10 Things to Know About 'Stranger than Paradise'

10 Things to Know About Stranger than Paradise

Stranger than Paradise was written and directed by Jim Jarmusch and follows three people through three vignettes of life in three different, unique locations, New York City, Cleveland, Ohio, and Florida.

10 The Cannes Film Festival

Stranger than Paradise premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984. The film won Best First Feature at the event and Roger Ebert met the film with massive praise, calling it ‘a perfectly told short story.’

9 Music and Process Serving

Jim Jarmusch while preparing Stranger than Paradise supported himself as a process server in New York City where he prevented people from being evicted by serving papers to landlords. He also got by gigging with bands The Del-Byzantines and The Lone Rangers. Jarmusch described their music as New Wave and non-traditional.

8 The Truly Miniscule Budget

Stranger than Paradise was made on a budget of $100,000, an insanely small amount of money for a film that travels from New York to Cleveland, to Florida over the course of 90 minutes.

7 Was Chosen to Open the Detroit Film Festival on a Hunch

Detroit Film Festival director, at the time, Elliott Wilhelm saw Stranger than Paradise at the New York Film Festival and had a hunch that the film would be a huge hit to open his own Detroit Film Festival. Thus, the film, hardly from a household name director, was chosen to open the festival and to have more daily screenings than any other film at the festival, a gamble that paid off.

6 Jarmusch Tried to Describe what Stranger than Paradise Was

Speaking to Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Jim Jarmusch shared an anecdote about trying to explain what kind of movie Stranger than Paradise was:

“While shooting the film, someone outside the production asked me what kind of movie we were making. I wanted to tell him it was a semi-neorealistic black comedy in the style of an imaginary Eastern European director obsessed with (Japanese filmmaker) Ozu and familiar with the fifties television series The Honeymooners.”

He wound up telling them that it was about a Hungarian immigrant's view of America.

5 A Charming Cynicism

Jim Jarmusch was ready for Hollywood in that, hitting it big at 31 years old meant he was armored with just the right amount of cynicism before heading to Hollywood and taking meetings with executives who pitched him scripts about teenage vulgarity and losing virginity.

Speaking to Patrick Goldstein at the L.A. Times, Jarmusch demonstrated his charming cynicism telling Goldstein:

“This whole business of being hot is pretty much based on how often you are mentioned in Variety. I don’t think these guys actually saw my movie.”

4 Built on Scraps

Stranger Than Paradise was based on a short film that Jarmusch made as a proof of concept. That short was the ultimate in DIY ingenuity. The whole short was filmed using stitched together scraps of unused film stock unused from the production of Wim Wenders movie, The State of Things.

3 Part of the Criterion Collection

On September 4th, 2007, Stranger than Paradise became Spine #400 in The Criterion Collection. Special Features on the Criterion release include the previously mentioned short film called

2 John Lurie’s Multiple Roles on Set

Actor John Lurie starred in Stranger than Paradise as Willie but that wasn’t the only work Lurie provided. Lurie also co-wr0te a portion of the film, specifically the opening, New York sequence. And Lurie composed and performed the film’s score.

1 Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

Jim Jarmusch chose the song “I Put a Spell on You” as the song specifically loved by Ezter Balint’s Eve because of its unique structure. According to Jarmusch:

“It’s the only rock song that I know that has a waltz tempo. That was a sort of joke about Eve’s Central European background.”