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Jim Jarmusch on Broken Flowers
A masterclass with Jim Jarmusch
Following a preview of Broken Flowers
London, 16 August 2005
Presented by The Script Factory & National Film & Television School, in association with Momentum Pictures, & The Screen on the Green
Briony Hanson (Co-director, The Script Factory)
Was this a project that you wrote specifically for Bill [Murray] – were you inspired to make it after your experience working with him on Coffee and Cigarettes?
Jim Jarmusch
No, I wrote a script for Bill in 2001 called Three Moons in the Sky and I even raised money to produce the film. I then decided that I didn’t want to make the film. I liked the story a lot, but the script was over-written and I hate re-writing scripts. So I went to Bill and said I didn’t want to do the film, but I have another idea. He said, ‘really, you don’t want to do the film?’ Because he really liked the story. But he asked about the other idea, and I told him the rough idea of this story [Broken Flowers], and he said he wanted to do that instead. So I was very relieved! I then made Coffee and Cigarettes and then wrote this after that.
Bill Murray plays Don Johnson in Broken Flowers
BH
When you were writing for him, or certainly thinking about him a lot when you’re writing, how do you actually script something for him? How do you direct him? He does nothing and everything at the same time – now how do you write that?
JJ
Everything I’ve written I’ve had actors in mind for the central characters. So I always have actors that I can envision as the character while I’m writing it. Beyond that, I don’t exactly know how to explain it, but I really wanted to make a film with Bill which was minimal in terms of his performance. This film was the result of that.
BH
And how descriptive are you in your scripts when you’re writing for him?
JJ
Not extremely descriptive. I try to leave adjectives and adverbs out. Things that try to explain or direct the character. I try to keep it relatively concise.
BH
I gather that your script for Broken Flowers pre-dated Lost in Translation.
JJ
The story did, and the previous script did certainly.
BH
For us, we’re used to Bill being very obviously funny; then he ‘went minimal’ for Lost in Translation, and with this one, more minimal still. How bizarre was it that this came after Lost in Translation – were you irritated by that?
JJ
No. I liked Lost in Translation. I find this a different character. I don’t follow this idea that the minimal side of Bill has just emerged. I’ve seen him develop a very wide range of his craft for a long time, starting with a film that he instigated – The Razor’s Edge. He gave a great performance in a film called Mad Dog and Glory. Then he was doing Rushmore and several things with Wes Anderson – three films. It’s something he’s been working on a long time – he’s just better known for more broader performances. But, younger people might know him from Rushmore and Sofia’s film and our film, and they might say – “you mean Bill Murray was in Meatballs!”. So it might be part of Bill’s master-plan, I’m not sure. He’s had a delicate range for a long time, but he’s better known at a more mainstream level.
BH
You’ve said that you were looking to create roles for women, and for a particular type of actress (40-55 year old), who don’t usually get meaty roles. How did you select these actresses, and was it a particular film of theirs that inspired you to put them into this film?
JJ
Not particularly. There was an impetus for wanting to do this story, because I’ve been carrying this idea around for about seven years. I carry a lot of ideas around and make notes on them, and then write a script eventually. One of the things that excited me about working with female actors at that age range. I wrote the part for Sharon Stone thinking of her – there wasn’t a particular role aside from Casino which was an incredible performance and she should have won an Academy Award for.
Jim Jarmuch's Broken Flowers - FREE to Script Factory Members
I thought Jessica Lange was an incredible presence on screen for a long time. Francis Conroy I knew was on a TV show [Six Feet Under], but I never saw it – so I didn’t even know who she was, but I had worked with Ellen Lewis, the casting director that works with Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, and she introduced me to Francis and I just loved her. So I wanted her in the film. I’ve watched Tilda Swinton’s work for quite a long time. She’s a little closer to me in that she started with Derek Jarmen, and started not in mainstream, but she’s adventurous, and her career has followed that instinct.
BH
Could any of them have swapped roles or did you always have them set up for the particular roles that they took?
JJ
I did originally offer Jessica Lange the part that Francis plays. So I did switch that. When I met Francis I asked her to play the character of Dora. I had to then ask Jessica what she thought about playing another character – and she said she preferred the other character, so she agreed to that. Those two were swappable – but otherwise it’s a really hard question for my brain to think about.
...whos charm fails to impress Jessica Lange
BH
Are you somebody who is precious about your script? Did Bill or the women contribute to their own lines and parts?
JJ
I’m not precious about my scripts. It’s always a collaboration making a character with the actors, so I hope that they will bring ideas to the dialogue and the writing. In this case, it was a little less than I’d hoped for and less than usual. They really didn’t improvise so much.
BH
Did you encourage it?
JJ
Bill brought a few beautiful ideas to the script but mostly he kept to the dialogue. He’d say “I like what we got”. They all did that, which made me upset – they’re supposed to make it better! Improvisation is a funny thing because any decision an actor makes is improvised. Acting, to me, is about reacting as a character, not acting out a scene. So every movement of Bill’s eyelids is improvised – I’m not saying to him, move your eyelid after you say this word, then blink! Improvisation is hard to define. But I would have liked to have let them have a longer leash then they had in this film – but they didn’t want it. Damn actors! They could’ve made it better. [Laughter]
BH
Did they all – or did anyone – actually see the whole script?
JJ
Yes, all the main characters. Except I’m still not sure that Bill ever read the script. I went to his house once, and I’d sent him the script, and I said, Bill, have you got the script? And he said, ‘yes, it’s really important to me, I put it in a safe place, I’ll show you’. We went to his office that had so many papers you’d have had to shovel them out. He spent twenty minutes looking for it, and eventually I said ‘it’s OK I have one in the car.’ He said, no, I have it here – it’s upstairs. He went upstairs for another twenty minutes and came back down with no script. He panicked too, because he wanted to show me that the script was important to him. So I left him another script on his table, and called him three days later, and he said, I can see the script from here, it’s on the table where you left it. I know he read the script each night before we did the shot – although I re-write the night before each shoot – so I’m still not convinced he read the script.
BH
Did they know who had written the letter?
JJ
Well do you know…?
BH
No, but I’m wondering about your preparation period with them on this part of the story.
JJ
Actually I asked each of the four women to write the letter. I said it doesn’t mean that you are the mother, but if you were, could you please write this letter from your character. And they wrote these beautiful letters, and then I re-wrote the letter in the script using parts of those letters. I saved their letters as they’re really fun to read and very different.
BH
You’ve talked before about how you don’t ‘do back story’, but you have also talked about how you get your characters to rehearse scenes that don’t end up in the film, so how does that work? Is that not back story?
JJ
I don’t like rehearsing scenes in the film, but I like rehearsing with actors. I love coming up with scenes on the spot that their characters would be in. I don’t like rehearsing scenes from the film because I don’t believe actors should be acting out something. They should be reacting to something as a character. So for me, it’s really fun to rehearse with them. When I worked with Forest Whittaker, he became ‘Ghost Dog’, (we made a film together called, Ghost Dog, The Way of the Samurai), and he was Ghost Dog. We could walk anywhere and he would be in character, and that was interesting. But scenes in the film should be fresh. I also never talk to the actors as a group about a scene because the scene has a different meaning for each character so I talk to them separately.
BH
Presumably, you shot all the individual segments separately – you’re known for making your films in segments. Mystery Train had three stories, Night on Earth had five, and this one seems to continue that structure. What is the appeal of breaking up a narrative into bite size chunks?
JJ
I had the great fortune when I was young to have a few years as an assistant/gofer for Nicholas Roeg, who is a heroic director for me. He told me over and over, the one thing I want you to learn is when you’re shooting a scene, think only about the scene you’re shooting. Give it a beginning and an end, and don’t think about how it connects to the rest of the film. Think of it as little beads that you’re making, and eventually you’ll string them together. Don’t string them together in your head while you’re shooting them. That had a big effect on me. I’ve never been able to shoot a film in continuity. You’re always shooting a film way out of order. I even write my scripts out of order. Sometimes I’ll write scene thirty two, then I’ll get an idea for scene six. I’m not very analytical about my own work.
BH
When do you come up with the structure that we see?
JJ
I have a script when I shoot, but when I’m collecting all the ideas I’ve had, it’s a ‘connect the dots’ story. So I do have a general idea for a story, and it is there in the script and I don’t work from notes. Although some critics might not believe that…
BH
Another thing that felt very familiar in this film is in a lot of your films it feels almost like an American looking at America with a foreigner’s eye, and this one does the same. Bill’s character doesn’t really belong there in the way that the Winston character belongs – did you decide purposefully to blur the actual places that Don [Bill Murray] goes to, were we supposed think it was ‘just America’?
JJ
On the crew while we were shooting we referred to it as ‘Generica’. It looks the same if you avoid the beautiful landscapes, but mostly it looks like this. The license plates had fake names, even the letter has a zip code that is non-existent. It was intended to be Generica. My favourite critic in the US, Jonathan Rosembaum, I spoke to him briefly on the phone and he said ‘Broken Flowers is your most anti-American film yet’. Then we got disconnected…maybe Condeleeza Rice was listening…. I’m curious to find out what he meant, but I took that as a compliment in some ways.
Julie Delpy takes her leave of Bill Murray's Don
BH
What is the process that you use when you write? Do you isolate yourself, go into the country..?
JJ
Yes. I live partly in the city, and partly very isolated in the Catskills, north of New York City. I almost always write up there. Coffee and Cigarettes I wrote in the city, but I wrote those scripts the night before we were filming once I knew which actors were going to be there. I’m not sure you would even call that writing. I like to write away from the energy of the city.
BH
Does it come easy to you?
JJ
It depends, some take a long time. This script took two and a half weeks to write, and that’s pretty fast. But I collect ideas for a long time – I have ideas for several scripts now. One of which I have notes going back fifteen years. I’m very slow – it takes a while for things to ferment.
BH
How do you work with collaborators? You have two other names credited with story on this film.
JJ
Well I don’t collaborate as a writer. I don’t know how to do that. Sarah Driver and Bill Raden were writing a script together seven years ago and they threw this idea at me about a guy getting a letter like this. But that was the whole idea. I said that’s a cool idea, don’t you guys want to use that, and they said no, that’s why we’re giving it to you, it’s something you might want to play with. So I just carried it around for a long time. I have the actors that I’d hope would play the characters in my head, and then I sit down and make it into a script. And I hate re-writing, and I hate scripts – they’re not literature or a play or a novel, they are a blue print for something. And I don’t like reading scripts that I don’t know who was going to make it into a film because I cannot visualize it. If it’s someone I know, like Aki Kaurismaki gives me a script that he’s written, I know his style. But I just don’t like the form. I re-write each night before shooting, but I don’t like labouring over the script or analyzing the script because I realize it’s an important part of my job to not know what it means. It’s not my job to analyze the thing. This film I kept that analytical side at bay while writing, directing and editing. I don’t want to be responsible for the meaning of the film. Certainly it has intentions that I’ve put in there. But I wait for people smarter than me to explain it to me later.
Audience Member
Have you got any intention to work with Jon Kilik [producer] on another picture, perhaps based in the UK?
JJ
I don’t plan ahead very much. I must say though, secretly, there is a film I’d like to make in England. It’s not the next thing I’m going to do, but it’s one of the five things I have in notebooks that I’d very much like to shoot here. I had a very good experience working with Jon Kilik, he worked also with Stacey Smith, and they produced the film. They were great producers. I’m also really honoured that a close friend of mine is here – Drew Kunin, who’s a sound mixer extraordinaire. [applause]
AM
How did you get Robert Mitchum into the film [Dead Man], and did you enjoy working with him? When you are shooting a scene, are you enjoying it or are you stressed about whether it’ll meet your expectations?
JJ
I don’t know if I’d say I enjoy it, but I do love the filming part because you’re working with so many other people. I do really enjoy filming, but it’s really hard work. Making a film will kick your ass. I read an interview with Dennis Hopper where he said, ‘y’know it’s just as hard to make a good film as it is to make a bad one’. But I think of the writing as seduction, and then when you’re filming it’s like sex – because you’re with all these amazing people – then when you’re editing it’s like you’re pregnant and you’re waiting to deliver this thing. I do love shooting, but it’s exhausting. Working with Robert Mitchum, he’s such an icon. He’s the only actor I’ve ever been somewhat intimidated by because, damn, it’s Robert Mitchum! But he’s very self effacing and very surly. He does not improvise, and he has to have the script several days in advance, and at one point I wanted to flip two sentences in his dialogue and I told his assistant outside his trailer, ‘I just want to talk to him about the script’. And he said, ‘good luck to you, go right in!’ I went in, and he said, ‘what do you want, what is it?’ ‘Well, I just wanted to change… ‘Change what? The script? No, I don’t do that’. But I explained and said ‘I’m really sorry to do this to you’, and he said ‘yeah, that’s what they said to Gary Gilmour before they executed him’. But he did relent. And a lot of his surliness was just his own personality, and he’s actually a very sweet person. But he’s intimidating just by who he is and what he’s given us – it was quite amazing. Sometimes we’d be doing a take, and instead of watching the take I’d be thinking ‘that’s Robert Mitchum, he’s in our film, how did this happen!’
AM
The music in the film is fantastic, and I was wondering if any of the sound stuff was going through your head a lot earlier on in the process?
JJ
Music is really important and inspiring to me, and I’m a film geek, and I read a lot and I like all kinds of human expression. I love literature and cinema, but to me, music is the highest form of expression. I get a lot from music – and it affects the way I think, and I listen a lot to music when I’m writing. In this case, I discovered the music of Mulatu Astatke about 7 or 8 years ago, and started fiending for his music and trying to find it anywhere I could. He’s from Ethiopia. When I was writing the film, I was listening to his music a lot and that’s why I wrote Jeffrey Wright’s character to be of Ethiopian origin – to sneak the music into the film. I remember taking a break from writing, and I’ll use music to wash away everything and go to another place, and I was listening to Gabriel Faure’s Requiem, and damn, if that didn’t sneak into the film too! I often have a semi-specific idea about the score of the film. In this film there is no real score, but the Mulatu Astatke music serves as one, but it’s all originally existing music.
AM
Was the use of fade-out in the script, or introduced at editing stage?
JJ
It was in the script, although the script had more of them. At a certain point during the editing, I started trying to see if I could hard-cut everything together and not use them at all, but there were moments where I felt the film needed that respiration. I used them where they exist, but there were more in the script.
AM
There’s a lot of comments this year about the dwindling box office in America – and your film is a breath of fresh air. Do you think that the independent film sector is finally getting their chance to really go to town and make some more movies that are reasonably budgeted movies that are seen at a more broader scale?
JJ
I don’t know how to analyse that. I don’t even understand the idea of independent cinema – it seems to get usurped and used as a marketing label. But Hollywood has started imitating what they thought was independent cinema, and with great success such as American Beauty. That was really a studio film and it won some Academy Awards. I live in my own sphere away from that world of distribution and marketing – how those things work is very foreign to me. My criticism of Hollywood is not that they make commercial films, it’s that they are very timid and cowardly about what they choose to do. From a business point of view, if they made more films for less money, I would think that they would make more money. It’s a mystery what people want to see, and you can’t just to marketing analysis and then force-feed people things which is what Hollywood does. Even box office now is a small percentage of what they make so it’s inflated in importance to the studios in terms of their profit – it’s now only 26% profit that comes from box office.
AM
Referring to the topology of Generica, and since this is a bit of a road movie, I was fascinated by the different locations that you chose – none of them were in cities. No-one lived in a town house or an apartment. Was there any reason for that?
JJ
I don’t know why they don’t live in cities. I thought that the visual ambience of the film would be more suburban and generic. Which is odd for me as I love cities. Partly I did it to keep away from an urban feel. The last feature film I made was almost completely urban. It was really more about the characters – in my imagination the women’s characters took me to these kind of locations, rather to an urban one. I’m not exactly sure why. I know that it was very depressing for me to scout locations, and when we finally got to the place to shoot where Tilda lives, it was ‘wow! I could live here’, but the other places were very foreign to me. Maybe it was some masochistic streak. The other thing is that I’m more of a night person - my body adapts wherever I go, but I go back to a night schedule. When I finish this script I thought, ‘oh man, it all takes place during the day’. Why did I do that? I don’t know what I was thinking.
AM
Can you talk more about the performances that you got from the women. The intensity and vibrancy of their performances is extraordinary, and it’s remarkable how intensely those characters have come across. But Tilda Swinton probably only had three shots in the movie.
Who's the daddy? Tilda Swinton's biker chick greets her ex
JJ
The credit is to these amazing actors and their ability to do that. And also their willingness to portray characters that are on screen for such a short time. It’s often easier to create a character if you have more screen time – it’s harder to do it this way and you get less recognition and less billing. But that wasn’t any concern to any of them. With Tilda particularly, it was such a drag to only get to work with her for two days. I felt bad, because I wanted to film with her more. But she did something very riveting in a very small amount of time in proportion to the rest of the film. But I worked with them each on a different level – on their approach and how we can collaborate. But they were amazing actors and willing to do something challenging like leaving something in your head or soul with very little screen time.
AM
Do you work with your mixer in terms of having the sounds in the film, because they seem to be conscious decisions (for instance when Bill Murray is in a café, there’s a sound of trains). And how does the mixer feel about his mix after it leaves him?
JJ
Capturing a sound is a huge part of a film. I’ve talked about a lot of people that I work with – from PAs to 1st ADs - and they never print that. People don’t want to write about technical people on your crew. Drew hears everything that happens in every shot. I’ll ask Drew not just about the recording of the sound but about the writing and the dialogue. For example, Tilda’s character is saying ‘What the fuck do you want?’, and we had a line – but I talked to Drew and he said, ‘tell him you’re just checking in’. Of course! We added that line. If Drew hadn’t been there, it would’ve probably escaped me. He’s helped me do that for years.
AM
Could you talk about Jean Eustache - and how was it working with animals?
JJ
Jean Eustache is not in the style of any of his films. He made films because he was a poet of cinema – he didn’t do it for the money or to be famous, and all his films are different stylistically. I have a framed photograph of him from his obituary in 1981 that I cut out of a newspaper, and it hangs over a little desk that I write in the woods. For some reason while writing this film, he was really there. The first thing I wrote when I started writing the script was ‘For Eustache’. I kept it on there hoping that someone who doesn’t know his films might discover it by seeing that dedication. When I did a Q&A in Los Angeles recently, I don’t think anyone in the entire audience knew who he was. But he isn’t that well-known. And working with animals? There’s only a cat, a rabbit and a dog. The cat we shot an hour of footage – and every usable frame is in the film! I’ve had cats and dogs – I’ve had one cat that behaved like a dog but still would not do what you wanted it to do. So it was interesting having a cat actor – but he did well…
AM
Do you still need to be persuasive to the money people?
JJ
I have to negotiate with a shot gun. I have to have certain things: I have to have complete creative control over the film; I don’t want suggestions on the casting or anyone on my set that’s from financing, or in the editing room; and I don’t want them to see the film until I have locked the picture; I have final cut over the film and all the music. Everything is decided by me or the people I choose to collaborate with. That’s always difficult. I’ve walked out of a lot of meetings to get the film financed at the very start. I say, ‘If you put up the money, I will make the film’. I don’t tell them how to run their business, so why should they tell me how to make a film. The negotiations with Focus Features that put up all the money to make this film (it’s an American company which is new for me because I don’t trust Americans), respected that and they didn’t bother me at all. But the negotiation was really rough.
BH
Was there a negotiation over the ending?
JJ
There was no negotiation – it’s not negotiable. That’s in my contract. I have final cut. But I’m unusually stubborn, but I can’t do it any other way.
AM
How do you work with your producer, not on a financial level, but when you’re developing stories?
JJ
The producers come on board when I have my script finished and have financed the film. So their job is to see that the money we have raised to make the film goes properly to the budget of the film, and they oversee that. It’s complicated and they’re incredibly valuable. They also protect me from the investors, who no matter what contract they sign, still try to get to you. They still want to give you notes on things. Their main job is to deliver the film on budget and to protect the filmmakers from any outside interference.
AM
Can you tell us a bit about how you directed Winston’s daughter’s performance?
JJ
I direct every actor differently depending on how I can collaborate with them. I try never to treat children like children, although all actors are kind of like children in a way. That’s a good thing because they are playing pretend people. I found a way to collaborate with her where we could communicate with each other. She understood things which was very good. The hardest thing with children is that they have parents, who when you’re not there, take them home and run lines with them, and try to direct them. This is really bad. I always ask the parents, ‘please, don’t practice or rehearse with them – I’ll do that, just leave them alone’. But invariably they try to. That’s very bad because the child actor says the line the same way every time because their parents told them that’s how it should be. That’s annoying because the parents aren’t directing the film. I try to relate with them as a human being, as I would with any other human being or animal being.
AM
You once mentioned how you held Robert Frank as a father figure in your life. Are there any other filmmakers or cinematographers that have given you sources of inspiration or strength?
JJ
I wouldn’t use the word ‘father figure’, and doubt whether I would have about Robert, but I would certainly hold him up as someone who is greatly inspiring to me as an artist, and someone whose life’s work is always a process. Robert Frank particularly when he got known for his book, The Americans, immediately decided to pick up a film camera so that he could break that stigma of being known for this one thing, and he hasn’t stopped since. But, I’ve been lucky as I knew Nick Roeg, Sam Fuller and I’ve been lucky to have people like that in my life. There are also innumerable other inspirations, like Jean Eustache, although I never met him. There are many people who treated their work as a process, and who had an amazing effect on me through their work. It’s an endless list of people, not just through cinema, but also music and people who do all kinds of things.
AM
To what extent do you wonder about how the audience will interpret your story given that you work in isolation?
JJ
To hell with them! [Laughter]. My answer is a contradiction: I don’t think about the audience while making the film, I think about our reaction as filmmakers to what we are doing, which is very disjointed because we’re not working in order. What’s important to me are those of us who are collaborating. I refuse to think about what the audience wants from the film while making the film, but at the same time, the contradiction is, that if you make a film, the beauty of the cinema is entering a story or a world for the first time. If you’ve made the film that’s completely impossible, in my case I wrote it, shot it, edited it, it can never be new to me. So to me, the film is like a light bulb that doesn’t go on until it’s plugged in. A film doesn’t illuminate until someone else receives it. The film is for the audience most definitely, and often the audience as a clearer interpretation than my own. I want the audience to have an experience that’s entering something for the first time, but I don’t want to think about what they would want while we’re making the film.
AM
Given that you don’t shoot the film in sequence, do you sometimes wish that you could go back to a scene and tweak it, or do you think that once the scene is done, that’s it?
JJ
While you’re shooting a film, it’s like you’re capturing things. You’re going into a marble quarry, and you’re trying to cut out a piece of stone that looks like a rhinoceros, then you want to take it back and carve it in to a rhinoceros but you realize it’s a giraffe. So, you can’t go back and I don’t like regrets. I’ve made mistakes while working, but they’re very valuable as I realized, ‘wow! That was a mistake, man!’ But things that work are mysterious, and you don’t really analyze them. There are times you wish that you had done something differently, but I don’t have the luxury, even on the set, to play endlessly. Sometimes I’ll get what I think I wanted, and I’ll let the actors go play more with it if I have time. But I’ve never made a wildly improvised film. I have a structure for the film, and I have characters, but the thing that’s not set in stone is dialogue because people have different ways of saying things, and that character might say it a little differently than the writer who wrote it. I encourage that. But I don’t do re-shoots, at least not so far. I carry all the materials I’ve collected on my back into the editing room, and collapse in there to try to sort it out. The film tells you what it wants to be while you’re editing, and if you try to bludgeon it into what you hoped it would be, or expected it would be, you’ll be bashing your head against the wall. You have to really let the film tell you what it wants and listen to it, and let it work that way.
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