March 23, 2000, Thursday

SECTION: Movies

LENGTH: 1252 words

HEADLINE: The Way of Jim Jarmusch;

BYLINE: Robert Wilonsky

BODY:

An interview with the director of Ghost Dog

It's a brave thief who reveals his booty to the man from whom he stole it. But Jim
Jarmusch could not resist showing his film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to
Seijun Suzuki, the 76-year-old Japanese director whose 1967 film Branded to Kill is
echoed throughout Ghost Dog. Indeed Jarmusch's film is like a fresh coat of paint poured
over the master's original masterpiece. It could not exist without Suzuki's stylish, almost
garish thriller about a yakuza hit man who must pay for a job gone wrong. It would be too
simple to say Ghost Dog tells the same story (though Forest Whitaker's title character, a
self-styled samurai under contract to the mob, is forced to endure the same fate) but
Jarmusch himself would admit as much. His movie would not exist were it not for
Suzuki's template.

As such, he was more than a little nervous about showing it to Suzuki in Tokyo last year
(the film opened overseas in 1999). Imagine the stress of screening your movie to the man
who inspired it. It didn't help that Suzuki didn't ... well, see, he liked it. He just didn't get
it, especially a scene late in the film, when the gangsters out to kill Ghost Dog instead
massacre his pet pigeons. Suzuki would have had his hero seek revenge immediately;
vengeance does not dawdle. Jarmusch, who never met a long pause he didn't like, waits
forever for the payoff.

"Umm, Mr. Suzuki liked the film a lot," Jarmusch says, "but then I got him kinda drunk,
'cause I kept saying, 'Tell me what you don't like; tell me what didn't work for you.'
Finally he said, 'Well, your sense of tension is very different than mine.' Which is
certainly true, because after I finished this film I was wondering if I could show it to Sam
Fuller -- if he were still around -- what would he think? And I thought to myself, he
would say, 'Well, it lacks conventional tension or, you know, a killer or revenge motive or
whatever,' which it certainly does, because that's not my approach. But finally Mr. Suzuki
kind of said the same thing: 'After they kill his birds, he drives around for a long time
before taking action.' He couldn't understand that at all."

Jarmusch is the film world's turntablist, mixing and matching samples until someone
else's work becomes his own singular art. Ghost Dog, with its RZA-provided soundtrack
and Public Enemy in-jokes and cartoon images that play nonstop on constantly blaring
television sets, is a film you can dance to. Not since last year's Run Lola Run has a movie
so propelled a viewer through its landscape. Yes, it may feel slow, but that's only because
its thrills sneak up on you, like a shadow in a dark alley.

To that end Ghost Dog is the writer-director's most complete, satisfying film since his
1984 debut Stranger Than Paradise. It's more of a Western than his own Dead Man, the
1995 film that starred Johnny Depp as a white man lost in the Wild West frontier. Where
that film was turgid, flat, and indulgent, Ghost Dog is so vibrant and alive (and, often,
hysterical) it appears to have been shot in 3-D. No matter how leisurely Whitaker lumbers
across the screen, he is always moving forward, dragging the audience along. It's a
performance of brute force commingled with slow-mo poetry. He barely speaks. For the
first half-hour or so, you only hear his voice when he's reading from the Hagakure: The
Book of the Samurai a centuries-old samurai text, though he need not say anything at
all.

Which would make Ghost Dog the antithesis of Jim Jarmusch, who never met a question
he didn't like to answer -- not once, but a handful of different ways. He's much like his
own body of work, a series of notes constructed (sort of) to make a final, complete
picture. The man doesn't write scripts as much as he assembles bits and pieces into a
whole. Ghost Dog began as nothing more than a modern-day, East-meets-West gangster
film written for Forest Whitaker. What it turned into is a profound, arresting work: the
best of Jarmusch's career.New Times: Since your films are assembled from a collection of
notes, are you surprised by the way they come together at the end? Or are you so aware of
it as you 're putting it together that when it 's done, you go, "Oh, this is what I always
intended anyway? '

Jim Jarmusch: Well, I build into the whole process a kind of intuitive acceptance of its
own organic nature, whereas most directors will get a script written by someone else, and
then they start rehearsing that script, which has been okayed by the executive producers
or whatever. They're basically following that map pretty carefully. And what I do is, my
script is only a blueprint: It shows the shape of the house, but it doesn't tell you what the
interior colors look like or the where the furniture goes or even where all the windows
might be. So I do have a structure that I'm trying to build to the plan. But I'm also -- and
I'm trying to learn this more and more -- I'm very open to things that might change. Like
I've never used a storyboard, because I like to be thinking on my feet.... I try to be open to
things, changing and adapting, and this goes through all the way to the end of the editing
process.

When you say you 're learning how t