Jim Jarmusch - Personal Life

Personal Life

Jarmusch rarely discusses his personal life in public. His longtime girlfriend, filmmaker Sara Driver, worked closely with him on his early films, but the stress this put on their relationship caused them to break up and resolve thereafter not to work together and have since lived together for many years. He divides his time between New York City and the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York. Jarmusch stopped drinking coffee in 1986, the year of the first installment of Coffee and Cigarettes, though he remained a smoker.

In the early 1980s, Jarmusch was part of a revolving lineup of musicians in Robin Crutchfield's Dark Day project, and later became the keyboardist and one of two vocalists for The Del-Byzanteens, a No Wave band whose sole LP Lies to Live By was a minor underground hit in the United States and Britain in 1982. Jarmusch is also featured on the album Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture (2005) in two interludes described by Sean Fennessy in a Pitchfork Media review of the album as both "bizarrely pretentious" and "reason alone to give it a listen". Jarmusch and Michel Gondry each contributed a remix to a limited edition release of the track "Blue Orchid" by The White Stripes in 2005.

The author of a series of essays on influential bands, Jarmusch has also had at least two poems published. He is a founding member of The Sons of Lee Marvin, a humorous "semi-secret society" of artists resembling the iconic actor, which issues communiqués and meets on occasion for the ostensible purpose of watching Marvin's films.