Jim Jarmusch has undoubtedly been the most visible peripheral filmmaker of the last thirty years. Since his jagged rise to fame in the mid-1980s, he has worked with some of the most entrenched actors, actresses, producers, and distributors in Hollywood without ever becoming part of the establishment himself. Now, at the age of 70, his primary occupation is that of frontman for the “enthusiastically marginal rock band,” SQÜRL, which he formed with producer Carter Logan in 2009. “The film industry is kind of gone,” Jarmusch told the Guardian earlier this year. “It sucks.”
Last week, in an interview with Believer Magazine, Jarmusch reiterated that sentiment and expressed his indifference to some of cinema’s most beloved and successful films. “I will never see any Star Wars films, because I resent that I know so much about them and the characters. Why is all that in my head when I’ve never actually seen one, you know? Why do I know about R2-D2 and Darth Vader and all these things when I’ve never even seen any Star Wars films? I’ve never seen Gone with the Wind, and I never will, just because I feel like it’s forced on me and it’s some kind of corny thing. But these are very subjective, just kind of stubborn things on my part. I don’t like mass things being shoved on me, but I will go see them. Like The Terminator is a masterpiece of cinema. It’s a big action movie, essentially. So I don’t really differentiate.”
He went on to say that what he dislikes most about modern action movies is not the acting, direction, or lack of “genuine emotional danger,” as Martin Scorsese bemoaned of the MCU, but the editing: “But I have to tell you one thing I hate—and you can just do a little test yourself: watch any recent action-oriented movie and look for any shot that’s more than three seconds long. I find that really insulting and shit filmmaking: like they have to keep it moving every three seconds. And that’s the longest they’ll leave a shot on! And then cut. One second, cut! Two seconds, cut! Three seconds, cut! Man, I get a headache. I just turn it off. I’m like, Come on, man, go to film school! Watch something! Go read a book! Look at a painting! Look at something. This is nonsense. I can’t stand that.”
Despite his misgivings, Jarmusch has not given up on cinema, and he has a new “quiet, funny, and sad” movie in the works that is expected to start shooting this fall. The film does not yet have a synopsis, trailer, or even a title, but we do know, from an interview he gave The Playlist in April, that it may be aurally very different from his recent films. “The film…may have no music. It’s a very subtle film; it’s very quiet. And I think music could move it too much one way—it’s a funny and sad film, right? It sort of has both woven in. I don’t know if I wanna have music to add some other thing over it. It doesn’t really want it so far.” The film will be his first feature since The Dead Don’t Die, which opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.
Check out the full Believer interview here.