Jim Jarmusch, the acclaimed director of Down By Law and Paterson, has a new movie in theaters this weekend. But The Dead Don’t Die isn’t a typical Jarmusch production. It’s a very gory zombie comedy starring Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton and a host of other recognizable actors, as they fight off a zombie invasion and say silly things.
It’s an interesting departure for Jarmusch, who previously delved into the horror genre with 2014’s vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive. Not just because this particular horror comedy is absurd, but because he’s entering well-trodden territory, where filmmakers like George A. Romero have already blazed a trail, and used the image of an unstoppable horde of brainless cannibal corpses to convey sociopolitical messages about consumerism, racism and other hot button issues.
Jarmusch has something to say in The Dead Don’t Die, but in a recent interview with Bloody-Disgusting the filmmaker explained that the film began with a very different intention.
“I wanted to make a kind of comic, kind of dumb humor – like this film has – but I wanted to make a film a little more structurally like Coffee and Cigarettes,” Jarmusch explains. “Not separate vignettes but people from one town that are holed up in smaller groups in different places, which this film has a little of that still in it.”
“But then I wanted long spaces where they’re waiting for the next zombie intrusion, which would be brief, and then dead periods where they could just talk about any dumb shit I wanted to write? And get all the actors that I love. So I did get actors that I love and I did have a lot of dumb dialogue,” the director explained.
Over the course of the film, it becomes clear that the zombies have some residual consciousness, and repeat the names of things the corpses were obsessed with in life. Like Snapple, or their phones. It sends a message about dangers of social constructs and consumerism, and Jarmusch knows he’s not the first person to use the zombie genre to convey that concept.
“I heard a few things of people saying, well, there’s nothing new in this, and it’s even the same sociopolitical message from Night of the Living Dead,” Jarmusch says.
“Well fuck yeah it is. It hasn’t changed! It’s just gotten worse in the last 50 years. What am I supposed to do, invent a new form?
“I’m not trying to revolutionize the genre. I’m just trying to use it as a frame and zombies is the most obvious metaphor you could possibly have,” Jarmusch adds.
Audiences looking for Jarmusch’s message need only to look at who survives the zombie apocalypse at the end of the film, specifically – SPOILER ALERT – Tom Waits, who plays a hermit living in the woods, and the film’s teenaged cast.
“We don’t see [the teenagers] get zombified. And I brought back all the others, so it’s an intentional thing,” Jarmusch explains. “They don’t get zombified.”
It’s an element of hope in an otherwise somewhat cynical storyline, the director notes. “Yeah, because teenagers are really important to me. They define a lot of things, culturally, so I like those characters. And also they’d been removed from society because they had some problems, right? So they’re in detention. And Tom Waits has removed himself from it.”
So if you find yourself in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, and it’s a specifically Jarmuschian zombie apocalypse, you’re only going to survive if you aren’t part of the problems in society as we know it, like Waits and those teens.
“Well yeah, they [have] somehow been removed from the broken part of it in some way,” Jarmusch confirms. “In [Waits’] case it’s by his choice and in their case, it’s not their choice.”
But even though Jarmusch has a point to make, it’s okay to laugh. The director cracked himself up while writing the movie, after all.
“I laughed at some things throughout. I did find some things funny,” Jarmusch said. “Some of the zombies’ minimal obsessions that are just vestigial.”
“Yeah, [like] Snapple,” Jarmusch continued. “I liked the pharmaceutical zombies. The phone zombies is too real, man, because I live in New York. You can’t even walk without these zombies in the way. I’m getting almost toward violence toward them because they’re oblivious to other people and I’m getting sick of it. That one.”
Get off your cell phones and get into The Dead Don’t Die, in theaters now.
