Although he bristles at the title - his expression hardens, and his face starts to resemble a cloudy day with thunder threatening - Jim Jarmusch is the last major truly independent film director in America. This is not a statement about his sensibility, although it is true that his minimalist cinematic style and ability to deftly cross-pollinate pop culture, eastern philosophy and classic movie genres have made him a unique presence in film for the past 20 years.
While other directors may be hailed for their originality and independent point of view, Jarmusch, unlike Quentin Tarantino or pretty much any other auteur, has never made a film under a studio's watch. Ever since his debut feature - Stranger Than Paradise in 1984, which won the Camera d'Or at Cannes and permanently upended the idea of independent film as an intrinsically inaccessible avant-garde form - he has owned and controlled all his movies.
His films, with their immediately recognisable idiosyncrasies, testify to his independence. In 1986, he made Down by Law, the story of two deadbeats in New Orleans who are joined in jail by an eccentric Italian, played by Roberto Benigni, who plans their escape. Like all Jarmusch films, Down by Law combined cool, apathetic hipsters with flashes of poetry and wisdom. (For instance, Benigni's character quotes Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, but in Italian.)
In 1989, Jarmusch set his protagonists in a seedy hotel in Memphis for Mystery Train, a film with three related stories, all influenced by Elvis Presley. In what has become his custom, Jarmusch cast musicians in key roles - Joe Strummer, lead singer of the Clash, starred in Mystery Train, just as Tom Waits and John Lurie did in Down by Law.
Benigni resurfaced in 1992 in Night on Earth, which featured five separate narratives, each set in a different city, all centring on the relationship between cab-drivers and their passengers. Dead Man, a psychedelic western, was released in 1996, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which starred Forest Whitaker as a conflicted hitman who lives by an ancient Japanese warrior code, came out in 2000, with music by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan.
Ghost Dog was chiefly about the blurring of belief systems, cultural lines and ethnicities - a common theme in Jarmusch's films. Like the bebop music he loves, his movies begin with a familiar melody and then adapt that tune into something else, something new.
Broken Flowers, which opens here later this year, represents something of a departure. The movie stars Bill Murray as a man on a road trip, searching for the mother of a son he may have fathered. Like the rest of Jarmusch's work, Broken Flowers is a kind of foreign film set in America. It seems less concerned with results than with the in-between moments of life: the journey rather than the destination.
Jarmusch has updated the iconic loner movie guys - the gangster, the cowboy, the gambler - by making them modern and deadpan and curious. Broken Flowers expands that focus, moving beyond hipster cool to something more like maturity, but the film still maintains Jarmusch's outsider stance: it is stripped down, closely observed, with an almost dreamlike aura.
"I know," Jarmusch moans during a meeting with me in Manhattan. "It's all so independent . I'm so sick of that word. I reach for my revolver when I hear the word quirky. Or edgy. Those words are now becoming labels that are slapped on products to sell them. Anyone who makes a film that is the film they want to make, and it is not defined by marketing analysis or a commercial enterprise, is independent. My movies are kind of made by hand. They're not polished - they're sort of built in the garage. It's more like being an artisan in some way."
More than anything, Jarmusch is a sort of focused amateur enthusiast. His passions, which reflect his resolute disinterest in the conventional, include the study of mushrooms, bird-watching, the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, the history of cinema and, most of all, music.
After Jarmusch moved to New York in the 1970s to attend Columbia, he formed a band called the Del-Byzanteens, and he lived in the East Village, the same neighbourhood he lives in now.
"I feel so lucky," he says. "During the late 70s in New York, anything seemed possible. You could make a movie or a record and work part-time, and you could find an apartment for 160 bucks a month. And the conversations were about ideas. No one was talking about money. It was pretty amazing. But looking back is dangerous. I don't like nostalgia." He smiles. "But, still, damn, it was fun. I'm glad I was there."
Setting up a Jarmusch movie is a complicated process. Because he doesn't work within the studio system, each film has to be sold individually. He and his agent, Bart Walker of Creative Artists Agency, meet foreign distributors who have worked with Jarmusch before.
Jarmusch has one especially difficult and costly requirement: unlike many other American directors, he strongly resists his films being dubbed into other languages. "Jim feels that an actor's voice is a part of who they are in the film," Walker explains. "The integrity of his film changes when the actor's voice is changed." He is also known to shoot his movies in black and white, which also alienates investors; television networks and movie-rental outlets are chiefly interested in colour films.
Jarmusch grew up in Akron, Ohio, the middle of three children. "Jim is from Ohio," Waits told me, as if it were more an explanation than a fact. "It's very flat. You dream in very flat places. You learn to solve problems. Six presidents were born there. And Jim." His father worked for BF Goodrich rubber company, and his mother, before marrying and becoming a housewife, reviewed films for the Akron Beacon Journal.
"My maternal grandmother was amazingly inspiring to me," Jarmusch says. "On my 16th birthday, my grandmother gave me the Moncrieff translation of Proust. She had a lot of activities: she traded oriental rugs, she knew Gypsies and got me interested in Native American culture. By the time I was 14, I discovered the Beats and rock'n'roll, and I knew I wanted to get out of Akron. By 17, I was gone."
He studied journalism briefly at Northwestern University and transferred to Columbia, where he majored in literature. In 1977, he enrolled at New York University's film school. In the third year, he became a teaching assistant for Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause. Ray, who died of cancer in 1979, became hugely important to Jarmusch.
After Ray's death, the director Wim Wenders, who met Jarmusch while filming a documentary about Ray's last years, gave Jarmusch about 40 minutes' worth of black-and-white film stock he had left over from another movie - a precious gift for a young film-maker. Jarmusch used the film to make a 30-minute short, which became the first third of Stranger Than Paradise.
The final, complete film, which the critic Pauline Kael aptly titled a "punk picaresque", has a cool, absurdist sensibility. There is no real plot - just snippets of conversation between two buddies and a teenage girl from Budapest and a road trip to Cleveland - but Stranger Than Paradise, with its irresistible evocation of the downtown spirit of the time, was one of those rare movies that changes the culture. The film had a big-city release in the US, played for one solid year in a theatre in Paris and established a new breed of do-it-yourself film-making.
"Stranger Than Paradise made me feel that films could be made in a different way in America," Tilda Swinton, who met Jarmusch backstage at a Darkness concert, told me. "Jim has a way of explaining America. He says, 'I'm an alien, but I'm also an American, and we'll experience this world together.' That's why he's become such a force in international film - he explains America to aliens, while remaining an alien himself."
Truly independent film-making is risky, and the failures can be tremendously frustrating. When Dead Man, Jarmusch's most ambitious film, finished playing in competition at Cannes in 1995, the audience was virtually silent. The movie, which stars Johnny Depp as an accountant named William Blake (as a homage to the romantic poet), is a modernist twist on a classic film genre. Jarmusch loves to take his characters on a journey, and Dead Man is the western as road trip, with Depp gaining enlightenment through exposure to Native American culture.
Nearly all Jarmusch's films had been warmly received in competition at Cannes, and there had been talk that Dead Man was going to win best movie. But after the film was shown on the huge screen at the Palais, only a few people applauded. And then, in the vast, mostly quiet auditorium, a voice boomed down from the balcony. "Jeem," a man yelled in a heavy French accent, "it's sheet!"
Jarmusch had struggled to make the movie for a budget of only $9m (astonishingly small for a period film set on location in the American west), and he admits today it was the most difficult film he has ever directed, but he will not break his Zen-like code and show any disappointment that Dead Man played in cinemas for just a few weeks.
At Cannes in May, before the screening of Broken Flowers, Jarmusch expected the worst. As he later told me: "It's easier that way." It rained on the night of the premiere, and the weather nicely underscored the film's comic melancholy. By all accounts, the Cannes audiences loved it, which of course made Jarmusch uncomfortable. "If something gets too good a response, I want to head for the hills," he said later. "And not Beverly Hills. Popular success is not my area of expertise."
Murray, who claims to be "semi-psychic", turned to Jarmusch and said, enigmatically, "I think second place is OK." He was referring to the coming announcement of the Palme d'Or, the top prize at Cannes. Two days later, Broken Flowers won the Grand Prix, the runner-up prize at the festival, just as Murray predicted. "That was better for Jim," Murray said. He could win and not feel awkward. His victory was a bit off to the side. And he's happier there."
· Broken Flowers is out on October 21.