Jim Jarmusch may just be the last person one would suspect of harbouring back-to-nature dreams.
The New York filmmaker has always seemed as citified as a skyscraper’s steel, and every bit as rigid in appearance. He’s forever dressed all in black, with the shock of white hair he’s had since he was a teenager completing the monochrome look.
Yet as he reluctantly nears the traditional age of retirement – he turned 64 on Jan. 22 – he finds himself thinking about what he wants to do with the rest of his life. And the idea of smelling daisies before he’s pushing them up excites him. He’s moving to land he owns in the Catskill Mountains near Woodstock, N.Y., where he’ll set down new roots.
“I’ve built a new kind of complex up there that is my new laboratory for the rest of my years,” Jarmusch says in an interview during TIFF 2016, where his new film Paterson had its North American premiere. (The film opens commercially in Toronto on Feb. 10.)
“I have a little recording studio, I have an art room, a place to look at films, places to write. It’s for what I’m supposed to do, and I can get out of the f—ing city, because I’m sick of it, you know?
“It’s changed so much. It’s so loud and crass. It used to give me energy; now it’s just sucking it. And I love it up there. It is incredible. So I’m very excited.
“Hitting 60 made me realize, wait a minute, man, you’re wasting a lot of your energy, you’re supposed to be doing these things! So now we made a new world for me to my design that is fantastic. It’s important, man – you’ve got to know that time goes so fast.”
All of this is by way of explanation of how a film as placid and poetic as Paterson could germinate in Jarmusch’s fertile mind, which also found room last year for the punk explosions of Gimme Danger, the Iggy Pop biopic that also played TIFF 2016; both films played Cannes prior to TIFF.
Paterson stars Adam Driver as a bus driver named Paterson in the New Jersey suburban city of Paterson. He lives with his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) and their sweet bulldog Marvin. Laura, an artist and extrovert, is always trying new things; Paterson is a poetically inclined introvert, a complete creature of habit.
When he’s not driving his bus, or drinking the single post-shift beer that completes his workday, Paterson scribbles poems into a notebook he carries with him. Jarmusch arrays the poems on the screen and the overall effect is intoxicating. Paterson the man seems like a latter-day Walt Whitman; Paterson the film is like Whitman’s famous ode “I Hear America Singing.”
Poetry on film isn’t an entirely new pursuit for Jarmusch, who was originally a punker when he moved to New York from hometown Akron, Ohio, in the mid-1970s. His first feature, Stranger Than Paradise, which won him the Camera d’Or prize for new filmmakers at Cannes in 1984, made poetic use of black screens to separate the mini-tales of his boho road movie.
And his 1999 feature Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, starred Forest Whitaker as a mob hitman who inscribes and studies the ancient code of the samurai that he lives by, the words appearing like free verse or rap lyrics.
Paterson takes the poetry-as-life idea to a whole other level of wonderment.
“I just see it as kind of accumulation of things, and a guy who needs routine so that he can drift and receive things, like an antennae,” Jarmusch says.
“He loves poems, and I like his kind of slight obliviousness to all the things his wife does. She’s so active and has so many projects. I love that they love each other for who they are. They’re very different, and yet they’re like the yin and yang together. I was so happy to have Adam and Golshifteh. It was just a real joy to make the film.”
The tall and lanky Driver seemed going into the film to be an odd choice for the title role. He was just coming off playing a Darth Vader acolyte in The Force Awakens, the most recent Star Wars film in which his character was demonic, not poetic.
What had Jarmusch seen Driver do in other films that drew the filmmaker to the actor? Not much, as it turns out.
“I saw him do a nice little thing in (the Coen Bros.’) Inside Llewyn Davis and another in (Noah Baumbach’s) Frances Ha, and I also heard a couple of interviews with him,” Jarmusch says.
“I love his face, and his look, and I love that kind of quietness about him, and I just wanted to meet him. Unlike most of my films where I have the main characters and I kind of know who I’m writing it for, I did not for (Paterson). So I got to meet him and then I was like, ‘This is the guy!’
“I also love the fact that he’s been in the Marines but he also went to Juilliard. I’m making a film about a working-class guy who’s a poet and Adam just had all these things that would help him embody that character or collaborate to create it. He’s wonderful, and very reactive. His worst nightmare would be to act out the meaning of something, which I love about him as well.”
Driver said at Cannes that Jarmusch’s script was so strong and the characters were so well-defined “the biggest thing I tried to do was not get in the way of it or add anything on top of it, (to not) try to force it into something that it didn’t want to be.”
Paterson didn’t win any prizes at Cannes, to the surprise of many. Critics at the festival were betting that if the film didn’t take the Palme d’Or, which ultimately went to Ken Loach’s social realist drama I, Daniel Blake, that Paterson might score the director’s prize for Jarmusch or the actor’s one for Driver. It got none of the above, but true to Jarmusch’s non-competitive nature and newly acquired pastoral calm, it didn’t bother him a bit.
“We had very nice reviews, so that was our prize. So honestly, I was very happy. Also, I hate those awards. I was so relieved when we didn’t have to go at all. I was like, ‘Can we go to that Italian restaurant I like tonight?’ And I was so happy.”
Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.
Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.
The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
