In Conversation with Jim Jarmusch

Jim Jarmusch does not enjoy the image of Kate Moss wearing a beard any more than I do. But that's what we've been confronted with, on the glossy cover of a Hollywood-lifestyle magazine placed, no doubt by the Gideons, on the coffee table in Château Marmont's Suite 69. It's very unsettling.

"And it's kind of freaking me out," says Jarmusch.

"Here," I offer, rising from my comfy spot on the floor. "Allow me."

I do what I must: extract the shiny magazine from the coffee table, walk it through the dining room to the kitchen and stash it somewhere safe.

"Did you put it in the fridge?" Jarmusch asks when I return.

"In the freezer."

"Good."

Now we can concentrate.

Jarmusch and I replant ourselves in the comfortable living room, and I propose terms for the rest of our one-hour relationship.

"In theory," I say, "you should be the accomplished artist who says complex and interesting things, and I'll be the benevolent parasite who encourages you and pretends to understand what you're talking about."

"In theory," says Jarmusch, sucking down a healthy dose of smoke. "We'll see about that."

I'm Jarmusch's first interview of the day. Afterward, he'll go back downstairs to his room, then return to this suite, back and forth, until sundown. Then on to other hotels in Seattle, Chicago, New York and abroad.

"Usually you feel like a whore in a hotel room," he says. "The next one comes in to fuck you, then the next. Next! And you don't even get paid. You were lucky to even get to make the film! Now shut up and take it! Well, actually, no--they don't treat me like that. But, you know, often [interviewers] already have an idea of what they want me to be, so that's what they're going to make me. You know?"

"The outsider. The control freak."

"Yeah, yeah. Aging punk rock indie whatever. And quirky. Don't forget quirky."

"Quirky. Check. Within six words of sensibility."

"I did an interview in England, and then I read that I spoke as though I were English. Like, 'Yes, I'd just popped 'round to the local pub to meet my mates'--stuff like that--when I'd actually said, 'Yeah, I met some friends at a bar.' They changed it into their vernacular, as if that was the way I spoke. They didn't really misquote me, they just retranslated it."

"Fucking cunts."

"Fucking ’ell."

In art school, one of my painting instructors took our class to see a film called Stranger Than Paradise. That was Jarmusch's first commercial release, and I became an instant fan. Over the next two decades, I followed faithfully as Jarmusch continued to create these heroically small, inimitably patient pictures, filled with austere absurdities and precise, silent punch lines: Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), Night on Earth (1991), Dead Man (1995), the Neil Young and Crazy Horse concert film/documentary Year of the Horse (1997), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) and Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), which he'd begun in 1986 as a series of black-and-white shorts. One of those shorts featured Bill Murray, star of Jarmusch's newest work, Broken Flowers, which recently received the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.

"Did you know Bill Murray before Coffee and Cigarettes?"

"Yeah, but not really. I wrote a script for Bill in 2001, and even raised most of the money for it. Then I came back from Europe and read the script again, and I thought it was a good story, but it needed work. And I hate rewriting scripts. I just do one draft and then start going.

"So I went to Bill's house and said, 'You know, Bill, I got a weird thing. I think I got the money to pay for this, but I don't feel like doing it. But I have this other idea I want to throw on you.' So I told him the basic idea for Broken Flowers. I hadn't written it, but I'd been carrying the idea around for some years. And he said, 'I like that one, too. I like that as much as the other one. You wanna do that?' And I was like, 'Thank you!' So then I wrote this script--really fast, in less than three weeks--and brought it to Bill, and we just went ahead and made it."