Deconstructing David

Interview: ‘Mulholland Drive’ continues to explore director David Lynch’s beguiling obsessions

By BRETT BUCKALEW
Staff Writer
Waiting in a hotel room to interview David Lynch, the strikingly surrealist and creative filmmaker behind "Blue Velvet," "Lost Highway" and TV's "Twin Peaks," one cannot help but hypothesize as to just how bizarre the director will turn out to be. Will his arrival into the Four Seasons suite be foreshadowed by an ominous dimming of the lights? Will the slinky, insinuating music of composer Angelo Badalementi, a frequent collaborator, be filtered through the room's ventilation shafts? Will he be accompanied by the eerie dancing midget from "Twin Peaks?"

When Lynch sat down to promote "Mulholland Drive," his newest cinematic brainteaser, there were no such elaborate Lynch-isms heralding his presence.

During the interview, however, he did exhibit a number of intriguingly odd physical mannerisms, such as the way he would occasionally clench the lapels of his jacket with tight fists, bracing for who knows what, and the way he would let his cigarette dangle precariously from his lips, threatening at any time to fall on the table in front of him. Naturally, much of what he said also seemed to spring from the mind of a particularly offbeat genius.

"Ideas are kind of reality waiting to happen," he said in one of his unique tangents, "so I love thinking about ideas, because everything in this room came from an idea. It's like there are little sparks that show the way, and off you go, you're either building a house or a chair, or making a film with those ideas, or making music, or whatever."

The first little spark that paved the way for "Mulholland Drive," the story of a starry-eyed aspiring actress, Betty (Naomi Watts), who helps a haunted amnesiac, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), uncover the secrets of her past, was the winding Hollywood road that gave the movie its title.

"Knowing the road, and knowing that road at night Š you start getting a mystery. And when you start getting a mystery, you're starting to get pulled in, so you're starting to kind of fall in love, and the journey to find those pieces starts," said Lynch, who sets the car collision that robs Rita of her memory on Mulholland.

Lynch's journey with "Mulholland Drive" began with the director preparing the project as a television series for ABC, the network that aired "Twin Peaks." When ABC rejected the series' pilot episode, "Mulholland" appeared to have hit a dead end. Salvation for the project came when the French company StudioCanal gave Lynch money to go back to "Mulholland" and complete it as a feature film.

Lynch holds no ill will towards ABC.

"I wouldn't have gotten those ideas (of how to end ŚMulholland Drive'] if it hadn't gone that way first, so it's really interesting to me how it happened," he said.

According to actor Justin Theroux, who plays arrogant hotshot filmmaker Adam Kesher, Lynch is, perhaps against expectation, a "wonderful, calm, sane, serene director," one who is open to actors' suggestions, even when he is subtly guiding them toward his vision.

"He's very good at smacking any sort of intellectual impulses to the ground and focusing you on exactly the task at hand, which is completing the scene in the way in which he sees it," said Theroux, who acknowledges that such a technique must be Lynch's way of "distracting you from what's to come, because he almost doesn't want you to know (where he's going)."

Harring, who said Lynch wanted her to visualize "a black cloud hovering over" the lost Rita, calls the director "a true poet, and a true artist Š he's constantly creating."

Like many of Lynch's films, "Mulholland Drive," with its identity-swapping twists and bizarre, open-ended conclusion, is a puzzle that the viewer must piece together something that delights Harring. She has found that the movie is "like unlayering an onion" because her interpretation becomes increasingly complex with each viewing.

"The first time I saw the movie, I was convinced that it was a movie about Hollywood dreams and obsession," Harring said. "And then, the second time I saw it, I thought, ŚNo, this is a movie about identity and how we really don't know who we are,' which I think is really true in life."

Because Lynch's fractured, ambiguous narratives rely more on style than they do on dialogue or character development , Theroux was not surprised to find the script for "Mulholland Drive" an initially baffling read.

"The things that I think are sort of signature David Lynch are sound, color, mood, tempo Š these are all things that can't exist on a written page," he said.

When Theroux finally saw the completed film, his first thought was that "(Lynch) has created something completely new and original that I didn't know we were creating."

When asked about the distinctive dreamlike mood that his films conjure, Lynch said, "Film can tell and can show abstractions. It is a beautiful language, and it's a language that doesn't rely on words, so with sound and picture and timing, you can make some beautiful abstractions that other human beings can feel and intuit, just like they would feel their subconscious, in a dream or some abstraction coming up."

Lynch, who won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival for "Mulholland Drive" (in a tie with Joel Coen for "The Man Who Wasn't There"), remains optimistic that his newest film is not too abstract for audiences.

"I don't want (people) to think it's strange and not understandable, because it isn't," Lynch said. "It's got abstractions in it, but it's a human story and it's got a mood and a feel, and it's a great world to go into."

A director so rigidly outside of the mainstream describing his work as accessible? Now, that is weird.

Copyright 2001 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.
This article was published in Vol. 144, No. 31 (Wednesday, October 10, 2001), beginning on page 7 and ending on page 9.