Jim Jarmusch: "I am for the survival of beauty. I am for the mystery of life "| Movie

CUyahoga Falls is a suburban middle clbad suburb of Akron, Ohio, a network of green streets and comfortable houses bordered by the river. When Jim Jarmusch was a boy, he knew how to stand out of the water because, although the town may be placid, the Cuyahoga River was poisonous. The pickling acids had colored it in bright orange. The factory detergents had put a white foam on its surface. In June 1969, a spark of a train lit Cuyahoga and the flames rose to a five-storey building.

Fifty years later, Jarmusch remembers it well. "It was not a pleasant thing to do," he says euphemistically, which has become his style. "In fact, if you're looking for a metaphor for modern American life, it's no more obvious than seeing your local river catch fire."

As a filmmaker, Jarmusch likes to make movies about the little details of the world. on drifters and searchers, and the rambling detours that add to a life. This is an area that has served it well, from the meanders of 1984, monochrome Stranger Than Paradise until 2016, meditative and inspired Paterson. But it's hard to focus on small images when the big one is so scary: when a river flames or the entire planet is in flames. He says: "It is clear that we are living in an ecological crisis and that the situation is getting worse. We are threatened by the denial of science and corporate greed. If that is the path we continue to take, it will only lead to the end of the world. "

I met Jarmusch for the first time in the alleys of Cannes in May of this year, where his last work, The dead do not die, opens the film festival as protesters face the climate crisis gather near the Palace. A few weeks later, I talk to him again on the phone at his home in upstate New York. He explains that while he maintains a lock hole in his Manhattan adoption, these days he prefers to live in the Catskills. He shares the house with his partner for four decades, the actor and filmmaker Sara Driver. "It's family time," said the 66-year-old. "I guess you could say I'm here to recover."

The alternative view is that he hides in the woods; the silver fox of independent cinema on the belly. If the apocalypse is waiting, The dead do not die shows the way forward: Polar fracture deforming the axis of the planet, racists who support Trump turn on their bar stools and army of zombies lying in the main street. Jarmusch continues to refer to the film as a comedy – quite funny, a lot of jokes – but his sales model carries a plaintive note. He knows that the film is not as sparkling as expected.

He sighs. "The tone is different from what I had anticipated. It's a lot darker than I imagined, especially the end. I try not to over badyze these things, but it reflects the world we are in; the impending environmental crisis has become more and more of a cloud. I worked on this film for two years and during that time, it was as if the planet was changing almost every day. "

It is no wonder that the final film shoots in different directions and seems almost at war with itself. The story is presented as a sage, knowing deconstruction of the zombie genre, only to be caught in the crossfire of fatalism and despair. "All of this is going to end badly," warns the policeman in the small town of Adam Driver as the undead descend on Centerville, demanding coffee and wifi, chardonnay and Xanax. The cast is a nice storage bag for Jarmusch's friends and collaborators. There is Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, a non-living Iggy Pop. Tom Waits co-performs the role of Hermit Bob, an insidious old recluse who lives in the forest and survives on squirrels and insects. He knows what will happen and accepts it with a shrug of his shoulders. "The world is screwed," he informs us at the end.

The film was shot near the home of Jarmusch, the nearby towns of Kingston and Fleischmanns. It should have simplified production, but it did not. The calendar was a nightmare; they only had the driver for three weeks. On top of that, he rained constantly. The director caught the flu and broke a toe on the board. "And then we had to hurry up to complete the project so we could give it to Cannes." I have the impression that he is always trying to understand what he has made. "I mean, I would not have changed the movie at all. But I probably would have had more time to think about what I was doing. He slipped from my hands like a little child by the river.

Back in Akron, Jarmusch also dreamed of escaping. The place was too small, too conservative. Everyone worked for the rubber companies: his father for BF Goodrich, his uncle for Goodyear, his neighbor for Firestone. His mother, Betty French, had been an art journalist for the Akron Beacon Journal. She examined the young Marlon Brando in the Broadway production A streetcar named desire and covered the Hollywood wedding of Bogart and Bacall. But when she got married, she took the day job and hid in a small office upstairs at her home. Jarmusch remembers the sound she had had on an old royal typewriter, writing freelance articles for a local antiques magazine.

He attributes to his mother the interest aroused by art, music and cinema. But it is also inspired by a more sinister source. Ghoulardi, the ghost host, was a costumed presenter who introduced the B-series movies on Cleveland's JWJ-TV channel. The dead do not die contains a Ghoulardi poster as a tribute.

"Well, he was a very important cultural figure," says Jarmusch, impbadive. "He had a TV show on Friday night at 11:30, where he was showing sci-fi, horror or monster movies, mostly monster movies. And he's done all kinds of crazy things in between. He was this type of beatnik with a goat, wearing a white coat with a scary wig, black glbades with a missing lens. He used a lot of very fancy slogans invented. He would have exploded models of cars with cherry bombs and he had that early kinescope effect in which he briefly placed himself in the film that he was showing. So, if you ask someone who grew up in northeastern Ohio in the '60s, we all know Ghoulardi and his influence on us. I think Chrissie Hynde still has her original Ghoulardi t-shirt. "

He pauses. "You know who Ghoulardi's son is, is not it?" Ghoulardi was played by a television announcer named Ernie Anderson, who later became father Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of Magnolia, Boogie Nights and Ghost wire. "I only met Paul once, and the first thing I said to him was," Your father was Ghoulardi! "He rolled his eyes about it, but I mean, come on, it was my young bohemian dream – a weird dad like Ghoulardi. "

Except why stop with Ghoulardi? Jarmusch is a sponge of pop culture. He absorbs just about everything and likes to quote Joe Strummer's old motto: "No entry, no exit." His films are made up of flea markets and drafts, twisted to adapt to his own sensitivity, even his own image. I tell him that they are distinctive and elegant, sometimes at fault.

"Well, style is very important," he says, unperturbed. "That's what Martin Scorsese says that differentiates all filmmakers. Style is the important identifier of someone's personal expression. "

Hitchbad once said that drama is life with dull cut pieces. But Jarmusch's films seem expressly designed to test this maxim, to overthrow it. They fly over scenes that could constitute the centerpiece of a more conventional image and recover incidents from the floor of the cutting room. On his breakthrough of 1986, Down By the lawhe blurred a jailbreak drama that ignored the jailbreak. On the western 1995 Dead manhe took a perverse pleasure in finding the most mundane places in Oregon and Arizona. At best, his images are all-American ruminative and poetic stories that move to the carefree pace of Asian fiction, or postcards of obscure places, accompanied by scribbled footnotes. Balance sheet of 1989 Mystery train, Roger Ebert wrote, "The best thing about the movie is that it takes you to an America that you feel should be able to find yourself if you only knew where to look."

Of course, says Jarmusch, movies are a reflection of him. "I know I have a terse approach, in terms of time. I know I speak slowly enough. I think probably a little slowly. I like slow music. I like slow movies. It's just inherent. Godard said that every filmmaker turns the same film over and over. This is probably true in my case.

Let's talk about his personal style. This has remained a constant, too. Jarmusch's hair started to whiten at the age of mid-teens, around the time the Cuyahoga caught fire, so that he seems to have hardly changed in the half century that has followed. Compare an image of the 80s with today's Jarmusch and it's hard to tell the difference. It has the same fine features, beautiful features, the same scent of space, the same dark charisma. On the photographs, intentionally or not, he always seems to take a pose. It's as if he sees himself as a leader in the images he makes.

But the suggestion makes him sniff. The surest way to prick her immaculate virgin aura is to ask her questions about her immaculate virgin aura. "I find this idea ridiculous," he says. "My personal style, my look and my dress – I do not consider it part of my art. It reminds me of my beginnings and people were saying, "Oh my God, he wears black clothes, dyes his hair white, and makes black-and-white films. What a pretentious badhole. While none of these things are told. My hair was prematurely white. I started wearing black in adolescence because I liked Zorro and Johnny Cash well. And then, all of a sudden, in New York, it was: "Oh, it's a hipster," it's hilarious for me.

He thinks about it. "I mean, I guess since I've been a teenager I've always thought that your appearance and dress should reflect something on you, but I paid much more attention to it at the time, so that I was in Ohio, that I am doing it now, because I have stayed there somehow, I have not really changed.

When he landed for the first time in New York, he wanted to be a poet or a musician, whichever was easier. More than anything, he wanted to immerse himself, reinvent himself, put as much distance as possible between him and Akron. It's tempting to compare it to Andy Warhol, another rust-belt escapee, or to Jay Gatsby from F. Fitzgerald, a superb series of successful moves. In fact, he says, Manhattan was not so much prettier at the time than Cuyahoga Falls with its poisoned river. It was in 1977, the year of the power outage, the summer of Sam; graffiti was sprayed on subway cars and the entire city on the brink of bankruptcy. But it was also a good time, a creative glitch; the streets are teeming with rampant hip-hop and punk-rock.

"It was dirty, it was dangerous. It was everything I had dreamed of. And you would go out at night and, yes, you would see Andy Warhol. You have seen Ornette Coleman arrive, carrying a holster of horn. I have met [experimental film-maker] Jack Smith on the street and he was pushing a pram filled with garbage for one of his shows. He gave me a business card in which he wrote: "Jack Smith – an exotic theatrical genius". I met Nico in the street and she invited me to have tea with her at the Chelsea Hotel. It was … "He can not pronounce the words. "It was magical. It was incredible. That was – wow. "

The first films of Jarmusch spoke of men and women in motion. The fugitives on Down By the law, Memphis tourists Mystery train, the taxi pbadengers of Night on earth. Recently, however, his protagonists seem to be slowing down, turning to rest, like the jaded vampires of Detroit's Only lovers will stay alive. In 2016, he ventured to Paterson, New Jersey, the former home of poet William Carlos Willams, to do what was arguably his simplest and most personal painting. Paterson told the story of a serene and serene poet who integrates the creation of great art into his daily routine. Jarmusch shot the film on the spot. He dragged his camera in front of the nail bars, pizzerias, factories and the river. Somewhere along the way, he found that Paterson, New Jersey, looked a lot like Akron, Ohio – and that by making the film, he was returning home somehow.

Paterson has collected some of the best critics of the director's career. It was seen as sincere and pure; in weightlessness and transcendent. The dead do not die caused a more sniffing response. But that's good, insists Jarmusch. He knows that his films tend to divide an audience. What some consider beautiful and strange, others as artificial and artificial. He stopped worrying about being misunderstood.

Jarmusch said, "That's the problem: the dilemma of all filmmakers. The beauty of the cinema lies in the fact that you enter the cave of Plato. You go into a dark room and enter a world you do not know anything about. You go on a trip and you do not know what to expect. He pauses. "But if you wrote the screenplay, collected the funds, shot the film and then spent six months in the editing room, you will not be able to enter this world. This experience has been stolen. The result is that you can not see the movie you did. The interpretations of others are more valuable than yours. "

In addition, he adds, if you look long and hard enough, you realize that almost every element is contradicted by another. This is true for all films; it's true of every person. "Just look at me. I am very attached to the state of the planet. I find the actions of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion very moving. But I also make a movie intended to be a genre entertainment. I drive a fossil fuel vehicle. I use credit cards and plastic. So what am I doing? Is it only black or white? Am I only part of the problem or part of the solution? He does not know it, he is lost. "I'm not for negativity. I am not fatalistic. I am for the survival of beauty. I am for the mystery of life. "

I ask him if he comes back to Ohio a lot these days and he says no, there are not many reasons to visit. His mother died about a year ago. he had to return to organize the sale of his house. He adds that he still has some close friends in Cleveland, some of whom run the Blue Arrow record shop. I ask how he feels about New York and he sighs. The change is good, basically. He is not nostalgic by nature. But it's not the same place where he came as a weird kid with white hair.

"In fact, I like it less and less," he says. "New York gave me so much energy when I was young and I have been enjoying it ever since. The city is demographically less varied. I do not really understand the values ​​of many young people: I guess they just want to make money and go out with models. It does not seem that it is expression and art, as formerly. It may be unfair, I do not know. These days, I prefer to be alone in the woods. "

He looks more like Hermit Bob by the second. The next thing we know, he will eat squirrels and insects. "Yeah well," he retorted. "The world is screwed."

The dead do not die published in the UK on Friday

The five best Xan Brooks Jarmusch movies

1984: Stranger Than Paradise
Jarmusch set up his stand in a delightfully dismal road movie in which three square stakes (jazz musician John Lurie, drummer-turned-actor Richard Edson and Hungarian Eszter Balint) ring out across American rounds. Shot in black and white on a budget of $ 125,000, the film wins the Camera d'Or prize in Cannes and paves the way for independent American cinema.

1989: Mystery Train
The director's fascination with American pop culture culminated with Mystery train, a colorful suitcase from Memphis, paradoxically financed by Japanese money. The film's winding route leads from the resort to the dive bars to the unhealthy lobby of the Arcade Hotel, where Screamin 'Jay Hawkins night clerk closely monitors foreign tourists.

1995: dead man
The American West, which hides hidden, takes a new strange and mesmerizing form with Dead man, a story of manifest destiny fell back on itself, with visions in the meadow and sandblasted by Neil Young's elemental guitar score. Robert Mitchum set the tone for his career as a 19th century industrialist, while Johnny Depp was quoting William Blake, a fugitive bookkeeper who had a shot in the head.

2014: Only lovers left alive
Jarmusch admits that he's always been more of a vampire man than a fan of zombies. He loves their refinement, their beauty, their decadent nightlife. With Only lovers will stay alive (starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston), he poses himself a vampire movie, hovering around the exotic ruins of Detroit and trailing behind him clouds of glory. The critics inevitably wanted to present it as a barely veiled self-portrait.

2016: Paterson
Every day, Adam Driver's modest young driver sets off on his journey. Every day he writes poetry pure and simple in his notebook. Paterson tells us that routine is important, that little is beautiful and that artistic creation is as natural as breathing. It's a movie that – wrongly William Blake – sees the world in a bus schedule and paradise in the old, tired streets of a small industrial town.