Jim Jarmusch Discusses Paterson at NPR

Jim Jarmusch's new movie, Paterson pays tribute to two of the director's favorite subjects: poetry and cities. Jarmusch's Paterson is based on the epic poem by William Carlos Williams. The film travels through Paterson, New Jersey led by a bus driver, also named Paterson, played by Adam Driver. At All Things Considered, Joel Rose dissects Jarmusch's new movie:

Paterson unfolds like the stanzas of a poem. Every morning, the main character (Adam Driver) wakes up and goes to work. He drives a bus around the New Jersey city that shares his name and writes in his notebook on his lunch break. At night, he comes home to his wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), then walks the dog and stops by the local bar for a beer. He does the same thing every day.

"Routine is very liberating and nurturing for him," Jarmusch says. "To be a poet and to drift around and observe small things, overhear conversations, you know, whatever strikes him."

Jarmusch says he got the idea for the script more than 20 years ago on a trip to Paterson, where one of his favorite poets set one of his most famous poems. William Carlos Williams worked as a pediatrician in nearby Rutherford, N.J., and much of his work draws on the lives of his working-class patients.

"The beginning of the poem 'Paterson' has a metaphor of a man being the town, and the town being a man," Jarmusch says. "And I took something from that — a small idea of maybe someday I'd make a film about a man named Paterson, who lives in Paterson, is a poet and like a working-class guy."

Listen to or read Rose's movie review at NPR.