Multiplexes are stranger than zombies for famed filmmaker
Director Jim Jarmusch’s work has long been synonymous with art-house fare. Director says The Dead Don’t Die strives to wrap its point about global warming in a hilarious, but deadpan package
If it seems strange that Jim Jarmusch has made a zombie movie, The Dead
Don’t Die, even stranger has to be where it played its opening weekend: multiplexes.
The New York writer/director has been so much a part of the indie film scene, at least since his 1984 breakthrough Stranger Than Paradise, that you could almost Google “art house” and expect a picture of his Ray-Banned and silver-maned face to pop up.
He admits to feeling a little weird knowing The Dead Don’t Die was competing for eyeballs in hundreds of pop
corn palaces with Shaft and Men in Black: International, even if his film does boast as many or more A-list actors as those other films.
Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny and more play denizens of a town invaded by an undead army.
“Definitely strange, for me!” Jarmusch, 66, agrees on the line from Los Angeles. “It wasn’t any plan in any way in the nature of the film (to open in multiplexes), but it’s kind of interesting.
“It’s a first for me, for sure, so we’ll see what happens. I don’t know what to make of it, but I’m not against it. I hope people don’t think it’s supposed to be like The Walking Dead or something, because they’re going to be real disappointed if that’s the case. But they already have that kind of stuff.
“We were trying to make something of
JARMUSCH continued on E4
our own.”
The Dead Don’t Die was the opening gala at the Cannes Film Festival last month, a fest that has long adored Jarmusch’s deadpan slow-take style. The fest often features his work, including his previous genre exercise Only Lovers Left Alive, a vampire movie starring Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as weary Detroit bloodsuckers.
Walking the Cannes red carpet and feeling the spotlight on the fest’s opening night was another trepiditious feeling for Jarmusch, who normally is as cool as Miles Davis.
“I’m not sure it wouldn’t have been nicer to be like a 4 o’clock screening on a Thursday or something. Because all of that is kind of strange to me and foreign, kind of a weird dream. I don’t know if it was good or bad, but it wasn’t bad.”
Jarmusch isn’t known for making horror films, although he loved watching them as a kid — George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, an early fave, is repeatedly referenced in The Dead Don’t Die.
He was also pleased to bump into legendary horror directors John Carpenter and Dario Argento at a Cannes party.
And he’s happy to talk about zombies, blood, dust, audience expectations and the death-defying struggles of planet Earth:
Is it true you write handwritten letters to actors, inviting them to be in your films?
“I do. I don’t have a laptop and I don’t have personal email. I have it in my office and I do use iPads with GarageBand to record and things like that, in my little studio. But I do write my scripts by hand and then I get them onto a computer.
I do write letters and notes to people by hand, I just prefer it. I’ll even write a letter by hand and then have my office scan it and then email the handwritten thing, you know? It just seems more personal to me. People may have a tendency to overthink your films, but the subtext of The Dead Don’t Die is that we’ll all be stumbling around like zombies soon if we don’t solve the global warming problem.
The film has that sociopolitical thread à la George Romero, who’s our template, our master, whom we look up to. He’s the postmodern zombie master, for sure. Global warming is a huge concern for me. I didn’t want to make a statement movie, but I wasn’t going to leave that out. It’s woven in there because it’s the biggest thing facing the survival of our planet. I just don’t understand how you can run away from facts and science.
Your zombies mostly don’t splatter into gobs of blood like most zombies do. They dissolve into black dust. Why’s that?
Yes, I don’t like splatter things. I wanted to get most of the bloody stuff sort of out of the way with the first “coffee zombie” attack. There’s a little blood, but when we’re dead there’s no fluid in dead corpses. Even embalming fluid dissipates. We are dust inside, so I wanted to use that; also visually, I quite like it.
As a teenager, we used to walk along the rail road tracks outside of Akron and smoke cigarettes and do bad things. We used to find cartons of fluorescent light bulbs that would have fallen off of trains and we used to throw them like spears, and when they hit the ground they just became dust like glass, dust for a moment.
And we used to just love that visual feeling and the sound of it, and I remember thinking of that when we were imagining the zombies.
Did you enjoy Bill Murray riffing on you at the Cannes press conference as being “an operator” and “a manipulator”? You did manage to get him to work with you again, no mean feat.
I don’t remember any of that, but I’m used to it. I consider it endearing no matter what nasty thing he might say about me, because I love Bill and he knows that and, you know, I think he’s fond of me, I hope. What kind of response have you had to The Dead Don’t Die?
I haven’t read a lot of the things written about it, although I could feel a little bit about people not wanting to hear about the end of the world, which I understand. But you know, this film is a comedy. It doesn’t take itself seriously, even if it has a sociopolitical thread and a point of view woven into it.
I do abide by Oscar Wilde, a quote I love, where he said: “Life is far too important to be taken seriously.” I kind of go by that because I think humour is as important as science and art, and people who make jokes are extremely important to our survival and our health. Jokes are very important.