Did the Melville film about the samurai have any shape on Ghost Dog?
Jim Jarmusch: Inspiration certainly. Not so much on the shape of the movie, but certain thematic things. Melville always has killers wear white editorâs gloves, which is a private joke between him and his editors, I guess saying his editor kills his films. So Forest wears white editorâs gloves in the film. But there are references to other films. My favorite hitman films of all time are Le samouraĂŻ, and Branded to Kill by Suzuki. I made quotations from those films in ways. [ x ]
Ghost Dog was a big breakthrough for me. Though I refer to Chaucer or to Walt Whitman or things in passing in the earlier films, in this case I opened myself up to actually quoting other things, and that came, I really think, from my love of music. I love all kinds of music, but hard bebop, dub, and hip-hop, in particular, are forms that are very open about taking things from other places, and I think they gave meâwell, âcourage" isnât the right word, but my love of those forms of music somehow spoke to me internally and said, âDonât push things away just because they come from other sources," which is what I often used to do. âGo ahead and open the windows and let them in, and donât hide that you let them in." Iâm not going to play a game like all these ideas are original and theyâre mine: I want to talk about where they came from, because if someone sees Ghost Dog and it leads them to see films by Melville or Point Blank, by John Boorman, or the films of Seijun Suzuki, or to read Don Quixote, or something that I mention in the credits, then thatâs a good thing. I didnât hide that in any way in Ghost Dog. Maybe Dead Man was a precedent, because that wacky poet William Blake walked right into my damn script. [ x ]
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