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.

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.

By Nick Dawson, posted as a slide show at TheLimitsofControl.com

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Talking about his creative process while writing Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jim Jarmusch revealed that in his earlier days, "when I wrote a script and some idea came to me from another source, I would immediately shove it away and say, 'That's not original, that's not my idea, I don't want that entering this story.' But in this case, I decided, well, why not just open the doors to those things in this case? Don't hide them. When Charlie Parker quotes a standard in the middle of a solo, he weaves it in beautifully, and it makes a reference, but he's still making his own music out of it.” In The Limits of Control, Jarmusch weaves in a few familiar melodies into the fabric of his cinematic symphony, and the following slideshow takes a look at a few of the artistic influences and cultural references that are visible in the film.

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

       

As of today, the 2CD soundtrack is available through iTunes – "The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" at $9.99 and Bad Rabbit's "Film Music from The Limits of Control" EP at $5.99. The records won't be released to the stores for another fortnight (May 12).

From The New York Times, April 26 (published online April 23), by Dennis Lim:

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A Director Content to Wander On

THIRTY years ago, when he was a student at New York University, Jim Jarmusch used some scholarship money meant for tuition to make a movie called “Permanent Vacation.” Like many first films, it is a little awkward and more than a little precious. But viewed today this imperfect debut also sums up the themes of his career: it gets across the sense of being a stranger at home and the empathy for life on the margins, and it even offers a kind of manifesto about the art of storytelling. “What’s a story anyway?” its protagonist muses, “except one of those connect-the-dots drawings that in the end forms a picture of something?”

The largely plotless movie ends with an image that now seems neatly symbolic: its hepcat hero is on a boat pulling out of New York Harbor, the Manhattan skyline receding into the distance. Since then Mr. Jarmusch has found his place as a poet of travel and a global ambassador for downtown cool. His protagonists are typically solitary adventurers, and his stories are usually mere clotheslines on which chance encounters and running gags are hung. His career, while not exactly a permanent vacation, has been consecrated to the romance of wanderlust and the possibilities of cross-cultural exchange. 

A true independent who insists on final cut and who even owns all his negatives, Mr. Jarmusch has long been a world-cinema brand name, especially popular in Europe and Japan. Except for parts of the taxicab anthology “Night on Earth” (1991), however, his films have been set in the United States, which he has a particular knack for depicting through the eyes of outsiders. But with his 10th feature, “The Limits of Control,” which follows an impassive man of mystery (Isaach De Bankolé) on a lethal mission through Spain, Mr. Jarmusch, no less than his protagonist, is the stranger in paradise. 

“Being in a place where you don’t understand certain things is really inspiring for your imagination,” Mr. Jarmusch said in a recent interview in the Manhattan office of Focus Features, the distributor of “The Limits of Control,” which opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles. 

“Maybe it’s because I grew up in Akron, Ohio, and never thought I would get out,” Mr. Jarmusch said, reflecting on the importance of travel in his films. It could also be, he added, because his first trip abroad, as a college student in Paris, reading André Breton and watching movies at the Cinémathèque Française, had such a mind-expanding effect. 

Mr. Jarmusch has made a specialty of the deadpan odyssey, starting with his breakthrough film, “Stranger Than Paradise” (1984). “The oldest narrative in the world is the journey,” he said. “I don’t really believe in originality. Art and human expression are about variations. There’s an ocean of possible ways, but they don’t ever come in the same configuration.” 

The road movie is certainly not the only genre Mr. Jarmusch has tailored to suit his needs. “Dead Man” (1995) is a western with both cosmic and political dimensions. “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” (1999) cross-pollinates the rituals of the samurai film with those of the Mafia movie. 

“The Limits of Control” harks back to the existential crime films that enjoyed a golden age in the late ’60s with Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Samourai” and John Boorman’s “Point Blank.” Mr. Jarmusch summed up his intentions with typical dry perversity: “I always wanted to make an action film with no action, or a film with suspense but no drama.” 

In keeping with his fondness for repetition and episodic structures, “The Limits of Control” takes shape as a series of interactions and transactions. The lone man runs into a series of colorful types (Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Gael García Bernal, Bill Murray and others, making the most of minimal screen time), most of them envoys of a sort, who dispense gnomic instructions and presumably less pertinent ruminations. Matchboxes branded “Le Boxeur” are exchanged. Some contain a piece of paper bearing coded inscriptions, which the De Bankolé character dutifully folds up and swallows, washing down the clue with a gulp of espresso. 

Mr. Jarmusch’s previous film, the melancholic “Broken Flowers” (2005), in which Mr. Murray played a graying lothario who goes in search of his former flames, seemed like the product of a mellowed middle age. But “The Limits of Control” affirms that at 56 he remains open as ever to experimentation, perhaps even to new ways of making and seeing movies. 

There are obvious affinities between “The Limits of Control” and Mr. Jarmusch’s most adventurous film, “Dead Man,” which received mixed reviews when it was released but found its way onto many critics’ lists of the best movies of the ’90s. Each film undertakes a journey that is as much metaphysical as literal: a trip in more than one sense. By opening with a quotation from the Rimbaud poem “The Drunken Boat,” with its hallucinatory visions of being lost at sea, “The Limits of Control” even picks up where “Dead Man” left off, with Johnny Depp’s character being pushed out to sea and into the spirit world. 

The title comes from an essay by William S. Burroughs about mind-control techniques. “I like the double sense,” Mr. Jarmusch said. “Is it the limits to our own self-control? Or is it the limits to which they can control us, ‘they’ being whoever tries to inject some kind of reality over us?” 

But the title also registers as an acknowledgment that control, while unavoidable in the messy collective endeavor of moviemaking, runs counter to Mr. Jarmusch’s free-form approach. He starts with specific actors, gathers up seemingly unrelated ideas and settles on situations and moods before filling in what passes for a plot. “I work backwards,” he said. “That can be dangerous, and it can take a while.” For “The Limits of Control” he had even fewer starting points than usual: an actor, a character and a place, the curving Torres Blancas, a Madrid apartment tower that he first visited in the ’80s.

Location scouting was critical, since the movie, as Mr. Jarmusch saw it, was very much a matter of finding evocative spaces and landscapes and responding to them. The film came together as a connect-the-dots exercise. He sketched out the character’s itinerary, beginning in the cosmopolitan capital, Madrid, then heading south to the Moorish city of Seville on a high-speed train that traverses the olive groves and almond orchards of the Andalusian countryside. The eventual destination is the southeast, the lunar desert terrain near the coastal town of Alméria (where many spaghetti westerns were shot).

Mr. Jarmusch started filming without a complete script; instead he had what he called “a minimal map,” a 25-page story. The dialogue was filled in the night before a scene was shot. “With Jim it’s always about what’s between the lines,” said Mr. De Bankolé, who has appeared in three of Mr. Jarmusch’s previous films. 

The odd little totems and fetishes embedded throughout the movie may seem arbitrary, but mention any one of them and Mr. Jarmusch will riff at length about its personal significance. He had received the Boxeur matches, which are common throughout Africa, as gifts, first from the musicologist Louis Sarno, then from Mr. De Bankolé, who was born in Ivory Coast. The black pickup truck that transports Mr. De Bankolé’s character to his ultimate destination, down to the slogan emblazoned on it (“La Vida No Vale Nada,” the title of a song by the Cuban singer and revolutionary Pablo Milanés), is modeled on one owned by Joe Strummer of the Clash, who appeared in “Mystery Train” and, before his death in 2002, lived part time in the south of Spain. 

The clearest sign of Mr. Jarmusch’s commitment to a looser way of working was his decision to team up with the cinematographer Christopher Doyle, best known for his seat-of-the-pants collaborations with Wong Kar-wai. “I wanted Chris’s wild side to find things I might not find,” Mr. Jarmusch said. 

Music was the most important key to the rhythms and textures of the film. Mr. Jarmusch’s soundtracks are the height of hipster connoisseurship: Neil Young’s feedback-choked guitar vamps on “Dead Man,” RZA’s sinuous hip-hop on “Ghost Dog,” Mulatu Astatke’s Ethiopian jazz-funk on “Broken Flowers.” For “The Limits of Control,” which called for a soundscape that he described as “layered, big, sort of damaged,” he relies on distortion-heavy epics by ambient-noise bands like Boris and Sunn O))). 

Mr. Doyle, who has worked extensively in Asia, said there are ways in which Mr. Jarmusch’s methods are more East than West. “There are certain aspects of Asian filmmaking where you’re always looking for the essential in the picture,” he said. “We’re not sure what the film is until we find it.” 

Like Forest Whitaker’s urban samurai in “Ghost Dog,” Mr. De Bankolé’s character is an apparent adherent of Eastern philosophy. The lone man practices tai chi and has a deliberate, Zenlike air to him. (At museums he takes in only one painting per visit.) Mr. De Bankolé said he got into character by reading the Japanese martial-arts manual “The Art of Peace.” 

“It would slow me down,” he said. “He should be almost floating when he walks.” 

Mr. Jarmusch is not a practicing Buddhist, but he said, “it’s a philosophy that speaks to me more clearly than others.” He does tai chi and qigong and has come up with a concentration exercise — “a cross between meditating and taking a hallucinogenic drug” — that requires him to pay close attention to all noises within earshot. (In a lovely sequence Mr. De Bankolé’s character lies on his bed in a Seville apartment as the light changes and the sounds of the neighborhood wash over him.) 

To the extent that “The Limits of Control” is a puzzle, Mr. Jarmusch said he drew inspiration from Jacques Rivette’s films, where the pleasure often lies in disorientation in the accumulation of cryptic clues and resonances rather than in solutions. Accordingly, he was more eager to hear interpretations of the film than to offer his own. 

“It’s not my job to know what it means,” he said, adding that the Juan Gris painting seen at one point could be taken as a hint to the movie’s Cubist nature. “It’s interpretable in different ways, and they’re all valid.” 

The other day his friend the actress Ingrid Caven told him she had assumed the little pieces of paper that Mr. De Bankolé’s character swallows are tabs of blotter acid. “She said each time he eats one of those, he gets perky,” Mr. Jarmusch said. “I hadn’t thought of that, but I’ll take it.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum has posted this item on his blog:

Even if he didn’t like Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, which I found immensely pleasurable and mesmerizing, I’m glad that Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Rechtshaffen at least picked up on the fact that Bill Murray, who turns up very late in the film, is “channeling” Dick Cheney when he does. This is by no means a gratuitous detail. Trust a minimalist to make absences as important as presences. None of the characters in this movie is named, all of them are assigned labels in the cast list, and the only label assigned to Murray is “American”. Furthermore, unless I missed something, the European (specifically Spanish) landscape that Jarmusch and his cinematographer Chris Doyle capture so beautifully and variously, in diverse corners of Madrid and Seville, is otherwise utterly devoid of Americans of any kind — a significant statement in itself — until a foul-mouthed Murray makes his belated experience in a bunker, as ill-tempered as the American trade press is already being about this entrancing movie. Prior to that, we’re told repeatedly, in Spanish, by a good many others in the film, that he who tries to be bigger than all the others will wind up in a cemetery. 

It’s no less pertinent that a Spanish boy on the street previously asks Isaach De Bankolé — who’s channeling Lee Marvin in Point Blank, and is called “Lone Man” in the cast list — if he’s an American gangster and De Bankolé replies, “No.” It seems like an act of prophecy that an American gangster like Chaney should meet his symbolic comeuppance in the same country that might now arrest him for war crimes if he should ever make an actual appearance there. It also seems relevant that the boy and his street pals are reluctant to believe what the Lone Man says. After all, American gangsterism is a style that seems designed for export. In Point Blank, directed by an Englishman, the terrain is supposedly Los Angeles, but Lee Marvin might as well be trekking across Mars; and in Le samourai, directed by a Frenchman — another obvious source for The Limits of Control — the terrain is supposedly Paris, but Alain Delon might as well be holing up somewhere in Tokyo.  

I was originally going to wait until The Limits of Control opened in early May before posting anything on this site about it, but I figure that if the trade press can sound off about it, so can I. Or at least offer a couple of first impressions of why I mainly prefer this movie to Broken Flowers. 

For one think, De Bankolé is a magnificent camera subject –a lot more fascinating to follow in his lonely rounds than Murray is in Broken Flowers, at least to me — and the urban and rural landscapes here do more for my imagination than the various American suburban stretches of  Jarmusch’s previous feature. 

Another thing: Tilda Swinton (identified as “Blonde,” and lightly suggesting to me Bulle Ogier in Rivette’s Duelle) observes to the Lone Man at one point that she likes films even when people are just sitting around in them and not saying anything — a declaration followed by a long pause. 

“There are limits to artistic self-indulgence,” begins Todd McCarthy’s review in Variety. I disagree. And there are no limits to the pleasures that can be afforded from this kind of freedom. 

I can’t wait to see this movie again. [4/24/09]

Jonathan Monina of the NY Entertainment Industry Examiner has posted an interview he's done with Isaach De Bankolé, who plays the lead character in The Limits of Control:

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