from various levels of producers from Dino de Laurentis to Arthur Cohn. A lot of people expressed interest, which was very flattering, and I learned a lot. At first, I used to say a lot of things about what it is to be an independent filmmaker, which I now have learned doesn't exist. You are never independent of the money, of obtaining the money, but I'm still very obstinate as far as compromise. I would much rather walk away from something immediately than compromise. I'm very stubborn, so my independence is based on that rather on what kind of money it is or whose money it is or where it comes from. I've learned a lot about that; I don't think independent filmmakers really exist, because you have to get money to make the film, and where the money comes from is not important. It's what's on the screen and how it's presented that counts.
I'm still not interested in making a studio film where some businessman is going to tell me how to cut it or what kind of music or what actors to use. That I would never do, even if I was starving. I just would rather do something else to get by. This film will have a negative pickup deal from an American distributor, where they will have distribution rights in English in advance. That will the major part of the financing and the rest of the financing will come Europe and deals there. None of these deals are made; we're negotiating them at the moment. So I can't say from whom, but it will be an American-European coproduction, executive-produced by the same German producer who produced Stranger Than Paradise. So it won't be a studio film, but it will have a distribution presale. The budget is around one million dollars.
Other films have such high budgets because a lot of bankers, executives, agents, and lawyers get their money, and that takes a lot of it. Fassbinder made a lot of films, but he had it all figured out that he would burn our working at that rate. There was no way around that, but he made more films than a lot of people do in a much longer lifetime. That doesn't mean a lot to me anyway. I mean, Nick Ray didn't make his first film until was thirty-seven or something, and Jean Vigo only made four films although he died at twenty-nine.
I went to graduate film school at New York University, but I don't have a degree. I went for two years, but I didn't complete the program because I made a feature-length film as my thesis project and used some of the funding that was supposed to pay my tuition to make Permanent Vacation. I got out with my first feature, but I didn't come out with a degree. I worked with Nick Ray and met Wim Wenders through Nick. Wenders' company helped me make the first part of Stranger, and the feature was produced by a different producer.
I met Tom Waits in January of 1985 just be hanging out a bit and we became friends. I was writing a different script, a love story, which I wasn't able to finish for emotional reasons. It was for a specific actress when I started writing it--a close friend of mine who died last October. Right around the time I first met Tom, I was still trying to complete that somehow but was not able to. I started writing a separate script at the same time, writing a character for Tom and one for John Lurie, and somehow it just became easier to take up this story. Then I met the other actor in Italy, Roberto Benigni, and the whole story sort of snapped into place, based on thinking of these people as characters--I invented characters for them. So in a way meeting Tom started Down by Law.
I don't understand the process of writing a script and then casting for the main characters. I start with the actors with whom I want to work and then try to write characters for them, which is how Stranger came about. Essentially John Lurie was the most important. He was somebody I'd known for six or seven years before making the film. He's briefly in my first film also. I'd wanted to do something with him and then Stranger came about from that.
I'm really interested in acting but not in the sense of having personalities or actors who just play themselves, although some people thought in Stranger that these people were just playing themselves. I'm interested in working really closely with the actors. First, I write it with them in mind, but I don't base the character completely on their own personality. I find things in their personality that suggest a character. Then the process that's most interesting to me is to work with them individually and decide with them what parts of this character are parts of themselves and what parts are not; how can we accentuate those parts that are and make a character that's not them. Once the cameras roll, it's their emotions that are responding, not the character's, but they are the character at that point. To me the most exciting thing about filmmaking is working with the actors and getting to the moment where their own emotions are really reacting but they're in character. They're in this removed, abstracted story that's not real life anyway, and yet they're reacting to the emotions. That's what interests me. I'm not interested in camp acting or just personality acting, where they just play themselves. It's a delicate thing and working with the actors is really exciting.
The difference is that I've written it with them in mind, so right from the beginning I've been developing it in my head for that actor. I know them personally; it's not like some stranger that I want to be zapped into character and when the camera stops then they're out of character. It's more intricate than that. The script does change once I start working with the actors, but the essential idea of every scene I write doesn't change. The dialogue sometimes changes and sometimes doesn't. In Stranger probably eight percent of the scenes are exactly as I wrote them and twenty percent of the dialogue changed through rehearsals and making decisions on characters as we worked. It depends, but one thing I believe in, that I learned from Nick Ray and from watching Wim Wenders work also, is that film for me is dead if it's finished by the time your script is finished. That, for me, is completely uninteresting. The script is a blueprint and from there you make a piece of architecture, but you're going to get ideas for new rooms as you go along. I think it's different for everyone.
That's why Jean Eustache amazes me and why he was one of the most important film directors. Yet he was someone who, from what I've learned from talking to people who worked with him, had everything completely scripted. The dialogue--even Lea's long, rambling monologues--was totally scripted. It seems completely improvised, and yet it was the opposite. So I think it's just how you work best, and not only does every director work differently but every actor works differently, even if it's with the same director. It's always a matter of finding the right way of communicating with each person.
I think there's a need for all kinds of cinema. What Douglas Trumbull is doing sounds very interesting to me, but it's very unrealistic. They had some questionnaire in American Film about the future of cinema and the effect of video. There was something Scorsese said that made so much sense to me. He said that he was composing his films for the small screen as well as for the big screen, because twenty years from now probably the only way you will be able to see his films will be on video. I think that's realistic. That, to me, is a more realistic stance than to go after whatever technology can do, when people are not going to have access to it. I hope that people keep exploring technology and that people like Trumbull can find out what can be done so we can have that spectacular kind of experience with cinema. But for somebody like me who wants to tell basically small stories, that's not a viable pursuit. It would bother me a lot to have my films shown exclusively on video, but a lot of things that are reality bother me a lot. So you have to make a decision about who is going to see your films, who you are going to make them for, and how they will be seen in the future, or whether they will at all.
I feel optimistic, which is against my generally cynical nature, but for some reason I feel optimistic. Rambo exists--that's a problem both politically and aesthetically because so many people like it, but, at the same time, there are enough people now who are saying, "We're tired of this kind of crap. What else is going on?" That makes me optimistic.