Jim Jarmusch has earned a legion of indie fans for his laconic, smart and unusual comedies and dramas, but the director of Night on Earth and Broken Flowers loves genre movies too. His latest film is a zombie comedy, The Dead Don’t Die, with an all-star cast including Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Tilda Swinton. He’s also made the alluring vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive, the grimy western Dead Man and – perhaps most famously – the modern samurai gangster classic Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai.
Ghost Dog starred future Academy Award-winner Forest Whitaker as the title character, a philosophical hitman who wields a katana and communicates by homing pigeon. The film, inspired by crime classics by Jean-Pierre Melville and Seijun Suzuki, has been developing a cult following since its release in 1999, and fans have always clamored for a follow-up.
But the new Ghost Dog won’t be another movie. “We’re working on [a] Ghost Dog TV series,” Jarmusch told Bloody-Disgusting in a recent interview. “We’re trying to get that going.”
The idea for a Ghost Dog series was teased earlier this year by Forest Whitaker, who told Entertainment Weekly that he was working on the project with Jim Jarmusch and RZA. Whitaker said he wouldn’t be starring in the series, which – if you’ve seen the original movie – makes a lot of sense.
But would Jarmusch come back to direct the Ghost Dog series? “Probably not,” Jarmusch told us. “I might direct the pilot but I’m more interested in being an executive producer and a kind of guide, which has been my involvement thus far along with RZA. So we’ve kind of been working together.”
“They have a script for a pilot that I had no involvement in except some ideas, that I really like. So yeah, we’re working on that but beyond that I don’t know,” Jarmusch added.
The director of The Dead Don’t Die hasn’t worked much in television, but he has some ideas. “How about the sitcom, The Coffee Zombies? There’s a sitcom,” Jarmusch joked. “I could be into that.”
“And you know I like this new format of 15 minute shows. It’s kind of cool. So maybe Coffee Zombies, the 15-minute sitcom. I don’t know!” Jarmusch laughed.
The Dead Don’t Die but they shamble into theaters on June 14, 2019.
