Vivid voyager

Legendary indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch
on puzzles, the importance of the imagination
and taking audiences on a trip in his new film
The Limits of Control

FORMIDABLE PROFESSIONAL: De Bankolé

by MARK SLUTSKY

“Montreal’s a nice town,” says Jim Jarmusch. “I’ve been there but not in maybe 10 years. I just keep thinking of going back some time. I live in New York City, but I live partly in the Catskills and when I’m on my way there, there’s always signs for Montreal and I’m always thinking ‘I’ll just keep driving, man!’”

On the line with the Mirror to talk about his newest film, The Limits of Control, the 56-year-old Jarmusch sounds as youthful as ever. And, as recent photos show, the filmmaker looks much the same as he did a quarter of a century ago, when he burst out of the downtown NYC art and music scene with films like Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law that synthesized the stylistic pre-occupations of European art house cinema with a particularly American attitude and sense of humour.

The signature shock of white hair might be the same, but Jarmusch, who hasn’t shot a feature film in New York in years, continues to experiment and explore. The Limits of Control, shot on location in Spain, is intriguingly cryptic, a riddle of a film. Isaach De Bankolé plays an unnamed “Lone Man,” a well-dressed professional, possibly in a violent profession, who arrives in Spain on an unspecified mission. He barely speaks, but his every movement seems deliberate and willed; formidable.

His mysterious travels take him through Spain, meeting with operatives along the way, played by the likes of Tilda Swinton, Gael Garcia Bernal and John Hurt (Bill Murray also appears). Their encounters are formalized, almost repetitive, though each seems to offer another clue to unpacking the exact nature of the Lone Man’s fate and final destination. Gorgeously shot by legendary cinematography Christopher Doyle, best-known here for his work with Wong-Kar Wai, soundtracked by drone-metal bands like Boris and Sunn O))), The Limits of Control is a hypnotic, beautiful and sometimes maddening film.

Friendly and talkative, Jarmusch spoke about movies, music and the power of the imagination…

Mirror: The Limits of Control seems almost like a puzzle to be solved. Was that how you meant the audience to see it?

Jim Jarmusch: There’s certainly a puzzle element to it. But we were trying to make the details of the plot be kind of not important. What we were really trying to do was just make a kind of little trip you could take, that hopefully would affect your consciousness in some small way. It’s kind of a puzzle, which is certainly not a new structure to throw on people, but it’s not like a complicated exercise for the audience to try to figure out. It’s more like, are you open to just taking a trip? Or having a dream? Rather than piecing it together and figuring it all out.

CONSCIOUS CHOICES

M: The movie reminded me of Dead Man, but it seemed less about the inner life of the protagonist and more about the audience’s journey.

JJ: I don’t know if I see it that way, but then again I might be the worst person to answer that! I see it that he is the owner of his own consciousness. He’s looking at the world through his own senses and he’s not trusting of those who guide us toward what to think about what we receive.

M: So is it about self-control versus external control?

JJ: It’s about knowing that you do have the control over what you consider to be reality. The Bill Murray character says at one point, “You just don’t understand how the world really works.” And you know, that’s been a problem for me since I was a child—people telling me that, over and over! I think it’s a problem now, as we’re on the cusp of making a decision of how humans go forward on this planet. I think you can’t keep following the sheep or you’re just going to run into the sea, like lemmings, off the cliff. The imagination is more powerful than guns or money and one’s consciousness is the most valuable thing one has. There’s certainly, I hope, elements of that in the film without hitting people over the head with a hammer in a didactic way.

M: It seems an appropriate dilemma for a filmmaker—don’t you have to sort of ignore the way the world works to make a movie in the first place?

JJ: Yeah, you do and there are people who analyze a film purely as a product—they have to make their money back and that’s a business venture on their part. But I think when filmmakers are drawn into that dilemma they are weakened. The beauty of filmmaking comes from the imagination, which is something that I think is worth fighting for in every possible way. People get very complacent or they follow what they’re told is the way it’s supposed to be. But if you look at the history of human expression or just cinema in general, to me, and I’m not a real mainstream guy, but there are gifts all over the place that don’t follow those conventions. Whether it’s films by Bresson or Tarkovsky or Antonioni or Jacques Rivette.

EXPERIMENTING AND EXPLORING: Jarmusch

STIMULATING ENVIRONMENTS

M: Tell me about making the film in Spain. I liked how you avoided showing obvious landmarks or postcard-like shots.

JJ: I was drawn to Spain for a lot of not-logical reasons, just things pulling me there, like my love of the city of Seville. Shooting in Madrid we had that very strange, odd apartment building, the Torres Blanca, but the rest I wanted to seem like quotidian Madrid, the way you would see it if you lived there, not the way you would see it if you were a tourist. Seville was a bit hard to avoid incredible, almost postcard shots just of the streets there, but again we weren’t trying to show the cathedral or things like that.

But I’ve always tried to avoid that. I remember scouting for the film Dead Man and we’d see these incredible landscapes and just turn our backs on them and look in the other direction because we weren’t trying to create Ansel Adams calendar photographs. We were trying to get a sense of a place for the characters to inhabit. So this is kind of the same. The last third of the film in the south of Spain, outside Almeria, is where not only all these Spaghetti Westerns were filmed, but also a lot of Hollywood biblical epics and stuff were filmed there. So those landscapes are kind of in our semi-consciousness, if you’re a movie fan, just from those movies as well.

M: In the recent documentary Blank City you’re interviewed about the downtown New York scene of the ’70s and ’80s. Was your environment then a strong influence on you as a filmmaker and does it influence you still?

JJ: I’m sure it does, but not in ways I can really calculate. The beauty of New York has always been that it’s about change. If you expect it to stay the same, then it’s not New York—although it has changed dramatically more so than ever in its history, I think in the last 15 years or so. I’m sure it has an effect on me, but at the same time I’m instilled by that earlier period when we were making things because we loved the form. We loved the form of rock’n’roll as expression or making films to express something.

The general feeling of the scene was really about ideas, expression, the imagination and these beautiful forms, whether they were painting or poetry or rock-and-roll or filmmaking or graffiti or early hip hop culture. It was all kind of intertwined, flowering at that late ’70s, early ’80s period and that really has remained my guide in a way. It’s in me, I don’t really analyze it, it’s not calculated, but I’m aware that it was very strong in forming my way of expressing myself.

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, MAY 22