Caffeine And Nicotine

Actor Roberto Benigni was 34 when he filmed his part in "Coffee and Cigarettes." He'll be 51 when the movie finally hits U.S. screens this Friday. It took director Jim Jarmusch 17 years to finish the film, which began as a short skit for "Saturday Night Live" and evolved into a series of 11 vignettes (the first with Benigni) that revolve around conversations between different characters as they smoke cigarettes or sip coffee. The full-length film made its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival last fall then screened to a sold-out crowd at the Toronto International Film Festival and again at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York this month. Starting May 14, it will be released in selected theaters around the country. In between filming scenes for "Coffee and Cigarettes" over the years, Jarmusch has kept busy. He's made at least a half-dozen other movies--including "Dead Man" with Johnny Depp and "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai" with Forest Whitaker--and built up a loyal following of fans and friends, some of whom appear in the new film. The cast ranges from Bill Murray to Cate Blanchett, from rocker Iggy Pop to White Stripes frontman Jack White. NEWSWEEK's Jennifer Barrett spoke with the 51-year-old Jarmusch from his office in New York about what took him so long to finish this film and what he's got planned for his next project. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: I understand this project started when "Saturday Night Live" asked you to make a short film in 1986. That was a long time ago.

Jim Jarmusch: Yeah, Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright were around, so we just cooked up something and shot it really fast and then it became an ongoing project where I kept making more and more of them between other projects until I had enough songs for an album, so to speak.

At what point did you decide it could be a full-length movie?

After I made like two or three of them, I realized I was making the same film over and over again, just different variations of it. I realized I wanted to keep doing it with the possibility of eventually putting a number of them together. So that happened pretty early on. But these were done so intermittently and as a kind of escape--they were really fun to do--so I didn't spend a lot of time analyzing it as a project, just kept doing it for amusement, really. And I got to work with people I wanted to play with.

Play with?