Jim Jarmusch: few directors have been as consistent in their approach to filmmaking as the independent's independent, Jim Jarmusch—but that doesn't mean he hasn't got a surprise or two up his sleeve

Jim Jarmusch's new film, Broken Flowers, is a backward-looking rake's progress. Don Johnston (Bill Murray), a financially secure retiree newly dumped by his younger girlfriend (Julie Delpy), receives an anonymous letter alleging he fathered a child with one of five women with whom he was involved a couple of decades before. Prompted by his sleuthing buddy next door (Jeffrey Wright), this ladies' magnet--a spellbinding study in middle-aged dolefulness and drollness by Murray--bows to his fate and consecutively visits the four of those old flames (Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton) who are still alive. Encountering them, he finds a little tenderness but mostly damage, disdain, and rage. He also finds a drifting youth who may or may not be his son, assuming he exists in the first place.

With this latest road movie, Jarmusch has moved away from the nonchalant beat sensibility that connects his work from Permanent Vacation (1980) through Coffee and Cigarettes toward an antibohemian, middle-American milieu that--no surprise--is more spiritually enervated and anxiety-provoking. Though it ripples with that old deadpan wit, it's the closest Jarmusch has yet come to an existential tragedy, though there is hope at the last for its chastened Don Juan.

GRAHAM FULLER: Broken Flowers is the first film you've made that dwells on love and its repercussions. Why do you think it's taken you so long to get to that point?

JIM JARMUSCH: Man, I have no idea. I'm very non-analytical about my work. One thing that has always disturbed me--which this film doesn't address, though I intend to address it in the future--is sex in films. It never really gets the whole range of being silly, funny, stupid, passionate, beautiful, romantic, addictive, all those things. That may sound off the track, but maybe there's a connection to this film. Though I'm not even sure this movie is so much about romance as it is about someone finding himself in a very static state and then something happening that spurs him on toward examining his life. But I don't know. I don't like looking back on my own life and work, and so to make a film about the consequences of one's romantic episodes seems very foreign to me.

GF: Isn't the film saying you can't really go back?

JJ: You can never go back to where you were even 10 minutes ago. It can be very dangerous when you've had that level of intimacy with someone to go and see them again, although sometimes it can be healthy. But for me it's inadvisable to look back in general. Because, just using filmmaking as a metaphor, I've been making films, slowly, for over 25 years, and I've learned a lot from my mistakes. But the things I did right or that worked for some reason remain somewhat mysterious to me, and to analyze them is dangerous because it makes them less mysterious and therefore less powerful. I don't want to break that, whatever it is. I don't know if that's a good metaphor for personal life or not.

GF: Is paternity an important theme for you in the movie?

JJ: It's more about attempting to be in the present moment or defining where you are. Everything one does creatively comes from somewhere, but this film is not in any blatant way autobiographical, and if it is in a subconscious way, prefer to leave it there. Regret or guilt are not issues for me. I have a varied romantic past, and it just wasn't what drove the film. What drove it more, for example, was a desire to work with female actors of a certain age, say between 40 and 55, who are regarded as too old in the world of commercial cinema, so they don't really get interesting roles. That lured me to writing this story, though it has nothing to do with the story itself.

GF: We often see Don sitting immobile in his house. He's almost like a Buddha. In fact, he hardly moves in the film--except at the end, when he runs after the boy. It's as if he's breaking out of that emotional stasis.

JJ: In the early part of the film, he is very static because he's not enlightened. When the boy asks for philosophical advice, Don says, "The past is gone. I know that. And the future isn't here yet, whatever it's going to be. So, all there is, is ... is this, the present." He's not yet conscious of the amazing thing he just said. Shortly afterward, he runs after the kid, breaking that physical immobility. He really wants this kid to be his son for some reason. I think when the last shot of the film--which rotates 360 degrees around him--settles, he is at least, whether he likes it or not, in the present moment. He's right there.

The basis of any kind of Eastern philosophy is that obtaining consciousness of being in the present moment is the highest state of enlightenment. I'm not a Buddhist, but I've read a lot of Eastern philosophy. The original Buddha was a very rich, really decadent Don Juan type of playboy--lots of women, crazy parties all the time--before he became enlightened and then became a teacher. Whatever that has to do with anything.