Dead Man

A Neil Young Soundtrack Film

Directed by Jim Jarmusch

Neil Young News

Dead Man, USA 1995, directed by Jim Jarmush, story: Jim Jarmusch, Music: Neil Young, starring: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, 121 min b/w

Director Jim Jarmusch's film Dead Man with a Neil Young soundtrack is considered by Greil Marcus in Salon Magazine to be "the best movie of the end of the 20th century." Among reasons that Marcus cites are: "For a film set more than a century ago, an electric guitar, playing a modal melody, surrounded by nothing, sounds older than anything you see on the screen."



• In an interview, Jim Jarmusch said of Neil's efforts:
  "What he brought to the film lifts it to another level, intertwining the soul of the story with Neil's musically emotional reaction to it - the guy reached down to some deep place inside himself to create such strong music for our film."

• From Filmateur review which called "Dead Man" a "5 star masterpiece":
  "What the close of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man - arguably its most important sequence (and my favorite in the film) - reminds me most of is a cross between the endings of both Apocalypse Now and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The easy comparison to be made is the hallucinatory nature of the three - Jarmusch's pondering camera coupled with Neil Young's brooding score is certainly comparable to the insanity of Coppola's film, and somewhat to the otherworldliness of Kubrick's. The main comparison here remains detached from the stylisms of either, however."

  

• From Roger Ebert's I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie on Dead Man:
  "Dead Man is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning. The black-and-white photography by Robby Muller is a series of monochromes in which the brave new land of the West already betrays a certain loneliness. Farmer brings to the Indian a sweetness and a curious contemporary air (he talks like a New Age guru), and Johnny Depp is sad and lost as the opposite of Nobody - which is, I fear, Everyman. A mood might have developed here, had it not been for the unfortunate score by Neil Young, which for the film's final 30 minutes sounds like nothing so much as a man repeatedly dropping his guitar"

• From Australia's The Age Newspaper interview with Jim Jarmusch by writer Stephanie Bunbury:
  "For "Year of the Horse", his documentary about a Neil Young concert tour, Young himself suggested the project after he had written the music for Dead Man and they had made a video clip for his song Big Time. "Young said: 'Look, I'll pay for it. Just shoot some stuff and see if you like it, and we'll continue if you do, and if you don't, I'll just put it on a shelf somewhere.' How could I refuse that? And it was a really great experience, because there was no road map at all."

• From an interview with Neil Young on FRESH AIR (25 March 2004) by Terry Gross.
  GROSS: You did the score for the Jim Jarmusch movie "Dead Man." Did you--did that teach you anything about the interaction between music and what's on the screen?

  Mr. YOUNG: Well, there are some similarities between "Greendale" and "Dead Man" because the approach that I took to the--they're kind of off-the-wall similarities, but they are nonetheless--the approach that I took to doing the score to "Dead Man" was I went back to--the concept was that "Dead Man" was basically a silent movie and that, you know, in the old days, in the '20s and stuff, when they had theaters, there'd be an organist or a piano player who would play along with the film, and that--and you'd get subtitles and the live music and that was it. So when I did the score for "Dead Man," I had the film projected on TV screens, and I had, like, about 20 TVs all around me, big ones, little ones, tiny little portables, and wide screens and everything hanging from the ceiling in a big semicircle all the way around me. No, in full circle. And then I had my instruments inside the circle.

  So the instruments were always close enough for me to go from one to another, and they were all set up and the levels were all set, and everything was recording. So the film started, and I started playing the instruments. So I watched the show--I watched the film go through, and I played all the way through live. I'd put my guitar down and walk over and play the piano in the bar when there's a bar scene. I played the tack piano. Then when that scene was over, I'd walk over from the piano and go play the organ for another scene and then--a little pump organ I have, and then I'd pick up the electric guitar again and get all my distorted sounds out of that to go with the Indian drums and the things that were happening in the film. And basically, it was all a real-time experience. And so in that...

  GROSS: Did you have it planned out before? I mean, did you compose things in advance, or was this all improvised?

  Mr. YOUNG: I had a theme.

  GROSS: Uh-huh.

  Mr. YOUNG: Well, I actually had two themes that I used. And one of them had to do with violence because there was a string of violence. So you kind of get the feeling that when you heard--you know, there was one theme that went with that and there was another type of subtheme that went with some of the other feelings in the film. So that's all I had.

  GROSS: Wow.

  Mr. YOUNG: And I just, you know--and the theme was very simple. It only had three notes in it, so I just, you know, replayed it, repeated it in different ways and explored it live during the playback of the film.

• From Addicted to Noise's Music News of the World (January 26, 1996) review "JIM JARMUSCH'S DEAD MAN IS A MASTERPIECE" by editor Michael Goldberg:
  "Neil Young delivers some of his most inspired and impressionistic playing--which is saying something. The 64 minute soundtrack album mixes spoken word bits from the movie (including one partially delivered by Iggy Pop) with Young's instrumentals. This film will blow you away. The stark imagery will stick in your mind, as will Young's melodies.

  

More Dead Man Film Reviews.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse in "Year of The Horse". Also, for more on Jim Jarmusch's films, see interview on directing Neil Young and Crazy Horse in a concert film.

Also, for more see Jim Jarmusch page.

Neil Young Films