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Jim Jarmusch Interview in The Reykjavik Grapvine

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Jim Jarmusch on...
This year's guest of honour shares his thoughts on film and reality
3.10.2010 Words by Wiebke Wolter
Photos by
“I'm not an analytical person and I don't really analyse what my films mean or what their intention is. I'm intuitive,” says Jim Jarmusch, icon of independent filmmaking. His films are independent in multiple ways: On one hand Jarmusch finances his movies indpendently, and on the other hand he doesn't tell a story on screen in in the traditional Hollywood way.

His early films from the Eighties, like 'Stranger Then Paradise' or 'Down By Law', follow male outsiders drifting around. These films, called “plotless” by some critics, requite the spectator to focus carefully because they are told a story in a slower rhythm, neglecting the well known Hollywood causation principle along with the concept of a hero achieving his goal. His later work, like 'Coffee & Cigarettes', 'Broken Flowers' and his latest film 'The Limits Of Control', is more abstract, working with repeating motifs and focussing more on individual scenes than on a comprehensible storyline.

Jim Jarmusch, who received the Creative Excellence Award at this year's RIFF, attended a double feature screening of his films 'Down By Law' and 'The Limits Of Control' and shared his thoughts with the audience. Jarmusch spent over one and a half hours telling us about his movies, the process of filmmaking and reality in general. The Grapevine was there and collected some of his thoughts for you.

… The process of filmmaking

“I consider my job to be a kind of receptor of things that move me. When I am working on a film idea I take quite a long time to collect disparate things, that I don't know quite know how they go together yet. I usually have some some actors that I would like to imagine to become certain characters in a kind of imagined world of a film. I start gathering these things. And then something tells me, it is time now to connect the dots, than I write a script based on the collection of these things. I don't even write the script always in continuity, I might write scene 56 and then scene 3, I'm not always sure how it goes together. I write really fast, because the script is just a starting map. Then I get my cast together, I get some more ideas and change some things. Then I look at other locations, and get more ideas. After shooting, the final draft is the editing. I try to be open to different possibilities that might suggest themselves. When I'm done making the film and having presented it, I never look at it again.”

… Limits of Control: Reality and consciousness

“Limits of Control for me is about the fact that each one of us has our own consciousness and it is the most valuable thing we have, it is our own. You can be influenced, people will try to tell you what is reality. I grew up with authority figures in school, police men even my father telling me things similar to what the character of Bill Murray says to the lone man in the end of the film: `You just don't understand how the real world works´. And I heard that so many times. But the real world is mine to interpret. I don't like to be told what is real. (…) I think it should be a sin or even a criminal thing for anyone to tell other people `what I believe is right and therefore you have to believe in the same thing´. (…) I really respect their consciousness and everyone has very different experiences, they accumulate and form you own kind of consciousness. It is a very valuable thing, ones particular perspective of what ever the world is.”

… How to understand his films

“A poet, I think it was E. E. Cummings said `You can understand the poem without knowing what it means´ [`Don't try to understand it, let it try to understand you.´ E.E. Cummings]. That is very important to me, because you can feel things from a painting, a film, from music without necessarily knowing exactly what it means, which essentially is less important than understanding it on another level, which may not be rational or logical.”

After chatting with the audience, Jarmusch went downtown where he continued chatting with people at Kaffibarinn, Bakkus and Boston.

The Limits of Control | Film review | Film | The Observer

This was one of my favourite pictures of last year, a minimalist hit man noir from Jim Jarmusch, starring Isaac De Bankole, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton and Bill Murray.

 

The Limits of Control

Jim Jarmusch sets his latest enigma in Madrid, Seville and Almería. Existentialist mystery ensues…

 Philip French Critic of the year

• • The Observer, Sunday 13 December 2009
  • Article history

Isaach De Bankolé in The Limits of Control.

Jim Jarmusch has been writing and directing intriguing, highly accomplished independent movies for a quarter of a century now and occasionally acting in those of fellow independents. His budgets remain relatively modest by Hollywood standards, but he has attracted leading performers like Johnny Depp and Robert Mitchum to work with him, as well as musicians such as Tom Waits and Joe Strummer.

1. The Limits of Control
2. Production year: 2009
3. Country: Rest of the world
4. Cert (UK): 15
5. Runtime: 116 mins
6. Directors: Jim Jarmusch
7. Cast: Alex Descas, Bill Murray, Gael Garcia Bernal, Isaach de Bankole, John Hurt, Paz de la Huerta, Tilda Swinton
8. More on this film

His films are mysterious without being obscure and are sometimes carefully patterned and sometimes linear stories of journeys of discovery. Mystery Train, for instance, retraces the same few hours as it interweaves several stories of Presley fans in Memphis, while in Broken Flowers Bill Murray crisscrosses America visiting old girlfriends (all played by well-known actresses) to discover which one bore him a son. Despite the fact that few of the characters actually meet each other, there's always a sense of ensemble acting in Jarmusch's work and this is true of his hypnotic new picture The Limits of Control.

Isaach De Bankolé, the black French actor from the Ivory Coast making his fourth film with Jarmusch, travels around Spain encountering a dozen people played by familiar actors from a dozen countries ranging from Japan to Palestine, none of whom appears to know of the others' existence. The movie is something of a homage to John Boorman's dreamlike thriller Point Blank (it's actually announced as "A Point Blank production") and is much influenced in its themes and settings by Melville's Le samouraï, Antonioni's The Passenger and the conspiracy pictures of Jacques Rivette.

No one has a name. Bankolé, identified in the credits as "Lone Man", belongs in that tradition of professional hitmen who have fascinated writers and film-makers from Shakespeare (the Murderers in Richard III and Macbeth) through Graham Greene (A Gun for Sale) and Jean Paul-Sartre (Les mains sales) to Michael Mann (Collateral). Forest Whitaker played such a figure in Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and while Bankolé also seems attracted to eastern ways (he begins the day with tai chi), he's an existential figure about whom we know nothing beyond his few laconic statements and his behaviour.

He's dispatched on a mission by two Frenchmen, one black, one white, in an airport lounge, who begin their briefing with the question: "You don't speak Spanish, right?", which becomes both recognition code and mantra. As with his later contacts, they exchange matchboxes, alternately red and green, from a brand called Le Boxeur, the one he receives always containing a small, encrypted message which he chews and swallows. He first flies to Madrid, where he stays in a famous high-rise apartment block that looks like a Bauhaus reworking of Gaudi. Wherever he goes, he orders two separate espressos, an indication of his rigid sense of control, and makes contact according to oblique instructions.

From Madrid, he takes the train to Seville, where his backstreet apartment in the old town is in a different, more traditional style. Another train takes him to rural Almería, where he stays in a ghost town near his target, a closely guarded fortress belonging to some powerful international organisation, possibly connected to the helicopters that hover everywhere.

Along the way, the Lone Man meets a variety of colourful characters, all of a philosophical bent, who have to be reminded of their essential roles in some conspiratorial enterprise, at which we can only guess. My hunch is that we're watching the revenge of the downtrodden upon globalism and capitalist society. The film's one demon is called simply "the American". Death and disorientation are much in the air.

The only time Bankolé faintly smiles is when he watches a flamenco singer and dancer in Seville and several times he is directed to a grand art gallery in Madrid to interrogate a cubist painting by Juan Gris of a violin, an erotic 1920s nude by Roberto Balbuena and, at the end, an all-white painting by Antonie Tàpies of a sheet nailed to a canvas. There are numerous clues in this delightfully ludic, enigmatic film to suggest we're experiencing a dream or watching a film about film. For example, the hero flies by Air Lumière and an exotic cinephile dressed all in white (Tilda Swinton) tells him she loves old films because they capture a vanished past, that in her memory she can't distinguish dreams from films and that she loves watching movies where people just sit around and nothing happens.

The Limits of Control is a picture people will love or loathe, though no one could fail to be impressed by the haunted, surreal atmosphere that is rendered by the brilliant Hong Kong-based Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle. I was riveted from the moment I read the epigraph from Arthur Rimbaud's "Le bateau ivre": "As I descended into impassable rivers/ I no longer felt guided by the ferryman."