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Small Talk is Optional: Jim Jarmusch and Amalia Ulman Discuss “Father Mother Sister Brother”
Across his 45-year career, independent auteur Jim Jarmusch has continually returned to a particular type of film in which feature-length narrative is broken into a series of short, discrete episodes united by place (Mystery Train), time (Night on Earth) or activity (Coffee and Cigarettes). Through their internal correspondences and connections, and perhaps because of their fractured nature, these films, liberated from traditional three-act structure, produce sly epiphanies and unexpected pleasures.
Jarmusch’s attraction to filmic miniatures continues with Father Mother Sister Brother, in which the connective tissue is, yes, the family. (In a clever bit of calendaring by MUBI, the film will be released on Christmas Eve, when its depiction of awkward parent-child reunions will achieve peak audience relatability.) The picture, which won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival, is a triptych featuring the characters suggested by its title. In the opening segment, Adam Driver and Mayim Bialak are siblings visiting their divorced father (Tom Waits), who lives alone in a state of seeming self-neglect; their dialogues are full of gentle pleasantries and mild notes of concern, with all three just waiting for the encounter to end. The second segment moves from the Northeast US to London, where Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps are quite different sisters visiting their elegant mom (Charlotte Rampling), who may have reason to believe her kids are not all right. And in the Paris-set third, Billy (Luka Sabbat) and Skye (Indya Moore) are siblings who finally begin understanding their parents, who have died in a plane crash, as they clean out their flat and move their belongings to storage. Details and poetic grace notes—drinking water, Rolex watches, free-spirited skateboarders—recur from section to section, as Jarmusch distills his longstanding interest in the rhythms and mysteries of human relations into its most minimalist form.
We asked Amalia Ulman—a director whose first film, El Planeta, explored mother-daughter relations—to interview Jarmusch. Her follow-up ensemble comedy, Magic Farm, is currently in release from MUBI. —Scott Macaulay
Ulman: Stranger Than Paradise was a big inspiration for El Planeta, so I’m thrilled to be chatting with you. I want to talk about the structure of the film. You’ve done this before. I don’t know if “vignette” is the right word…
Jarmusch: Well, they use different words that don’t quite apply to this one, like “episodic.” I call it “a triptych with three chapters” because. to me, it’s like a piece of music with three movements. You can’t play them separately or out of order. I’ve done that before in Mystery Train. Night on Earth or Coffee and Cigarettes, on the other hand, were more modular—you could have moved them around or seen them separately—but this film is different. I worked really hard for Father Mother Sister Brother to be cumulative. I like those forms because they’re literary forms. Stories within stories, like The Decameron or the Canterbury Tales or even the cantos within Dante that are separate little incidents moving toward the same overall story—in that case, his journey into the inferno.
It’s a literary form that’s been used in films in many ways. It was very popular in Italian cinema in the ’60s and ’70s; often, they were different episodes made by different directors, like anthology films. But this is not that. This is a triptych where you have to have all three panels. I worked very carefully to have them play out this way because, let’s face it, I removed everything expected from the film—drama, violence, action, sex. It’s just about observing these people. I’m not trying to say something or teach you anything, I’m just trying to promote empathetic observation. I worked hard to have it build emotionally without you noticing it so that when the two twins embrace in their parents’ room, there’s some sort of emotional impact without it being too dramatic.
Ulman: The way I interpreted the film is that it’s about cool Gen Xer parents and their lame normie kids. I have cool parents who are more irresponsible than I am, so I connected with that (laughs).
Jarmusch: With the “Father” one, definitely.
Ulman: But even in the last one, they’re reminiscing about how cool and wild their parents were. And in the second one, the mother, played by Charlotte Rampling, is a gorgeous, talented and charismatic writer while her daughters are… still finding their way. Is that how you feel about your kid? (laughs)
Jarmusch: No, she’s totally not like me at all, and I love that about her. She’s very much her own person and always has been. She does not imitate my interests or anything. She has always been very self-aware. For example, when she was five years old, we’re eating dinner, and I said to her, “Josephine, you get food on the floor, in your hair; you got food everywhere.” She looked me right in the eyes and said, “Hey, I’m five,” then rolled her eyes. That’s just such a perfect portrait of her. She’s always been like that. One time, while editing this film about Iggy and the Stooges, she walked in the editing room, and the editor said, “Do you like this kind of music—the Velvet Underground, the MC5, the Ramones?” She puts her hands on her hips and says, “Hey, I’m nine years old. I listen to Taylor Swift, OK?”
Ulman: So, where did the inspiration for the story come from?
Jarmusch: I have no idea. I gather things for quite a while. I start with characters; I start with actors. In this case, the very first thing was, “It would be interesting if Tom Waits was Adam Driver’s father because I love them both and they’re very different.” And I’m a Jeopardy! nerd, and Mayim Bialik was my favorite host ever. So, I thought, “What if Mayim Bialik is sort of similar to her host character and played Adam’s sister?” And then I was thinking, “What if Vicky and Cate were sisters?”
Ulman: Yes, now that you mention it, it makes a lot of sense to me that you work with the actress in mind first since you tend to work with a recurring cast.
Jarmusch: I know them, so I can imagine them. But when I wrote the second one, I wrote the mischievous one to be Cate because Cate is very mischievous. Vicky, who I love, I thought she could do anything, she could be the nerdy one. I gave the script first to Cate, who said, “Would you consider me to be the nerdy one? I’m always the mischievous one, and I’d love to do something unexpected.” And I thought, wow, Vicky would be great as the mischievous one. I immediately talked to Vicky and she preferred that role. So, that one I flipped, which is very unusual for me, but it worked out really well. And having Charlotte Rampling be their mother—I love Charlotte.
I had worked with Luka and Indya briefly before. I just love them as people. Honestly, those characters are the ones closest to me, in a way—they’re outsiders, and they’re not conventional people. My mother was a twin with her brother. They were telepathic because their father was a criminal and in jail all the time. He basically abandoned them as children, and their mother, my grandmother, whom I loved, became a school teacher to support them, so they were left alone a lot. All my life, if the phone rang and it was my uncle, my mother would say, “Oh, that’s Bob.” And they always knew if the other one was sick. Weird, right? As a child, I wondered if that would happen to me and my sister. But we’re not twins, so it didn’t.
Ulman: Why Paris?
Jarmusch: City-wise, Paris is the second-most important place in my life after New York. I tried to make Paris not quaint. Like, the cafe where they stop, it’s a Chinese-run place that sells lottery cards, not a chic, hipster place. And I shot things in the south of Paris which are not touristic or hip.
Ulman: When did you start going to Paris so much?
Jarmusch: When I went to Columbia as a student, I got to go abroad for one semester and ended up staying for eight or nine months. I went to the Cinémathèque almost every day, and therefore, when I returned, I hadn’t completed my studies. I became obsessed with movies. The Cinémathèque was incredible, and I stayed out all night, walking around alone. I had André Breton’s book, Nadja, and also Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant—surrealist texts about walking through Paris, which were kind of guides to me. The literature, the art history and all the architecture—I still love it so much. I’m getting an artist visa and possibly a French passport.
Ulman: I have a similar experience. I mean, it’s different, but my love affair with China started with my first visit to Hong Kong, where I listened to the soundtrack of Dead Man over and over again. That soundtrack transports me immediately to the streets of Hong Kong—which is funny because it has nothing to do with the film, which is a western, but that’s the beauty of the afterlife of an artwork.
Jarmusch: That’s like synesthesia, things you connect. Neil would appreciate that it works in Hong Kong.
Ulman: I noticed that when you create these sort of episodic structures, there’s something that connects them, like coffee and cigarettes. This one mentions water a lot. I’m a water sommelier, so I was surprised by that.
Jarmusch: Wow, I’ve never met a water sommelier.
Ulman: So, why water?
Jarmusch: The sillier repeated things—the Rolex watch, “Bob’s your uncle”—are things I put in to amuse myself while I’m writing. The water thing, though, is important to me. They also talk about it in Only Lovers Left Alive when they talk about the coming “water wars.” An Indigenous friend of mine was the one who talked about water being medicine. We were just drinking water, and she simply said, “medicine.” So, yeah, I really appreciate water. It is my favorite drink, and it’s so taken for granted.
Ulman: You have Czech roots, right?
Jarmusch: Well, Bohemian.
Ulman: They also consider water to be medicinal there.
Jarmusch: Is that so?
Ulman: Yeah, I just came from the Water Sommelier [Union] annual meetup in Karlovy Vary.
Jarmusch: Well, I know that different waters from different places have different medicinal effects. Water is so fascinating, and it controls everything. The ocean’s tides are controlled by the moon. Water is a mysteriously important force. I’m sort of afraid of the ocean because of how powerful it is. I’m not an ocean guy.
Ulman: I grew up in a fisherman’s place where the ocean was terrifying. That’s why they give it a feminine name: In Spanish, you can say “el mar,” but when it’s scary you say, “la mar.” That makes me think of Charlotte Rampling as the mother, this powerful, talented, imposing presence. I want to know more about these sorts of figures in your own life. I want to know more about your time with Nicholas Ray.
Jarmusch: He was a mentor and teacher to me in many ways. I became his teaching assistant kind of randomly. I went to tell them I wasn’t coming back to NYU to graduate because I had no money. So, the [chair] of the [graduate] school, László Benedek, said, “I’m going to get you a scholarship. Also, someone that you really respect is going to teach here. He needs an assistant, and I’ve recommended you.” I was like, “Who’s that?” “Nicholas Ray’s in the next room. Go talk with him.” So, I went in and became this assistant for the next year or so. When he stopped teaching because his health wasn’t good, he stayed at his place in SoHo. I would just go there every few days and hang out. Then, when he was dying in the hospital, I slept in his house to answer the phone because Susan, his wife, was staying in the hospital. So, I became very close with him. He’s one of the great, deeply romantic American Hollywood directors, and he was very knowledgeable about many things. He taught me that cinema incorporates all these different forms. Nick Ray had a radio show about Appalachian music. Nick Ray studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright. Nick Ray had Bertolt Brecht sleep on his couch. At one point, he had Woody Guthrie sleep on his lawn. He knew a lot of painters, and he didn’t make a film until his 30s—They Live By Night, one of my favorite films.
Ulman: Yeah, same. I love it so much.
Jarmusch: It’s like Tristan and Isolde in a hillbilly crime movie. It’s so beautiful.
Ulman: Yes, their marriage scene.
Jarmusch: They’re so naive, you know? Your heart goes out to them. It’s a beautifully made film. But he was a problematic man: he wasn’t good with his kids, he wasn’t reliable with his partners, he had issues with drug use and misbehavior throughout. He wasn’t reliable personally, but he was this really incredibly important filmmaker for me, and even though all those personal things didn’t affect me, I was aware of them. For example, I know that Nicca, [one of] his daughter[s], did not have an easy time.
But Nick Ray taught me many things. He was the one who told me to shoot out of order, so the actors aren’t thinking about what they did in the scene before. Also, talk to each actor separately, not all together, about a scene because it’s not the same for each character. Think on your feet and be open to changing things, following your intuition. Your inspirations will not just come from movies, they’ll come from books and conversations, things you overheard, the weather, architecture, cloud formations and music. He was like, “Just be an antenna; be a receptor, and then put it in your work and make your work your own, and fuck what they think. Just be true to what it is you’re trying to do.”
Sam Fuller was sort of the opposite of Nick, not a romantic. But I loved Sam Fuller so much. He would say [Jarmusch puts on a deep voice and impersonates Sam Fuller], “Real life’s in color, but black and white’s more realistic.” You know, he was very visceral: “If the first scene doesn’t give you a hard-on, throw the goddamn script away.” He was kind of crude, but also one of our greats. They’re two of my favorite American directors ever. I put Buster Keaton up there, too. [Again, in a deep voice:] “I write with my camera. My typewriter is useless.” I got to spend time with Sam in many places: Paris, Berlin, L.A., the Amazon.
Ulman: The Amazon?
Jarmusch: Yes! Mika Kaurismäki made a film called Tigrero because Sam Fuller had gone to the Amazon in the ’50s to scout a film. He was going to make it with Ava Gardner and John Wayne. He went on his own and shot films of a very remote tribe in the Amazon called the Karajá, then came back and said, “OK, we’re going to shoot down there.” And Daryl Zanuck said, “You can’t shoot there. I can’t insure these actors in the Amazon.” So, the film was never made, but then Mika was in Paris, where Sam was living, too, and found this footage in Sam’s closet that he had shot in the ’50s. So, Mika said, “Why don’t we go back there and make a film now?” It was like 40 years later, and Sam and I are kind of the characters in the film. It was wild. These people were still so remote that they told us that in 1989 there was a German guy near their village, who they saw down by the river, with some kind of stick in his mouth and foaming at the mouth. He was right where their children bathed, so they killed him. But he was just brushing his teeth.
Ulman: Oh, no!
Jarmusch: Yeah, they had never seen that before.
Ulman: Well, I guess he was foaming at the mouth…
Jarmusch: And that was in 1989! These people were quite remote and amazing. So, yeah, I spent time with Sam in the Amazon but also in Paris and Berlin. My favorite was to spend time with him in L.A., though, because he had this garage that was his office. It had all his files and was where he wrote. He had a bust of Mark Twain and a bust of Beethoven, his two heroes, and he would take me in there and talk, talk, talk. He could talk forever. He and Nick were so
passionate about the elegance and potential of the language of cinema. My other big mentor was Robert Frank. I’m very lucky to have spent time with them.
Ulman: What do you do when you finish shooting a film? Right after you wrap, what happens to you?
Jarmusch: I have to be kind of propped up against a wall. When I shoot, I give it everything, so I often get sick after I wrap for a week or so. Then, I go straight into editing with Affonso Gonçalves, the editor I’ve been working with for a number of years. We look at every take. It’s excruciating. I’m always saying, “Fonzie, do we have to do that this time? Can’t we just start cutting and look through the takes as we go?” “Nope, we’re gonna look through every single take, and you’re gonna give me your notes.” We do that for about two weeks straight, like seven, eight hours a day, and make notes of everything. We then start cutting and it starts to get fun. For me, shooting is about gathering the stuff you make it from, and the cutting rooms are where you make the film. Of course, you have plans while you shoot, but I learned pretty early on that the film must tell you what it wants to be in the cutting room. You cannot start bludgeoning it into what you hoped or thought it would be. I don’t use a storyboard, so that’s super important to me. I have to be very Zen-like and open while cutting because I have to listen to the film now. That’s where it gets exciting,
Ulman: What’s your favorite part of the process, then?
Jarmusch: Shooting! I love my crews and all the other people collaborating. I don’t like group activities of any kind unless it’s a film crew or a musical group. It’s like we’re on a pirate ship and the rest of the world goes away. It’s so much fun, and it’s so weird. For example, if you say you have a house in the country and want to build a little bridge over a stream in your yard, you get the contractor. You get the guy; they’ve got to get the wood. It takes two weeks. Something happens, it gets delayed, it takes three weeks…. Five weeks later, maybe, you have the little bridge. On the other hand, with a film crew, you say you need a bridge and by tomorrow, the bridge is there. It’s magical. Everything’s sort of at your disposal.
Ulman: Yes, absolutely. I was actually thinking about that recently because a few months after I shot my film, I renovated my apartment. Everything is so slow in the real world, Meanwhile, during a shoot—
Jarmusch: Everything happens so fast. The renovation would have taken a week. I love scenics, I love the prop department. I’m always attentive to every detail in a film I make, like what kind of socks they have on. Adam Driver was in the military, and he told me that a film crew is the closest thing to the military because you’re all together, watching each other’s backs. You have separate jobs, but they’re dependent on one another; we all have to do them on [the same] time frame and our work depends on that collaboration.
Ulman: I’m happy you say that because I’ve always described the relationship with the crew as going to war together. There’s a level of closeness that you don’t even get with friends you have known for years. Suddenly, during a shoot, there are no secrets. It’s so intimate.
Jarmusch: Yes, and immediately after a shoot I crash out on separation anxiety with my crew. And I have dreams for a while: I gotta get up and go to the set! And while editing, because I’m so focused day after day, I have endless dreams about editing. We’ll be cutting a scene, and then, like, “Wait, why is Ernest Borgnine in this scene, he’s not even alive. This is fucked up!” Then, I wake up.
Ulman: Where do you fit your fine arts practice in all of this?
Jarmusch: I make art and music. It depends on what sort of things are presenting themselves. My artwork, for the most part, is all newsprint collages that are minimal and all about reappropriation of imagery, recontextualizing it in a very simple way. It’s tied to surrealism in a way, [although] they’re not strictly surrealist. I realized while making [these collages]—which I’ve made for many years, almost as a way of being calm and alone—that I use the same procedure in my scripts, writing and music, in that I gather elements from which I’m going to make something and allow them to speak to me while doing so. I don’t quite know [the end result] in advance, especially with the collages. It’s very much like juxtaposition that happens intuitively, not randomly. When I write a script, I start with certain things: the actors I want to imagine, little relationships between them, the places. I’m gathering those things in the same way that I put a collage together. And when I make music, I’m not a rigorous, formalistic musician. I’m also intuitive. I also write poetry, and I have a notebook full of titles. Sometimes, I’ll just pick a title first.
Ulman: I also save titles before I know what I’m going to use them for.
Jarmusch: I wanted a more poetic title than Father Mother Sister Brother and kept trying and trying; then, the poetic titles seemed pretentious.
Ulman: When a title works, it works, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s like the name of a pet.
Jarmusch: Exactly. Growing up, I had a dog named Alice. My father tried to rename the dog “Tip” because our neighbor was named Alice, right? He was like, “We’re not gonna be out there screaming, ‘Alice!’” But the dog’s name was Alice, and she was such an Alice. She was so cool. I found her in the woods.
Ulman: What kind of dog was she?
Jarmusch: A kind of terrier mix that had been bred, apparently, as a circus dog. She was abandoned as a puppy and thrown out into the woods. When I found her, it took me an hour and a half to get her to come to me. She was trembling and bleeding and very young, like five months old. The vet he said she had been attacked by wild animals and was very traumatized. She was bred to do tricks, so maybe some passing circus people just abandoned her. It was strange—she would do random tricks even though she wasn’t trained. She’d sit right next to me, look at us, then without hesitation would jump and end up in a sitting position on top of the table. We would say, “Alice, good girl,” and she would wag her tail proudly. She did a lot of weird shit like that, untrained.
Ulman: Did you ever try to train her?
Jarmusch: No, never did. But I would say, “Roll over” and she’d roll over. She was very smart.
Ulman: Did you have more dogs after Alice?
Jarmusch: Yes, I’ve had dogs and cats. I love animals. I love cats, too, but dogs especially.
Ulman: There was a very cool dog in Paterson. She won the Palm Dog Award in Cannes, right?
Jarmusch: Yes, very important dog. She played Marvin, but she was Nellie. Wonderful. I’m a vegan, but I don’t proselytize and tell other people they shouldn’t eat meat or whatever—that’s not my thing. But I love dogs. And cats… I saw a great cartoon in The New Yorker, like a year ago, and it had a mouse with a thought balloon with a cat in it, and a dog with a thought balloon with a cat in it, and a cat with a thought balloon with a cat in it. They are so funny: cats can recognize like 30 words, but they will ignore them all!
