DANIEL ESTRIN, HOST:
Jim Jarmusch has a new movie that follows a trio of families reuniting in awkward and unusual ways.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER")
TOM WAITS: (As Father) What do you say we toast our tea to family relations?
MAYIM BIALIK: (As Emily) Oh, OK. To family relations.
ADAM DRIVER: (As Jeff) To family, then. To family.
BIALIK: (As Emily) To family.
DRIVER: (As Jeff) Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF GLASS CLINKING)
DRIVER: (As Jeff) Can you toast with tea, though?
ESTRIN: Tom Waits with Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik. "Father Mother Sister Brother" is quiet and contemplative and strange, like all of Jarmusch's films. When we spoke, I asked him to describe the three acts in the film.
JIM JARMUSCH: Well, the first one's "Father." It's two adult children visiting their father who is reclusive, and that takes place in sort of rural New Jersey, out in a wooded area. The next one is Dublin, takes place in Dublin. An English writer played by Charlotte Rampling lives in Dublin, as do her two adult daughters, Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER")
CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: (As Mother) shall I be mother?
VICKY KRIEPS: (As Lilith) You might as well start sometime.
RAMPLING: (As Mother, laughter).
JARMUSCH: And the third story is Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore, two younger actors that I had worked with before. They are in Paris, where they partly grew up. Their parents were very wild and died recently in a small plane crash. So they are kind of grieving, getting some closure on the loss of their parents.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER")
INDYA MOORE: (As Skye) Aren't you glad we have - we had such unconventional parents?
LUKA SABBAT: (As Billy) Yeah. I mean, who wants to be a square and live a conventional life?
MOORE: (As Skye) True.
ESTRIN: And it's really, I think, refreshing to see those three very different kind of unexpected locations. How did you settle on those three different settings?
JARMUSCH: Well, the first one's kind of reflective of my - I live in Lower Manhattan, but I have a place in the Lower Catskills that's my refuge where I create and hide from what I call the so-called real world. So I wanted him to live a little bit like that.
The second one, you know, if you are a writer and you live in Ireland, you don't pay taxes because the Irish - they really support writers, you know? They're storytellers. So I thought it'd be good to have her set in Dublin, and then her daughters have moved there to be near her but ironically only see her probably once a year or maybe twice.
The third one - you know, Paris is very dear to me. I - if cities are kind of your lovers in your life, you know, New York is very prominent, but next for me would be Paris, where I've spent a lot of time and things have happened in my life. And the reason I make films kind of came from my first living in Paris. Yeah, those are the locations that I chose to write for.
ESTRIN: Wow. So it's a really personal film for you, a lot more than I'd realized.
JARMUSCH: Well, I don't know in what way it is. I don't really - I don't use personal experiences necessarily in the film, but the places are personal. I really think of the film as kind of structurally like a piece of music because it has separate movements, but there are themes that kind of echo through, and you cannot listen to them separately or move them around.
ESTRIN: A lot of the dialogue in this film is this kind of surface chitchat. You know, on the face of it, it doesn't really say much at all, but it's all about the subtext that says everything. How do you think about dialogue when you're writing?
JARMUSCH: When I write dialogue that seems good to me, I get into this zone where I'm just listening to them talk in my imagination, and I'm just writing it down. And it's kind of weird because it's - sometimes I feel it's not coming from me exactly, but the characters are kind of now alive in my imagination. The pauses and silences - the things between things have always been very important to me because - I don't know. I don't like the things that have the big dramatic label on them. And I'm not trying to say anything particularly, but the silences also are kind of a musical thing because the silences - the notes not played help define the notes that are. I find a lot of beauty or resonance in the details of things and sort of in the shadows rather than the fully illuminated places, if you know what I mean.
ESTRIN: I love it. Well, I do want to ask you, you are one of the key figures of the independent film movement of the 1980s. How do you think your filmmaking has changed?
JARMUSCH: Oh, man, you know, I don't really evaluate it. I would say that, to quote David Lynch, the language of cinema is very complex, and it takes a long time to learn it. And I'm still learning it, you know? And I have my own rhythm. I have my own way. I'm very stubborn. And I don't know. I have my own rhythm. I think as many filmmakers as there are, there should be that many ways to make films.
ESTRIN: There's a theme that you visit that I think is the unknowability of our parents. Is there a mystery of parents that intrigued you as you were writing this film?
JARMUSCH: You know, it kind of hit me after the fact, as I was making the film. I realized there's a lot of deception or hidden things with parents, you know? I think parents hide things from their kids for different reasons - sometimes to keep them safe from certain things, sometimes to hide things from their own lives that they kind of don't want to affect their children. There were things I learned that - about my father after I lost him that I had no idea about. And we're not trying to judge these characters, but they do have flaws, all of them, as we all do, I guess, 'cause we all had parents that hid things from us.
ESTRIN: You can't watch this film and not think about your own family. I certainly did. I'm sure many viewers of this film will see themselves and people they know in this film.
JARMUSCH: Yeah, a few people have seen it at premieres and said to me, oh, man, I had to go out and call my mother. I hadn't talked to her in a while, you know? So I'm sure that - yeah, and of course it reverberates. These family things - as Adam Driver's character said...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER")
DRIVER: (As Jeff) You can choose your friends and your lovers, but you can't choose your family.
JARMUSCH: But they're in us and they have affected us. So, you know, it reverberates. But I tried to build it actually emotionally to the moment where the two kids, the twins in the third story, embrace each other in the empty bedroom of their parents who are gone, you know, without a big dramatic arc or anything. As you say, nothing really happens in this movie. We're just watching sort of small talk. But, you know, there is a carefully constructed accumulation of something. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but it's kind of a musical crescendo that hits there in a funny way, in a small way.
ESTRIN: Jim Jarmusch is the writer and director of the film "Father Mother Sister Brother." It's really been a pleasure speaking with you.
JARMUSCH: Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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