Limited Control

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.

The news on The Limits of Control are still very scarce.

And curiously, the few related snapshots that have cropped up on the web, mostly on Flickr and various blogs (among which the one below, by Flickr user "Left Hand Rotation" - - looks to be the most revealing) all seem to stem either from a few days in September 2007, when Jim Jarmusch appears to be scouting for locations in Madrid, Spain, or from early February 2008, on the set in Madrid.

Please drop me a line if you come across anything else. I will of course post any news here as soon as I catch it.

Meanwhile, here is what Jim Jarmusch has revealed in the past, presumably regarding The Limits of Control

In a 2004 (post Coffee and Cigarettes) interview with Fredrik Johansson in Swedish magazine Stick (http://www.stick.se/), Jim Jarmusch mentioned his future film projects:

JJ: I'm just preparing to begin shooting one project this fall [Broken Flowers], and I have another one that I would like to make next year. I'd like to speed up the tempo, I've been too slow these last years for several reasons. The next two films I'd really like to finish in the next two and a half years.
FJ: Would you want to do like Warren Zevon, and try to make one last film during your last months alive?
JJ: Yes, I would. There's a film that I've carried with me for ten years now. It's not the next film I'll be doing, but the one after that. And it's very important for me to get it made. If I'd find out that I had only more year to live, I'd drop everything and start working with it immediately.

And in an interview the same year with David Noh of Film Journal International (http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/filmmakers/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000692688), there was this exchange:

FJI: I hope it won't be too long before your next film.
JJ: I just finished a script four days ago and have another one half done. As soon as I finish doing the press for this, I'm going to finish it and want to shoot the first one in the fall. I want to have two projects ready to go, which I've never had before; I'm like single cell. They're very different, but they're not episodic in any way. One's a road movie and the other's kind of a semi-road movie. But I don't want to talk about them, don't want to jinx them.