00:00Baila a veteran filmmaker takes on the art of poetry
00:04Jeffrey Brown has our look at the new movie Patterson
00:08I go through trillions of molecules that move aside to make way for me
00:14Where does poetry come from?
00:16It's not a question normally posed by a film
00:19I remember giving the script, sending it first to Ron
00:23And he called me and said, wow, Jim, I think you're really going for the big bucks here
00:27A poet who's a bus driver in New Jersey, you know
00:31The script that director Jim Jarmo shared with his friend poet Ron Padgett was for the film Patterson
00:37And it is indeed about a bus driver played by Adam Driver
00:41Making his daily route through the streets of Patterson, New Jersey
00:44Taking in what's around him, overhearing conversations
00:48Using the stuff of everyday life to write poems
00:51Which we hear him recite and see on screen
00:54Another one
00:56When you're a child
01:00You learn there are three dimensions
01:02Height, width
01:04And depth
01:05Like a shoebox
01:08Then later you hear
01:10There's a fourth dimension
01:11Time
01:12Hmm
01:15That and other plain-spoken poems in the film
01:18Were actually written by the 74-year-old Padgett
01:21Prize-winning poet, essayist, and translator
01:24Who's been publishing his work since the 1960s
01:27He said he was taken aback at first when Jim Jarmusch asked if he wanted to write new poems for the film
01:33And then we hung up and I started thinking
01:35Why not?
01:36Why do I have to be such a chicken?
01:38Why can't I just really accept this challenge?
01:42And not too long thereafter
01:44And I'd read the script and I kind of had an idea about this character Patterson
01:49I kind of found myself falling into what I kind of temporarily fantasized to be his world
01:56I tried to make it by him, not by me, but also by me
02:01Poetry was also a longtime love of Jim Jarmusch
02:04Who, beginning in the 1980s in films like Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law
02:10Established himself as a filmmaker with a very personal and distinctly non-Hollywood vision
02:16As movies seem to get ever bigger and louder, he's managed to set his own pace
02:21I love the form of filmmaking
02:24I love all the aspects of it except financing and promoting them
02:32But it's such a beautiful form to me
02:35I know that I'm not able to make someone else's film for them
02:39In, say, a studio setting
02:42I can't have other people's input who are thinking about the commercial viability of the film
02:50Affecting how the film is made or what goes into it
02:54I'd end up in jail having kneecapped some executive who previously ran an underwear factory
03:00You know, I'm a filmmaker
03:02I'm, this is what I'm learning to do
03:05In the film Patterson, Jarmusch has also created an ode to an earlier Patterson
03:10The epic poem written in the 1940s and 50s by one of America's most renowned poets
03:16William Carlos Williams
03:18Williams lived and worked as a doctor in the area
03:21In the poem's preface, Williams writes
03:24To make a start out of particulars and make them general
03:28The bus driver in the film Patterson is no William Carlos Williams
03:33He's never published a thing and is unlikely to
03:36But he'd understand the sentiment
03:38I'm working on a poem for you
03:40A love poem?
03:45Yeah, I guess if it's for you, it's a love poem
03:49And Jarmusch picked up on the notion of taking the particulars of everyday life
03:54Looking at them, listening to them, and making art from them
03:57Because he's a bus driver and we have images flowing past him
04:02Both visually and things he overhears
04:06He kind of drifts through his job, which is very
04:10It's a routine, right?
04:12It's all very set for him
04:14And this allows him to just take things in
04:18I think that's what poets
04:19In this case, he's a poet
04:21All people who create things
04:24This is what they do
04:25You know, they have to get input from something
04:28I mean, the stuff of life
04:30Becomes the details of poetry
04:33I hope so
04:34I can't figure out where else to get it
04:36I asked Ron Padgett, who's taught writing to children, college students, and adults
04:42What people too often don't get about poetry
04:45They're given the quote
04:47I think wrong or misleading or narrow idea of what poetry is or can be
04:52And secondly, they don't value their own imaginations
04:56They just suppress or don't want to deal with their imagination
04:59And yet it's so close to being a poet in many ways
05:06So if we can only bust through those barriers
05:08And maybe a film like Patterson will help some people say
05:11Huh, you know, maybe I could write something like this too
05:15The film Patterson is now in wider release around the country
05:19From New York, I'm Jeffrey Brown for the PBS NewsHour
05:26To be continued
05:27To be continued
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