Limited Control

The November issue of British magazine The Wire includes an interview with Jim Jarmusch. The article is part of their regular series of interviews with musicians and artists called "Invisible Jukebox", in which they're asked to identify and comment on (with no prior knowledge of what it is they will hear) an eclectic and provoking series of tracks. Jim was interviewed by the writer and musician Alan Licht in NYC.

[Photo: Camera Press/Andy Cantillon]

   

"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."

Jim Jarmusch and the music of The Limits of Control

By Scott Macaulay, posted on TheLimitsOfControl.com, May 01, 2009

Boris

As the Lone Man makes his trek through Spain in Jim Jarmusch’s new film, The Limits of Control, his journey is underscored by sonically rich, pulsing electric guitar music, an ambient haze evocative of explorations in both inner and outer spaces. This music comes from not a traditional soundtrack composer but from an assortment of artists whose similarities and differences are plot points all their own. There are cuts from several difficult-to-describe experimental guitar bands, there’s classical music, traditional flamenco as well as an aching, gorgeous song that belongs to the musical tradition of peteneras, a hit from LCD Soundsystem and finally, cuts from Jarmusch’s own band, Bad Rabbit. Below Jarmusch discusses how he discovered all this music and wove it into his film.

How do you describe the music of some of these bands like Boris, Sunn O))) and Earth that you’ve featured in The Limits of Control?

I don’t know what genre it is. They call it all kinds of things — space metal, doom, neo-psychedelic stoner sludge — but whatever category it is, that musical landscape is amazing.

Your use of music here reminded me a little bit of the way you used Neil Young’s score in Dead Man. Electric guitar dominates, and it’s not so much guitar as a melodic element than as a textural one.

Well, to me, electric guitars are one of the great inventions of the 20th century, along with quantum physics, the human genome and the bikini, I guess. I’ve been a Boris fan for probably ten years ever since someone gave me a cassette of Amplifier Worship. I’ve been exploring all this stuff for a while, from Earth and Sleep and Om and High on Fire and certainly Sunn O))). I was listening to a lot of this stuff [while writing], and I thought, I don’t want to have someone make a score, I wanted to do what I did on Broken Flowers with the Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatke. I wanted to create a score out of existing music and edit it [together]. I started collecting stuff, and by the time I cut the film I had a whole file of music to work with in the editing room.

Did the process of listening to this music and choosing some of it while writing and shooting push the narrative in any particular direction?

That’s very hard to answer because those things overlap and are intertwined in so many ways. Certainly some of the music inspired some of the editing of the film, and it inspired atmospheric things that are kind of intangible and only in my imagination. I don’t like film music that feels slapped on the surface of the images. I like it to be woven into the mood of the film. The music was inspiring on a lot of levels — I wasn’t listening to it on the set or anything, but certain qualities were pushing me forward in an abstract way.

Earth

How much does the imagery and theatrical presentation of Sunn O))) and some of these other bands affect your listening of them? Do you connect to the so-called black metal content?

Jarmusch: Not really. I got to see Sunn O))) play maybe four months ago at the Knitting Factory. They play once every five years, so it’s hard to see them. I certainly knew their music, but it was the first time I saw them live. There are visual references to metal — they wear long hooded cloaks, they have smoke machines, and when they play kids make this claw shape with their hand and drag it down in slow motion through the air. [When I saw them] they just played one piece of music that was an hour-and-a-half long, just the two of them playing guitars, feedback, distortion, chords they would let ring for 30 seconds before they’d go to another chord, and while I was listening to this beautiful musical landscape going by, which was extremely loud, I was thinking man, if I were blindfolded and hearing this music for the first time, these visual references would be completely unimportant. In other words, I might think this was avant-garde electronically generated so-called classical music. Or, you could play it alongside Morton Feldman or Glenn Branca. I’ve seen Boris play a lot and it’s amazing to watch how carefully they are listening to what they are doing and constructing it as they are going along. They are much more like jazz musicians — I don’t mean musically, but in the way they construct something by listening so intently. Visually, what does that link to black metal mean? I’m not sure.

It’s always struck me as interesting because, like you, I’m reminded of composers like Iannis Xennakis or Glenn Branca when I listen to some of these bands, but to a younger audience these bands are a descendent of metal.

Maybe it’s kind of an unconscious trick to draw people into their music by having some reference point. But the music stands on its own so beautifully. I’m really attracted to how slow it is. Sunn O))) is probably the slowest rock group on the planet, and Earth has aspirations to be one of the slowest bands in the world.

What is some of the other music heard in the movie?

There’s the Schubert, an adagio from his string quartet. Over the last years I find myself making mix tapes of classical music using only the slow movements, or adagios, from quartets and string orchestras. It has again to do with that slowness, which connects to Earth and Boris. And we haven’t mentioned the Black Angels, a band from Austin I really love. We took a piece of one of their songs, “You on the Run,” and slowed it down and maintained the pitch. It’s an instrumental part, and they were cool with that. We also have a track from LCD Soundsystem [“Daft Punk is Playing at my House”] that everyone is familiar with. And then my band Bad Rabbit made some recordings for the museum sequences in the film. In the existing file I just didn’t find things that were exactly right for that, so we decided to record some of our own.

Tell me about Bad Rabbit. Is it an ongoing project?

Well we have two tracks on the soundtrack record that are in the film, and then we have an EP with those two plus two more that are going to come out with the film, and we are in the process of recording an album-length record. It’s very slow, very psychedelic, and a little thick, sort of in the vein of this [doom] music, this category we are trying to categorize. Carter Logan plays drums, I play guitars, and on the album there are some vocals that I do, and then there is Shane Stoneback, who is our kind of wizard. We record in his studio, he is our engineer and produces the stuff with us, and he lays on other instruments.

Sun O)))

How about the flamenco music? How did you find that beautiful song that is played during the flamenco sequence?

When I was preparing the film in Spain, I was doing a lot of research into flamenco music. A friend turned me on to a certain form of flamenco called peteneras. It’s a slow form of flamenco that goes back to the 14th century, and it’s oddly enough a taboo form among most flamenco people because it has a long history of bad things happening. It’s kind of shunned. It doesn’t involve a lot of foot stamping, more hand gestures, so, as a dance, that linked it to our tai chi stuff in the film. I was interested in it being almost the blues version of the flamenco. It’s often about tragic subjects — death, lost love — and I discovered this one particular song that has an incredible existing version by Carmen Linares, one of the most amazing flamenco singers. I asked the dancer La Truco, [the singer] Talegón de Córdoba and the guitarist Jorge Rodriguez Padilla, the people who were preparing flamenco for our film, if they’d be willing to create something based on this traditional song. At first, they were like, “It’s a peteneras, it’s taboo, it’s got all this bad luck associated with it.” And then they came back and said, “We love this form and we don’t think it should be shunned.” So the song is in the film both a version by Carmen Linares and a version by Talegón De Córdoba with the guitarist [Padilla] and the dancer La Truco. I ended weaving its lyrics throughout the entire film. “He who thinks he is bigger than the rest must go to the cemetery, there he will see what life really is. It is a handful of dirt, a handful of dust…” — that comes from that song.

What about the other flamenco song in the movie?

There is an amazing record store in Madrid that only [sells] flamenco stuff, and there is an old guy there who is an expert in the history of flamenco. I asked him, “What are the oldest recordings you have, the earliest ones?” He went upstairs and brought me back this two CD set of flamenco recordings made in the 1920s on wax cylinders. So [one of those], a little piece performed by Manuel El Sevillano, found its way in the film. I even wrote in the dialogue that the guitar in the film is supposed to be the same guitar used by Manuel El Sevillano on the recording. All these things just keep getting woven into the film somehow.