Break with the past

September 10, 2005
Director Jim Jarmusch.

Director Jim Jarmusch.
Photo: AFP

A retrospective of Jim Jarmusch films joins some interesting dots, writes Phillipa Hawker.

DIRECTOR Jim Jarmusch famously loves cinema's past but isn't very interested in his own. He declares - speaking from New York, in a tone of leisurely certainty - that he doesn't see his movies once they're finished, that he won't do DVD director's commentaries and doesn't feel it's his job to analyse or discuss what he has done.

"Don't look back" might be his personal philosophy but the Australian Centre for the Moving Image gives filmgoers the chance to do just that: it is holding a Jarmusch retrospective, a record of 25 years of graceful, strong and singular movie-making.

It begins with Permanent Vacation, his 1980 graduation film and concludes with a sneak preview of his new work, Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray.

And there is also the chance to see four classic features that have been selected for their affinities with Jarmusch movies - films from other directors that have influenced him and speak to his sensibility.

He didn't select these four films but he approved their selection and he appreciates the concept. "Being a film geek myself, I'm fascinated by the history of cinema in all its variants. And I like things that connect.

"I also like it because I think originality is overrated, everyone takes things from other places and hopefully makes them their own."

Jarmusch made his breakthrough in 1983 with the leisurely, off-kilter Stranger Than Paradise, a journey through the fringes of the US that helped to define him as a chronicler of the margins, someone who found outsider elements in the culture and brought them together in intriguing combinations.

He struck filmgoers as the quintessence of cool, and it would have been tempting for some critics to imagine that he would either fall swiftly out of fashion or take his stylish moves to Hollywood.

But he took his own course, stubbornly maintaining creative independence and control, finding sources for finance outside the US and going deeper into the myths, mysteries and offhand moments that have continued to compel his imagination.

Through the 1990s, his work got darker but no less graceful, particularly his ambitious and haunting Dead Man, his self-styled "psychedelic Western", an austerely beautiful and grim examination of American and cinematic mythologies.

It was a film that gave Jarmusch the chance to work with an actor he has been a fan of since childhood, Robert Mitchum, whom he cast in a small role and fondly recalls as the only actor who has ever intimidated him. ("Every once in a while in the middle of a shot I'd get distracted and think, it's Robert Mitchum in my film.")

Jarmusch has evolved a consistent pattern of working. It begins with the collecting of ideas, a random process that has a life of its own. "I have different notebooks for different projects. I write down things that strike me: it might be a bit of conversation, a scrap of colour, a photograph, a quotation, an idea for a scene or a character, the style of a building but mostly it's ideas that will go into the script - little thoughts about the character, a piece of dialogue."

He has many projects on the go, all at different stages: he has been collecting ideas for one script for more than 15 years, while another goes back only a matter of months.

He wrote Broken Flowers in three weeks, and the first words he inscribed in his notebook have made their way on to screen: the dedication "For Jean Eustache".

Since 1981, Jarmusch has had a framed photograph of the French filmmaker beside him while he writes. Eustache is best known for The Mother and the Whore, his harrowing 1973 exploration of a relationship between a man and two women; to Jarmusch, "he really did things as a poet who chose the form of cinema and his films are very different from one another".

The dedication, Jarmusch says, "was sending respect out to his spirit and to many other filmmakers who have given me so much strength and inspiration by doing things their way".

As a writer-director, he says, "I am the navigator, the story comes from me, the final edit is going to be mine, and I'm responsible for the casting, overseeing every object in the film and the colour of the film and all that stuff."

This isn't auteurism, he adds, because of the importance of collaborators: people can help you to realise what you imagined and then take it further.

He mentions "the colour of the film" deliberately. Jarmusch knows, early in the process, whether he sees a work in black-and-white or colour - and he has made several features in black-and-white.

"It's really part of how you imagine something and how you want it to feel emotionally. If I had shot Dead Man in colour, it would have looked like an episode of Bonanza."

Jarmusch generally writes his scripts with a specific actor in mind: Tom Waits for Down by Law, Forest Whitaker for Ghost Dog, Johnny Depp for Dead Man, Bill Murray for Broken Flowers.

"It's a tricky thing, it's subjectively seeing a quality or qualities in that actor that you want the character you are trying to create to embody. But that actor will have other qualities you don't want." So some elements are exaggerated, others blocked out.

The next step, he says, is collaboration - getting together to find the character - "and that's really a lot of fun". It could be talking, it could be rehearsing, it depends on what works for the particular actor: but rehearsal never involves scenes written for the film. Jarmusch devises scenes on the spot, involving the character, "then when we get to the point where I can take the actor to a restaurant, a pizza stand, anywhere and have them stay in character and observe them."

Characters propel his films but in restrained ways that withhold, or emphasise the apparently uneventful, the spaces between events and actions. "I feel a lot of things happen in life in between the dialogue - those things inform you about human beings and about life. I'm drawn to quiet moments or even situations that are not dramatic."

During filming: what he wants, he says, is not "acting" but "reacting": he can't bear to watch films when he sees performers "acting out the meaning of a scene rather than existing in the world of the film. I find that a betrayal, somehow. It drives me crazy."

He likes to give himself room to manoeuvre while shooting, to change and rewrite at the last minute. But he doesn't reshoot, partly because he can't afford it.

And finally, there's the editing process, the last stage before the work goes out into the world and becomes part of the past. "I sit in the editing room and let the film start talking to me.

And sometimes I don't like what it wants, it wants me to take out a scene or a shot I'm very fond of, but I trust the film and I take it out and forget about it." Once again, what's done is done. No looking back.

Focus on Jim Jarmusch is at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, from Friday, September 16 to Monday, September 26.
