Jim Jarmusch

James Robert Jarmusch (/ˈdʒɑːrməʃ/ JAR-məsh; born January 22, 1953) is an American filmmaker and musician.

He has been a major proponent of independent cinema since the 1980s, directing films such as Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), Night on Earth (1991), Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Broken Flowers (2005), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Paterson (2016) and Father Mother Sister Brother (2025). Stranger Than Paradise was added to the National Film Registry in December 2002.. For Father Mother Sister Brother, Jarmusch won the Golden Lion at the 82nd Venice Film Festival.

As a musician, he has been part of the no wave band The Del-Byzanteens and in addition composed music for some of his films. He has released four musical albums with Jozef van Wissem.

Jarmusch was born in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, the second of three children of middle-class suburbanites. His mother, of German and Irish descent, was a reviewer of film and theatre for the Akron Beacon Journal before marrying his father, a businessman of Czech and German descent who worked for the B.F. Goodrich Company. She introduced Jarmusch to cinema by leaving him at a local theater to watch matinee double features such as Attack of the Crab Monsters and Creature From the Black Lagoon while she ran errands. The first adult film he recalls seeing was the 1958 cult classic Thunder Road, the violence and darkness of which left an impression on the seven-year-old Jarmusch. Another B-movie influence from his childhood was Ghoulardi, an eccentric Cleveland television show which featured horror films.

The key, I think, to Jim, is that he went gray when he was 15... As a result, he always felt like an immigrant in the teenage world. He's been an immigrant—a benign, fascinated foreigner—ever since. And all his films are about that.

Jarmusch was an avid reader in his youth and acquired an enthusiasm for film. He had an even greater interest in literature which was encouraged by his grandmother. Though he refused to attend church with his Episcopalian parents (not liking "the idea of sitting in a stuffy room wearing a little tie"), Jarmusch credits literature with shaping his metaphysical beliefs and leading him to reconsider theology in his mid-teens.

From his peers, he developed a taste for counterculture, and he and his friends would steal the records and books of their older siblings—this included works by William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and The Mothers of Invention. They made fake identity documents which allowed them to visit bars at the weekend but also the local art house cinema, which typically showed pornographic films but would occasionally feature underground films such as Robert Downey, Sr.'s Putney Swope and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls. At one point, he took an apprenticeship with a commercial photographer. He later remarked, "Growing up in Ohio was just planning to get out."

After graduating from high school in 1971, Jarmusch moved to Chicago and enrolled in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. After being asked to leave because he had neglected to take any journalism courses—Jarmusch favored literature and art history—he transferred to Columbia University the following year, with the intention of becoming a poet. At Columbia he studied English and American literature under professors including New York School avant garde poets Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro. At Columbia, he began to write short "semi-narrative abstract pieces" and edited the undergraduate literary journal The Columbia Review.