I never start with the story first, which is maybe obvious, because the narrative line of my films is really not that strong or dramatic. They're very simple.

My first film I made, "Permanent Vacation," we shot in 1979 for like $12,000, part of which I got a fake car loan for that Amos Poe told me you could do that. And, yeah, I had no idea what I was doing. It was just like, well, we're going to try and do this. Partly because I had been following Amos Poe and Eric Mitchell around for about a year, and I worked on some of Eric's films as a sound recordist and stuff.

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

Jim Jarmusch: Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

I think we need to sort of broaden our definition of poetry, which maybe it's a good thing that they just gave this Nobel Prize to [Bob] Dylan because blurring the lines of song lyrics and also hip-hop for me is like some of the greatest uses - most innovative uses of language in my lifetime.

As soon as you start making a film that's expensive then the studio wants total control over all elements of it because they want to get all their money back. If you make a smaller film you can try a lot more things because you can have control over it and not just be a hired director. The lower the budget the more freedom you have.

When I left Ohio when I was 17 and ended up in New York and realised that not all films had the giant crab monsters in them, it really opened up a lot of things for me.