Interview

There must be something about New York City that makes its homegrown filmmakers rebels and mavericks with a natural immunity to the temptations and formulas of Hollywood. Films by John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, James Toback, Woody Allen, or Spike Lee don’t need that last title card—the directors’ signatures are in every frame and every cut. New York is the art capital of the world, and maybe that’s what infects our directors with painterliness, poetry, and non-negotiable independence.

Jim Jarmusch is New York’s great new-wave film director in a couple of senses: He was a part of the punk and new-wave generation of musicians and artists, playing in the band The Del-Byzanteens, and conspiring with a group of like-minded bohemians as he turned the new-wave musical energy into the no-wave cinema, a spiritual descendent of the French cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Melville.

Jarmusch’s first feature, Permanent Vacation (1980), made with his scholarship money from NYU, was one of the more accomplished films of a burgeoning underground film scene whose directors and actors consisted mostly of lower -Manhattan’s band members and starving artists. It was followed by Stranger Than Paradise (1984), an oddball comedy—made with leftover film donated by Wim Wenders—that starred two of Jim’s downtown musician friends, John Lurie and Richard Edson, as well as Eszter Balint, a member of the Hungarian-refugee Squat Theatre troupe. Stranger won the Caméra d’or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984 and earned Jarmusch international acclaim. Next was the antic Down by Law (1986), the misadventures of a trio of escaped convicts in Louisiana, featuring Lurie, Tom Waits, and Roberto Benigni, which established Jarmusch as the hipsters’ auteur. His episodic films, which include Mystery Train (1989), Night on Earth (1991), and Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), have brought together eclectic ensemble casts telling interwoven stories in a wry, laconic style marked by blackouts and picaresque but inscrutable plot arcs.

Jarmusch didn’t need to change to please his public, but he changed to please himself. With Dead Man (1995), starring Johnny Depp as a fugitive who travels to the Far Western frontier, the director moved into a new phase—the personal journey, a mode also explored in the brilliant Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), featuring Forest Whitaker, about a hit man with an inner life. The Limits of Control, which opened May 1, follows a similarly enigmatic character, played by Isaach De Bankolé, who appeared in Night on Earth and Ghost Dog, and who will be recognized by many from his portrayal of the African Prime Minister Motobo on the television series 24. In The Limits of Control, De Bankolé travels through magical landscapes of Spain carrying out a mission mysterious enough to live up to the film’s title, which was borrowed from a William S. Burroughs essay. A wonderful cast including Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Paz de la Huerta, and Bill Murray conspires to delight with unexpected cryptic comedy and abstract suspense. This extraordinary film should confirm Jarmusch as an artist who ranks with the filmmakers he admires—artists like Melville, John Boorman, Nicholas Ray, and Samuel Fuller.

GLENN O’BRIEN: So The Limits of Control really surprised me. I was even more surprised to learn that you went into production without a script—just notes, right? It seemed so perfectly -plotted out, in a way, almost like a Hitchcock film, I guess because there’s a lot of reverberation. You were playing with repetition.

JIM JARMUSCH: Yeah. We wanted to use variations, so we were building it as we went along. We really had a highly tuned antenna to be open to things. We knew we were building on things that repeat and vary, but we didn’t have all of them—some of them we found along the way. It’s lucky to be able to make a film like that these days, you know?

O’BRIEN: Had you spent a lot of time in Spain?

JARMUSCH: I had off and on. I’d been back there a couple years ago, but it was just kind of reverberating in me. In the press notes, I mentioned these little things that started me off with the story in the first place—one of them being Torres Blancas, this apartment building in Madrid.

O’BRIEN: That’s the building that looks like a flying-saucer convention.

JARMUSCH: Yeah, it’s so wild.

O’BRIEN: Is that from the ’60s?

JARMUSCH: The late ’60s. I always wanted to shoot there. I’d stayed there, like, 20 years ago. So I had that, and the idea of Isaach’s character, in a vague way. I had also always wanted to film in Seville. And then I was shown this picture of this house in the south, outside of Almería. My friends lived on the same street, and they said, “You gotta use this someday.”