White Stripes for Coffee and Cigarettes
By Daniel Robert Epstein
May 11, 2004
First things first, before I started my interview with Jack and Meg White of The White Stripes the publicist came in and said “Don’t ask them personal questions!” That means don’t ask Jack about his attack on Jason Stollsteimer of The Von Bondies or his burgeoning relationship with Renée Zellweger.
I wanted to respect the publicist and at the same not cheat the people of SuicideGirls. So I mentioned “the controversy that shall not be named,” TWICE. Both times he dodged it.
But I guess when you're co-starring in Coffee and Cigarettes the latest by one of the world’s most respected filmmakers, Jim Jarmusch. One would rather talk about that instead of past indiscretions. When I say talk I mean Jack White because Meg hardly speaks at all.
Coffee and Cigarettes is a series of vignettes that Jarmusch has been shooting since 1986 that all have their main character sitting around…well…drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. The standout vignettes are RZA and GZA bumping into Bill Murray who is pretending to be a coffee shop waiter, Alfred Molina telling Steve Coogan that they are related and Jack and Meg White, playing themselves, arguing over whether the Tesla Coil that Jack just built is dangerous.
Coffee and Cigarettes opens May 14th.
Daniel Robert Epstein: Did you two actually know what a Tesla Coil was before this movie?
Jack White: [Laughs] Yeah, I very much knew what it was. I've wanted to see one ever since I was a little kid. When we first met Jim [Jarmusch], he had a book about Tesla on his desk and I was saying how much of an admirer of Tesla's that I was. We started talking and eventually we wanted to make a video for our last album where I was going to play Tesla and we were going to reenact [Thomas] Edison's execution of an elephant. I was going to turn Edison's head into an incandescent light bulb at the end to pay him back because of the elephant murder. It didn't work out. It got too expensive so we couldn't do it. Then Jim said, “Well, I have a script if you guys want to do it” and it was all about the Tesla Coil. I was so excited because I knew that it'd be interesting. We wanted to do something creative with Jim and also bring people some more knowledge of someone who was really underrated and misunderstood. At that point he didn't have any idea of what he was going to do with these little short films. He didn't say, “I'm making a feature length film and I am going to put all of these in there.” He said, “I'm just doing these. If you guys want to do one, we could do one together. I don't know what I'm going to do with them.”
DRE:
Were you surprised that someone wanted you two to act together?
JW:
Yeah, but it was cool. We’d do whatever Jim wanted us to do.
Meg White: Yeah.
DRE:
How did you meet him?
JW:
We'd played a free show at Union Square in New York. He was out in the audience and we saw him standing out there. We met that day and became fast friends.
DRE:
Is the way you act in Coffee and Cigarettes close to how you are with one another in real life?
JW:
Almost completely untrue.
DRE:
Was there any improvisation?
JW:
Mostly it was Jim's script, but there were a couple of things that we added here and there.
DRE:
Who built the Tesla Coil in the movie?
JW:
That was a guy from Pennsylvania who had built a couple of them that Jim had gotten a hold of. That was something that I've always wanted to build since I was kid. I still haven't gotten to do that.
DRE:
It was real?
JW:
Oh yeah, it was totally real. It was a scary day of filming [laughs]. We were scared of it. We had a metal table in front of us and the guy said it had a 14-inch arc and we were about 15 and a half inches from the table.
DRE:
What is the fascination with Nikola Tesla's life?
JW:
I think that he is extremely important because number one, he was robbed of the fact that he invented radio and [Guglielmo] Marconi gets all of the credit for it. His ideas could be used today to provide everyone with free electricity.
The big power outage that we just had, no one talks about how the only power plant that didn't go down was the Niagara Falls power plant, which Tesla designed and constructed. There's something interesting about that. If you go through his list of inventions, no one knows that he invented the fluorescent light, radio control and the alternating current motor. It just goes on and on. He's so important and so much more important than Edison because he was a true genius and Edison had a lot of really good inventors working for him and was taking their ideas. When Tesla worked for Edison, Edison said, “If you can go and fix all my power stations and get them working better, I'll pay you $50,000.” Tesla went out and did it in two months time and said, “I did what you asked” Edison said, “Oh you don't know an American joke when you hear one.” So Tesla quit.
The big power outage that we just had, no one talks about how the only power plant that didn't go down was the Niagara Falls power plant, which Tesla designed and constructed. There's something interesting about that. If you go through his list of inventions, no one knows that he invented the fluorescent light, radio control and the alternating current motor. It just goes on and on. He's so important and so much more important than Edison because he was a true genius and Edison had a lot of really good inventors working for him and was taking their ideas. When Tesla worked for Edison, Edison said, “If you can go and fix all my power stations and get them working better, I'll pay you $50,000.” Tesla went out and did it in two months time and said, “I did what you asked” Edison said, “Oh you don't know an American joke when you hear one.” So Tesla quit.
DRE:
Meg, how do you feel about being the most prominent person on the poster for Coffee and Cigarettes?
MW:
[Laughs] I'm surprised. I didn't think he was going to do it.
DRE:
What do you like about Jarmusch’s films?
JW:
I really love his use of silence and empty space. I think that it's really just as powerful as dialogue at times. I think that Orson Wells said “When you watch a film, you should be able to watch it with the sound completely off and still recognize the relationships between people.” I think that silence is really powerful and I think that a lot of times in Hollywood films, it's really difficult for people to get away with all of that dead air. You can't get away with that dead air on radio or music very much and he's getting away with it. It shows audiences how important it is to see people just sitting there. At the beginning of our segment there's like twenty seconds of nothing being said.
Also he's very much a minimalist. Coffee and Cigarettes is black and white with two people at a table. It's a really simple notion. Let’s see what happens when you put these two people together. It's not that complex at all. He's not complicated just like we aren't complicated.
Also he's very much a minimalist. Coffee and Cigarettes is black and white with two people at a table. It's a really simple notion. Let’s see what happens when you put these two people together. It's not that complex at all. He's not complicated just like we aren't complicated.
DRE:
There was that Lee Marvin photo that in the back and there was another scene that had a picture of Henry Silva in it.
JW:
Well, Jim Jarmusch belongs to a club called The Sons of Lee Marvin. It's him, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Richard Bose that belong to that society. I saw a little clip of our scene recently and I said that the picture looks like Jim and I thought that was the joke but no, it's this secret society.
DRE:
When did you start smoking cigarettes?
JW:
It was probably about the time that we started this band.
DRE:
Did you see the Saturday Night Live parody of you two that Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore did?
JW:
Yeah. They're good [Laughs].
MW:
I didn't get a chance to see it. I heard about it. I was really mad too because I was watching a different channel at the time.
DRE:
Jack do you do most of the talking when you do stuff together?
MW:
I don't talk at all [laughs].
DRE:
How did you come to produce Loretta Lynn’s album?
JW:
We had dedicated our third album to her. Then our new manager had told her about it and she sent me a thank you letter and invited us down to dinner. She made us chicken and dumplings. Then we played a show together in New York and they said, “You know what, she's thinking about making another album,” and I just threw my name out there. They let me do it and I couldn’t believe it. It was a big honor. I think that we got really close to the real Loretta making that record.
DRE:
How did it feel to be listed in the top 100 guitarists in Rolling Stone magazine?
JW:
There was a controversy? I didn't know [laughs]. I don't know, I've never had much faith in lists. I'm not a technically proficient guitar player. I'm about what it means at the moment, the attack and attitude of it. I don't sit at home trying to learn how to play scales and be as fast as I can. I just care about the emotion that comes out of it. So they can take it any way that they want to. I don't care. This band just got going and there's been five books written about us already. It’s ridiculous. Why don't you wait ten, fifteen, twenty years before you write even one book or even half of a paragraph about a band like us? It's a different age I suppose.
DRE:
Do you regret anything about the other controversy that shall not be named?
JW:
I don't care.
DRE:
Besides this, you were also in Cold Mountain. Is film always something you wanted to get into?
JW:
Definitely. I really wanted to be a filmmaker when I was a teenager. I started to do work as an assistant on commercials just to make some quick money in Detroit. Now that I’ve been in a couple of films, I think it's the hardest and most difficult art form. To make a good film is next to impossible. There are so many people involved, so much money and a studio on your back. To keep it pure is so hard and so difficult. I don't know how those people do it. So I lost my dream of that a long time ago.
DRE:
Can you compare Anthony Minghella to Jim Jarmusch?
JW:
I think that the most appealing quality of both of them is that their egos are not vocalized in barking out orders and saying, “This is what I want to do. I want it this way and that way.” They're very sweet and generous individuals. I could see Anthony Minghella's attitude towards what was going on trickled all the way down. I remember when I worked on a couple of commercials, those people were such jerks and so mean and everyone had a problem and an attitude as if it was the most important thing in the world to get this shot of a hand on a steering wheel or something.
DRE:
What’s it like working Michel Gondry?
JW:
It's great. It's like working with a six year old but a brilliant one. It's amazing. Cameras and editing equipment are like crayons for him.
MW:
Everything was very mathematical with him. The tiniest little detail is worked out. Every second is mapped out and he has this total childish fascination with color and shapes and sequences.
DRE:
How much input did you have into the videos you did with him?
JW:
I think that with Michel, you just stay out of his way. You can't make it any better. It's brilliant right off of the bat.
DRE:
Are you ever going to work on any of his movies?
JW:
We were going to act in his new one [Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind] that just came out and there were a couple of songs we all wanted in there, but it didn't end up working with the scene. So that didn't happen. I'm sure that we'll work together again because we've become really good friends.
DRE:
Have you ever been accosted by bass players who to join the band?
JW:
[Laughs] Yeah, that's happened a couple of times.
DRE:
Jack, how are you holding up under everything that’s happened to you this year?
JW:
This has really been the best year of my life. The most amazing opportunities have come up and I've gotten a chance to play with or was on the same stage as Bob Dylan, Loretta Lynn, Beck, Jeff Beck, David Bowie and Iggy Pop. These are things that would've never occurred to me as being possible, even to be in the same room with any of those people let alone have my creative aspect be acknowledged and being able to share that with an audience. I think that as things go, people generally know that I'm not at all attempting celebrity or fame. These are things that happened to us. For example, after White Blood Cells came out, we were on the covers of all these magazines and we didn't have a manager or a lawyer. We were not a signed band. We never sent out demos to a record label to try and get signed. It was never our goal to expand. We were misinterpreted on things like that. Like being in Cold Mountain happened because of how much I like southern American folk music. That was my relation to that. It wasn't a step in the direction of more fame and celebrity.
DRE:
Is there a logical crossover from being a musician to being an actor?
JW:
Anthony Minghella said something about that to me; that all musicians who perform on stage are acting and he's right. I think that as natural as things can be, as natural as we've ever been, there's a still prefabrication to it. The fact that people paid for tickets, there are lights on us and we’re playing electrical instruments isn’t exactly natural. It all relates to a theory that I have that everything other than the story itself is a trick. The melody that you sing it too, the rhythm of the song, the electricity and volume that it's being played at, the way it's presented onstage, the way it looks and the way that the lights are on. Those are all tricks that are all supposed to lead you back to relating to the story.
DRE:
At the very beginning did you think a two-piece band like The White Stripes could play in a big venue?
JW:
I think that it was the whole idea of the band, that it had a concept to it. It was all about what not to do and what we don't want to be there. Why have two guitars players? Why have a bass player playing the same thing as the guitar is playing? Let’s cut this down as much as possible and have it still be rock and roll. Let’s see what two people can do. Revolving everything around the number three, like vocals guitar drums and melody storytelling and rhythm. It was all about, “Let’s restrict ourselves, live inside of a box and have there be rules.” When you're given a $2 million budget for your album to make in six months. All of that opportunity steals or robs you of a lot of creativity because you're not focused or confined. We purposely confined ourselves to help us be more focused.
DRE:
Do you two ever argue much?
JW:
Not really. We've always gotten along pretty well. The important part of a two-piece band is that you can't take sides [laughs]. If you have a third person, they take someone's side and cause dissention.
DRE:
Has it been a struggle to stick to your original ideals?
JW:
Well, at times, when we played at Glastonbury Festival and The Reading Festival it was fifty to eighty thousand people and we thought there was no way that this two piece band is going to relate to this kind of crowd. But it surprised us because it worked there too. I don’t know why it works on radio or on MTV either because it seems like there should be more going on.
DRE:
What's coming up next for you guys?
MW:
We'll probably be working on another album in the next few months here. Then we're going to take a lot of time off because in the last three years we've been touring continuously.
DRE:
How long will it take to record a new album?
MW:
Not very long. The last one was ten days.
JW:
White Blood Cells took three days.
DRE:
What's the best part of fame for each of you?
MW:
It's cool to meet your idols. It's a good opportunity to travel. Those kinds of things are good.
DRE:
So you don't take fame too seriously?
JW:
I really try not to. It's dangerous. It's like having the love of money because they both lead to nowhere. I've never had a love for money. A love for things is so empty. Celebrity is very empty. It's like people talking about Paris Hilton or whatever, there's really nothing going on there. She doesn't do anything. It's fake celebrity, but people love that and people strive for that. I've never wanted that.
DRE:
Are you both self-taught musicians?
JW:
Yeah. But I took a percussion class in high school. I was a drummer from the time I was like five years old. At one point, I wanted to learn how to read music but the way school taught music seemed kind of soulless and ridiculous. So I didn't follow up on it.
DRE:
What do you think teaching yourself did for you?
JW:
I guess that it's more natural. I asked someone when I was younger to teach me how to play guitar and he said, “No one ever taught me.” I'm glad that he didn't show me because it's better to teach yourself how to do it because you're more in tune with it. I play chords for example, with these two fingers [holds up two outside fingers] and that's not the way that you're supposed to do it. If you're taught how to play guitar, you use four fingers. Of course, I'm not very good anymore because I can't bend that finger anymore since I broke it. So that's been a new battle, which I'm learning how to deal with. I think that it's something that's more natural and it's more coming from yourself and I think that also helped with songwriting.
DRE:
Would you like to score films?
JW:
I'd love to do that. Here and there, people have wanted to use songs, but no one has really asked that.
DRE:
Are there some directors that you'd like to work with?
JW:
I'd like to work with Michel Gondry on something. That'd be great. I'd like to work musically with him as well.
DRE:
Are you going to try and get Jim to do a video for you?
JW:
Yeah, I'm sure that it'll happen.
DRE:
Meg, what are you listening to right now?
MW:
Bubblegum music [Laughs]. Actually, all my records and CD's were boxed up for a while because I'm moving. So, I was cut off from most of them for a while, but just a little bit of this and a little of that. There's nothing really exciting, just the usual.
JW:
She hates that question by the way.
DRE:
When Hollywood makes The White Stripes story, who do you want to play you? Jim Jarmusch?
JW:
[Laughs] Yeah. He could play both roles.
DRE:
What did you buy with your first royalty check?
MW:
I was able to afford a car that didn't break down every five minutes.
JW:
That's right. We bought a van with a suitcase full of money. I paid $16,000 cash for a van.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
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