Zen and the art of interviewing

The perfect way to interview filmmaker Jim Jarmusch would be not to interview him. To capture the man who has made it his life’s work to illuminate the in-between moments of life, it would probably be best to simply take him to a diner or a front porch or a Japanese garden somewhere and just sit. Not talking. Or talking about whatever was actually on your mind. Just sit there for an hour or two and see what happened, what would emerge.

Instead, in an effort to promote his award-winning “Broken Flowers,” you are offered 45 minutes in a room at the Chateau Marmont. Forty-five minutes because publicists, in an apparent homage to the psychiatric industry, have decided that 45 minutes is the new hour, and the Chateau Marmont because, well, Jarmusch isn’t exactly a Four Seasons Kind of Guy.

The interview is set for three “ish” then moved to 3:30, but at 3 you get a call on your cell from a publicist asking “how soon” can you get there. You say 3:30 and he is clearly disappointed, so you say you will drive as fast as traffic will allow, which doesn’t seem like a very Jim Jarmuschy thing to do at all but you do it anyway.

Twenty-five minutes and two calls later (“I’m on the 101” you answer, “Now I’m on Sunset”) you arrive at the Chateau, and toss the keys at the guy standing by the valet booth who is hopefully the valet and race to the tiny creaking elevator that cranks itself up, inch by inch to the third floor.

Another journalist passes by in the narrow hall (the notepad and the sheepishly hunched shoulders are a dead giveaway). The room is inhabited by three male publicists in polo shirts, one of whom is just taking a bite of an enormous hamburger. They are working for Focus Films. Jarmusch’s personal publicist is a blond woman who appears from an adjacent room, smiles and says Jim will be ready in about five minutes.

When he is, you are led into another room, a suite really, and told, by the publicist, that she will give you a 15-minute warning and then a five-minute warning because “that makes it much easier.” The warning thing is slightly insulting -- are they afraid you will kidnap Jarmusch and take him to your basement, demand he edit your home video collection?

And the whole setup is turning out too junkety to be of any use -- really, what can you learn from another human being in 45 minutes in a room at the Chateau Marmont? If you’re just going to talk?

At the same time it’s always interesting to see what people will do when left to their own devices, especially someone like Jim Jarmusch.

Jarmusch is quiet and friendly. His hair seems to achieve its height and mass without the benefit of “product,” and he clearly would rather not be here but he is willing to make the best of it, to pretend that something approaching a normal conversation can come of a series of reporters sidling into a hotel room in 45-minute increments. There is a pack of yellow American Spirit cigarettes on the table in front of him, and he does actually smoke one so it isn’t just for show.

You keep your questions focused on a subject that pertains to “Broken Flowers” but is not exclusively about “Broken Flowers.” This way, you hope, he doesn’t have to give the same answer to the same questions he has been hearing since Cannes, which must be pretty boring.

He seems used to having perfect strangers suddenly appear and ask him probing questions about life and art and film and he says more than a few things worthy of being written down. The subject moves to politics, but then there is a tap on the door and 15 minutes is called, which is startling and the train of thought is temporarily derailed.

It isn’t until the end of the interview, after the five-minute warning, that he seems actually happy, that he smiles and laughs and tells a personal story. Maybe he is warming up or is just happy the “interview” is almost over. You will never know. The publicist enters the room, everyone is suddenly standing, the farewells quickly said, and you leave as you came, passing the next reporter on his way in, and it is difficult to know if anything really happened at all.