Jim Jarmusch
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Natural Born Killers, The Virgin Suicides and More: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
From 1986, the year in which he made two flat-out masterpieces (Salvador and Platoon) to 1995, when he directed his boldest and richest film to that point (Nixon), Oliver Stone was on a streak like no other filmmaker has ever had before or since. Ten films in ten years, many of them (Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, The Doors) enormous epics and all of them ambitious attempts to assess where America had been, where it was, and where it was going. The scale and depth of Stone’s work during this period is equaled by the diversity of tone, […]
by Jim Hemphill on Apr 27, 2018 -
Strategies for Sharing
“I’m the only one of these directors with a @twitter account. Am I doing it wrong?!” tweeted, tongue-in-cheek, Moonlight helmer Barry Jenkins last November. Good question: Jenkins had just been announced as one of the Best Director nominees for the Film Independent Spirit Awards (the others were Andrea Arnold, for American Honey; Pablo Larraín, for Jackie; Jeff Nichols, for Loving; and Kelly Reichardt, for Certain Women), and among such esteemed company he was the sole denizen of the Twittersphere. Was Jenkins boosting his chances during awards season by maintaining an active presence on Twitter? Or does a social media identity […]
by Stephen Garrett on Jan 18, 2017 -
Welcome to the Working Week: On Paterson and Groundhog Day
Every day begins the same: We wake up. Usually in a bed, often by an alarm. Sometimes a pet gets me, or a slice of sunlight, or the shrill beeps of a garbage truck. I awake with a slow fade, or maybe a jolt, or perhaps only after a series of false starts. We can delay our rise from bed, but the inevitable remains: A full day of consciousness awaits us. How will we use it? How do we live life so we can live with ourselves? For Phil Connors, he awakes at the strike of 6:00 AM to the […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 9, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Jim Jarmusch’s The Stooges Documentary Gimme Danger
“Iggy and The Stooges reinvented music as we know it,” says Danny Fields, former Stooges manager, in the trailer for Jim Jarmusch’s documentary about the band (above). Relying on archival clips, interviews, and animation, the film traces the hard rocking history of the proto-punk band from its inception in late ’60s Michigan through the ups and downs of stardom (and drug addiction). Gimme Danger had its world premiere in the Midnight Screenings section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival before screening at The Toronto International Film Festival and The New York Film Festival. The film is scheduled to be released on October 28, 2016, by Amazon […]
by Paula Bernstein on Oct 17, 2016 -
Watch: Jim Jarmusch on Cinema and His Influences
Director Jim Jarmusch sat down with New York Film Festival Director Kent Jones for this year’s On Cinema master class, to discuss some of his favorite films and directors, including Samuel Fuller, Abbas Kiarostami, Aki Kaurismäki, Robert Wise, Nicholas Ray, and others. You can watch the entire one-hour conversation in the video above. Jarmusch had two films at the 54th New York Film Festival: Main Slate selection Paterson starring Adam Driver, and Gimme Danger, a documentary on Iggy Pop and the Stooges, which will open at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on October 28.
by Paula Bernstein on Oct 14, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson Stars Adam Driver as a Poet/Bus Driver
Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, Paterson, premiered to acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival in May and now, courtesy of Yahoo Movies, it’s gotten its first trailer (above). The film stars Adam Driver (Girls, The Force Awakens) as Paterson, a poet/bus driver who lives an uneventful life with his pregnant wife (Golshifteh Farahani) in Paterson, New Jersey. In a report from Cannes, Blake Williams wrote, “It’s a remarkably free form film —so affable and comfortable in its skin —that my registration of time (‘the fourth dimension’; ‘Hmm’) dropped away for much of the first hour; I would have been perfectly satisfied to see it continue, devoid […]
by Paula Bernstein on Sep 29, 2016 -
Cannes Dispatch #2: Paterson, Happy Times Will Come Soon, Harmonium, Personal Shopper
I really ought to have more faith in Jim Jarmusch. Here’s an artist who, despite routinely delivering cinematic UFOs time and again, is still capable of surprising me with works that feel sui generis not only with regard to world cinema, but to his own filmography as well. Paterson, which is not even close to the “slight” or “minor” effort early reports claimed were threatening to land it in a sidebar (low key, sure, but so what?), manages to restate a number of Jarmusch’s pet motifs and themes in a tenor I’d not yet experienced in his work—at least not […]
by Blake Williams on May 17, 2016 -
Structuring Uncle Howard in Production and Post using William Burroughs’s The Western Lands and Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru
One of the earliest challenges in making Uncle Howard was figuring out how to tell a story around a main character who is essentially absent. My uncle, Howard Brookner, was a fairly obscure director, whose work went missing to varying degrees, and who had died some 25 years ago. Yet, to me and others around him, he left a very strong memory and spirit. How to show this? For inspiration, my producer, Paula Vaccaro, and I turned to Howard’s friend and former film subject, William S. Burroughs (Burroughs: The Movie, 1983), whose book, The Western Lands, was the last he wrote before dedicating himself […]
by Aaron Brookner on Jan 26, 2016 -
A Conversation with Philippe Garrel (Part 1)
Explaining why Philippe Garrel is one of my favorite working directors can be difficult. Talking with a co-worker, I tried to sketch out his recurring interests: “he makes movies about men, often directors, who cheat on women and have trouble with themselves.” She rolled her eyes, and I’m not blaming her: what, again? Garrel began making movies as a teenager, and his early work that I’ve seen is both gorgeous and the epitome of stereotypical arthouse pretension of the period. There is 1968’s Le lit de la vierge, a very of-its-time film about a particularly mopey Jesus, and 1975’s Le berceau […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 13, 2016 -
Iggy Pop, Jim Jarmusch, Sleep and Script Development
Originally discovered by E.V. Grieve and reposted by Gothamist, this short video of Iggy Pop touring the East Village in 1993 contains an interesting nugget of script development wisdom. I was watching the video this morning purely nostalgically — checking out my neighborhood 20 years ago — when I came across, at around the 10-minute mark, a short bit about the shooting of Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes. Pop says his segment with Tom Waits — a one-day, 16-hour shoot — was his best shooting experience ever. When the interviewer asks if the shoot was improvised, Pop says there was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 5, 2014
