Filmmaker takes poetic licence

It’s important to note that Jim Jarmusch is a fan of variations on a theme.

The New York-based writer-director’s films are full of repetitions and recurrence. Some are overt, like the 11 black-and-white vignettes in 2003’s Coffee and Cigarettes, or the five taxi rides in 1991’s Night on Earth. Others are more oblique: Take Bill Murray’s quixotic quest from one woman to another in 2005’s Broken Flowers. And some cross from one film to another, like Murray himself, or Tilda Swinton.

Jarmusch’s newest, Paterson, is a movie with the structure of a poem — days of the week function as stanzas, and there are internal rhymes and repeated images throughout the story of (if you’ll forgive the haiku): Bus driver Paterson of Paterson, New Jersey, with Adam Driver Jarmusch, discussing the film at the Toronto International Film Festival, says he generally writes his screenplays with a particular performer in mind. “This time I did not,” he says.

He had seen Driver in TV’s Girls, but really noticed him in small roles in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis and also in Frances Ha. But what clinched it was learning that the actor had served in the U.S. Marine Corps before studying at the prestigious Juilliard school for the performing arts.

“I loved that, because a poet who was a working-class guy was my character,” Jarmusch says.)

Jarmusch sounds very much in awe of Driver’s style. “He works very hard to protect his strengths as an actor, which are intuitive and reactive. And so he will not watch a film that he’s in, because he does not want to think about ‘how did I look?’ and ‘how did I walk?’ Because that would break something. I think Adam Driver would commit harikari if he thought he was acting out the ‘intention’ of a scene. That is horrifying to him. He just wants to be the person, and react.”

Jarmusch has been thinking about making Paterson for more than 25 years now, ever since he took a day trip to the New Jersey city. “I was drawn there by William Carlos Williams,” he says, naming the writer whose epic poem Paterson was the first winner of the U.S. National Book Award for Poetry.

For the poems written by Driver’s character, he turned to an old friend and poet Ron Padgett, who let Jarmusch use several of his poems, and wrote others specifically for the film. The exception is a verse written by a little girl — Jarmusch wrote that one himself.