But scoring for a film meant, as RZA put it, “the music can be as awkward as you want it to be.” “Awkward” became a useful byword for RZA’s Ghost Dog work. When you were making a track for a rapper, there had to be sturdy rhythmic footholds in place. Along the way, he tapped into places in his creative mind he’d never been before. Jarmusch told him to go with his instincts, and so RZA went back to craft a score that better suited the mood. The music had to be a barely felt pulse, the only lingering remnant of a time when warriors clashed steel and clans fought for honor. They are the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns of the other mob movies, workers with no real boss, and they live by a Mafioso code in the same way a goldendoodle puppy feels the stirrings of wolf ancestry when it sniffs the air. In Ghost Dog, the Mafia is a joke, a bunch of cut-rate mobsters with central-casting names like Valerio and Francis and Louie and Vinny, saying things like “forget about it” and “you’re gonna get whacked.” They meet at dollar stores and hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurants instead of red-carpeted clubs, and they fend off their wheedling landlord instead of breaking kneecaps. His first compositions were made with a much more conventional movie in mind-lush, traditionally cinematic, fit for the Hong Kong action flicks that were starting to pop up on American shores, but all wrong for the quizzical, emptied-out stage on which Ghost Dog’s action takes place. The pairing felt like a secret handshake.Įven so, it took a while for RZA to adjust to Jarmusch’s strange, silence-filled style. He agreed to score the film before Jarmusch had even shot it. RZA, who had gone to school with members of the Castellano family, understood the magnetic pull of mafioso culture better than anyone. Jarmusch grew up in 1950s and ’60s Akron, on the street where the Gambino family had their social club, during a time when the mafia’s real-life grip was fading as quickly as pop culture’s fascination with it was booming. But for both of them, the story of Ghost Dog had biographical echoes. The pair made strange bedfellows at first-RZA in army fatigues, Jarmusch with his silver-white pompadour and black sunglasses, like Lou Reed and Andy Warhol remixed into one person. After settling his script and securing Whitaker’s commitment, he tapped a few mutual acquaintances and requested a meeting with the RZA. His movies were as much about sound as they were sight- Dead Man was as much a vehicle for the wordless score by Neil Young as it was for lead actor Johnny Depp-and for the Ghost Dog score, he had only one man in mind. The story mimicked the structure of many classic crime noir or kung fu films, but Jarmusch wanted to treat the framework just as he used the Western in 1995’s Dead Man: as a bemused meditation on humankind’s attempts to impose meaning and order on a meaningless existence. When a hit goes wrong and the Mafia decides Ghost Dog must die, he goes up against them all, one by one. The downtown New York City filmmaker conceived of the sad-eyed hitman Ghost Dog-played, in his mind, by Forest Whitaker, an actor so inextricable from his role that Jarmusch has said that if Whitaker turned him down, the movie would never have existed-as a Black man living on a rooftop, tending to pigeons and reading from the Hagakure, an 18th-century text on the Bushido code, while he waits for assignments from his mob handler. Around that same time, Jim Jarmusch was toying with the notion of a movie about a sympathetic killer.
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