"Behind Jim Jarmusch" is a 52 minute behind the scenes-documentary by Léa Rinaldi.

Excerpts here and here

No Limits: The exotic stylings of Jim Jarmusch’s latest film. A cultural primer.

By Logan Hill, New York Magazine

                     

From Stranger Than Paradise to Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch’s films are cultural scrapbooks, jam-packed with references to his favorite music, movies, writers, and artists. His latest, The Limits of Control, is set in Spain and stars Isaach De Bankolé as a hit man in calm, cool pursuit of a target—though Jarmusch says he’s “not as interested in the plot” as he is in the paintings that the killer admires in a museum, or the music on the soundtrack. The movie, which also stars Bill Murray, Gael García Bernal, and Tilda Swinton, was a collaboration between the cinematographer Chris Doyle (famous for his work with Wong Kar Wai) and production designer Eugenio Caballero (Academy Award winner for Pan’s Labyrinth). Caballero’s book of inspirations (click on the slideshow above to see pages with commentary from Jarmusch)—scraps of color, images, drawings, postcards—was the visual log the three repeatedly referred back to. Jarmusch talks about the process.

Let’s start at the beginning. The title, The Limits of Control, is taken from a William S. Burroughs essay.
It’s about language being used as a mechanism of control, but I like the double meaning. Does that mean the limits of our own self-control, or the limits to which people control us? Burroughs was always looking for coincidental connectedness. Our film is kinda built on that philosophy.

Hiding in Plain Sight
The film’s dapper hit man (Isaach De Bankolé, above) has a conspicuous hideout in Madrid: Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza’s Torres Blancas, a bizarre apartment building that has fascinated Jarmusch for decades. “Chema Prado is the director of the Spanish Cinematheque, and we’re film-freak friends from way back. He’s lived in this building for years,” says Jarmusch. “It’s called Torres Blancas—White Towers—and it’s amazingly strange, though I’m not sure I’d want to live in it. The owner ran out of money when it was built in the late sixties, so instead of white marble on the exterior, they ended up using brown concrete. Each apartment is configured differently, and the building has all these curves.” (And the curves don’t end there. Pictured, above, in a page from Caballero’s book of inspiration, you can see how the sinuous rooms on the bottom—an empty apartment in Torres Blancas—were transformed into the hit man’s hideout. In one scene, he finds a surprise in his round bed, in the shape of wildly curvy actress Paz de la Huerta.)

It’s also something of an ode to repetition and variation.
The idea of the variations was there from the beginning, because the guy is doing the same things over and over: going to the café, waiting, going to some safe house, waiting, going to the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid to see a single painting each time. It’s an action film without action, a suspense film without the drama of suspense.

The film starts with a quote from Rimbaud.
The poem, “The Drunken Boat,” is about the derangement of the senses. He’s starting a very strange adventure of his consciousness, and the film does that, too.

You were inspired by the movie Point Blank. Why?
I’m a huge fan of Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson, and it’s one of John Boorman’s strongest films—a masterpiece, I think. It’s based on Donald Westlake’s book—he wrote a series under the name Richard Stark about a character named Parker. And Parker is a criminal who is very, very focused and cannot be distracted. He is samurai-like, in a way. Especially when I was younger, I devoured crime novels by Charles Willeford and James Cain.

The hit man wears some fabulous suits. Where did they come from?
I’ve been friends with Isaach De Bankolé since 1984. Once, about twelve years ago, he had on this iridescent fitted suit. I was like, “Damn …” He looked like some kind of gangster, in the best sense. I had that image in my head for years. I follow fashion design, and I liked Tom Ford’s fitted men’s-suit look, so I asked him to do it, but he was swamped. So we had a great costume designer who found an amazing tailor in Madrid—an old guy—and I’d go in there every few days, saying, “It’s a half an inch too short, the jacket.” Or, “No, I wanted the pockets Continental style.”

What references did you talk about with Caballero?
We talked endlessly about photographs, paintings, things we saw on the street, music and books and Neruda.

Why Neruda?
This film is about the trip. I’m more interested in the plate of pears on the table than the plot payoff. Neruda, he wrote all these odes to ordinary objects, like “Ode to an Artichoke.” And they are incredibly beautiful poems.

They’re very funny, as is this film.
One of my favorite quotes is Oscar Wilde saying, “Life is far too important to be taken seriously.” You gotta realize my poetry teachers were Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro, and the New York School is very close to my heart. Frank O’Hara was always putting funny things in the poems. Sometimes the poetry is in the silly thing, the funny thing, the offhand thing; it’s not always in the heavy thing. There’s an end of a Frank O’Hara poem that’s “My heart is in my pocket / It is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.” He’s kind of a minor twentieth-century French poet, but O’Hara meant it. There’s something so exuberant to that. And there’s something in this film that celebrates the artifice of cinema too. It’s certainly not a neo-neorealism sort of film. Tilda Swinton’s character represents some kind of angel of the artifice of cinema for me.

(Photo: Teresa Isasi-Isasmendi/Courtesy of Focus Features; Pipo Fernandez/Courtesy of Focus Features)

Like all your soundtracks, this one is integral to the mood and very unpredictable, with everything from Schubert to trippier stuff by bands like Boris.
I was listening to Boris, thinking of it as edited into a score. There’s one piece of music of theirs with Michio Kurihara, who’s a guitarist from the band Ghost, called “Fuzzy Reactor.” When I was writing, I put it on repeat. It had a psychedelic density to it. I was trying to find music that engendered that kind of slightly altered consciousness. Chris Doyle and I talked about making a film that was mildly hallucinogenic in some cumulative way—almost like a drug. As images accumulate, you gradually start looking at mundane things in a different way.

There’s quite a lot of flamenco—at one point the hit man goes to a performance. We started with one song from the fourteenth century, and I wove that lyric throughout the film: “He who thinks he’s bigger than the rest should go to the cemetery. There he’ll find what life really is: It’s a handful of dirt.” And we used Peteneras, which is kind of the flamenco equivalent of blues. The dancing isn’t a lot of foot-stamping, it’s slow motions. Peteneras is taboo among flamenco people; a lot of bad luck is associated with it. But nothing bad has happened yet …

Peteneras looks like t’ai chi.
La Truco, the dancer we worked with, actually teaches a class which she calls t’ai chi flamenco. When she told me that, I started laughing and told her that we have a lot of t’ai chi in the film. The whole film is built on connections that sort of circumstantially presented themselves.

Jarmusch: The Production Journal

"Our production designer, Eugenio Caballero, won an Academy Award for Pan's Labyrinth—a totally different kind of film—but we were just so much on the same plane. He made this fantastic production notebook and I hope someone publishes it: scraps of color, images, drawings, postcards taped into it. It was sort of his log book of developing ideas. And then Chris [Doyle] and I would look through it constantly."

On the Script

"My script for this film was initially only a 25-page story, but throughout that story it said, maybe 15 times, 'He looks at so-and-so as though looking at a painting at a museum.' I was going for a kind of trippiness, a way of looking at everything in a different way. I kept accumulating things as we went along, without a completely drawn map from the beginning. We had more of a sketch of a map, which was the idea—to have freedom to expand it."

Posted on The Independent Film Channel:

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Jim Jarmusch Pushes the "Limits"

by Aaron Hillis

As filmmaker Jim Jarmusch sits down for our conversation, he pulls out a small notebook filled with what looks like quickly jotted-down ideas during his travels. When I ask about it, he jokes with the same deadpan wit that his movies are known for that they're his answers to my questions. He then segues to his musician friend and hipster icon Tom Waits, who apparently kept a similar notebook full of topics he wanted to remember to discuss while being interviewed: "So, regardless of the question, he'd say: 'Do you know there are albino moles living under Las Vegas?'" Since his rise from early '80s Lower East Side breakout to world-renowned auteur, Jarmusch is still one of the coolest people living in New York.

Also effortlessly chic is "The Limits of Control," Jarmusch's first film since 2005's "Broken Flowers," in which a sharkskin-suited Isaach De Bankolé stars as an enigmatic, meticulous criminal on an unknown assignment in picturesque Spain. Shot for shot the most gorgeous film of the year thus far (thanks to cinematographer extraordinaire Christopher Doyle), the film is an impressionistic, minimalist art-thriller... but maybe that's not accurate. The two-espresso-drinking De Bankolé sits in cafés, visits museums, walks around and encounters a bizarre series of contacts (Tilda Swinton, Gael García Bernal, John Hurt) on the way to completing some mission involving Bill Murray's patronizing businessman. It's a viewing experience that's mysterious and fulfilling, cerebral but open to analysis. Jarmusch and I certainly analyzed the film a bit, while occasionally discussing William Burroughs and French poetry, Dick Cheney and naked women. If you're confused by Jarmusch's references to "he," by the way, that would be De Bankolé's nameless "Lone Man."

After reading "The Limits of Control," the William Burroughs essay with the same title, the only direct correlation I could come up with was that you frequently have characters who interact with one another through language barriers.

The Burroughs essay isn't all that pertinent to the film, although it concerns language as a control mechanism, a very powerful one. But really, I was just lifting the title because I liked it. The essay is interesting, although somewhat out of date due to the web. The way information is disseminated now is quite different than 1975 or whenever he wrote that. More importantly from Burroughs to me are his investigations into coincidence, the cut-up method and using the I Ching. Those things were very important in how this film was created. The essay itself is less directly relevant than some [other] ideas of Burroughs'.

What made me think there was more to it was the end credits, which close with "No Limit. No Control." That was the only reason I took another peek at Burroughs' essay.

Well, it's in there. But this film has an incredible amount of references to other things that are not essential to understanding. I didn't want to make a film that was mentally taxing. I wanted it to be, not an exercise, but a trip for the audience to be sucked along by, and hopefully be entertaining on some level. The film was structured [so that audiences] accept things as we went along and look for connective layers that would present themselves if you're open to them.

I don't know if you know this French school of poetry called Oulipo. Raymond Queneau used a lot of game structures, puzzling things together that are seemingly not connected but then become connected by juxtaposition. Burroughs made a series of incredibly beautiful scrapbooks where he would take things out of the newspaper. He'd find things on the same page that were seemingly unrelated, and yet he'd find something else that connected them. I like Brian Eno's little Oblique Strategies cards. All those things were inspirations on to construct a film as you go, to some extent. I had all the scenes sketched out, but I hadn't written the dialogue. We were very open as we went. That makes no sense at all now. [laughs]

No, it does. I was enthralled with the film's peculiar sense of logic. It has these delightful red herrings, and an elliptical sense of both dialogue and imagery that seems just out of reach of concrete meaning. It's a very human trait to search for patterns in these kinds of elements.

Yeah, and to me, one of the strongest forms of human expression has always been variations on things. The film embraces that, too. A lot of the situations keep repeating, but they're varied by the place or the person he's meeting with, or where he's waiting. It's just a series of variations, which is in classical music, pop music, fashion, architecture, literature and painting.

At the press screening I attended, a woman behind me kept sighing. I think she was expecting something more to happen, and I wanted to turn around and say, "You're watching it." In a film that's clearly about the moment-to-moment experience but still about the puzzle, how do you strike a balance between giving and withholding?

In this case, one key is the first painting that he goes and looks at, a Cubist painting of a violin by Juan Gris. The film, although not visually referential to Cubism in any other way, is kind of cubistic philosophically or structurally, in that you can look at scenes differently, details differently, details from different perspectives that are all equally valid. The film doesn't tell you how to interpret anything, really. That was the intention, which I understand -- for some people, like that lady -- might be frustrating because it's an action movie with no action. That's contradictory and frustrating if you're expecting conventional action, but we're referencing crime films and action movies in small ways... my big Michael Bay helicopter descending shot, you know? There is no real convention that satisfies those things, although the ending is kind of a convention because he [has to] complete his mission. But even that, what does it mean? It's amusing to me to hear that people have interpreted some things that I didn't even think of.

Talking with a colleague after the screening, we concurred that the film could be an elaborate Dick Cheney revenge fantasy. Bill Murray's villainous character even calls for someone named Addington.

[laughs] You're the first person I've talked to who's even noticed that. There's a layer of that in there, but the end is also purely metaphorical in that expression and imagination strangles conventional power of money and control. The end is, in a way, a convention that's not so important or interesting. I don't know, it's so hard for me to see the film. This's the case with any film that you spend two years making. You want people to see it for the first time, but I can never see it for the first time. It's impossible. It's a strange dilemma. The film's certainly constructed, to a large degree, in the editing. In the shooting, scenes were kind of modular, like when he's waiting in certain apartments. We tried to put them in different orders in the editing and found the musical rhythm of the storyline.

How much more footage is there?

There are a few extra scenes with Paz de la Huerta, the naked girl, that are not in the film. They were good scenes, but the rhythm didn't really need them. But those are really the only things removed. There was a theme in the film that we shot of these men in black that keep hovering around, like when he was in the train station. You see them in the airport in the beginning, briefly, but there were more of them throughout. Frankly, it felt heavy-handed and the actors weren't real great -- or maybe the directing of them wasn't, I don't want to blame them. It wasn't really happening, so those got removed. But that's about it.

Logistically, it seems like the most expansive film you've yet made.

I think "Dead Man" was more expansive. We traipsed across five states with horses and period wardrobe and had to shoot in places where you couldn't see a road or a telephone pole. That one was a little more complicated in that way. But this was kind of rushed, how we shot. Maybe that gave us something, I don't know. [laughs] It gave us a lot of anxiety and tension while shooting, which I generally don't like to have on the set, but it was kind of unavoidable due to the schedule. We were a little frazzled.

But you always seem so cool and collected. Maybe you hide it well.

I think I internalize it, but generally, I try to keep things calm, a little bit funny, and not take myself too seriously. With this film, a lot of that evaporated due to the pressure. That's kind of a drag.

I named the characters in the credits like paintings, "Lone Man," "Nude," "Blonde," "Violin," "Guitar," you know? I don't know how that answers the question, but [de la Huerta] just assumed that nude character, vulnerable but sort of a femme fatale. It doesn't quite pay off since there's obviously not a sexual thing happening, to her frustration, and her wanting to be more manipulative of him, but she's still mysterious, too -- to me, as well. I don't really know where that comes from. I have a film that I have notes and sketches on that I don't know when I'll make that is highly sexual, a love story of two young characters that fuck all the time. I've never really addressed that in a film. At some point, I'd like to.

In this film, I had an initial inspiration in my head: I still read a lot of crime fiction, but I used to devour it, and I read all the books a long time ago by Richard Stark, which is [the pseudonym for] Donald Westlake. This character he has, Parker, when he's on these criminal missions, usually heists and stuff, is always totally focused. He cannot be distracted by girls, parties, alcohol -- nothing. So that focus was part of the thing I had in my head for a long time, wanting to make a film with Isaach De Bankolé as a character like that, very controlled. Not distracted by sex came from those Parker books, which "Point Blank" is based on.

You named this film's production company after that film, as I saw in the opening credits.

Yeah, I love that film. We weren't trying to imitate it, but we were using it for inspiration because, to me, every camera angle in "Point Blank" is stunning. We watched it, Chris Doyle, [production designer] Eugenio Caballero and I, then we talked about the things we were struck by. We weren't trying to replicate them. It's a lone guy on a mission, but he's angry and out for revenge, so we drained all that from this story. Again, draining the action from an action film, what were we thinking?

Here's a question I've wanted to ask you for at least 15 years: how do you get your hair to stick up so cool?

I have a procedure [that I've been doing] for 20 years. I brush my hair back, and after I take a shower, I wear a wool hat for five minutes every day. When I take it off, I just take a towel and my hair just goes in position. I think it's been trained. It's the best way. I use a little hair grease sometimes, which Joe Strummer turned me on to. It's called "Black & White" and smells like coconuts. All those rockabilly and ska guys in England always used this stuff for their quiffs. Joe gave me a thing of that in, like, 1982 or something. I still have a lot that I've had for 10 years, so it's still good.

Posted on ArtForum:

JIM JARMUSCH’S NEW FILM, The Limits of Control, is a cryptographer’s dream. In this interpretation—fittingly, one among many—the cryptographer is at once the filmmaker, the viewer, and the film’s protagonist, a professional hit man (played by Isaach De Bankolé) who travels through Spain, following a series of gnomic clues as he tracks down his target. The dream is the film itself, an embodiment of the Surrealist notion of movies as oneiric experiences—elusive projections where memory and desire are coded in images of disturbing beauty. Thoroughly implicated in the very apparatus of moviemaking (photography and editing) and exhibition (projection), Surrealism infiltrated many popular and art-film genres. The Limits of Control is partly inspired by one such strain—French secret-society conspiracy narratives, most pertinently the silent serials of Louis Feuillade (Les Vampires [1915], Judex [1916]), Jacques Rivette’s early New Wave Paris Belongs to Us (1960) and his epic Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971), and many of the films that the Chilean director Raúl Ruiz has made over the past thirty-odd years in France and Portugal.

Acknowledged worldwide as an “American independent,” Jarmusch has always kept one foot in the US and the other abroad in terms of the form, content, and financing of his movies. His United States is a land of immigrants and subcultures, where no one seems at home—except for the Native American spirit guide in his greatest film, Dead Man (1995). Beginning with Stranger than Paradise (1984), all his films could be described as “travelogues,” but only one, Night on Earth (1991), is situated, even in part, outside North America. The Limits of Control is in that sense a first: Set in Spain and shot by the brilliant, freewheeling Hong Kong–based cinematographer Christopher Doyle, it fabricates its alluring dreamscape from the vistas, architecture, and dramatically shifting light that inspired a century of surrealist visions. And yet this is also a movie made from an American perspective, albeit a subversive one. Its title is taken from an essay of the same name by William S. Burroughs, and its production company, PointBlank, named for the 1967 chill neo-noir puzzle movie directed by John Boorman and starring Lee Marvin as a blinkered but implacable avenger, perhaps come back from the dead to put a bullet through the heart not only of his nemesis but of the Hollywood studio system as well. Most crucially, Jarmusch’s villain, identified in the credits as the “American” and played by Bill Murray, faces down the man who comes to kill him, raging against everything that the director, his films, and their audience hold dear.

Like Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), and Broken Flowers (2005), The Limits of Control is built around the journey of one man: an outsider with a mission. Here the character is even named the Lone Man (though no one ever calls him that). The narrative alternates sequences of this inscrutable sojourner alone—traveling by plane, train, and automobile and performing private rituals to hone his body and his imagination—with one-on-one meetings with his contacts, played by an international array of actors, including Hiam Abbass, Gael García Bernal, Paz de la Huerta, Alex Descas, John Hurt, Oscar Jaenada, Youki Kudoh, Tilda Swinton, and Luis Tosar. Although the hit man presents an enigmatic face to the world, he is also a fully human presence—De Bankolé’s performance suggests that he contains multitudes—especially compared with his contacts, who, despite their intense and colorful obsessions, are as flat as tarot-card figures. In the endless succession of hotel rooms he briefly inhabits, the hit man practices tai chi and listens to Schubert, but his quest is driven by a score that features noise bands, including the Japanese ensemble Boris, who sound like early Velvet Underground combined with New York No Wave (a scene in which Jarmusch participated in the early ’80s)—all processed through a contemporary Japanese rock sensibility. The Limits of Control presents a vision of a culture, not without limits, perhaps, but certainly without borders.

The Limits of Control opens in New York and Los Angeles on May 1.

Amy Taubin is a contributing editor of Film Comment and Sight & Sound.

AMY TAUBIN: Has anyone ever told you that you look amazingly like Lee Marvin in John Boorman’s Point Blank [1967]?

JIM JARMUSCH: Well, yeah, because I’ve been in this secret organization—the Sons of Lee Marvin—for twenty years. We consider ourselves his theoretical sons. Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Nick Cave are members, and so was [the writer] Richard Boes, who just died. Both Sam Fuller and John Boorman told me I remind them of Lee sometimes. John Boorman even asked me to read Marvin’s war diaries for a film. He said my voice sometimes reminds him of Lee’s, too.

AT: It’s a remarkable resemblance, given that your body language is nothing like his. The similarity is just from the neck up—in close-up. When did you first see Point Blank?

JJ: Probably in the late ’70s, not when it came out in the ’60s. When we made The Limits of Control, we weren’t trying to imitate Boorman’s film. We were merely using it as a strong inspiration. Chris Doyle and I would watch it together and talk about how it was constructed or comment on certain camera angles, not to replicate them but just to sort of soak in things we both responded to. The editing and rhythm of Point Blank is way far from our film. And the main character is quite different because in Boorman’s movie, Lee Marvin is on a revenge thing, and it’s very emotional to him. Our film avoids that, to the point where one character says, “Revenge is useless.” I find revenge to be devolutionary. It’s like capital punishment. That’s just going backward. I get bored with revenge plots. They’re so easy.

AT: I noticed a couple of parallels between the two films. The repetition of close-ups in which your protagonist is framed dead center so his face is like a mandala. Boorman did that with Marvin. And the use of architectural structures with multiple levels. Both films have really extreme camera angles in relation to the architecture.

JJ: Yeah. Boorman sort of alternates between a kind of classical symmetry and something very unusual or striking. He did something beautiful in the contrast between the symmetry of the shots of Lee Marvin and the asymmetry of so many of the other shots. We kind of did that too, but I’m not sure how consciously we did that because of Point Blank.

AT: And the position Isaach’s character gets into each time he lies awake on his back in bed is very much like the shot of Lee Marvin in bed, but every time you do it, you have the light moving to gradually reveal his face, which is nothing like the style of Point Blank.

JJ: But it is a repetition of something, and there is a lot of repetition in Point Blank. Variations were very important in making The Limits of Control. The whole film was really just built on variations of similar things happening again.

AT: Compared with your other films, the camera positions and moves are unpredictable. There are the close-ups of Isaach’s face that anchor the film and some of your signature lateral tracking shots, where Isaach walks across the frame, but beyond those I had the feeling that I never knew where the camera was going to be next.

JJ: Chris has an amazing eye. He brought that plasticity of camera position for me. And yet it’s very careful. It’s not haphazard. Preparing a scene, I would say, “We’ll start on this side and this is what’s going to happen. What do you think? Where would you put the camera first?” And that’s not how I usually work. I’m usually like, “I want the camera here. I’m thinking this is 32 mm. What do you think?” But I’m pretty rigid. Here, I was always open. I would ask him what he thought and usually just go with that. A few times I placed the camera somewhere and he was like, “No, that’s not dynamic, man. Oh, I’ve seen that. That’s what you want? You want to do what’s expected?” And when I said I didn’t, he’d say, “Oh good, try this.” He has this intuitive gift. Obviously, he has to plan certain things technically and know about his film material and light and exposures. But he’s always in the moment. The moment of any take you’ve done—that moment is gone. That’s what filmmaking is. It teaches you that everything is momentary.

For the last shot of the film, we were going up the escalator and Chris had the camera on his shoulder. He couldn’t hit the button to turn it off until he took it off his shoulder, right? We did two takes of that move, and each time at the end the camera was still rolling when he took it off. When I saw that in the dailies, I was like, “I want to keep that part.” We had been so careful up until then and in the last shot we throw it all away. It wasn’t intended. It was just when I saw it, I thought, How could you not use that as the nature of the film and Chris Doyle? He likes accidents and mistakes, so he was perfect for this film that way.

AT: How did this project come about?

JJ: I had a very vague set of notes about creating a film for Isaach De Bankolé, as a very strong sort of criminal-type guy. Then I just started, as I usually do, collecting elements in my notebook. Then I wrote a twenty-five-page story. I approached Focus Features, saying, “I’m going to start with this. Here’s my cast, what do you think?” And they said, “Oh, we’d like to finance it and leave you alone,” which they did completely.

AT: Was it conceived for Spain?

JJ: For Spain and for Isaach. I had always loved Seville and just wanted to shoot there. And I had been in the south of Spain, in Almería, where that strange, bunkerlike house is that we kind of doctored up—you know, the one where the helicopter lands, bringing Bill Murray’s character. And I had known that amazing building, the Torres Blancas in Madrid, for twenty years. I just started collecting those things. The twenty-five pages didn’t really have any dialogue, but they were a map of the story. It was very, very minimally written on purpose. I even tried to make the language very minimal, not very descriptive at all. So I started with that.

AT: So many elements in the film—the references to Cubism and Surrealism and particularly the combination of Western European and Moorish elements—are central to Spanish culture. And then you have Isaach, whose face could be a Cubist painting.

Cinematographer Christopher Doyle shooting The Limits of Control, Madrid, February 22, 2008. Photo: Teresa Isasi-Isasmendi.

JJ: Yeah. The planes of his face are insanely beautiful. Isaach is African, and Cubism came from African masks and those planes of the face.

AT: Because the style of the film is so minimal, Isaach seems like an even stronger center than Johnny Depp in Dead Man or Forest Whitaker in Ghost Dog. How did you direct his performance?

JJ: We didn’t want to define where his character was coming from or where he’s going. Basically, we talked about his procedure on his voyage and how he comports himself. And tai chi was very important because it gave his character a way of centering himself. It also gave the title a double meaning. Are the limits of control limits on the way we are controlled or the limits of our own self-control or what? Doing tai chi or yoga or qigong or any kind of meditation that is physical and involves your breathing is a centering thing that connects you with all other things. It connects you with the universe. We talked a lot about how that’s how he looks at himself in the world and how looking at a painting on the wall is no different for him than looking at a blank brick wall and seeing the quality of light on that. Or how you see a plate of pears on a table, as opposed to a painting of a plate of pears in a museum. That is taking something out of context and then out of context again and putting it in a museum. Shifu Yan Ming—the martial-arts master who heads the USA Shaolin Temple in Manhattan—instructed Isaach’s tai chi, and he is sort of a philosophical advisor to me in life.

AT: There are only two points in the film where Isaach openly expresses emotion. One is in the scene where he goes to a flamenco bar and gets carried away by the music, but his biggest reaction is in the confrontation with the American at the end. Even though he says, “I don’t believe in revenge,” there’s real anger in him there. It’s not just “I’m doing my job as an assassin.” Did you steer him in that direction?

JJ: Actually, we used the least angry take we did. I wanted it cool, but I didn’t want it devoid. He’s not a robot, and if he’s representing human nature and the imagination or whatever he’s representing metaphorically in the film, then he feels things. And you know, Bill Murray’s character is like a condescending school principal the way he talks to him. I heard that so much in my life—“You don’t know how the world really works”—from my father, from cops, teachers, any authority figure. So it’s hard for it not to be personal in some way. He’s pretty cool. He’s doing his job. But he’s feeling it, too, so it was the right balance.

Amy Taubin and Jim Jarmusch’s conversation continues in the May issue of Artforum.

The title for The Limits of Control is a reference to an essay of the same name written by seminal Beat writer William S. Burroughs. As Jarmusch says, Burrough's essay "is mostly about language as a control mechanism; 'words are still the principal instruments of control. Suggestions are words. Persuasions are words. Orders are words. No control machine so far devised can operate without words, and any control machine which attempts to do so relying entirely on external force or entirely on physical control of the mind will soon encounter the limits of control.' While that inspired me to think about how we perceive things and how they are attempted to be controlled, I didn't use the essay directly for the film's content but I did use the title."

The Limits of Control opens with a quote from Arthur Rimbaud's verse poem "Le Bateau Ivre" ("The Drunken Boat"), which the 19th Century French poet wrote when he was just 17. The image conjured in the quote, of a controlling force being removed, was one that Jim Jarmusch felt was appropriate for the film's credit sequence, as he explains: "I did want a jumping-off point, or, more accurately, a boat getting pushed out from the shore. But I didn't think of putting the quote on until the film was finished, so it wasn't an initial inspiration. And the fact is, though, that "Le Bâteau Ivre," as a poem, is a kind of metaphor for the derangement of the senses; an intentional disorientation of perception."

Another influence on Jarmusch for The Limits of Control was the work of the French New Wave director Jacques Rivette, whose first few films, such as Paris Belongs to Us, resonated with the kind of vision the director had for Limits of Control. As Jarmusch sees it, Rivette's early movies "incorporate the idea of a conspiracy that's hard to pinpoint and seems to grow entropically. At the end of some of these films, you understand the conspiracy less than you did earlier on, because it's grown out of control."

Jim Jarmusch has explained that one way he thought of the movie was, "What would it be like if Jacques Rivette remade John Boorman's masterpiece Point Blank?" Boorman's classic 1967 revenge movie starring Lee Marvin was such an influence on the film that the production company formed to make Limits is even called PointBlank Films. In its visual style, The Limits of Control is influenced by Boorman's film stylistically, as Jarmusch looked to echo its use of "frames within frames, objects framed by doors or windows or archways, shots that intentionally confuse as to what is exterior and what is interior due to reflective surfaces."

In addition to Boorman's movie of Point Blank, the novel which inspired it – The Hunter by Donald Westlake (writing under the name Richard Stark) – was also an inspiration. Parker, the protagonist of Point Blank – and a series of other novels by Stark / Westlake – is a similarly clinical and controlled character to Limits' Lone Man. "Parker is a professional criminal," says Jarmusch, "and he is very, very controlled; when he's on a job, he will not be distracted by sex, by alcohol, by any kind of diversions. …It's a fascinating character. So these books were a big influence, although I didn't go back and re-read any of them. The character in the books and in Point Blank was always connected, in my mind, to how the character in this film came out."

Just as with Jarmusch's conception of the film being a collision of Rivette and Point Blank, the Limits auteur pondered the question, "What if Marguerite Duras remade Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï?" The movie certainly boasts a Duras-esque minimalism while this is the second of Jarmusch's films to give a nod to Le Samuraï's as buttoned-down, hermetic assassin after Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai put a contemporary, hip hop spin on Melville's classic thriller starring Alain Delon. The way that Jarmusch describes Melville's style also recalls the mix of influences in his own films: "They are so French, and yet he want them to be so American. Is his vision American? Western? Eastern? Hip-hop? What is it?"

A movie poster seen on a building by the Lone Man in the later stages of Limits shows a picture of Tilda Swinton's character, Blonde, and the title Un Lugar Solitario. (The poster declares the film to be the work of Roi Prada, an enigmatic Spanish animator and designer.) The direct translation of the Spanish title is In A Lonely Place, which is the name of a 1950 film directed by Nicholas Ray starring Humphrey Bogart about a Hollywood screenwriter suspected of murder. Ray, who is most famous for films like Rebel Without a Cause, co-directed the 1980 documentary Lightning Over Water with Wim Wenders, to whom he was a mentor figure, just before he died. Jarmusch, then a film student, also worked on Lightning Over Water, and became friends with the German director. In 1982, Jarmusch contributed original music to Wenders' The State of Things, the first of a number of collaborations. Subsequently, both directors contributed music videos of Cole Porter songs for the Red Hot and Blue AIDS charity project in 1990, directed segments of the portmanteau movie Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002), and had cameos in Mika Kaurismäki's 1987 Helsinki Napoli All Night Long.

In his explanation to the Lone Man about how the term "Bohemian" came to mean a young artistic type, the Guitar mentions La Bohème and recommends an unnamed film version of the story by a – once again unnamed – Finnish film director. This reference is an affection nod to Aki Kaurismäki and his movie La Vie de Bohème (1994). (Matti Pellonpää and Kari Väänänen, the two leads in Jarmusch's Helsinki segment of Night on Earth (1991), also starred went on to star in La Vie de Bohème a year later.) Jarmusch and Kaurismäki both share drily understated comic sensibility, and the two have long been friends. Jarmusch takes a cameo as a NYC car dealer in Kaurismäki's cult classic Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989), and Jarmusch and Kaurismäki played Silver Rider and Cadillac Man respectively in Gilles Charmant's 1994 Iron Horsemen. Jarmusch also appeared with Sam Fuller (another mutual friend of Wenders') in the 1994 doc Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made, directed by Aki's brother Mika Kaurismäki.

For Jarmusch, the paintings the Lone Man sees at the Madrid art museum Museo Reina Sofia – El Violin (1916) by Juan Gris, Desnudo (1922) by Roberto Fernández Balbuena, Madrid Desde Capitán Haya (1987 – 1994) by Antonio López and Gran Sábana (1968) by Antoni Tapies – were a major creative touchstone while generating his visual vocabulary. "He goes there and picks out only one painting each time," the director says. "For me, if something moves me, I get flooded with it. So the idea was that he looks at everything in the way he looks at paintings. The way he watches the nude girl swimming in a pool. There's a scene where there are pears on a plate, and I wanted that to look like a painting. The way he compares the Tower of Gold to a postcard. Even the moving landscapes, when he is traveling by train."

                   

Now that The Limits of Control has been released to US theaters, the verdict of the American mainstream press and blogosphere is in. The film seems to really divide its audience – some can't avoid being repelled by it, even though they've come to it with sympathetic expectations, whereas others are mesmerized even though they admit being challenged by the unorthodox slowness and uneventfulness of the film (cf Rotten Tomatoes). This blog review rather nicely sums up the film's particular challenges. Below I link to some reviews that pretty much covers the whole range:


THE GOOD

"The Limits of Control is a shaggy dog story, but it’s leaner and less precious (and more beautiful) than the past few Jarmusch films—not to mention his last exercise in existential assassinitis, the 1999 Forest Whittaker vehicle Ghost Dog."

"Jarmusch's Mythic Limits of Control His Best Since Dead Man", J Hoberman, The Village Voice

"Surrender to its formalistic rhythm and beautiful compositions and there is much pleasure to be had here for an intellectual audience. /.../ Shot gorgeously on location by Chris Doyle, each frame a composition in itself, the film moves at its own deliberate tempo: some would call it boring, others hypnotic."

Review, Mike Goodrich, Screen

Taken as a state of mind writ photochemically large (Jarmusch and DP Christopher Doyle compose astonishingly for 35mm), The Limits of Control suddenly reveals its depths of insight and emotion.

Review, Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

"It’s a return to the subliminally jokey neonoir of some of his early films, but it’s also unmistakably the work of a seasoned master who understands the power of every shot, cut, and uttered word."

"Mission Impassable", Michael Koresky, IndieWIRE

"Jarmusch fans, in short, will have a ball, and no other director, even now, can match him in his calculation of the offhand. Yet the movie itself, for all its cinematic references /.../, seems impatient with the need to tell a narrative at all, as if its secret wish were to be a photography exhibit, or an album of half-connected songs."

"Men of Mystery", Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

"I can't wait for you to see it, and I can't wait to see it again, like, about four more times before the DVD comes out."

Blog review, Glenn Kenny, Some Came Running

"I think what Jarmusch is up to here is a kind of moviemaking that comes perilously close to music or dance, where the momentum isn't shaped by explicit plot details so much as by chimeras of movies embedded in our collective dream-life."

"Lone Rangers", Gene Seymour, IFC.com

"The magic of Limits is that Jarmusch has used rigorous formalism (both within the narrative, and guiding it) to construct what feels like a loose, dreamy continuum of ideas."

Blog review, Karina Lonworth, Spout.com




THE BAD

"It's the kind of painfully reflexive exercise in which a character mentions that she likes movies in which people just sit there onscreen saying nothing, whereupon you immediately check your watch to see how much time will elapse before the next line of dialogue. (About a minute.)"

"Begging to Differ", Mike D'Angelo, blog review

"There’s no humanity here, no genuine feeling. The picture badly needs some of the heartfelt yearning that’s characterized some of the more memorable loner figures in Mr. Jarmusch’s oeuvre."

 "Hit Man of La Mancha", Robert Levin, Critic's Notebook

"What begins as an intriguingly symbolic gangster-saga-turned-spiritual head-trip, however, quickly turns into a slab of inert pretentiousness."

Blog review, Nick Schager, The Screengrab




THE UGLY

"Paint drying. Photosynthesis. Rush-hour traffic on the 405. All these activities would be more entertaining to watch — and probably speedier — than Jim Jarmusch's 'The Limits of Control.'"

"`Limits of Control' tests limits of patience", Christy Lemire, PopEater.com

"Resembling what a David Lynch film no doubt looks like to people who don't actually like David Lynch films, Limits of Control is a singular but bland vision that seems only useful as a feng shui instruction manual."

Review, Ed Gozanels, Slant Magazine