It was 27 years ago today
There are some influences from film noir, particularly Melville's Le Samourai with Alain Delon . . . and certain Japanese Samurai films. The idea of a Samurai character intrigues me now. The Samurai were trained in the military, and their training involved a religious discipline. They learn how to make life and death decisions immediately, because of this central stabilization. I want to transpose that into Western morality. Their idea is a Zen ideal, that of victory through failure.
- Jim Jarmusch, speaking not about Ghost Dog, but about Permanent Vacation, in 1981.
I recently found an early interview with Jim Jarmusch – in fact it ought to be one of the very first ones, made in the Fall of 1981, about a year after he finished Permanent Vacation, in a US magazine called Vacation Project 13 (Fall-Winter 1981-82). (The earliest interview that I'm aware of was made by the German magazine Filmkritik during the Mannheim film festival in October 1980 and the Berlin festival in February 1982; translated into English and republished in the interview collection I edited for Mississippi University Press in 2001 - more here.) The Vacation Project 13 interview with Jarmusch and Permanent Vacation star Chris Parker was made by Terence Sellers in New York.
In the interview, Jarmusch talks about his "next film", The Garden of Divorce (which would never get made; more here) - "The story of the film is when this guy gets out of prison, and New York, or this imaginary city he returns to, is now completely changed to a controlled police state, like an occupied city" - about working with Chris Parker, and about his sense of disaffection. The piece also reveals that Martin Scorsese apparently had planned to use footage of the Permanent Vacation sequence of Parker dancing in The King of Comedy, as a scene a character sees on a television monitor (I can't recall having seen it or heard whether it was actually used - so probably not?). There's also a mention of a (mixed) review of Permanent Vacation by Gary Indiana in Artforum, which would be interesting to read - if you happen to have a copy, please drop me a line in the comments! I've posted a transcript of the whole interview on the Resource Page - here.