Coffee and Cigarettes

quote:

Blanchett caught up in Coffee and Cigarettes
September 18, 2003

Jim Jarmusch is on a coffee break. Leave it to the director of such unhurriedly paced films as Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to make quiet banter over caffeine and nicotine the focus of an entire movie.

Coffee and Cigarettes, featured at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, collects a series of strange encounters Jarmusch has been capturing in short films since the mid-1980s.

Shot in black and white, they feature a great cast that includes Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, GZA and RZA of Wu-Tang Clan, Steve Buscemi and Alfred Molina. They babble and prattle about anything and everything, often carrying on bizarre and extended conversations even when their characters have little to say.

Jarmusch said the focus on idle coffee breaks is akin to his film Night on Earth, which plays out entirely during five separate taxi rides taking place at the same time in cities around the globe.

"The reason I made that is, when you're watching movies, the guy's girlfriend calls him, she's having something bad happening, and he says, 'I'll take a cab. I'll be right over.' Cut to him getting out of the cab," Jarmusch said in an interview with The Associated Press. "And my brain always says, what about the cab ride? The incidental thing, the thing that's not the destination?

"So this is like little breaks in your day that are not part of the structure. It's not like, what did you do today? I had a coffee break. That's the last thing you think of. So I love the idea of the thing you're not drawn to dramatically becoming the essence of the whole thing. It's very contrary, but my brain works that way a lot."

Jarmusch has lined up distributors for Coffee and Cigarettes across much of Europe, and United Artists announced at the Toronto festival that it has bought North American rights to the film.

Coffee and Cigarettes originated in 1986 when Jarmusch was asked to make a short film for Saturday Night Live. That first one starred Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright in a goofy, highly improvised story of two men meeting over coffee and smokes.

More films followed over the next decade and a half, with Jarmusch directing the most recent ones early this year. The storylines have grown gradually more intricate and scripted, including Blanchett's, in which she plays dual roles as a movie star and an embittered, envious cousin in an awkward reunion.

Murray appears in a hilarious scenario as a caffeine junkie swilling coffee straight from the pot and pondering the value of alternative medicine with RZA and GZA. Other films meander through discussions of Nicola Tesla's achievements, the lustre of Paris in the 1920s and conspiracy theories about Elvis Presley.

Jarmusch hopes to continue the coffee-and-cigarette shorts in coming years, stitching new ones together into a second feature-length collection.

His main inspiration?

"Probably too much caffeine," Jarmusch said.