Geez, ask a simple question, get a simple answer. Jim Jarmusch recently sat down with Pitchfork to talk about his work curating a day at the upcoming All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in upstate New York (his pretty great line up includes Girls, Fucked Up, Kurt Vile, Vivian Girls, Raekwon, GZA, DJ Kool Herc, Sunn O))) and Boris) and it didn’t take much prompting for him to drop some pretty big news about a couple of forthcoming projects he’s working on.
Most excitingly, Jarmusch has lined up a helluva cast for his next film. Three of our favorites, Tilda Swinton, Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska are tentatively slated to star in the director’s next film. He reveals that while it isn’t “quite financed yet” he does “hope to shoot early next year.” No details on what it’s about but frankly, who cares. That lineup sounds extraordinary and we hope some investors out there start writing some checks to make this happen. For Swinton, it will be her third film with Jarmusch following 2009’s excellent and under-appreciated “The Limits Of Control” and 2005’s “Broken Flowers.” And if it all comes together it will be a re-team for Fassbender and Wasikowska following their work on Cary Fukunaga’s forthcoming “Jane Eyre.”
Also on Jarmusch’s busy plate is a gestating documentary on punk legends The Stooges. “It’s going to take a few years. There’s no rush on it, but it’s something that Iggy asked me to do,” Jarmusch reveals. Perhaps it’s something like “Coffee and Cigarettes” that the director will dip in and out of for the next little while?
And if that isn’t enough to keep him busy, Jarmusch is also working on a non-traditional opera about Nikolai Tesla with composer Phil Klein, has a new EP by his band Bad Rabbit (featured on the soundtrack of “The Limits Of Control”) coming out in time for ATP and is hoping to do some silent film score work.
And when he’s not taking calls from Iggy Pop, writing music and getting together film projects, Jarmusch tries (like all of us, really) to get in some quality hang time with Bill Murray, “I invited Bill Murray to come to ATP just to hang out, but I haven’t heard back from him. I think he’d dig it, but I don’t know where he is at the moment.”
As a side note, the August 16- 23 issue of the New Yorker has a fascinating and tragic profile on John Lurie, Jarmusch’s collaborator on his early films “Permanent Vacation,” “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down By Law.” It’s a fascinating must-read if you ever wondered what happened to the jazz musician, artist, actor and New York City personality.
