The Current Cinema - The Editor talks to Jim Jarmusch about his new film FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER

 This interview was recorded on 1st April 2026.

GG: Good to see you again.

JJ: We’ve met before?

GG: I suppose I could say I’m surprised you don’t remember, but it was maybe your first brush with European celebrity at the Mannheim Film Festival in 1980. You screened Permanent Vacation and I saw it and invited it to the Melbourne Film Festival.

JJ: Now I remember…. How did the screening go?

GG: You never sent the film. You gave it to the Australian Film Institute for a season of New York Independents they ran. Lindsay Smith put it all together.

JJ: Oh… now I remember. Lindsay, huh? He used to spell his name L-I-N-Z-E-E. 

GG: Right. I suppose the AFI must have offered you more money than the MFF which offered only honour and glory in those days.

JJ: I know you are joking. Nobody paid you anything to screen your film in those days. Festivals and everyone else thought, as you said, you should be grateful for their attention.

GG: Things have changed.

JJ: Not everything.

GG: That’s right. You have just done another ‘film a sketches’  as the French called them. Did you like all those films made by the French and the Italians in the 60s and 70s when people like Godard, Pasolini, Truffaut, Visconti, Fellini, Louis Malle, Roberto Rossellini, Polanski, Wajda and more made episodes?

JJ: Loved ‘em. Really smart. Did you see Rogopag? Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini and someone else. RO – GO – PA-G. Who was the final G? 

GG: Ugo Gregoretti. Never heard of again. I often wondered though whether Mystery Train started out as a movie where you were going to intercut the stories but instead just kept it as three separate ones.

JJ: I don’t remember.

GG: So why another film a sketches at this time.

JJ: Well I wanted to make a movie about just how complicated families can be in all their rich diversity and finally it came down to something about a dad with a secret, a daughter with a secret and a brother and sister who uncover a secret. There you are …and Bob’s your uncle.

GG: Very witty. The common element joke about the fake or not Rolex watches was rather good and in each there are also the skateboarders and some jokes about plumbing and the local water.

JJ: Hey you picked that up? Well done.

GG: Too easy. I did like the moment when Tom Waits as the apparently somewhat befuddled father in the New Jersey episode assures his two children that he’s not taking any drugs and then reels off  the names of about fifteen drugs he’s ‘not taking’. 

JJ: Yes. Tom enjoyed doing that scene.

GG: Waits was one of your early stalwarts, a go to for you? By that I mean do you write parts that you know he’ll fit like a glove. 

JJ: Well as I said once before, Tom and I have a kindred aesthetic… An interest in unambitious people, marginal people. 

GG: Except in Father, Mother Sister Brother there’s a trick ending…

JJ: Agree that was a bit odd ….but the ep lacked oomph until that moment…

GG: Yes you couldn’t really get why the two middle-aged kids had decided to pay a visit. It’s one of three stories about families set in three different parts of the world. The backblocks of New Jersey, a nondescript part of Ireland and Paris. You do get around. One other common trope is the overhead shot of the tables and the food and drink. It’s sort of an abstract image you use to denote time passing.

JJ: Yeah

GG: In the Irish story the food on the table doesn’t seem to disappear. Nobody seems to actually eat anything. Is that so that the mother can give them a doggy bag to take home..

JJ: That’s right…

GG: Was the Irish story located somewhere else when you first wrote it…

JJ: Not really. I think all three have a universal quality …but then reality intrudes and you have to follow the money and go where all those thirty or forty executive producers lead you.

GG: Like Ireland. You never filmed there before?

JJ: Never.

GG: So why this time?

JJ: Come on. Irish film money is excellent. They really want major filmmakers to go there. They were happy I was willing to go as well.

GG; Did they ask if you had an ‘Irish story’. Irish in quotation marks.

JJ: I said sure I’ve got this great story about a mother who sees her two daughters once a year. It’s very Irish. 

Vicki Krieps, Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling
in the Mother story

GG: Was it cast before the Irish money came through?

JJ: I don’t quite recall the timing… but I know I always wanted Cate Blanchett… and Vicki Krieps has been in my sights since Phantom Thread…  and I always remember the way she responded when she was asked about the MeToo movement and said “Maybe it's very European, but I always see both sides. I feel very sorry for the people who have been harassed, but I also feel very sorry for the people who have lived a life where they have been harassing people.”

GG: Wow…an exact quote. You don’t think she should have had an Irish accent…or indeed any of the three women, including Charlotte Rampling, should have had Irish accents?

JJ: Didn’t worry me …and nobody in Ireland mentioned  it after the film won the Golden Lion at Venice. 

GG: The Paris episode is the most enigmatic. The others are about reunions but this one focuses on discovering something secret. 

JJ: Yes. It’s the one I most enjoyed making. What’s not to like about making a movie in Paris almost like the New Wave guys did way back. Shooting in the streets, natural dialogue, unknown actors…and you’re in Paris for a month or so.

GG: Good to catch up.

JJ: You too. Stay safe…