STRANGER IN PARADISE

Film-maker Jim Jarmusch has gone his own way for so long that when mainstream success finally catches up to him, he doesn't know what to think of it. The director of hip/cult attractions Down By Law, Mystery Train, Dead Man and Ghost Dog tells Michael Dwyer about working with Bill Murray on his sweet hit, Broken Flowers

AFTER 25 years working as one of American cinema's truly independent writer-directors, making only the movies he wants to make and maintaining complete creative control over all of them, Jim Jarmusch seems mildly embarrassed to be experiencing mainstream success with his charming new film. Broken Flowers was warmly received by critics at Cannes in May and collected the festival's runner-up prize for best film. Now it's a hit at the US box-office, having earned more than $20 million on limited release.

"Yes, I am surprised it's doing so well," the impeccably coiffed Jarmsuch said when we talked over cups of tea at a London hotel recently. "I try to keep that stuff a little bit at a distance and I don't follow the numbers every weekend. This obsession with box-office is so unnatural, especially now that it accounts for only about 26 per cent of a film company's revenue.

"I'm very happy it's doing so well and that so many people are seeing it, but I'm not thinking too deeply about it. To paraphrase one of my heroes, William Blake, it's a crime to evaluate anything by money."

Broken Flowers is the type of well-regarded independent picture that often gets honoured in the screenplay categories at the Oscars, as happened with The Crying Game, The Usual Suspects, Lost in Translation and Sideways. If the movie is nominated, will Jarmusch make his debut at the ceremony next spring?

"I'm not sure," he says, pondering a prospect that never arose before. "I have two feelings about that. If you're not gracious when people ask you to momentarily stand on a pedestal - which, believe me, is not my thing - you seem arrogant. Then, if you stand up there and just jerk off, you seem like an idiot, you know. Maybe one should be gracious, but going to something like that is kind of against my nature. I'm not really thinking about it because I don't expect it. I think it would be nice if it happened for Bill."

The film stars Bill Murray as a middle-aged womaniser named Don Johnston, who has never married. He receives a letter from a former lover, advising him that she had a son by him and that their offspring, now 19, may try to contact him. The letter isn't signed, and Johnston embarks on a tour of the women in his life from 20 years earlier, played by Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy and Tilda Swinton. Trying to discover his son, Johnston discovers a great deal about himself in this deceptively light serious comedy.

Broken Flowers taps into one of the recurring themes in movies this year - fathers seeking out lost sons, or sons seeking out lost fathers - which figures centrally in the new films by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (L'Enfant), Wim Wenders (Don't Come Knocking), James Marsh (The King), Duncan Tucker (Transamerica), Claire Denis (The Intruder) and Wes Anderson (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which also features Bill Murray as the father).

"I have a very strange theory about this, which I only developed recently," Jarmusch says. "And it's completely off the wall - that it's a collective unconscious thing concerning the fact that we are among the last pure genetic humans, that in the future we will begin altering DNA sequencing and people will start being designed to some degree.

"That's my wacko theory, and maybe we are feeling that, but not consciously, and since film-makers are, in a way, receptors of ideas, maybe we are channelling these ideas in our films. You could carry this theory to an extreme sci-fi element and imagine that these so-called aliens that people repeatedly refer to are merely us in the future, time travelling back to analyse humans before these alterations."

Jarmusch has a penchant for wordplay, often expressed through the names he gives his characters. In Dead Man, his remarkable 1995 surreal western, Johnny Depp's pivotal character is William Blake, there are marshals named Lee and Marvin, and killers called Wilson and Pickett. A running joke in Broken Flowers is that Don Johnston's name prompts several references to the similarly named Miami Vice actor, and to Don Juan, the subject of a movie Johnston is watching in an early scene.

"I intentionally tried to employ a lot of cliches in the film," Jarmusch says, "and that's the first, most obvious one - Don Juan, Don Johnston - and then there's the girl named Lolita. There's a lot of things woven into the film that are cliches that I was embracing, not necessarily to subvert them, but to apply them.

"With Don Johnston, my intention was not to make him an obviously charming lover. A few people asked me why I've got all this Don Juan stuff when the character isn't all that suave, but I wanted to show by quoting all the Don Juan references that people project that image on to men who are not married, are of a certain age and have had a number of relationships."

As Johnston revisits his former lovers, the film acutely captures the awkwardness of reunions between people who haven't met for decades.

"Yeah, it's a very delicate thing to walk into somebody's life that you could be part of if fate worked in a different way," Jarmusch says. "That's a very odd feeling. It's something I personally do not search out, because I'm not someone who likes to look back, so it's kind of odd that I wrote this story.

"At the same time, it's what attracted me to the story as I started to make notes and develop my ideas. The reactions are different with each of the women he visits, because every person is different. I find the sequence with Frances Conroy very painful, as her character is quite fragile, and it's so disruptive for her that he shows up at all."

Conroy found fame as the materfamilias in Six Feet Under, but Jarmusch says he has never seen that series.

"I'm not a big TV viewer, you know, so I didn't even know who she was. I wrote one character with Sharon Stone in mind and another for Jessica Lange. I had met Tilda Swinton in Los Angeles at a concert by The Darkness. But I didn't have anyone in mind for the other woman. Then my casting director told me I should meet Frances Conroy, and I did and I thought she was perfect."

Although Johnston's best friend in the film is his internet-obsessed neighbour played by Jeffrey Wright, Jarmsuch says he is even less interested in going online than in watching television "I don't even own a computer and I've no email, although my office has computers and email and I edit my films on Avid systems which are computers. I have a cellphone, but I usually keep it turned off and use it for messages or emergencies.

"Rather than this technology freeing people, they're tethered to it. They can't get away from it. That's a drag. I'm already irresponsible enough in terms of responding to all the calls, letters and faxes I get, so to add one more element for me to be delinquent on is just not helpful. I'm also a kind of Luddite. I still write my scripts by hand in notebooks and then dictate them to someone who types them up."

Broken Flowers is Jarmusch's second consecutive film with Bill Murray after Coffee and Cigarettes, although he had written an earlier screenplay, Three Moons in the Sky, in which Murray was to play a polygamist who loved each of his three wives but kept them secret from each other.

"We were going to make that film in 2001," Jarmusch says. "I even raised money for it, but then decided I didn't want to do it. Bill loved the story and I still like it, but the script was overwritten and needed a lot of work. I hate revising scripts. I like to write a draft, revise it slightly and then start production. Then I rewrite each scene the night before we shoot.

"So I had to go to Bill and tell him I didn't want to do that film even though I'd raised the money. I said I mustn't have known what I was thinking when I did that, but I just didn't want to do all this rewriting on the script. Bill was a little perplexed and looked at me blankly, but I could tell him I had this other idea and I told him about that, which was the basic story for Broken Flowers. He said he liked this idea just as much as the other one and that he was happy to do it. And I said, 'Thank you, Bill'."

Murray is regarded in the film business as quite difficult and unpredictable, and there were reports of a collective sigh of relief on the set of Lost in Translation when he actually turned up in Tokyo to work on it.

"Yes, Bill is very complicated," allows Jarmusch, "but he's also very, very generous. I know the same happened with The Life Aquatic. He didn't really give his final agreement to do the film until they had already spent some millions of dollars. But he did not do that to me. I don't know if it's because I'm older than those guys [Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola], or just because he trusts me, but he didn't play any games like that at all with me.

"I think he wants people to know his time is very valuable, that he has other priorities in life, and he kind of likes to make them sweat a bit, and he didn't do that to me. But I also am very careful about keeping my word and I tried to make sure I didn't go back on anything I told him in advance in terms of scheduling and all of that. I think he sensed that I'm pretty direct and I don't like to screw around - not that Sofia and Wes do, either. Or maybe I was just lucky."

Jarmusch's movies are generally serious in theme and tone, yet humour is never too far away, and while a melancholy strain runs through Broken Flowers, the film is often very funny.

"It's funny, although there are no physical gags," he says. "It's the humour of human behaviour. Even when I start making a film that I think is very sad or serious, I find myself accumulating little funny elements in the script as it goes along, and more get added as we work. That just seems to be my nature. One of my favourite quotes in the world is from Oscar Wilde: life is far too important to be taken seriously. I tend to approach everything that way.

"I read this report recently, one of those stupid enumerations that are produced all the time, and it said that to be healthy you should have 11 really big laughs every day of your life. I think that's probably very true."

Broken Flowers opens next Friday