I recently had a chance to chat with Jim Jarmusch to interview him for Ici, a French-language publication in Montreal. Ici doesn�t have a website, and it's in French anyway, so with their permission I'm just posting the interview here as well. [And, naturally, if you want to read more about the film at indieWIRE, we ran a review and an interview.] "Coffee and Cigarettes" is worth your $10 if only for the skit that introduces Bill Murray to members of the Wu-Tang Clan, or even better, a completely brilliant short with Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan.
Our chat for Ici:
When you shot the first short with Roberto Benigni, did you envision it as being a series?
For the first one, "Saturday Night Live" asked me to make a five-minute film and Roberto was coming to town and Steven Wright was in town and I knew both of them and thought they would be interesting characters to put together. So the night before, we just came up with a vague concept with a little script. And then a few years later, in Memphis, I found myself making another one with Steve Buscemi and Cinque and Joie [Lee], and then as I was preparing a third one with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits, I started thinking, "Hey, I'm making the same film over and over, what am I doing?" So I just kept doing it, kind of started weaving in pieces of dialogue that would repeat, or little themes that might recur, to see if they have a nice cumulative effect when I had a number of them. And last year I had 11 of them done, and I put them together to see how they worked, and I thought they were stronger together, so I came up with this film.
Why were coffee and cigarettes an important motif running through the shorts?
Well, it certainly is not important; it's just a conceit, a convention, a circumstance to place people in. I like things that are not dramatic by nature. The idea of people having a coffee break is not considered a dramatic moment in one's daily life, so I liked that as being like a little "free zone" in which dialogue can go anywhere.
More of the interview after the jump...
In writing the dialogue, how much did you collaborate with the actors?
I write a script for them. Then I try to get ideas from them or put them in the script or change it around or encourage or even trick them into improvising. Like sometimes, I'll say, "The next take we're just going to do the dialogue up until this point in the script" but when they've passed that point, and they don't know their lines anymore, I just keep the camera rolling and see what they do. But they all had scripts and all actors are different. Some like to improvise a lot and other like to stay closer to the road map. We start with a script and hope there will be improvisation within it.
Cate Blanchett's short would be very scripted, I imagine.
Yeah, that one there wasn't much improvisation because it was so technically tricky to do.
How did you do that? Was she acting against a double?
She just had a stand-in across from her, and we would pre-record the dialogue of the other character, and put it in an earwig in her ear, but sometimes that would get confusing rhythmically so then I or the script person would feed her lines. But the way she kept track of it emotionally and in terms of the little nuances of the back and forth resentments and things, that was really amazing. I was kind of amazed by that. We shot that one in two days, all of the others were shot in a single day. She was one character one day, and the other character the next, so how she kept track, I was getting confused, and I just had to try to direct and follow the outline of things. How she remembered it on an emotional level, I was amazed. She's something.
Is it harder for you to write lines for, say, Iggy Pop playing Iggy Pop, rather than a fictional character?
It's just a different approach, having them play themselves � of course they are abstractions of themselves and people tend to enjoy making fun of themselves, especially if there are pre-conceptions about them that are really invalid. But there's no real difference in my approach because they are still imaginary characters, they are acting.
Bill Murray doesn't actually chug coffee like that�
[Laughs] Well, one's not quite sure about that. You never know what Bill Murray might do.
Why are you so interested in these small-talk moments instead of big events?
I don't know. It's an obsession I guess I've had all along. I like moments when people aren't talking, I like moments when things aren't being acted out for an intention. I like the spaces between things. I like silences in music and dynamics. Sometimes watching someone react is more interesting than watching the person delivering the line. I don't know where that comes from, but I'm drawn to those non-dramatic moments because sometimes they reveal a lot more than the thing that has a big intention with a capital I. I did a whole film called "Night on Earth" about people in taxis, which was not about where they were going at all, it was about the ride in the cab that we take for granted and erase from our memory.
Are you still making these shorts?
Not at the moment but I'm not sure if I'm going to continue to make more "Coffee and Cigarettes" or maybe think of another loony premise with which to place people in a situation. But I'd like to keep doing it.
As a filmmaker, what do you like about the short format that you can't get from a feature-length project?
You're very free, you're only working on these for one day so there's a lot of weight taken off. They don't fit together in a larger way, so they are pretty much in the moment in a way, which is kind of liberating. These were very interesting because the camera setups are all the same, so I didn't have to visually reinvent each time, I already knew how it was going to be shot, so it allowed me to pay attention to the atmosphere, the details of props, and most importantly the dialogue. There are a lot of upsides to the short form.
But there are other strengths to a longer form when you can develop a character over a longer period and get more depth and insight into them.
Do you have a feature-length project in the works?
I do, I have two. One I hope to shoot this summer, I'm trying to gear up for that one. I have another one for the following year. I'm very superstitious about talking about them in advance. They are both in color.
This film looks great in black and white, with the smoke and the black coffee�
I knew we'd have black coffee, white cigarettes, also you have less information to be distracted by. You can work in a way more quickly with the art direction if you're not so preoccupied with what color everything is. Black and white is a little trickier to photograph in a way, to make work, to make look luminous on screen, that sometimes requires a little more attention to the lighting, separating characters from their backgrounds. But I've done a lot of things in black and white, I think it's another valid tool for expressing something. The thing you are doing, what does it call for? What does it want to be? I kind of do that intuitively.
Where do you go to drink coffee?
Actually I don't drink coffee anymore, but I do drink tea. There's a luncheonette I've always liked called Buffa's on Prince Street, and there's a place on Ludlow called The Pink Pony that I like a lot. Those are my two regular spots.
You're not a Starbucks guy.
Please. I am an anti-Starbucks guy.
How do you feel about the smoking ban in New York?
I'm a very sensitive smoker. I'm very sensitive to other people not liking smoke around them, so I never smoke in people's houses if they don't smoke. But at the same time, in bars I find it a little odd�I think it's for fines or money or something because people work in coal mines, people remove asbestos, people do a lot of jobs that have certain dangers to them. And the idea of not smoking in a bar, as Eddie Izzard said, "What's next? No talking? No drinking?" It just seems a little repressed to me.
So my favorite short is the one with Steve Coogan and Alfred Molina�did they know each other?
They did not, actually. They certainly knew each other's work. I've worked with Alfred a lot, I love Alfred. And when I saw Steve Coogan doing his TV stuff in England, and then I walked out of [seeing Coogan in] "24-Hour Party People" and I thought, "Steve Coogan and Alfred Molina could be cousins." I don't know why I thought that, I just did. I thought there was something about them that it would be fun to put them together. And then I thought, "What if Alfred thought they really were cousins? That would be a good premise. So I called them each up and gave them a rough idea. And they gave me a lot of ideas back on the phone. And I wrote a script and then they improvised stuff from the script in the rehearsal, and played around with it a lot, and then we shot it the next day. It was just a funny idea to put them together and they were fabulous together.
I almost thought they were best friends, they seemed so natural.
They hadn't met until the day before we shot. They are so incredible, their sense of timing, their comedic sense.
Do you have a favorite short among them, or is that like picking a favorite child?
Yeah, I couldn't really say that. The most personal to me in a way is the last one because Taylor Mead and Bill Rice were like superstars of the underground for me in the late '70s when I was first wanting to make films. They still are superstars to me. So that one is kind of personal, but I can't really say I have a favorite because I love all of these crazy characters that I got to play with. I'm sort of a whore, I just fall in love with all of these actors. I really love working them, I just feel like it's a gift to have gotten to play with them all. It's quite an amazing cast if you think about it�all those people in one movie, what were we thinking? [laughs]
没有评论:
发表评论