Coffee & Cigarettes

Programme Notes

About the film

Nine years after his wonderfully funny and perceptive appearance in Wayne Wang's scratch cigarette documentary Blue in the Face (1995), Jim Jarmusch has produced his own love-poem to nicotine… and its equally lambasted drinking partner, caffine.

Beginning in 1986 as a six-minute short for Saturday Night Live starring Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright, Coffee & Cigarettes is a portmanteau piece, consisting of 11 meetings over java and Malboro and peopled with an all-star cast of actors and musicians. Pairing such as Iggy Pop & Tom Waits, Billy Murray & the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA and GZA, Alfred Molina & Steve Coogan and Cate Blanchett & her alter-ego, ruminate in their laid-back, dropped-out way about class, race and physics.

Made with four cinematographers - Tom DiCillo, Frederik Elmes, Ellen Kuras and long-time collaborator Robby Müller - it is made in limpid black and white, with a repeated motif of checkerboard squares linking together the separate stories.

Excerpts from an interview with Jim Jarmusch (source www.indiewire.com)

indieWIRE: Why the subject of coffee and cigarettes?
JJ: The subject is not coffee and cigarettes… that's just a pretext for showing the undramatic part of your day, when you take a break and use these drugs, or whatever. It's a pretext for getting characters together to talk in the sort of throwaway period of their day.

iW: Why would viewers find that interesting?
JJ: Well, I thin our lives are made of little moments that are not necessarily dramatic, and for some odd reason I'm attracted to those moments. I made Night on Earth, which only takes place in taxi cabs, because I kept watching movies and where people, like, say, 'Oh, I'll be right over,' and you see them get out of the taxi, and I'm always thinking, 'I wonder what that moment would be like.' The moment that's not important to the plot. I made a whole movie about what could be taken out of movies.

iW: Are the vignettes chronological or ordered according to a different design?
JJ: We shot the first segment with Benigni right after Down by Law. So the first three are chronological, then it starts to diverge a bit, according to just… instinct. When I was putting them together, I played a lot with the order to see how they flowed, the variety of characters, what worked best. It was like a puzzle I tried different ways.

iW: Yet I picked up themes. Refrain-like repetitions.
JJ: Yeah, I always shot the table from above with the coffee and cigarettes and ashtray. It was liberating for me to make these little sections. Because when I make a feature film I'm very particular about thow the scene is constructed by the camera positions. In these, they're all shot exactly the same: a wide shot, a two-shot, single shots, and over the table. So going in, I don't have to think about that, it's just a given. Which frees me to think about the conversation, the details, nuances and interactions. You can play with the actors, give them room to improvise, or not, depending on their inclinations.

iW: The film plays as though improvised, but is it in fact scripted?
JJ: All the segments are scripted, but some of them diverge wildly from the script. The first scene with Roberto and Steve had very little scripts. We played around the night before and they came up with the bit of switching places. That one is pretty wildly improvised, whereas others are almost verbatim to the script.

iW: You seem to be reinventing dialogue, combining mundane chatter with things that spring from the subconscious.
JJ: It's not really realistic, and yet the intention is to get to something real between people and what it is to be a human and interact with each other. I hope it works. It's hard for me to know because I can't see the film in a fresh way. And I hope it's cumulative, rather than just cars on a train moving by. I hope they have a larger effect than just the individual cases. Theoretically, that's what we were trying to do. Emotions often aren't clear. So the theme becomes more and more resonant.

iW: How does music influence your work?
JJ: Music is my greatest inspiration. I love literature, cinema, painting and design. But all cultures have music. Music is to me the most immediate form of expression, so I get inspiration from music. I think film is a musical form. I treat it that way. Because it transpires over time in a constructed way. A book and a painting don't - you supply the time. When I'm editing, film becomes a piece of music, rhythmically and how the cuts work. Obviously I kinda like slow music.

About the director

Jim Jarmusch was born in 1953 in Akron, Ohio. He studied journalism for a year at Northwestern University, before switching to English Literature and going to study in Paris. There he fell in love with French cinema and stayed on for a year. On his return, he transferred to Columbia University, gaining a BA in English Literature. Eventually, he transferred to the Tisch School of the Arts in New York. Whilst there, he got a job as a director's assistant on Nicholas Ray and Wim Wenders' film Lightning Over Water. In 1982, he made his first film, Permanent Vacation, for $15,000. In 1984, with the backing of a German producer, he made Stranger than Paradise, a feature based on his 30-minute graduation project, New World. It went on to win the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. This film established the director's trademark cool style, looking at America through the eyes of an outsider, a theme which was to be repeated in Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989) and the recent Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai (1999)

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