For a filmmaker as singularly self-authored as Jim Jarmusch, the idea of stepping into someone else’s script has always felt a little out of character. But in a new Guardian interview tied to the UK release of his 2025 film, “Father Mother Sister Brother,” Jarmusch revealed there was one exception that nearly changed that: Gena Rowlands asking him to direct “Unless That Someone Is You,” an unmade John Cassavetes script written for her before his death.
A few years after they worked together on “Night on Earth,” Rowlands sent him the script, which Jarmusch described as “a beautiful, nonjudgmental love story” about a woman and a younger person on the spectrum. He said she wanted him to direct it and made clear that if he did not, the film would likely remain unmade. He agreed on one condition: she had to play the lead. She initially declined, then came back to him later, when, as he put it, time was running short.
By then, though, he was already too deep into his Johnny Depp-led 1995 existential Western to pivot. “Dead Man’ was a nightmare to prepare and I was like: ‘Oh fuck, I can’t do it right now.’ That was the only time I had any interest in directing someone else’s script.”
Rowlands was not just the center of the story; he was telling the story of the film that got away. Jarmusch also took a moment to talk about what it meant to work with her at all: “Gena Rowlands. What can I say? What a remarkable, apparently effortless person. Nothing was forced or faked. Coming from the Cassavetes procedure, she knew that the beauty of cinema was to find this real thing and let it come out of you. Man, what an incredibly beautiful experience. One of the most beautiful gifts of my working life.” He also said he feels “beautifully connected” to both Cassavetes and David Lynch through cinematographer Fred Elmes, who worked with each of them.
Jarmusch is also already moving toward the next film. Later in the interview, he said the new project starts shooting in Paris in May, and a separate recent interview described it more plainly as a road movie set in France, where he briefly lived in his youth and where he later shot part of “Night on Earth.”
“Father Mother Sister Brother” is now in UK cinemas, and given it’s a kind of triptych vignettes film, it’ll be interesting to see what shape his Paris-set road movie takes.
