Jim Jarmusch takes control
by Andrew O’Hehir
April 30, 2009 06:39
When you think about the American directors who embodied the independent-film
wave of the 1980s, Jim Jarmusch stands alone in many respects. Peers like Spike
Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Gus Van Sant and Wayne Wang moved on to a complicated
dance between the mainstream and the margins, mixing bigger Hollywood pictures
with smaller and ostensibly more personal projects. Other directors, like Alex
Cox of "Repo Man," couldn't create economically viable career models and dropped
off the film industry's radar screen altogether.
Jarmusch simply kept on doing what he started out doing. He probably could have
parlayed the modest success of the laconic road movie "Stranger Than Paradise"
and the equally laconic prison-break comedy "Down by Law" into a well-paying job
infusing quirkiness into Hollywood scripts, but he never tried. As he said
during our recent conversation in New York, he assumes each of his movies will
be a "marginal cult thing," and that way he can be pleasantly surprised if it
exceeds those expectations.
Maybe this sounds like an invidious comparison, but Jarmusch is the post-punk
hipster generation's answer to Woody Allen. He makes the movies he wants on the
schedule he wants, with little regard for current fashion or commercial
viability. Although he's clearly American in orientation and outlook, he
probably has more fans and followers in Europe than in America. Jarmusch works
at a glacial pace that makes Allen seem positively prolific, having made just 10
features in 25 years, a number that includes his 1997 Neil Young documentary,
"Year of the Horse."
But if Allen's films are more than anything about people talking, Jarmusch's
films are about the silences between the words, a subject explored to perfection
in his ravishing new slow-motion crime fable, "The Limits of Control." While I
think Jarmusch's work is a mixed bag taken as a whole, his artistic ambition is
exceedingly high and his best films are nothing like anybody else's. Taking his
cues from such unpopular sources as Ozu and Antonioni, Jarmusch isn't much
interested in plot for its own sake. He uses storytelling as a way to get from
one perfectly framed and highly ambiguous moment to the next.
At one point in "The Limits of Control," the handsome, enigmatic and unnamed
protagonist, played by Afro-French actor Isaach De Bankolé, has a cafe encounter
somewhere in Spain with Tilda Swinton, also playing a nameless character and
dressed in a ludicrous cowgirl get-up. The whole movie, in fact, is a series of
such assignations, in which transactions occur that we can't quite follow.
Swinton remarks that she likes those moments in movies where people sit there
and don't say anything. Then the two of them sit there without saying anything.
It's a highly Jarmuschian meta-movie joke, but it also begins to hint at the
hidden meanings within the slowly unpeeling onion of "The Limits of Control."
This is not Jarmusch's easiest film, nor his most audience-friendly, but for my
money it's the most rigorous and beautiful construction of his entire career.
Maybe I can put it this way: If you liked Jarmusch's 1995 "Dead Man," which has
a definite cult following but was a commercial failure, "The Limits of Control"
is the movie you've been wanting him to make ever since.
Working with the Hong Kong-based cinematographer Christopher Doyle (who shot
Wong Kar-wai's early films), Jarmusch has created something like a Bach fugue, a
complex set of themes and variations. It has the suave hero and the visual
vocabulary of a crime thriller, one in which De Bankolé follows a set of clues
and codes from one strange encounter to the next, each one moving him from
Madrid to Seville and onward into the Spanish countryside. (Let me reassure you
about one thing right now: He does have a clear purpose in mind, and his journey
does have a destination. This is not one of those postmodern stories with no
ending.)
But the suave hero, the sharp clothes, the noirish atmosphere and the
spectacular settings are only one layer of the onion. Jarmusch's title is meant
to be metaphysically suggestive, referring not just to the limits of political
control (that's a clue, but not a spoiler) but also to the fact that the movie
itself is a fiction, and to the possibility that the world is not what we
perceive it to be. There are hints that De Bankolé is able to control the
landscape around him, at least at times, almost like the author of a story or
like Keanu Reeves in "The Matrix."
Honestly, though, none of that would be worth talking about if "The Limits of
Control" weren't a hypnotic and witty concoction of picture and sound. Doyle's
spectacular but lived-in Spanish landscapes are supported by an amazing
soundtrack from the experimental-rock trio Boris, and De Bankolé's nearly
wordless protagonist bounces off entertaining cameos from Swinton, Bill Murray,
John Hurt, Gael García Bernal, Hiam Abbass and others. It feels to me as if
Jarmusch has shifted into a new gear at age 56, and that's very exciting.
Oddly, in 20-plus years of covering independent film, I'd never met Jarmusch in
person before. He was relaxed and friendly, and he kept on talking long after
our allotted time had run out. He announced early in the conversation that he
was no good at speaking analytically about his films, but that did not turn out
to be true.
This is another one of your films about a mysterious, lone protagonist. Talk
about casting Isaach De Bankolé and how you see his role.
Well, I've known Isaach for like 25 years. This is our fourth film we've made
together. And for some years now I wanted to make a film with Isaach in which he
was a very controlled, quiet, centered criminal of some kind. One of the
elements I started with writing this was, he's not very verbal but he expresses
things through the tiny details in his face, or gestures.
It's an extraordinary performance. He's in, if not every single shot, the vast
majority of them, with relatively little dialogue. It has to all be in his
expression or his body.
Yes, he speaks very little. He only speaks when it's necessary.
And in fact one of the -- I don't know if you want to call it a joke -- but one
of the running themes of the film is, he has these recurring meetings with
people in public places. And the first question is always addressed to him in
Spanish, "Do you speak Spanish?" The answer being "No."
Right. It's a kind of code. Yeah, he encounters these characters throughout. The
film is very much about variations. And scenes recur, but they're with a
different person in a different place. Fragments of dialogue recur throughout
the film, repeated by different people. He's always traveling and waiting and
getting the next piece of some puzzle where he'll make his next move, and then
wait. You know, I love variations. It's used so much in music and painting, and
it's in architecture and fashion and pop music. It's something that we're
celebrating, this idea of things that repeat but are slightly different.
You've always seemed to me to have an attitude toward the patience of the
audience, which I admire greatly: You're not afraid to ask them to wait, and to
allow some space for things that are not explained to happen in the film.
For me, film is very related to music, in that it flows before you in its own
time signature. And my own musicality is on the slower side. Maybe it's like the
way I talk. Maybe I think slowly.
Then there's the aspect that, I don't know why ... I'm attracted to the moments
that are somewhat -- maybe completely -- devoid of something dramatic. My films
are built around those things. "Coffee and Cigarettes'' is just little moments
out of a day that are not considered important. Or I made "Night on Earth," in
which the whole film is made up of cab rides that, in a dramatic narrative,
would be the part you would leave out.
I noticed that somebody online had described your film, based maybe on having
seen the trailer and some of the images, as being a suspense film or a crime
film. And it's not that it doesn't have elements of that, but people who go into
it with that expectation may be a little bit disappointed.
Yeah, I think that they should be warned that it's an action movie with no
action. And we were alluding to crime films and action films on a lot of levels,
but we were not employing the same conventions, basically. The film is almost
devoid of a lot of them. But it has the atmosphere of those kind of films.
Isaach De Bankolé carries mysterious objects whose purpose we're not sure about.
He's making exchanges with people. There are things like that, which certainly
signal a crime film.
He keeps getting coded notes, but they're never decoded for the audience. So you
know what they're for, but you don't know what they say. Or, you know that he
has to exchange certain things, but we don't know what their value is for who's
going to ultimately receive them. They're only conventions to move him along.
So, yeah, we took away a lot of the information that normally would be important
but isn't ultimately important in this story.
You talked earlier about the fact that certain snippets of dialogue reoccur.
There's this suggestion that there may almost be -- if this isn't totally
pretentious -- like a metaphysical element to the story. And that the world that
we see in the film is not ultimately real, or not ultimately the most meaningful
level.
Well, some of it is kind of a dream logic, rather than rationality. So you don't
quite know what things are, what they mean. He goes several times in the film to
museums and sees only one single painting, and leaves. And I carefully picked
Spanish painters in a kind of chronological order throughout the 20th century.
And the first one is Juan Gris’s Cubist painting of a violin. And that's a kind
of clue, in my mind anyway, to the film. Because cubism is a fracturing of your
perception of the physical properties of an object. So the film uses that in a
way so that a lot of these things -- I hope -- are interpretable from different
perspectives. There isn’t a right way to interpret them.
It's not nearly as straightforward as something like "The Matrix," where we see
that reality is actually totally constructed. But one could go in that direction
in interpreting your film.
Yes, there's certainly that theme in there, it's even in the title ... What if
you just flipped around these arbitrary values that are put on things? We are
constantly told, "We drive these fossil-burning vehicles because that's just the
way it is." But the imagination and science have a thousand different
possibilities, so why is one of the worst ones the one that's employed? And the
answer is obvious: because it's profitable for people that control this. That is
a theme repeated several times: "Reality is arbitrary." It is a theme in the
film that your consciousness and your perspective on anything is your own and
should be valued as your own and not just be part of a herd of sheep because
that's the direction we were told to go.
We shouldn't just act like this movie is just existing in the realm of ideas,
because it primarily is not.
I hope it's entertaining. I mean, it's not supposed to be an intellectual
exercise. You don't have to go in thinking about these themes. They’re just kind
of swirling around within the film.
It was a really beautiful film, visually and sonically. You shot in all these
very beautiful locations in Spain.
Yes. And also, it follows the storyline of the film in that the first act of the
film is in Madrid -- the kind of quotidian Madrid that you would see if you
lived there, not necessarily if you were there as a tourist. And then going to
Seville, one of the jewels of Spain of that period when Islamic culture, Judaism
and Christianity coexisted and flowered, until about the 14th century, you know?
And then the Christians killed the others. The last act of the film is almost
like a western, where he's outside of Almeria. Where, incidentally, and not
accidentally, all the spaghetti westerns were filmed.
I didn’t know that, but right at the end of the movie I started thinking: Here
we've got a protagonist with no name in this dusty, small town. We're a little
bit getting that Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood territory.
As film viewers we know all those landscapes from all those films. Maybe we’re
not aware they were Spain. And … no character reveals any real name. The names
in the credits are Lone Man, Nude, Blonde, Guitar, Violin, that kind of thing. I
was just trying to further abstract them and name them only like they were
paintings rather than characters.
You have these great, fairly small-scale performances by actors, many of whom
have been in other films of yours: Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Gael García Bernal,
Bill Murray … And all these people seem to want to make some sort of personal
connection with Isaach’s character. And he's resistant to that.
I don't see him as resistant, because he kind of lets them talk about subjects
that they are obsessed with or interested in. And they ask him each time. They
say, "Are you interested in science, by any chance?" And he never answers, but
he allows them to go off on it for a while, and he listens. So they talk about
painting and music and science and hallucinogenic drugs and the origin of the
word "bohemian." He's interested, as he is in all things around him. But after a
certain point, "OK, that's enough. I gotta do the thing here. I gotta go."
After the fact, I recognized that there were a few hints earlier in the film
about where he's going and what he's doing, what his assignment is. Although
it's not even clear when he knows exactly what his assignment it.
Yeah, it's not very clear. I think the only people that know are the Creole guy
in the beginning that sort of launches him, and then the driver who takes him at
the end to the act. But all the people in between, I think, only know their
piece of the puzzle. They only move him along to the next thing.
I interpreted the title, "The Limits of Control," as referring to the limits of
political military control. And also maybe to the more kind of existential
question that the hero is going through, like: What is his level of control over
his environment?
Yeah, that's perfect. I liked the title because it seemed two-edged and
contradictory in an appealing way. That you could look at it as, What are the
limits of our own personal control? What do we have control over in our lives,
and how do we respect our consciousness? And conversely, what are the limits to
which our consciousness is attempted to be controlled by outside things? For me
it holds both meanings, which I liked. It comes from William Burroughs.
Talk about what working with cinematographer Christopher Doyle brought to it.
This was a special visual experience.
Chris is, for me, like a river full of fish -- ideas swimming past continually.
And you can fish out however many or however few you want, and Chris is there to
realize them … Now, I've worked with great cinematographers. And what they
brought to all those films was way above my ideas, because we collaborate. But I
still wanted to remove myself from being quite so controlling of every setup.
I'm a formalist, and this film's very formal in a lot of ways. But I just really
appreciated Chris' ability to always have alternate ideas at any instant. I
think he's one of the great living directors of photography at this moment in
time. But he's also wild. You know, somebody said that Keith Richards met Chris
and said, "Well, Chris Doyle is the Keith Richards of cinematographers."
That's a hard burden to carry.
I would say Keith Richards is the Chris Doyle of rock and roll … I did some
funny things though. The film's so very carefully composed throughout, but the
very last shot of the film, the camera throws away that precision. And that was
because that last shot, Chris couldn't turn the camera off without pulling it
off his shoulders. So the camera had to throw the frame away before he could
turn it off. And when I saw those, I was like, "Oh man, I want to use that." I
didn't tell Chris until I'd edited the film. He was like, "Oh you looked for
some mistakes. You looked for the strikes and the things other people would
throw away. That's good. I like that." I was trying to give a little gift back
to him for all the amazing things he put into this film.
Have you ever felt any personal or professional desire to do anything on purpose
to get a larger audience for your films?
No, I really try very hard to protect myself from ever thinking that way. I
block it right away when people start talking about things like, "Well, but Bill
Murray, he's known to be funny. So people are going to expect him to be funny.
What are you going to do about that when he's not funny in that film?" I take
the approach that every one of my films is going to be a marginal cult film, if
I'm lucky. And so if it does that, I'm happy. I did that at least.
Some of the people in the American independent scene in the '80s that you
started around the same time as -- Spike Lee and Wayne Wang, to name two
examples--went on to make Hollywood films in addition to more personal small
films. You probably had those opportunities?
Yeah, I respect them. Or like Gus Van Sant, or Rick Linklater. You know, they
all make different movies for different reasons. But me … I'm not attracted to
the mainstream in my own aspirations. I mean, every once in a while something is
incredible like, say, Nirvana -- there's no way you could hold that back.
Generally my narrations don't come out of the mainstream.
But I'm also not calculatingly trying to avoid it. I just do things my way. And
I really don't have the confidence to make a mainstream film, or I don't have
the temperament to have people tell me how to make the film. I guess that would
be a really big problem for me. Because I am a control freak. So that would be a
big mess. Blood would be shed.
Andrew O'Hehir
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