Jim Jarmusch

James Robert Jarmusch (born January 22, 1953) is an American film director and screenwriter.

The first adult film he recalls seeing was the 1958 cult classic Thunder Road, the violence and darkness of which left an impression on the seven-year-old Jarmusch.

Another B-movie influence from his childhood was Ghoulardi, an eccentric Cleveland television show which featured horror films.

Jarmusch was an avid reader in his youth and acquired an enthusiasm for film.

He had an even greater interest in literature which was encouraged by his grandmother.

Though he refused to attend church with his Episcopalian parents (not liking "the idea of sitting in a stuffy room wearing a little tie"), Jarmusch credits literature with shaping his metaphysical beliefs and leading him to reconsider theology in his mid-teens.

From his peers he developed a taste for counterculture, and he and his friends would steal the records and books of their older siblings—this included works by William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and The Mothers of Invention.

They made fake identity documents which allowed them to visit bars at the weekend but also the local art house cinema, which typically showed pornographic films but would occasionally feature underground films such as Robert Downey, Sr.'s Putney Swope and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls.

At one point, he took an apprenticeship with a commercial photographer.

He later remarked, "Growing up in Ohio was just planning to get out."

During the late 1970s in New York City, Jarmusch and his contemporaries were part of an alternative culture scene centered on the CBGB music club.

In his final year at New York University, Jarmusch worked as an assistant to the film noir director Nicholas Ray, who was at that time teaching in the department.

In an anecdote, Jarmusch recounted the formative experience of showing his mentor his first script; Ray disapproved of its lack of action, to which Jarmusch responded after meditating on the critique by reworking the script to be even less eventful.

On Jarmusch's return with the revised script, Ray reacted favourably to his student's dissent, citing approvingly the young student's obstinate independence.

Jarmusch was the only person Ray brought to work—as his personal assistant—on Lightning Over Water, a documentary about his dying years on which he was collaborating with Wim Wenders.

After graduating from high school in 1971, Jarmusch moved to Chicago and enrolled in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

After being asked to leave because he had neglected to take any journalism courses—Jarmusch favored literature and art history—he transferred to Columbia University the following year, with the intention of becoming a poet.

At Columbia he studied English and American literature under professors including New York School avant garde poets Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro.

At Columbia, he began to write short "semi-narrative abstract pieces" and edited the undergraduate literary journal The Columbia Review.

During his final year studying at Columbia, Jarmusch moved to Paris for what was initially a summer semester on an exchange program, but turned into 10 months.

He worked as a delivery driver for an art gallery and spent most of his time at the Cinémathèque Française.

"That's where I saw things I had only read about and heard about—films by many of the good Japanese directors, like Imamura, Ozu, Mizoguchi. Also, films by European directors like Bresson and Dreyer, and even American films, like the retrospective of Samuel Fuller's films, which I only knew from seeing a few of them on television late at night. When I came back from Paris, I was still writing, and my writing was becoming more cinematic in certain ways, more visually descriptive."

Jarmusch graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1975.

He was broke and working as a musician in New York City after returning from Paris in 1976.

He applied on a whim to the graduate film school of New York University's School of the Arts (then under the direction of Hollywood director László Benedek).

Though he lacked experience in filmmaking, his submission of a collection of photographs and an essay about film secured his acceptance into the program.

He studied there for four years; he met fellow students and future collaborators Sara Driver, Tom DiCillo, Howard Brookner, and Spike Lee in the process.

Ray died in 1979 after a long fight with cancer.

A few days afterwards, having been encouraged by Ray and New York underground filmmaker Amos Poe and using scholarship funds given by the Louis B. Mayer Foundation to pay for his school tuition, Jarmusch started work on a film for his final project.

The university was unimpressed with Jarmusch's use of his funding as well as the project itself and refused to award him a degree.

He has been a major proponent of independent cinema since the 1980s, directing films such as Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Broken Flowers (2005), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), and Paterson (2016).

Jarmusch's final year university project was completed in 1980 as Permanent Vacation, his first feature film.

It had its premiere at the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg (formerly known as Filmweek Mannheim) and won the Josef von Sternberg Award.

It was made on a shoestring budget of around $12,000 in misdirected scholarship funds and shot by cinematographer Tom DiCillo on 16 mm film.

The quasi-autobiographical feature follows an adolescent drifter (Chris Parker) as he wanders around downtown Manhattan.

Stranger Than Paradise was added to the National Film Registry in December 2002.

As a musician, he has composed music for his films and released three albums with Jozef van Wissem.

Jarmusch was born in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, the second of three children of middle-class suburbanites.

His mother, of German and Irish descent, was a reviewer of film and theatre for the Akron Beacon Journal before marrying his father, a businessman of Czech and German descent who worked for the B.F. Goodrich Company.

She introduced Jarmusch to cinema by leaving him at a local theater to watch matinee double features such as Attack of the Crab Monsters and Creature From the Black Lagoon while she ran errands.