CANNES, France (AP) Jim Jarmusch and Bill Murray’s long-walking relationship began, fittingly, with a cup of coffee. In the early ’90s, Jarmusch began walking north on Manhattan’s Columbus Avenue (“now not my community,” he notes) while he noticed a guy strolling towards him. That’s Bill bleeping Murray, Jarmusch stated to himself.
“Bill walked right up to me and stated, ‘You’re Jim, right?’” Jarmusch remembers. “And I said, “Yeah. You’re Bill Murray.” And then he said, “You want to get a cup of coffee?” They popped into a diner, and after chatting for half an hour, Murray introduced, “I gotta pass. Nice speaking to you.” Jarmusch was gobsmacked by the random meeting.
“We didn’t communicate again for years, but I instructed my friends: I met Bill Murray,” he says. Murray, who has had sufficient risk encounters in his existence to ultimately one thousand Groundhog Days, presents some “tingling” in his mind at Jarmusch’s reminiscence. But Murray long ago gave up remembering how he is aware of who he knows.
“I don’t remember lots,” Murray says. “When anyone asks me, ‘How’d you meet?’ I say I, in reality, don’t understand.” That Murray and Jarmusch would discover each other was possibly fated. Both have made deadpan a high art form, finding sublimity within them, bone-dry. You wouldn’t want to play either of them in poker.
They’ve made 3 films together, starting with the 2003 black-and-white vignette anthology “Coffee and Cigarettes.” Murray performed as a waiter whose customers, the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and GZA, enthusiastically understand him. Then came the 2005 drama “Broken Flowers,” an excessive factor for each, in which Murray performed, in Julie Delpy’s phrases, “an over-the-hill Don Juan” whose idleness is shattered by the news that he fathered a son 20 years in the past.
In “The Dead Don’t Die,” Jarmusch’s wry but impassioned zombie tale, Murray plays the veteran sheriff of a small city known as Centerville, populated by Jarmusch regulars, amongst them Tilda Swinton, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny, Tom Waits, and Steve Buscemi. Jarmusch stated he became moved to write something like “Coffee and Cigarettes” with “a sort of ridiculousness to it.” But it’s additionally a zombie parable about the troubles of pressing seriousness to Jarmusch: virtual-age distraction and exchange. The movie opens in theaters Friday.
Shortly after “The Dead Don’t Die” opened closing month’s Cannes Film Festival, Jarmusch and Murray sat down to speak about their collaborations together. They drank coffee.
AP: Your first film together was “Coffee and Cigarettes.” Did you realize you had something appropriate together?
Murray: My reminiscence of it became RZA and GZA. They were loose thinkers at the time.
Jarmusch: Still are.
Murray: Still are. They were blazing weed through the day, type of renovation degree, all the time. I concept, OK. We had lines, but they weren’t necessarily written in stone because they never said the same factor two times, which I had no trouble with. But I do not forget to take them to lunch. I took them down the road to a Japanese location. They had in no way had sake, and I stated, “What? You’ve by no means had sake?” So I got a big bottle of sake, which we drank. I thought, “Oh, God, I’m going to get in a hassle.”
Jarmusch: I didn’t recognize this story.
Murray: Well, how could you recognize that they’re high? So we went back, and it affected them. But they didn’t panic. They started smoking every other joint or, to completely obscure any scent. And then they went on a crazy riff, and it became humorous. That’s what ended up in the movie, their crazier stuff.
Jarmusch: When I’m talking with GZA or RZA, they always ask me, “Yo, what’s up with Bill Murray? You, visible Bill Murray, guy?” And they’ll tell me, “We ran into Bill Murray in Texas, man. We were given to hang around with Bill Murray. Send our fine to Bill Murray.” They love Bill Murray.
