David Lynch Returns: Expect Moody Conditions, With Surreal Gusts

[7/4]

October 1, 2006

David Lynch Returns: Expect Moody Conditions, With Surreal Gusts

By DENNIS LIM

LOS ANGELES

TO hear him tell it, David Lynch has spent the last five years killing the thing he loves, for fear that it will kill him first.

“The sky’s the limit with digital,” he said in a recent conversation, his voice approaching foghorn pitch. “Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit. People might be sick to hear that because they love film, just like they loved magnetic tape. And I love film. I love it!”

He contorted his face into an expression that suggested pain more than love. “It’s so beautiful,” he said. But “I would die if I had to work like that again.”

Not one for understatement or half measures, Mr. Lynch takes a giant leap into the post-celluloid future with the three-hour “Inland Empire,” his first feature since “Mulholland Drive” in 2001, his 10th overall and the first to be shot on the humble medium of digital video. The movie had its premiere last month at the Venice Film Festival, where Mr. Lynch, who turned 60 in January, was awarded a Golden Lion for career achievement. It will have its first North American showings at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 8 and 9.

On this clear Los Angeles morning, his first at home after three weeks in Europe, Mr. Lynch was knocking back a huge cappuccino in his favorite corner of his painting studio, a scatter of stale cigarette butts on the cement floor around his Aeron chair.

“It’s actually cleaner that I thought it would be,” he said, looking around. The sunlit atelier is perched atop one of the three sleek concrete structures that make up his compound in the Hollywood Hills. He lives in one building; another is the office of his production company, Asymmetrical. This one, the hub of creative activity, served first as a location for his 1997 film “Lost Highway” and was later converted into a production facility with a recording and editing studio and a screening room. (Mr. Lynch’s chair, off limits to anyone else, can be identified by the sizable ashtray on the armrest.)

The moods and objects throughout inevitably bring to mind that most resonant of eponymous adjectives: Lynchian. Corridors and stairwells are minimally lighted. One room has the signature red curtains. Propped against one wall is an Abstract Expressionist canvas by Mr. Lynch, a brown expanse with a violent splotch of blue and the inscription “Bob loves Sally until she is blue in the face.” A photograph of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Transcendental Meditation guru, sits on a conference table, sunlight illuminating a single cobweb that hangs from its gold frame.

Lately Mr. Lynch has emerged as a keen proponent of Transcendental Meditation, which he said he has practiced twice a day since 1973 without missing a session. Last year he established the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace with the goal of raising $7 billion to create “universities of peace.” He also went on a campus tour, promoting the benefits of “diving within” with the help of a meditating assistant hooked up to an electroencephalograph.

His other consuming passion of recent years has been the Internet. Mr. Lynch grasped the potential of streaming media earlier and took to it with greater enthusiasm than filmmakers half his age. His sprawling Web site, davidlynch.com, begun in 2001, carries merchandise (mugs, photos, alarming ring tones) and subscriber-only content (original music, experimental vignettes, the animated series “Dumbland”). On the home page he delivers the daily weather report for Los Angeles direct to Webcam.

As it turns out, some of Mr. Lynch’s online experiments found their way into “Inland Empire,” which, despite his claims for the speed of direct video, took three years to make. It was shot in fits and starts and, for the longest time, on his own dime and without a unifying vision. At the outset, “I never saw any whole, W-H-O-L-E,” he said. “I saw plenty of holes, H-O-L-E-S. But I didn’t really worry. I would get an idea for a scene and shoot it, get another idea and shoot that. I didn’t know how they would relate.”

Only after the project was well under way did he contact the French studio Canal Plus, which financed the transformation of “Mulholland Drive” from a rejected television pilot into a feature film. Canal Plus signed on to “Inland Empire” even though, Mr. Lynch said, “I told them two things: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m shooting on D.V.’ ”

Eventually the grand design revealed itself. In interviews Mr. Lynch has repeatedly advanced a poetic, democratic notion of ideas as independent of the artist, waiting to be plucked from the ether, or, in his preferred analogy, reeled in: he’s working on a book about the creative process titled “Catching the Big Fish.” With “Mulholland Drive,” he said the eureka moment came while he was meditating. With “Eraserhead,” his indelible debut in 1977, inspiration came while reading the Bible. (He declined to specify the passage.) There was no equivalent lightning bolt on “Inland Empire,” but in due course “something started to talk to me,” he said. “It was as if it was talking to me all along but I didn’t know it.”

A thoroughly instinctual filmmaker, Mr. Lynch could never be accused of overthinking things. Or of overtalking them. In discussions of his work he reverts to affable stonewalling tactics, deflecting detailed or analytical probes with a knowing vagueness.

The vertiginous “Inland Empire” is sure to provoke questions about meaning, literal and metaphoric. Still without a United States distributor, this may be his most avant-garde offering since “Eraserhead.” In tone and structure the film resembles the cosmic free fall of the mind-warping final act in “Mulholland Drive.”

“Inland Empire” refers on one level to the landlocked region east of Los Angeles but also evokes the vast, murky kingdom of the unconscious. Like “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive,” the new movie is hard-wired into its protagonist’s disintegrating psyche, a condition that somehow prompts convulsive dislocations in time and space.

Laura Dern, who worked with Mr. Lynch on “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart,” plays an actress who lands a coveted role, only to learn that the movie, a remake, may be cursed: the original was aborted when both leads were murdered. Actor becomes character. Fiction infects reality. The various narrative strands — plagued by déjà vu, doppelgängers and the menacing ambient drone of Mr. Lynch’s sound design — start to unravel. Shuttling between California and Poland, the movie folds in a Baltic radio play, a Greek chorus of skimpily dressed young women and a ghostly sitcom featuring a rabbit-headed cast and an arbitrary laugh track.

Asked to elaborate on some of the film’s themes, Mr. Lynch was illuminating, if not always in expected ways. On his apparent conception of the self as fragmentary, he said: “The big self is mondo stable. But the small self — we’re blowing about like dry leaves in the wind.” Regarding the essential elusiveness of time, he declared, “It’s going backward and forward, and it’s slippery.”

He brought up wormholes, invoked the theories of the quantum physicist (and fellow meditator) John Hagelin and recounted a moment of déjà vu that overcame him while making “The Elephant Man.” “There was a feeling of a past thing and it’s holding, and the next instant I slipped forward” — he made a sound somewhere between a slurp and a whoosh — “and I see this future.”

A nightmare vision of the dream factory, “Inland Empire” belongs to the lineage of Hollywood bloody valentines that runs from “Sunset Boulevard” to “Mulholland Drive.” In one scene a character, stabbed in the gut with a screwdriver, runs down Hollywood Boulevard, leaving a gory trail on the Walk of Fame. Like “Mulholland Drive,” the film is at once a tribute to actors, especially those chewed up and spit out by the industry, and a study of the metaphysics of their craft.

Acting, Mr. Lynch suggests, is a kind of out-of-body experience. Like Naomi Watts in “Mulholland,” Ms. Dern summons an almost frightening intensity in a performance that requires her to inhabit three (if not more) overlapping parts, lapsing in and out of a Southern drawl.

“I thought of it as playing a broken or dismantled person, with these other people leaking out of her brain,” Ms. Dern said in a telephone interview. She said she held as a mental touchstone Catherine Deneuve’s portrait of psychosis in Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” and noted that the stop-start shoot had its advantages: “It’s unbelievably freeing. You’re not sure where you’re going or even where you’ve come from. You can only be in the moment.”

One of the pluses of video was that the moment could be extended. Despite the overall lack of continuity, the lightweight camera and longer takes allowed for more freedom in individual scenes. “When you don’t have to stop and spend two hours relighting, you’re just able to boogie together,” Mr. Lynch said.

The genesis of “Inland Empire” was a 14-page monologue he wrote for Ms. Dern. They shot it once, in a 70-minute take, on a set built in his painting studio. The scene is carved up and strewn throughout the film but remains its dark heart.

Watching “Inland Empire,” which makes little attempt to temper the harshness of video, it’s hard not to miss the tactile richness of Mr. Lynch’s celluloid images. Instead of a state-of-the-art high-definition camera, he used the Sony PD-150, a common midrange model.

“Everybody says, ‘But the quality, David, it’s not so good,’ and that’s true,” Mr. Lynch said. “But it’s a different quality. It reminds me of early 35-millimeter film. You see different things. It talks to you differently.”

Mary Sweeney, Mr. Lynch’s longtime producer (and ex-wife), called the new film a return to the obsessive experimentation of “Eraserhead,” which he also shot piecemeal over several years. “David got very excited about the ways the new technology could liberate him,” she said. “I think it took him back to a pure and fearless way of working.”

Mr. Lynch also stressed the importance of fearlessness. “Fear is like a tourniquet on the big tube of creative flow,” he said. And thanks to meditation, “negative things decrease,” he added. “You get more ideas. You catch them at a deeper level.”

The dissonance between this upbeat philosophy and the abysmal terror of his films is not lost on him. “You can understand depression much more when you’re not depressed,” he said. “You go to this ocean of knowingness. That’s what you use.”

His body of work may be, short of Hitchcock’s, the most psychoanalyzed in film history, but Mr. Lynch once forswore psychotherapy, fearing it might inhibit his creativity. Most things, as he sees it, are best left uninterrogated.

“As soon as you put things in words, no one ever sees the film the same way,” he said at one point, when the line of questioning turned too specific. “And that’s what I hate, you know. Talking — it’s real dangerous.”

[sal]

I saw "Inland Empire" this weekend.

It was absolutely brilliant. Its without a doubt a very challenging film, and one will drive themselves crazy if they try to make too much sense of it. But if you sit back and just take it scene by scene, you'll soon realize that you are witnessing something really special. Like the article mentions above, its true that you get a strong sense that Lynch is excited and inspired by the possibilities of the digital medium as you watch the film. Its like he's on the cusp of another creative breakthrough.

David Lynch is a master, and he demonstrates why he may be the best in the biz over and over again throughout the film. Nobody creates mood like him. This film is a must for fans of his work, but I would be more hesitant to recommend this to the general population, as there isn't really a plot and the film is very experimental. But its definitely one of his best films. Even if one finds it difficult to pick up on the themes he's covering here (there are many, and I would be surprised if Lynch himself was able to say what the film is "about), its worth it to just to experience his elation with the digital camera.

Edit to add the fact that its a f***ing travesty that Laura Dern did not get any recognition for her performance here. It was surely the best performance by an actress that I saw in any film from 2006.

Edited February 5, 2007 by sal

[J Larsen]

I think this may be his best movie, which is saying a lot given that Eraserhead is one of my all-time favorites. I can't wait for the DVD.

I also don't find the movie all that "challenging". It is a nightmare on film and as such follows the logic of dreams. As in a dream, sometimes things make have obvious meanings (such as the rabbit/Alice in Wonderland references in the film) and sometimes they don't. But if you just let it be what it is without trying to impose a hard and fast story line on it, it is an incredible artistic achievement, IMO.

Oh, and Laura Dern was incredible.

[sal]

I also don't find the movie all that "challenging". It is a nightmare on film and as such follows the logic of dreams.

I agree with you, and probably should have phrased myself differently. I can see this film being difficult for someone who is not familiar with Lynch, or is expecting some sort of narrative cohesiveness. In a general sense, its challenging, but like yourself, I didn't find it difficult to watch at all, just because I had an idea of what to expect. Its an experience, and you either surrender to it or you don't.

edit for spelling

Edited February 5, 2007 by sal

[porcy62]

TO hear him tell it, David Lynch has spent the last five years killing the thing he loves, for fear that it will kill him first.

That's the summary of my life.

[Lazaro Vega]

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000368/news

News for

Laura Dern

Lynch Honored With Lifetime Achievement Award

7 September 2006 (WENN)

Cult director David Lynch was honored with the prestigious lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival yesterday, and he used the opportunity to reassure the press about his quirky new movie Inland Empire. Lynch, who is behind hit movies Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet, spent two years developing the hallucinatory project, which stars Naomi Watts' vocal talents as a talking rabbit. He insisted, "It's supposed to make perfect sense. Every film is like going into a new world, going into the unknown. But you should be not afraid of using your intuition, and feel and think your way through." But Laura Dern, who also stars in the improvisation-based movie, admitted she is still baffled by the film herself. She said, "The truth is I didn't know who I was playing - and I still don't know. I'm looking forward to seeing the film tonight to learn more."

[Van Basten II]

Saw Inland empire today, all i gotta say is why buy expensive narcotics when for ten bucks you can end up in a similar state of mind watching a Lynch movie.

In stuff i can assimlate, soundtrack sounded great not so sure about the digital camera work.

[7/4]

Amazon says July 24, 2007 is the release date for the DVD, Ryko Distribution says Aug. 14, 2007.

[J Larsen]

The August date is correct.

[7/4]

Gotta distribute it first...

[J Larsen]

I'm pretty sure 8/14 is the new street date. I read something about it on Lynch's site, but can't find it now.

[sidewinder]

I think this may be his best movie, which is saying a lot given that Eraserhead is one of my all-time favorites. I can't wait for the DVD.

I also don't find the movie all that "challenging". It is a nightmare on film and as such follows the logic of dreams. As in a dream, sometimes things make have obvious meanings (such as the rabbit/Alice in Wonderland references in the film) and sometimes they don't. But if you just let it be what it is without trying to impose a hard and fast story line on it, it is an incredible artistic achievement, IMO.

Oh, and Laura Dern was incredible.

Looking forward to seeing that one on DVD too.

Love the way they had those radiators always humming at lots of dB ! Never could work out the bit with the melting lady singing on the stage though.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

david lynch is a talentless charlatan of the highest order but as long as he keeps having Laura Dern in his movie projects then hes alfred hitchcock as far as im concerned

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

dude im gonna transcribe this VHS back cover for you- its the greatest

Laura Dern stars in this award-winning tale of a young girl's sexual awakening during one hot and passionate summer. Fifteen year old Connie (Dern) has two thing on her mind, boys and how she looks. It's summer and her world is expanding...rapidly...The excitement and danger of adulthood beckons; at first a smoldering passion, then, suddenly ignited by the ardent advances of a dangerous man. Dangerous because he will SMOOTH TALK her into doing things only bad girls do...at fifteen...in the summer.

[Swinger]

I saw Inland Empire a week ago and what can I say...

It was a very challenging movie but it was really rewarding experience. I've been a Lynch fan ever since I saw Twin Peaks on Finnish television back in 1990. I definitely want to see this movie at least twice again.

I was almost literally scared to death when Laura was walking along the corridor,everything was silent and suddenly some really weird face appeared.I had similar experience with the scene when Laura was standing in the bedroom and the lamp began to blink...

[sal]

Its amazing how Lynch can make corridors/hallways, particularly those in apartment complexes, so damn scary.

[7/4]

Does the weird shit begin when a lamp starts blinking?

[sal]

Does the weird shit begin when a lamp starts blinking?

Nope the weird shit had been going on for quite some time by then.

[7/4]

Absurda

[sal]

Inland Empire is out on DVD tomorrow!

[7/4]

and I'm looking forward to it since I totally missed it the first time around. :rsmile:

[Man with the Golden Arm]

trickling from 7/4's youtube link. essential conversation w/ Badalamenti

[kh1958]

Pre-ordered.

[Man with the Golden Arm]

Lynch on NPR's 'Talk of the Nation' - today.

[sal]

The DVD is great. I think the film translates better to video than it does to the big screen.