Walking into the cafe where we`ve agreed to meet on a hot spring day, director Jim Jarmusch takes off his signature black leather jacket. It`s the type worn by blues musicians, `50s greasers and the downbeat bohemian odd couple Willie and Eddie of Jarmusch`s second film ”Stranger than Paradise.” A small triangular silver Triumph motorcycle pin affixed to the lapel is a tip-off to one of Jarmusch`s chief recreational passions. Among Jarmusch cognoscenti, the shock of thick, almost white hair that rises from his head in a handsomely shaped post-punk spike is another unmistakable signature.
In the eight years since ”Stranger than Paradise” became an arthouse hit, Jarmusch has garnered a loyal but limited American audience. Yet abroad, particularly in Japan and Europe, both Jarmusch and his films have achieved cult status. For foreigners, perhaps even more so than for Americans, Jarmusch`s films are the sine qua non of post-modern American hipdom. They articulate a distinctly funky, low-tech, outcast vision of American society that in both ethos and esthetics draws upon and amusingly blends the past five decades of postwar culture. While in content his films quietly defy Hollywood`s myths of American progress and prosperity, in form (due to their stylistic simplicity and small budgets) they are a retort to the movie industry`s bloated excess.
Recently, at the Yugoslavian film festival, 6,000 people turned out to fill a 4,000-seat theater for a midnight showing of Jarmusch`s latest film,
”Night on Earth” in wartorn Belgrade. In the past several months a traveling ”Jim Jarmusch Film Festival” was held in major cities throughout Poland. Czechoslavakia will soon hold such a festival. And in Japan, where the director is a national celebrity, he is offered huge sums to appear in and direct commercials. To date he has turned down all offers.
As the only American independent director who makes films for over $2 million without a bond completion company, and who owns the rights to his own negatives, Jarmusch is as uncompromising on the issue of artistic freedom as he is in the choices that back up his claim that ”he`s not in it for the money.” Financed two-thirds by the Japanese company JVC (which financed all of ”Mystery Train”), and one-third by pre-sale distribution agreements in Europe, ”Night on Earth” was made for $3.5 million, Jarmusch`s biggest budget to date.
”Again there`s no American money in this film, as there`s been none in any of my films except for `Down by Law,` which was almost completely financed by Island Pictures and a little bit by German television. I get a lot more freedom by getting money outside the states. They don`t put any conditions on me about final cut, who`s in the film, what kind of music. I`ve been very lucky. I haven`t found anybody in America except Island that has offered me that kind of freedom.” Still, the struggle for financing begins anew with each project.
Following his first feature, ”Permanent Vacation,” made while he was a student at NYU film school, Jarmusch began to shoot ”Stranger Than Paradise” with black and white film stock donated by his friend, director Wim Wenders. The film traces the exploits of two small-time gamblers, and seems inspired equally by Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton of ”The Honeymooners” and Vladimir and Estragon of ”Waiting for Godot.” ”Mystery Train,” Jarmusch`s last film and his first in color, is an off-the-cuff tribute to rhythym and blues, told through three consecutive stories about characters in a shabby Memphis hotel who in one way or another are affected by Elvis Presley.
Following ”Mystery Train,” Jarmusch attempted to finance ”the most expensive project of any that I had in my head.” Frustrated in his efforts, he began writing a new script based on a sketch he`d written (with Ellen Barkin and Tom Waits in mind) while shooting ”Down by Law.” Although he says he had no intention of making another episodic film after ”Mystery Train,”
in a little more than a week the writer/director created five vignettes for
”Night on Earth,” each of which takes place in a cab.
Through the diversity of his characters and his unique pairings of cabbies and passengers, Jarmusch reveals a fascinating and entertaining cross- section of modern humanity. Included in his menagerie are an East German former clown who drives a cab in New York; a tomboyish, chain-smoking L.A. cabbie; a black African taxi driver in Paris who inquires into the sex life of his blind, female passenger; and a hyper Italian cabbie who makes a hilarious confession to the bishop in his cab.
”I thought it would be an easy film to make,” Jarmusch muses. But the film, which was shot on location in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki, ”turned out not to be easy at all because of the logistics.” (Two identical cars were involved on each location, one with the engine block removed so the camera could be mounted on the hood, was rigged with lights and towed during the shoot.) As with his other films, Jarmusch says that in
”Night on Earth” he was interested in exploring the ”spaces between things that we normally think of as being not significant.
”For example, in most films, when you see someone take a taxi you`re going from one place to another and those points are significant and the ride itself is not really. In most films you see a guy get in a cab, then you cut and see him get out. So in a way it`s a whole film made up of things that normally wouldn`t even be in a film.”
Whereas in earlier Jarmusch films characters reveal themselves in ”the moments between dialogue,” in ”Night on Earth,” Jarmusch explains, the necessity of having the characters ”stuck in cabs” required a heavier reliance on dialogue than in past films. That Jarmusch successfully avoids the talking head syndrome in a film made up of a series of conversations has much to do with how the quirky absurdist humor he`s exhibited all along has matured into a rich comic talent.
For a director whose male characters often appear curiously indifferent to women, talk about sex in his new film marks a significant departure for the director. While Jarmusch has always punctuated the cool emotional mien of his characters by showing moments of surprising tenderness between them, in
”Night on Earth” not only are his characters more explicit about sex, they express all of their feelings with a surprising bluntness that prior to this film one would be hard-pressed to associate with Jarmusch`s characters.
In the L.A. vignette featuring Gena Rowlands and Winona, when the conversation turns to men, Ryder reveals with disarming honesty that she wants a man ”who will take me for who I am,” and will ”love my soul.” It`s a touching revelation. But as a moment that skirts sentimentality-an affect that all of Jarmusch`s films scrupulously eschew-it marks a risky choice for the director. Jarmusch`s admission that this is his ”favorite part of that story” suggests his ongoing interest in expanding the emotional range of his characters.
As is his habit, Jarmusch developed each character with a specific actor in mind. Very often the actors he uses are his friends. He explains that the appearance of musicians John Lurie, Richard Edson, Joe Strummer and Tom Waits (who created the ”Night on Earth” soundtrack) in earlier films wasn`t
”calculated.” ”It just happened because I was a musician and when I started making films, I made them with friends.”
”When I write for people, which is usually the case, I have a character in my head that`s based on elements of their own personality and I exaggerate certain elements and suppress other ones and work with them to make a character that is of course not them, but comes from qualities they have or that I interpret that they have.”
Long an admirer of the maverick director John Cassavetes (whose penchant for working with his friends Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel and his wife Gena Rowlands welded these actors into an impressive ”artistic family”), Jarmusch was led by circumstance to work in ”Night on Earth” with Gena Rowlands and director of photography Frederick Elmes (who shot Cassavetes ”Killing of a Chinese Bookie” and parts of ”Opening Night”).
Jarmusch voices a hopeful concern that audiences will see ”Night on Earth” as ”one film that is an accumulation of details, rather than five films.” The action, he said, is intended to be simultaneous, ”that kind of crossing of time zones, but staying at the same moment in time gives it some sense of being round like the planet in a way.” Then, true to his image as the arbiter of cool, and in ironic comment upon his own movie, he adds, ”It`s not a film for squares.”
