Ray Pride

After talking to Jim Jarmusch, you'd guess one reason he doesn't make movies very often is his curiosity.

His latest, "Broken Flowers," stars Bill Murray as Don Johnston, another forlorn middle-ager who's mucked up at love, a man who made his money in computers, who's dumped by younger girlfriend Julie Delpy on the same day an unsigned letter on pink paper falls through the mail slot, telling him he has a 19-year-old son. Enter: the couch. His Ethiopian neighbor (the always-swell Jeffrey Wright), an amateur detective, working with a list Don gives him, provides a literal road map for him to ever-so-reluctantly follow through his past. A first encounter with Sharon Stone as a literal NASCAR widow with a full-frontal Lolita of a daughter seems encouraging, but events grow stranger as he encounters other exes, including Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy and Tilda Swinton. (Don had better taste than the women, it seems.)

A son of Akron, Ohio, with a gravelly Lee Marvin voice, Jarmusch, whose "Stranger than Paradise" will permanently peg him as the original American indie filmmaker, is a more voluble storyteller in person than on screen, a true raconteur. We talk about styles of interviewing, for instance, and he offers this: "Once, I had interviews in Cannes. For `Dead Man.' Neil Young was done with his interviews, but he had another day. So he said, `I'm gonna sit in on your interviews, but I'm not gonna say anything.' I was like, `Why do you want to do that? It's so boring.' `Because I'm gonna tell `em when they're not good questions and you're not gonna answer them.' And he did! He would sit there, and he's scary, y'know. He's like, `Hey, man, that's a stupid question. The answer to the question is in the question, so you already have it, so it's not even a question, you're wasting his time.' People would go, `Ohhh, shit.' So I had Neil protect me. It was really fun. I felt so protected."

"Broken Flowers" is rife with allusions to filmmakers whom Jarmusch admires, but they're mostly covert, including a small bit nodding toward Young's 2004 "Greendale." "But all things have a reason," he says. You mean, it's personal bric-a-brac, but it doesn't get in the way of the story? "It's kind of a drag when they're pointed. But there's another one in the same scene, because in Wim Wenders' `The American Friend,' Bruno Ganz goes to a café, and a guy puts a Band-Aid over his eye, and that's Jean Eustache," the late French director who directed "The Mother and the Whore."

Continental allusions aside, Jarmusch says that despite shooting within 100 miles of Murray's New York home, he didn't want identifiable landscapes. "When I wrote it, I [wasn't] thinking about that. I wanted it to be what our crew called `Generica.'" The postmark on the letter Murray gets reads Circle Drive, Center City. "Yeah. NT is the zip code. No, it's not northern Tennessee! I just didn't want those things interfering. Bill said, `Okay, here's the deal, I can only shoot for six weeks, and it's gotta be within fifty miles of my house. It ended up my schedule was eight weeks, and I got it to seven and I got it to within about a hundred miles of his house. So he relented. I mean, he wasn't adamant."

It was only a suggestion? "Welllll, yeah." He laughs. "It wasn't presented as a suggestion, but it was received as one when I couldn't quite meet that extreme. But I didn't want the Rocky Mountains and the desert. I didn't want the swamps. And I didn't want characters with Southern accents versus Boston; I didn't want those details, that extra information. It's not important. It's important not to have that."

The movie does look like upstate New York, but not in a way that would distract an average moviegoer. "Remarkably, very few people have had any problem, saying, `I know where that was.' Except one guy I met in France, an American guy. He says, `My house is in the film!' And his house was, in fact, in the film, in just a POV out of a car. That was so bizarre. Wow."

We take a detour through still photography, and Jarmusch shares a story about another artist friend, best known for his book "The Americans." "I know Robert Frank, right? Once I went to visit him, he's there with his good friend, Gunther, who's an Alsatian electrician, right? They're sort of alike. I don't know, cranky guys, right? They have stacks of photographs tied up and they're drilling holes in them with a Makita drill gun. I'm like, `What are you guys doing?' [Jarmusch adopts Frank's German-Swiss accent.] And Robert goes, "This fucking lawyer had all my fucking prints in a vault that I didn't know about and I finally got access and now we're destroying them. He could have sold them, he was sitting on them, this bastard, now I took legal action and I got them back.' They're like little kids, and they're drilling holes through prints, Robert Frank prints, stacks of shit, y'know. I'm like, `Robert... You wanna destroy them?' `Yeah, takin' them off the market, fuck that! And then he's like, `Oh wait a minute,' and he takes out one. And it's this beautiful photo, it's called `Teardrops,' and it's just a luncheonette table by a window and the window is burned out but you see some 1961 Chevy parked out there and a little jukebox on the table, and you can read `Lonely Teardrops,' right? And he says, `Here,' he signs it for me, `Here, take this one.' And I have it. It's so beautiful. And then he's back to work, covered in dust like Robert always is, dirty, and they're having a ball. But I did get a print, a beautiful print. I said, `Is this a reject print?' He says, `No, it's a good print, I'm not giving you a reject print, Jim.' And then they're back [with the drill], `Zzzzzzzzhh! Zzzzzzzzhhh!' Jarmusch laughs again, knowing a good story when it finds him.

"Broken Flowers" opens Friday.

(2005-08-02)

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