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

Jim Jarmusch: The Limits of Control

The Limits of Control (Directed by Jim Jarmusch)

In 2009, Jim Jarmusch released The Limits of Control, his eleventh feature film, an existential thriller set in Spain. When Lone Man (Isaach de Bankolé) arrives in Spain, he is assigned an unspecified task with the instruction to "Use your imagination and your skills." He travels to Madrid and then Seville, where he meets a variety of individuals (including Tilda Swinton, Gael Garca Bernal, Hiam Abbass, Paz de la Huerta, and John Hurt), before locating his objective, the "American," in a subterranean stronghold. 

The Limits of Control takes viewers on a trip into the mind of one of America’s most celebrated  directors, moving through a bleak environment with a rich Flamenco-inspired soundscape. “His movies are all about the limits of control,” The Christian Science Monitor suggests. “What happens when you lose it, or, more precisely, realize you never had it.”

Limits of Control is Jarmusch's fourth collaboration with Isaach De Bankolé following Night on Earth, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and Coffee and Cigarettes. As the enigmatic loner, a stranger whose actions lie beyond the law, he is in the midst of finishing a task, but he trusts no one and first conceals his aims. His voyage, which is simultaneously both concentrated and dreamy, leads him not just across Spain, but also through his own psyche. 

Jim Jarmusch's lyrical, irreverent, and meticulously crafted films, ranging from Stranger Than Paradise to Broken Flowers, characterised American indie cinema for more than two decades. The Limits of Control is his first picture outside of the United States. “When I was writing the story Spain kept calling me,” noted Jarmusch. “I have so many Spanish heroes, from Cervantes to Goya to Buñuel and the Surrealists.” The original idea—“a very quiet, very centered criminal on some sort of mission”—had been with Jarmusch for over 15 years. Spain provided the right stage for the action to unfold, as well as the sensual inspiration for the filmmaker. “Shooting in Seville while the orange blossoms were blooming was like being on drugs,” Jarmusch recalls.

“All of my characters are on a journey,” Jarmusch remarked. "The journey is the narrative." Perhaps no film better exemplifies this core aesthetic than The Limits of Control. As Lone Man travels around Spain, picking up enigmatic signals at numerous checkpoints, it becomes evident that each meeting is both significant and pointless. Jarmusch told The New York Times, "I've always wanted to create an action picture without action, or a suspense thriller without drama." The spectator embarks on an adventure without a map and becomes the hero of his own adventures. The trip in The Limits of Control is ultimately ours, a trip of the viewer involved in cinema's great mystery.

The Limits of Control is in many ways a companion piece to Jim Jarmusch’s previous film Broken Flowers as it is structurally similar and spends a lot of time focusing on the ‘dead time’ in life that is occupied by waiting for something to happen or being in transit. However, The Limits of Control has even less narrative drive than Broken Flowers making it a more meditative experience. The repetition of dialogue, actions and motifs plays a big part in The Limits of Control giving it a Zen like quality that is akin to dreaming.

The following extract is from an interview with Jim Jarmusch for Film Comment Magazine on the writing and making of the film.

You’ve often said that your approach to writing is that you accumulate material and ideas in notebooks, and find the story through the development of characters. Is that applicable here?

JIM JARMUSCH: Yeah, maybe even more so to this. I mean, this came out of frustration because I had another project that took a long time to write, which means four months. I had written it for specific actors, as I always do, and it was a story for two people and one of them loved it and the other one didn’t really want to do the film, and that threw me for a loop. So then – I don’t know if I want to say I wasted time, but it was a somewhat bigger film for me, maybe $10-15 million, but the people who were interested in financing it started pulling this kind of traditional thing where they were giving me lists of actors that would replace the actor I had written for that would make it possible for them, and they were not actors that I wanted to work with, or that I had imagined. I’m not a studio filmmaker, so it just seemed like, Wow, I’m entering this kind of structure. So I basically got frustrated and put that script away in a drawer.

I had a lot of little elements for this film in my head. First of all, Isaach De Bankolé – wanting to write a character for him that was very quiet, possibly criminal, on some kind of mission. Then I had the idea of shooting in Spain for disparate reasons: one was the incredible architecture of Torres Blancas, this building in Madrid from the late Sixties that has almost no right angles in it and it’s very strange. I first encountered it maybe 20 years ago, an old friend of mine, Chema Prado, the head of the cinematheque in Spain now, has had an apartment there for years. And Joe Strummer’s widow, Lucinda, gave me a photograph of this house in the south of Spain, outside of Almería, and said that Joe always said, ‘We gotta show Jim this house, he’s gonna want to film it.’ So I had those elements. Then Paz De La Huerta, who I’d known since she was a teenager – somebody told me, you know, Isaach and Paz are in four films together, some of them student films. And I said, Man, I’m going to use them in a film together then! So that was another element. So that’s always my procedure – having these initial ideas. And I was listening to a lot of music by these bands Boris, Sunn O))), Earth, Sleep – it’s a certain genre of noise-oriented rock with some allusions to metal, but Sunn, for example – if you listen to some of their stuff without knowing what genre it is, you might think you were listening to some avant-garde classical music or electronic-generated feedback.

But anyway, that stuff was floating around in me, so it’s my normal process to have these things and then start drawing details and eventually a plot. But this one I kept very minimal because I wanted it to expand while we were shooting. I wrote the story in Italy over a period of a week or so, and I wrote a 25-page story, and there wasn’t really dialogue in it at all. So I used that and I took that to Focus and said, I want to make a film based on this story, I’m going to expand it as I go; I wanna cast these people. And they were like, Wow, yeah, great… I felt they’d say, Go write a script and come back, but instead they said, No, if that’s how you wanna do it, we’re interested in that. So they financed the film. And Chris Doyle and I had wanted to work together for a long time; we’d made one music video together, but we’d known each other a long time; he was actually going to shoot the other film that fell through, and he even put off certain films for that one, and gave up some things, and then he did the same for this as well because our schedule got moved. So he was very supportive in that way, waiting to work together. And we talked a lot about my little 25-page story; in New York, whenever he’d come through town, we’d spend a week or so just talking, listening to the music, getting general ideas for the images. Then we went to Spain and started getting locations.

So your approach to writing is very free-associative.

I don’t know how other people do it, and I don’t like scripts as a form. I don’t read other people’s scripts because I had a lawsuit against me some few years ago, and I hadn’t read the guy’s script, so scripts are always returned unread. So I don’t read scripts; I only read if a friend of mine asks because they’re going to make a film out of it, they’re not offering it to me. But I hate the form; I just don’t like it. Unless I know the director and their style, and the places they’re gonna shoot, I have a really big problem visualizing scripts. So for me, a script is only a map; it’s a roadmap that is created beforehand that has to grow as we work. So I kind of just emphasized that with this film. I took that further and had less to start with…

Than ever before, it seems to me.

I knew the film wanted from the beginning, because I wanted to let it find itself, and also while working be very aware that anything can change and new ideas will come. So they have to be sifted through or received, and thought about. The problem with this film strategically following that was that our shooting schedule was too short. And that became really exhausting because I have these great actors coming in only for a few days, and I have to get their wardrobe, and rehearse, and write their stuff. And also while having shot a 16-hour day. I wanted to have a longer shoot, but we got backed up against the Easter holiday, which in Spain is a whole week. And so keeping our crew and everything would have gone way over our budget so we worked our asses off to shoot it fast, but also to keep ideas coming. So I just put myself in a kind of suspended state of, Okay, you’re not going to get any sleep for six weeks, you’re gonna have to prepare yourself and work this way. So I spent weekends writing dialogue and stuff, trying to prepare for the next scenes with the actors coming in. Luckily, Chris Doyle is extremely fast and focused while he’s working. So without him, I don’t know how I ever would have shot the film in six and a half weeks or whatever it was; it ended up being about seven, I guess. And you’re moving all around Spain too; it was hard, shooting in train stations and stuff.

The movie has the minimal structure and trappings of a thriller, but it requires a different kind of engagement from the viewer; there’s a different kind of contract being made with the viewer in this movie than in the traditional genre movie. You could compare it to certain Rivette films like ‘Pont du Nord’ or ‘Paris Belongs to Us’.

Out 1 especially. Part of me wanted to make an action film with no action in it, whatever the hell that means. For me the plot, the resolution of the film, the action toward the end is not really of that much interest. It’s only metaphorical somehow.

It’s not cathartic.

No, and it’s not traditional in that it even says, ‘Revenge is useless,’ so it’s not a revenge plot. This sounds very simplistic but to me it’s more about the trip and the kind of trance of the trip for the character than the ending being a kind of…

Payoff.

Yeah. It’s there as a kind of convention, you know? But it’s definitely metaphorical. It’s an accumulative approach in terms of the contract with the audience. It requires them to allow things to accumulate, and in a way, just be passive receptors of the trip he takes.

And the film is also a celebration of cinema in a way that the artifice of cinema is definitely referred to as a positive thing, as something I love. This is not a neo-neo-realism style of film; it’s fantastic in a certain way. I didn’t want to make a film that people had to analyze particularly while watching it. I really wanted to make a film that was kind of like a hallucinogenic in the way that, when you left after having seen it, I hope the audience will look at mundane details in a slightly different way. Maybe it’s only temporary, maybe for only 15 minutes, but I wanted to do something to… I don’t know, just trigger an appreciation for one’s subjective consciousness. I was just thinking the other night that in a way, for me, the poet Neruda is a huge inspiration. All those beautiful odes to mundane objects. I kind of wanted to just build that kind of sense of perception of things through this character and how he sees the world. But he’s on a mission, and that’s another element – I’ve always liked this kind of game structure in things. The title comes from an essay by William Burroughs. And Burroughs, his use of cut-ups, and re-arranging found things, was very interesting to me in the same way that Burroughs was very interested in the I-Ching as a motivator. Or Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards. Or the French poets… Queneau made this book, Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, that has little strips you can move around. All of these things were inspiring, I didn’t realize until we were editing the film that I was using Oblique Strategies all along the way. I was weaving things, in a way...

I have the sense that in this film you’ve gone further in the direction of working from and being led by your unconscious – by setting up a situation where you didn’t have the usual comfort zones to rely on. Working fast with no script in a country where you don’t speak the language, working with a cameraman you don’t have an established routine with.

I wanted very badly to sort of break something – maybe it’s like breaking the idea of a frame I’m always looking through, that the frame could now be rubber, conceptually. I’d think of how I want to translate a scene from my imagination to the screen, and thought maybe I’m too rigid. I’ve always believed that limitations are a strength in a way. Which is why I maybe fell back on the hard-cuts, thinking, Let’s impose something that will make us stronger somehow. And for this film I needed to not have, first of all, a fully fleshed out script.

But you’re absolutely right, that the whole thing was wanting to break something in myself to tap into this intuition, which I’ve been trying to use all along. I’ve always been non-analytical in my films. I’ve always put things in the film without analyzing why. Or what do they mean? Or what am I trying to say? They drew me or pulled me towards them. So this time I wanted to do that even more. And so the structure of making a film and a production based on only 25 pages, ensured that there’s no other way to make it. You’re going to have to follow your instincts. And once you’ve got the cast, the money, the crew, and the locations: the train has left the station. And I had a really good feeling when the train had left the station, though I didn’t have a map of where it was going really. Or a map with only line drawing, sketched outlines. It was a very liberating thing. I can’t analyze if we’re successful but we felt like we were successful in following that instinctual strategy. We were happy to be on the boat that had left the shore and we were gone, you know. 

– Excerpt from Jim Jarmusch Interviewed by Gavin Smith. From Film Comment, May/June 2009 issue.

Full article here

Jim Jarmusch: Open Letter to John Cassavetes

Night on Earth (Directed by Jim Jarmusch)

‘Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?’ - Jim Jarmusch 

Originally from Akron, Ohio, a teenage Jim Jarmusch travelled to New York City in 1971 to study American and English literature at Columbia University. He spent his final semester before graduation studying French literature in Paris. Jarmusch was a frequent visitor to Paris's Cinémathèque and developed an obsession with films. He returned to New York and went to graduate film school at NYU but found the experience dispiriting. He did however meet famed filmmaker Nicholas Ray and Tom DiCillo, who would later become the cinematographer on his first two feature films.

Jarmusch gained valuable knowledge about technical aspects of filmmaking prior to dropping out of New York University, but he had to relearn how to work with actors. Jarmusch, like his idol John Cassavetes, is an actor-driven director. He begins by developing the characters, frequently with an actor in mind, and then "the storyline sort of reveals itself around the character" (

After dropping out of NYU he opted to expand his final effort, a short film, into the feature-length Permanent Vacation, which one critic called as an 80-minute prologue about drifting. Jarmusch then began work on Stranger Than Paradise, which began as a 30-minute short film filmed using 40 minutes of unused film stock supplied by German filmmaker Wim Wenders. Jarmusch eventually acquired a tiny sum of money - $120,000 – and was able to finish the film. Stranger is a road film about two down-on-their-luck New York City losers: Willie (John Lurie) and Eddie (Richard Edson). Their dull, aimless existence is upended when Willie's cousin (Eszter Balint) visits from Hungary for a few days before moving on to Cleveland. It was an immediate success and set the tone and style for his later distinctive work.  

Jim Jarmusch is a director interested in what occurs on the margins of existence. Like John Cassavetes, he is keen to document the seemingly trivial events that people often fail to appreciate and show that they too are filled with compelling drama. 

Jarmusch’s films are peopled by characters without any sense of direction in life, drifters who accidentally fall into risky situations – much like life itself. It is the delicacy of the speaking and acting in Cassavetes’ films that impresses Jarmusch the most – and Jarmusch is very much a director who prioritises the actor. Jarmusch creates the characters first, often with a particular actor in mind, and then ‘the plot kind of suggests itself around the character’. 

Before filming starts the actors rehearse scenes that are never filmed, but are deemed necessary to establish a tone and identity for when the actual filming begins. This process results in convincing, realistic characters fleshed out with their own shades and subtleties. 

In September 2000, Jarmusch wrote an open letter to John Cassavetes in tribute to the great American film-maker. It was published in Tom Charity’s excellent ‘LifeWorks’.

OPEN LETTER TO JOHN CASSAVETES

There’s a particular feeling I get when I’m about to see one of your films – an anticipation. It doesn’t matter if I’ve seen the film before or not (by now I think I’ve seen them all at least several times) I still get that feeling. I’m expecting something I seem to crave, a kind of cinematic enlightenment. As a film fan or as a filmmaker (there isn’t really a clear dividing line for me anymore) I’m anticipating a blast of inspiration. I want formal enlightenment. I need the secret consequences of a jump-cut to be revealed to me. I want to know how the rawness of the camera angles or the grain of the film material figures into the emotional equation. I want to learn about acting from the performances, about atmosphere from the light and locations. I’m ready, fully prepared to absorb ‘truth at twenty-four-frames-per-second.’

But the thing is this: as soon as the film begins, introduces its world to me, I’m lost. The expectation of that particular enlightenment evaporates. It leaves me there in the dark, alone. Human beings now inhabit that world inside the screen. They also seem lost, alone. I watch them. I observe every detail of their movements, their expressions, their reactions. I listen carefully to what each one is saying, to the frayed edges of someone’s tone of voice, the concealed mischief in the rhythm of another’s speech. I’m no longer thinking about acting. I’m oblivious to ‘dialogue.’ I’ve forgotten the camera.

The enlightenment I anticipated from you is being replaced by another. This one doesn’t invite analysis or dissection, only observation and intuition. Instead of insights into, say, the construction of a scene, I’m becoming enlightened by the sly nuances of human nature.

Your films are about love, about trust and mistrust, about isolation, joy, sadness, ecstasy and stupidity. They’re about restlessness, drunkenness, resilience and lust, about humor, stubbornness, miscommunication and fear. But mostly they’re about love and they take one to a far deeper place than any study of ‘narrative form.’ Yeah, you are a great filmmaker, one of my favorites. But what your films illuminate most poignantly is that celluloid is one thing and the beauty, strangeness and complexity of human experience is another.

John Cassavetes, my hat is off to you. I’m holding it over my heart.

– Jim Jarmusch. From ‘John Cassavetes: Lifeworks’ by Tom Charity.