In 1984 John Lurie had three films at Cannes but couldn’t afford a plane ticket. For a few indelible moments in Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas, as a high-end pimp he moves through the shadows of a brothel in a purple suit. He composed a nocturnal jazz score for Bette Gordon’s Variety. And in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise the world first got a load of his austere, trickster visage. For that film he also created a soundtrack first conceived on cocktail napkins and originally recorded with two handheld tape recorders. Stranger Than Paradise would take home the Caméra d’Or; Paris, Texas won the Palme d’Or. In Lurie’s memoir The History of Bones, published last August, he claims Jarmusch was supposed to take him to Cannes but took his girlfriend instead. This anecdote feels perfectly illustrative of Lurie’s career. Pervasively influential, a creative force of various fields, continually shafted and relegated to the sidelines. But that’s not the whole story; Lurie is also pretty good at shooting himself in the foot. In the wake of Stranger Than Paradise’s star turn, his profile as avant-jazz explorer and downtown figurehead growing, Lurie was invited to be a guest on Late Show with David Letterman; Lurie stood up Letterman and was subsequently blacklisted by the program.
In my youth I’d stay up almost nightly to watch Late Night with Conan O’Brien. For a show with hip bonafides out the ass, one of the coolest things going for it was having a theme composed by Lurie. But I didn’t know this at the time. I’d only consciously encounter Lurie during college, in the darkened dorm room of a friend who insisted I watch Stranger Than Paradise. Lurie’s face was born for black-and-white. The horn lip and sunken cheeks; the confrontational eyes; the baggy, drab suits. Something ethereal yet street-level scary. Whatever that something, it was enough to net roles with Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and Wim Wenders over his brief, storied acting career. I next saw Lurie in the bizarre cultural artifact that is Fishing With John, a television show where he’d go on exotic, sometimes perilous fishing expeditions with friends like Dennis Hopper and Tom Waits. I then became a fan of the Lounge Lizards, the No Wave-jazz institution Lurie founded and led until chronic Lyme Disease made playing (even listening to) music difficult, sometimes impossible. With music gone from his life Lurie, who had been painting for years, went about establishing himself as a revered visual artist. Like Lurie’s screen presence and music, the paintings are magical and confounding. And in early 2021 he returned to television with HBO’s Painting with John, a formally experimental show that offers a touching portrait of an artist aging, struggling with health, and reflecting on life.
I watched each week as new installments arrived, spellbound by how creative and strange it was. I also bought Lurie’s memoir when it first hit stands and began reaching out to his friend and longtime assistant, Nesrin Wolf, about doing an interview. After a month or so of it being unclear whether this would happen, Wolf got back to me. She said he would do the interview. There was one caveat: the interview had to be conducted over email, his answers not edited in any way. Back in 2010 Lurie got burned by a semi-infamous New Yorker profile that he deemed scurrilous and full of lies. The article, whether entirely accurate or not, is fascinating for the story it tells and fallout that followed. Lurie has since harbored a great distrust for the press and, a few exceptions notwithstanding, only does interviews over email so as to retain a record of his exact answers. Though disappointed, believing a more exciting conversation would take place via phone, I dutifully typed my questions and sent them off.
What follows are Lurie’s unedited responses. We discuss his memoir, the upcoming season of Painting with John, working with Martin Scorsese, and the unending appetite for self-discovery.
Hi, John. Thanks for doing this. What have you been up to?
I just finished the post on Painting with John. Was a bit of a scramble to meet the deadline.
Painting with John has received a great deal of praise and been renewed for a second season, but I still feel it has been underrated for how innovative and unique it is. There’s live-action and animation, monologues, and on and on. How did you come to form this strange, exciting multimedia approach?
It fell into place by accident. Nesrin and I were about to go back to New York and I was halfway through a painting that I knew I wasn’t going to remember the technique for. So Nesrin filmed me working on her phone. We started teasing each other and it was pretty funny and kind of sweet. Nesrin has wanted forever to post little videos on Instagram. Nesrin runs our Instagram page, so we thought we would have Erik Mockus come down and film it. But Erik turned out to be really, really good at multiple things and it just kept expanding. We didn’t know what we were making but it grew and grew. And we thought that it might be something but we didn’t know what. Then, I don’t normally do this, but he seemed like such a nice guy so I agreed to do Matt Dwyer’s podcast. I sent him some of this painting thing we were doing. Matt asked if I would mind if he sent it to Adam McKay. I said sure. Adam then asked if he could send it to HBO. I said sure. Then HBO wanted to know if they could have it as a show. I said sure.
Have you started working on season 2 yet? How do you think it will be different from the first?
Just finished it last weekend. It has the introduction of Cowboy Beckett which I am wildly excited about. I also wrote new music for actual musicians, which is the first time I have done that in 25 years.
Given your struggles with Lyme Disease and cancer, how difficult was it to make the first season? Was there any hesitancy about doing it again?
This season was pretty rough. But my symptoms come and go and Erik Mockus is remarkably patient. So we film when we can. Post was grueling. Erik carried me through that. We also have a good team with Nesrin, Todd Schulman and the addition of Helen Cho.
“A man, a Bull and of course the Soldier Bunnies” by John Lurie. Photo by Erik Mockus.
Last year you released a memoir, The History of Bones. I loved it. I was particularly taken with how confident your writing was. You don’t overwrite. It’s all very conversational. Was that a stylistic choice?
It seems confident? Wow. With music or painting, I really couldn’t give a fuck what people think. I know when it works and when it doesn’t. With music and later with painting, I do it when I feel compelled to do it. With the book, I felt compelled to write the first draft, but all the stuff that came after that, I was the opposite of compelled. See? I can’t be much of a writer, a real writer would have an antonym for compelled right at their fingertips. With a book, you are writing it so people can read it, so you have to care what people’s reactions are, at least, in a way. But I went to Goodreads the other day and read the reviews. Some of them made me want to get a hammer out of the drawer and smash myself squarely in the forehead. My next book may be entitled “Learn to read words.” I started writing it a little more than twenty years ago. And at that time, I used to talk to Elmore Leonard on the phone. I told him about the book and Elmore said, “make it conversational.” So I did.
Was there a reason you ended the book where you did? Do you hope to write a follow-up that picks up where you left off?
Yes, I hope so. Random House wanted a book about NYC in the 1980s. So I ended it on New Years 1990. I don’t love the ending. I had something else in mind and was talked out of doing it, perhaps rightly so. In defense of the ending that I don’t love, if one is writing a memoir, seems like it should be like life, things don’t get tied up with a nice bow.
Memories are strange—they become inflated and colored by the imagination over the course of years. When writing a book like this, are you leaning into the mythologizing we all do? Or do you try accessing the cold reality of what actually happened?
I don’t know, when I tell a story, I always tend to exaggerate a little. But I really tried to be as honest as I could possibly be with the book. I thought it only had true value if it was brutally honest. Real life is amazingly weird. Just that when you tell those stories, the weird ones, they can come off funny. So I told those stories as matter of factly as possible. It required a bit of finesse.
In the book you talk about how for a long time you were drawn to “the cool people” as opposed to “the real ones.” Was there a moment when your perspective changed on the type of person you wanted around?
I got really sick 20 years ago. At that time, I bet there were 3,000 people in New York City who would say, “Yeah! John Lurie is a really good friend of mine!” After I fell ill, that list went down to about 3.
It would be impossible to discuss your acting career without mentioning Jim Jarmusch. Where is your relationship? How do you look back on the legacy of the films you made together?
Well, we could solve this by not discussing my acting at all.
How do you feel now, at this vantage, about your acting career and what you were able to accomplish?
I think I have a natural ability but never put in the work. To be Philip Seymour Hoffman or Olivia Colman or Bill Camp, you have to be dedicated, acting never called me like music or painting did. Also, when I was younger, I was very concerned about how I would come off. What made me realize that I wasn’t really an actor was watching Miller’s Crossing. There is that scene where Turturro is on his knees begging for his life out in the woods. I could not have done that. I could never have let my character come off so ignobly. At least, back then.
In your short acting career you got to work with Wim Wenders, David Lynch, and Martin Scorsese—I’d say that speaks volumes about your abilities and the level of respect they had for you. What indelible memories do you have from working with those directors?
This answer would require a book.
Based on your recollections, you and Scorsese seemed to have a tense relationship making The Last Temptation of Christ. Why do you think that was?
Marty is not so comfortable. But I had the ridiculous notion that he was going to take me under his wing and teach me everything about directing. I would have found me irritating as well. But right from the beginning, Marty would say these snide things to me out of the corner of his mouth. I never really got why that was happening.
When recounting a story about the frustrating and chaotic aspects of Paris, Texas‘ production you sort of sarcastically repeat this refrain: “Ah, the life.” But you can sense some nostalgia and sentimentality in it too. Do you miss being involved in making films?
Whenever I see something good, which is rare, I think, “oh, I wish I had been involved in that.” But, no, I don’t really miss it.
It feels like one of the central tensions in your public persona is this desire for fame and recognition and then rejecting it once you’ve got it. One of the Painting with John episodes is titled “Fame Is Bad.” How do you feel about the experience of fame at this point?
Man, I want the work to be recognized. Not my face. But seems like you can’t get the work out there without some level of that. Though it has worked out quite nicely with the painting. I am getting my work seen by an awful lot of people and never for one moment have to deal with the art world. Excuse me while I dance around the room for a moment.
One of the things that seemed to frustrate you most with fame was the press, particularly an episode you had with the New Yorker and a profile from 2010. What were the biggest misconceptions that came out of that piece and how much has it soured you against doing press?
It is not possible to quickly explain the horrible damage that the New Yorker article did to my life. That article was, honestly, the worst thing that ever happened to me. It wasn’t that they ridiculed my illness or the blatant, intentional misquotes. It wasn’t that it was a needlessly nasty article, it is that they greatly increased the danger that I was in. I don’t believe that a magazine profile is supposed to do that, carelessly put the subject in grave danger. The most heinous thing about the article being the omissions. Things had happened, specific things that I don’t want to get into here, but things happened that I reacted to in order to protect myself. Those things, though there was a barrel of evidence that was made available to the writer, proving they were true, those things were left out of the article. Making me look nuts. Making me look hysterical is something the writer appears to have greatly enjoyed and he went out of his way to do that, over and over again. The magazine’s lack of accountability has been astounding. As far as souring, I can’t imagine another magazine could possibly be that perverse. I am much more careful now. It is why I insist on doing most interviews via email. At least I will have a record of what I actually did say.
I don’t want to pry, but how is your health holding up at this point?
That would depend on the day you ask the question.
I understand that your illness made playing music almost impossible at a certain point. In the book you write with so much passion about music, the almost religious devotion you had for it. Do you have moments of missing it?
I don’t let myself go there. It’s too much. I rarely even listen now. I can still play guitar and harmonica but the saxophone, which was everything to me at one time, is gone from my life. Hurts to even answer the question.
You’ve achieved the rare thing for an artist previously known for being a musician and actor: you’ve gained a level of notoriety and appreciation that isn’t tied to your celebrity but the work itself. It’s a major feat. How do you like the art world? How do you think the art world likes you? How would you compare it to show business?
I haven’t heard from the art world in quite a while. How are they doing?
Recently I was telling someone how being a bit confused about what you want to do, or being open to different things, may be better than knowing exactly what you want; life can surprise you and take you in directions you wouldn’t expect. You seem like someone who has always been in a place of self-discovery. What’s kept you curious all these years, trying different things?
People who know exactly what they want to do, especially at a very young age, that really scares me. First off, I don’t believe they really know what they want to do. I believe very much in attempting to live completely in the moment. Then the magic of life can unfold around you. If you know exactly where you are going and only concentrating on that, you might miss the 35 armadillos, singing on the curbside. One doesn’t want to miss the singing armadillos.