Jim Jarmusch and cinematographer Fred Elms, still from “Farmhouse”

You know they said that when photography was invented that was the death of painting. But painting just got more interesting in a lot of ways. Sometimes you need a hammer and a chisel instead of a chainsaw. Just because there are computers doesn’t mean you can’t write with a pen anymore. It depends on what material suits what you need. I like technology. I love all that stuff but that doesn’t mean that anything predating that is dead. It depends on what you need to use. I’m not a Luddite. I find a lot of uses for technology highly suspicious, but it’s not involved with technology itself.

Do you go back and look at your previous films?

Never. I don’t like to look back. It’s very uncomfortable. Don’t look back.

Time goes by too fast. I like getting older. I’m not afraid of age. In our culture people are supposed to think about being young and it’s bad to be older, whereas in a lot of cultures being older is really a cool thing. It’s like with Native Americans if you’re old, you get to the top of the mountain, you get the cool view. 

Time goes by so damn fast but I just try not to look back. I still try to keep my films out there if I can, I just don’t want to look at them myself.

Is it as good a time to be a so-called independent filmmaker as the media would like us to believe?

It’s just a load of shit. It’s just another brand slapped on something to market it. I don’t know what it means anymore. It’s like “alternative music.” It means nothing now. It’s used to make alternative music commercial, you know, mainstream. I’ve never liked titles slapped on things anyway. So I don’t know what it means. I’m getting really annoyed at even hearing the word. When I hear the word independent I reach for my revolver. At this point, what the hell does that mean? 

I’m getting annoyed though. Hootie and the Blowfish are alternative music. I’m the Queen of Denmark. I don’t know what it means anymore.

But there’s a real problem, it’s all screwed up because people go to Sundance and they want to get a studio deal or something. I know of a few films where distributors overpaid for the films for more than they were worth and then they couldn’t get their money back out of them, and then it was the filmmaker’s fault it was a failure. And the failure was that too much money was put on the film. So maybe it was a really great film but now the filmmaker is struggling to get another one because of being labled a failure. But the failure was because of some system that wanted to keep them alive and make them a product without being sensitive to what was the thing they did, you know. So the problems run pretty deep and it sort of started with Ronald Reagan when he allowed studios to own theatre chains again, which is a big disaster.

It’s changed a lot since I started out. But I always have hope for people who love movies because of what they can do with it.