The scene Jim Jarmusch instantly regretted shooting: “It was just bad”
The best way to make art is to use your instinct, trust in it and let it guide you to make the best decisions, which is what Jim Jarmusch soon realised when he was making Dead Man, that initially involved a scene that, deep down, he knew was wrong.
That’s the good thing about Jarmusch’s preference for working as independently as possible. Working without a group of profit-driven movie moguls dictating your every move allows you the freedom to make changes to your vision wherever you see fit, which came in handy when he decided he needed to backtrack and completely change a scene.
Dead Man was released in 1995 with Johnny Depp in the starring role as William Blake, an accountant who kills a man, something that is considerably out of character for him. When he is shot, he is cared for by a mysterious Native man who declares him to be a zombie-like reincarnation of the famous poet of the same name. Filmed in black and white, Jarmusch’s movie takes a lot of inspiration from the poet himself, exploring the duality of man and the fragmentation of identity.
The movie might not have made much at the box office, losing $8million, but it remains one of the director’s most beloved films, praised for its nuanced depiction of Native culture and its unconventional take on the western genre.
When making Dead Man, Jarmusch realised something was wrong when it came to a scene between Depp and Mili Avital, playing the ex-prostitute, Thel, who attempts to shield William when he gets shot. It turns out the pair had very little chemistry, and that posed an issue that Jarmusch had to find a clever way to resolve.
Talking to Film Comment, the filmmaker lamented how, when he was shooting a scene with Avital and Depp, he realised there was no chemistry between the two, “and it was terrible. It was just bad”, something he became acutely aware of and resolved to fix within constrained means.
He remarked, “So I realised, ‘I’m gonna make a love scene tomorrow with them, and they’re not gonna be in the same room together. So how am I gonna do that? I’m gonna do it all in close-ups. I got along with both of them. So it was me with Mili giving her a flower, saying things to her, letting her react, and getting moments from her that I loved.”
Working in this way might seem unusual, but you have to make compromises and get creative when you’ve got a film to make. Jarmusch couldn’t afford to mess around trying to get a scene that he was only half happy with, and while he admits that it was partly a chemistry issue, he also took responsibility for a “staging issue” too.
Jarmusch said, “I think, because I had staged it in a bad way. It was very comical and silly. It was inappropriate, and I knew it while I was shooting it. It was not in the style of the film, but I filmed it. The next day, I brought Johnny in and I told him jokes and made him laugh, and then I took the sound out. So then I had two close-ups to cut, and a scene to make of them. I was happy at the end, because I think I got a very beautiful little scene. That one was an example that I knew at the time, ‘Wrong! Not working!’”
