Jim Jarmusch Talks The Vampiric Charms Of ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’

Only Lovers Left Alive (Directed by Jim Jarmusch)

‘Iconoclastic filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has been living outside of the mainstream for his entire career, so it’s perhaps only fitting that for his 11th feature-length film, Only Lovers Left Alive, the writer/director turns his attentions to the outsiders that live in shadows.’

Eve is mentored by John Hurt's Kit Marlowe, another bloodsucker who is still upset by Shakespeare's successful accreditation of his own work. Kit supplies Eve with O-Negative human blood, the very finest of the best. While Eve lingers at late-night cafés, oblivious to the obnoxious locals, Adam has established a home in Detroit. He is a melancholic musician who has let his immortal depression to devour his entire life. He lacks a mentor, but he does have some "friends" that assist him in times of need. Jeffery Wright portrays the doctor who provides the blood, while Anton Yelchin portrays Ian, the musician friend who provides everything else. From the start, it's plainly evident that, despite the film's vampire theme, this is not a standard horror film. Indeed, Jarmusch opts not to address the more obvious and frightening aspects of what we've come to understand about a vampire's life. Anyone familiar with Jarmusch's work will not be startled by that submission. The film's speed is a reflection of the characters' lifestyles. As is the case with much of his prior work, this is a slow-burner that focuses on the romanticism of art, music, literature, and love. Rather than portraying vampires as monsters, Jarmusch gives their personalities more gravitas and eloquence. He makes an attempt to deconstruct the inescapable loneliness and the depressing routine of immortality. Adam and Eve are now tortured souls eking out an existence among a new generation of zombies (as they refer to humans). Is this a not-so-subtle way for Jim Jarmusch to convey the message that all humans are actually sheep? Are we modern-day slaves to all modern consumptions? That contemporary culture has devolved into brain-dead zombies? That is how it feels, isn't it? He's also posing the issue, "Is it possible to feel alone when your essence is permanently tied to another's?" Jarmusch would return to a similar style six years later in another "horror" picture, 'The Dead Don't Die,' starring Adam Driver, Bill Murray, and Chloe Sevigny. He continues to employ the same sluggish structure. Although the latter had a little more charm and subtle humour, it lacked Jarmusch's trademark flowery elegance.

The following excerpt is from an interview from Indiewire in 2014 with writer-director Jim Jarmusch prior to the release of his vampire-genre film Only Lovers Left Alive.

Vampires seems like an unlikely subject for you given their position in pop-culture right now. What drew you to them?

I just like genres, it’s one that I’ve always liked. I really like the whole history of vampire films that are more the kind of marginal, the less conventional ones. Starting with Vampyr by Carl Dreyer in the ‘30s, and many, many interesting films – Shadow of the Vampire with Willem Dafoe, then in the ‘80s The Hunger with David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve. I liked George Romero’s film Martin a lot, Katheryn Bigelow’s film Near Dark, Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, Clair Denis’ Trouble Every Day, Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers. I loved Let The Right One In—that was from like five, six years ago, beautiful.

That’s a good list of films.

Yeah, I’ve always loved all of those films, that type of approach. Rather than the sort of more obvious one and I wanted to make a love story for quite a long time. It’s had different variances to it, but somehow it got merged maybe eight years ago into my vampire film. So, I wanted to make a love story that involved vampires. Why, I can’t really tell you… It interests me. And I like genres too sometimes because they imply a kind of metaphoric element. Just by the fact that they are a genre. So you can work within [that genre] and do something different inside of that frame. So, that always appeals to me, or not always, but in the case of the few films where I’ve referred to genres, there’s something attractive there for me too.

I imagine the ideas of immortality and all that they entail were an appeal as well?

The possibility of having a historical overview was really interesting to me, because there’s a point where [Mia Wasikowska’s character] calls them snobs, when they’re throwing her out of their house, which on a certain level they are. It’s important it’s in the film, in a way. But who wouldn’t be considered a snob if you’d been alive for a thousand yeas and had all of this knowledge and accumulated experience? That’s ten, twenty times as much as any normal person. The idea of seeing history in a timeline by having lived through it, but from the margins, from the shadows: observing it half in secret is very interesting to me. I’ve always been drawn to outsider type of characters, so what more perfect shadowy inhabitants of the margins are there, than vampires? Who are not undead monsters, by the way, they’re humans that have been transformed and now have the possibility of immortality, but are reliant, like junkies, on blood.

One of the themes that struck me, presented from Adam’s [Tom Hiddleston] perspective is the decay of civilization, and the decay of culture.

Adam is a kind of romantic character. He maybe is a bit flawed in a way, whereas [Tilda Swinton’s character] Eve is very happy to just have a consciousness and be in awe of all the things, phenomenal logical things in the world, or in the world of ideas.

Adam, I mean, I carefully layered in that he was a friend of the romantic poets or hung out with Byron and Shelley and Scott. I really think of him as a tortured romantic. Is he really going to kill himself? I don’t know, maybe he’s just a drama queen, I’m not sure. But just the fact that it would occur to him, that kind of dramatic action is very insightful somehow.

He’s hurt by things he sees people do that he doesn’t understand or why does the world acts the way it does—what I like to think of as an operating system. Out of all of the potential operating systems we could have, why is it this one? It’s a system based on greed and power, manipulation, subjugation and colonialism, which obviously isn’t good. I have a sort of closeness to Adam on that level of, “Wow, I find that very kind of sad,” and him it really bothers him. That’s part of his character, that he’s an emotional, complex creature that is affected by these things. Eve has certainly been affected by them too. I think she’s a bit more resilient and maybe she’s just more centered as a person. They’re a bit different. I don’t know if I’m answering your question.

Is it meant to have any commentary on males and females? Adam being flawed and insecure and Eve being a more divine figure?

That’s interesting that you say that because to me what was most inspiring for me to make this film was the last book by Mark Twain, The Diaries of Adam and Eve. That’s why I named them Adam and Eve, not the direct Biblical thing, but via Mark Twain. That book is very funny, beautiful and kind of slight. It’s just diary entries of Adam and Eve’s vastly different perceptions of the world, via the fact that she’s female and he’s male. It’s a hilarious book and it really inspired me to want to make a film with two characters named Adam and Eve that sort of represented on some level the sun and the moon, but certainly very different perceptions of things.

So that was a big inspiration. It’s not even referred to in the film, the book. But it’s very important for me as a background for this.

There’s a temptation to see Adam as a surrogate for you; because of your similar taste and the similar artistic heroes on his wall…

Certainly there is, but it’s a bit reductive because I think there are qualities Adam has that I don’t have. And qualities that Eve has that I hope I have, or would aspire to have: that sense of wonder of the world and everyday there’s something else you could learn that you didn’t know before. But it’s very hard for me to analyze that because it’s not a self portrait in any intentional conscious way and yet there’s a lot of personal things in there that I would agree with them. So it’s hard to know those things.

It’s funny my friend Claire Denis had a Q&A after her film, Bastards, at the New York Film Festival a few months ago and someone asked her why she killed this character and she said, “I didn’t kill them, the other character did. I didn’t do it.”

You operate that way then. The story takes the characters where they want to go.

Yeah, when you make these films they do walk on their own after a certain point. Often when I’m writing dialogue in a script, it’s always whatever’s on paper for me is a sketch until you film it. But often they’re just talking and I am just writing it down. It’s not like I’m making them say words. I feel like I’m just transcribing what they’re saying. So there’s a funny disconnect where I can’t analyze, but to me it’s not autobiographical in any way. Of course I placed a lot of things I believe in, or even the photos on the wall, some of them are even my friends.

Those portraits on the wall I had five or six times as many people originally. The art department said, “Look after a certain point you have to clear all these images, so after a certain point we’ll just stop, we have enough, don’t worry.” But I could have kept feeding them more and more and more. I could still be giving them names of people I admire from the history of humans.

– Rodrigo Perez Interviews Jim Jarmusch. Full article via Indiewire here

Jean Cocteau: The Art of Film

Orphée (Directed by Jean Cocteau)

A poet and novelist who became a film-maker in his forties, Jean Cocteau proceeded to write and direct films on fantastic themes, marked by great visual beauty, full of haunting images and distinctly dreamy, almost mystical performances from a trusted company of actors that included Jean Marais. Cocteau once remarked that ‘when I make a film, it is a sleep in which I am dreaming’.

Jean Cocteau was born in 1889 to faintly artistic, middle-class parents. Accounts of his early life suggest only a passing interest in film. Instead it was theatre, under his mother’s influence, which dominated his upbringing. Through her, he developed the ‘fever of crimson and gold’ that would shape his artistic life. Cocteau would go on to make use of all the media available to him to create an intricate personal mythology. Novelist, poet, painter, playwright, designer –  all of those disciplines are reflected in his films. His three celebrated films of the fantastic – ‘Blood of the Poet’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Orphée’ – are central to his visual legacy, yet Cocteau always maintained that as a filmmaker he was only an amateur.

In the following extract Jean Cocteau discusses his creative process. It’s taken from an interview he gave a few months before his death in the Autumn of 1963:

Jean Cocteau: I feel myself inhabited by a force or being – very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow. The conception of my novel Les Enfants Terribles came to me from a friend, from what he told me of a circle: a family closed from societal life. I commenced to write: exactly seventeen pages per day. It went well. I was pleased with it. Very. There was in the original life story some connection with America, and I had something I wanted to say about America ... The being in me did not want to write that! Dead halt. A month of stupid staring at paper unable to say anything. One day it commenced again in its own way.

Interviewer: Do you mean the unconscious creates?  

I long said art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious. Latterly, I have begun to think: Is genius an at-present undiscovered form of the memory? 

Do you keep a sort of abstract potential reader or viewer in mind when you work?

You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.
       
Can you say something about inspiration?
       
It is not inspiration; it is expiration.

 Beauty and the Beast (Directed by Jean Cocteau)

Are there any artificial helps—stimulants or drugs? You resorted to opium after the death of [your friend] Radiguet, wrote your book about it, ‘Opium’, and were, I believe, in a period of disintoxication from it when you wrote ‘Les Enfants Terribles’.
       
It is very useful to have some depressant, perhaps. Extreme fatigue can serve. Filming Beauty and the Beast on the Loire in 1945 immediately at the end of the war, I was very ill. Everything went wrong. Electricity failures nearly every day; planes passing over just at the moment of a scene. Jean Marais’s horses made difficulties, and he persisted in vaulting onto them himself out of second-floor windows, refusing a double, and risking his bones. And the sunlight changes every minute on the Loire. All these things contributed to the virtue of the film. And in The Blood of a Poet Man Ray’s wife played a role; she had never acted. Her exhaustion and fear paralyzed her and she passed before the cameras so stunned she remembered nothing afterward. In the rushes we saw she was splendid; with the outer part suppressed, she had been let perform…
       
[The director] Rossellini, in Rome, told me that if he were to put down in a script all his imagination casts up for the scene he would have to write a novel; but in fiction we must put it down, or it is lost.
       
And the public is lazy! You ask them to enter into habits of thinking other than their own, and they don’t want to. And then . . . what you have written in autograph changes in typewriting, and again in print. Painting is more satisfying because it is more direct; you work directly on the surface.
       
What do you think of the French new-novelists who are beginning to abandon subject [in their work]?
       
... I read detective fiction, espionage, science fiction.
       
Do you recommend, then, to writers they read nothing serious at all?
       
[shrugs] I myself do not.

Les Enfants Terribles (Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville)

You wrote one of your novels in three weeks; one of your theatre pieces in a single night. What does this tell us about the act of composition?
       
If the force functions, it goes well. If not, you are helpless.
       
Is there no way to get it started, crank it up?
       
In painting, yes. By application to all the mechanical details one commences to begin. For writing, ‘one receives an order…’
       
Françoise Sagan describes how writing begins to flow with the use of the pen. I thought this was a rather general experience.
       
If the ideas come, one must hurry to set them down out of fear of forgetting them. They come once; once only. On the other hand, if I am obliged to do some little task – such as writing a preface or notice – the labor to give the appearance of easiness to the few lines is excruciating. I have no facility whatever. Yes, in one respect what you say is true. I had written a novel, then fallen silent. And the editors at the publishing house seeing this, said, ‘You have too great a fear of not writing a masterpiece. Write something, anything. Merely to begin’. So I did—and wrote the first lines of Les Enfants Terribles. But that is only for beginnings — in fiction. I have never written unless deeply moved about something. The one exception is my play La Machine à Écrire. I had written the play Les Parents Terribles and it was very successful, and something was wanted to follow. La Machine à Écríre exists in several versions, which is very telling, and was an enormous amount of work. It is no good at all. Of course, it is one of the most popular of my works. If you make fifty designs and one or two please you least, these will nearly surely be the ones most liked. No doubt because they resemble something. People love to recognize, not venture. The former is so much more comfortable and self-flattering. It seems to me nearly the whole of your work can be read as indirect spiritual autobiography.

The Blood of a Poet (Directed by Jean Cocteau)

The wound in the hand of the poet in your film ‘The Blood of a Poet’ — the wound in the man’s hand out of which the poetry speaks – certainly this reproduces the ‘wound’ of your experience in poetry around 1912-1914?

The work of every creator is autobiography, even if he does not know it or wish it, even if his work is ‘abstract’. It is why you cannot redo your work.

Not rewrite? Is that absolutely precluded?

Very superficially. Simply the syntax and orthography. And even there… I leave repetitions, mistakes, words badly placed quite unchanged, and there is no punctuation. It would be artificial to impose punctuation on a black river of ink.

– Jean Cocteau, The Art of Fiction No. 34. Interviewed by William Fifield. The Paris Review