Stephanie Bunbury
"It was so nice!" director David Lynch says of his appearance on the streets of Los Angeles with a cow on a rope, a brass band and a poster of his star to promote Inland Empire, his baffling new film that is about neither brass bands nor cows.
"It was kind of like a great gathering and talking and a lot of goodwill for Laura [Dern] and a lot of love for Georgia, this cow."
Lynch, whose reputation as a resolute visionary has made his films an arthouse staple for three decades, is surprisingly child-like in person. He answers questions in capitals - "YES!", "NO!" and "FOR SURE!" - as if he were pleased each time to be able to put up his hand.
Those who have worked with him say it is no pretence: he really is this slightly fey, deadly serious, eager boy scout who, at 61, is very much at home with his various madnesses.
His dense, often bewildering films have found a devoted and surprisingly wide public, even among people who would not normally fancy themselves as fans of the avant-garde.
His first feature Eraserhead, released in 1977, was so weird it seemed to have come from some other planet's cinema but its grainy black-and-white imagery, grinding soundtrack of industrial noise and grotesque science fiction interpretation of new parenthood immediately established him as an indie favourite.
And it wasn't just stoners who watched it. Older, established filmmakers were also quick to recognise Lynch's talents. Francis Ford Coppola showed Eraserhead to his cast and crew when he was making Apocalypse Now and Stanley Kubrick screened it while filming The Shining.
Lynch was was soon hired to direct The Elephant Man (1980), the true story of 19th century sideshow freak Joseph Merrick, to which he brought a particular sympathy and a bravura visual style, then the dismal Dune (1984).
"The feeling was very low after Dune because I felt I'd been selling out. I didn't have final control and then it didn't do well at the box office," Lynch says.
Then he adds brightly, "when you're down low, there is nowhere to go but up". Failure meant he was able to strike out afresh in his own voice. "There was just a huge sense of freedom and nothing to lose."
The result was Blue Velvet (1986), a work about the triumph of love over evil with a nightmare edge. It was pure Lynch and became a cinematic landmark. Palm D'Or winner Wild at Heart (1990) followed, then Twin Peaks, his television breakthrough in the early '90s.
Lynch's left-field series about a small town in America's north-west became that decade's must-see. You can never tell, he says, what will seize the public imagination. "A story that takes place in a little place, hidden away, and travels the world!" he says. "Who can figure it?"
His last film was Mulholland Drive (2001). It was a huge critical success, both for the director and for his star discovery, Naomi Watts, but only after the American television network ABC commissioned and then rejected it as a television series.
That wasn't all bad, he insists. "If they had loved it, I would have been destined to sign on for a long time and that takes tremendous energy and focus … looking back, it is as if it were meant to be."
The network's cold feet gave it a chance to become the film it is. "A lot of times, positives come from negatives."
His adventures in Los Angeles with Georgia the cow could be seen as a positive outcome of his latest problem: finding an American distributor for Inland Empire. The fact that he has had three Academy Award nominations and won several Cannes prizes doesn't seem to move the money men.
"It's a three-hour film, somewhat difficult to understand maybe, so distributors weren't racing to my door," he shrugs. So he decided to take it on himself, peddling his wares like some latter-day travelling showman.
Anyone who has seen Mulholland Drive will recognise many of the key story elements and visual symbols in the new film, although they are - somewhat incredibly - rather more impenetrably scrambled in Inland Empire.
None of this feels like repetition, however, still less that Lynch has run out of ideas.
There is, rather, a sense of the artist working once again with his chosen materials. Laura Dern plays a sunny-natured actress, not unlike the ingenue played by Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive, whose genial character begins to fracture into different identities in the same way Watts's did. One moment she is a cheesy, breezy American sweetheart; the next, she is a trashy tart telling the camera about the men she has sent packing.
Once again, too, the plucky female protagonist stages a climactic showdown with a lover who is rejecting her. Another empty theatre appears to hold the key to a mystery; the mystery, again, appears to be Los Angeles itself, which is cast as seething with seamy stories beneath its superficial glamour.
The title of Inland Empire refers to the suburban sprawl east of the city, while a long sequence with street prostitutes at the end of the film is set on the star-encrusted Walk of Fame. Dern - in her bedraggled, tarty persona - hangs out with them. "There is something about Hollywood and what happened there, the Golden Age of cinema, that has lit the dreamworld of billions," Lynch says. "It's got so much glamour and hope and, you know, despair and horror. The whole thing is beautiful!"
This story is confounded, however, with other elements that work in entirely mysterious ways. A girl weeps as she watches television, often gazing merely at snow; a violent man torments a prostitute, shouting at her in Polish. These sequences were shot in Lodz, a Polish city Lynch took to his heart when he went there for the city's film festival. "The festival takes place in the winter, so it was the winter light, the architecture, these clouds, the people and just a mood in the place I loved," he says.
Some other scenes cut to a stage set with humans in rabbit suits acting out banal kitchen sink dramas interspersed with canned laughter. These are taken from short films, all with rabbits, that Lynch made immediately after Mulholland Drive and has shown for years on his website. That's the way he has always worked, Lynch says; sometimes he can nurse an idea for 10 years until something else comes along that, at some subliminal level, somehow matches it.
"The feeling I have," he says, "is that someone is in another room with a completed puzzle and they keep flipping pieces in to me and as I get them and see them and feel them, I write them down until a whole thing starts revealing itself."
It is true, he admits, that Inland Empire is more of a mosaic than any of his previous films. He was writing scenes and shooting them one by one, for the first time, using digital technology that is cheap enough to allow that kind of randomness.
"I would get an idea and shoot it, not knowing I was building a feature at first. I was just building up scenes. Then the story came more, and I saw how those scenes were relating to each other. And then because so much more came, I wrote more."
He felt himself to be following the lead of the Surrealists he has always admired, throwing ideas up in the air and following wherever they fell.
He does not, as people often assume, work from dreams. "NO! I hardly EVER get an idea from a dream!" he insists. "But I have to say that I love this dream logic. Sometimes an idea comes that holds that dream feel, an abstraction that is not able to be said so well in words - at least not by me, although maybe it could by poets - but cinema is this beautiful language. You can say abstractions and cause wonderings and thinkings and feelings in the cinema that can't be gotten any other way."
That doesn't mean, in his view, that he is moving away from narrative structure. "NO!" he says firmly. "I believe in narrative but there's different narratives. So I like a story but I like a story that holds abstractions. All of them had that but this one maybe more than most."
If it is mysterious, that is what life is like too. "For sure! We are all detectives," he says happily. "We are all looking and feeling and intuiting things and wondering about them."
He is quite clear, within himself, about the story he has told. "But why do I need to worry about saying the words?" he demands. "The words just reduce it. It's the film that is the thing."
Inland Empire opens on November 15.
Twin Peaks seasons 1 and 2 (Paramount) is released on DVD the same day.
Sphere: Related Content
"It was so nice!" director David Lynch says of his appearance on the streets of Los Angeles with a cow on a rope, a brass band and a poster of his star to promote Inland Empire, his baffling new film that is about neither brass bands nor cows.
"It was kind of like a great gathering and talking and a lot of goodwill for Laura [Dern] and a lot of love for Georgia, this cow."
Lynch, whose reputation as a resolute visionary has made his films an arthouse staple for three decades, is surprisingly child-like in person. He answers questions in capitals - "YES!", "NO!" and "FOR SURE!" - as if he were pleased each time to be able to put up his hand.
Those who have worked with him say it is no pretence: he really is this slightly fey, deadly serious, eager boy scout who, at 61, is very much at home with his various madnesses.
His dense, often bewildering films have found a devoted and surprisingly wide public, even among people who would not normally fancy themselves as fans of the avant-garde.
His first feature Eraserhead, released in 1977, was so weird it seemed to have come from some other planet's cinema but its grainy black-and-white imagery, grinding soundtrack of industrial noise and grotesque science fiction interpretation of new parenthood immediately established him as an indie favourite.
And it wasn't just stoners who watched it. Older, established filmmakers were also quick to recognise Lynch's talents. Francis Ford Coppola showed Eraserhead to his cast and crew when he was making Apocalypse Now and Stanley Kubrick screened it while filming The Shining.
Lynch was was soon hired to direct The Elephant Man (1980), the true story of 19th century sideshow freak Joseph Merrick, to which he brought a particular sympathy and a bravura visual style, then the dismal Dune (1984).
"The feeling was very low after Dune because I felt I'd been selling out. I didn't have final control and then it didn't do well at the box office," Lynch says.
Then he adds brightly, "when you're down low, there is nowhere to go but up". Failure meant he was able to strike out afresh in his own voice. "There was just a huge sense of freedom and nothing to lose."
The result was Blue Velvet (1986), a work about the triumph of love over evil with a nightmare edge. It was pure Lynch and became a cinematic landmark. Palm D'Or winner Wild at Heart (1990) followed, then Twin Peaks, his television breakthrough in the early '90s.
Lynch's left-field series about a small town in America's north-west became that decade's must-see. You can never tell, he says, what will seize the public imagination. "A story that takes place in a little place, hidden away, and travels the world!" he says. "Who can figure it?"
His last film was Mulholland Drive (2001). It was a huge critical success, both for the director and for his star discovery, Naomi Watts, but only after the American television network ABC commissioned and then rejected it as a television series.
That wasn't all bad, he insists. "If they had loved it, I would have been destined to sign on for a long time and that takes tremendous energy and focus … looking back, it is as if it were meant to be."
The network's cold feet gave it a chance to become the film it is. "A lot of times, positives come from negatives."
His adventures in Los Angeles with Georgia the cow could be seen as a positive outcome of his latest problem: finding an American distributor for Inland Empire. The fact that he has had three Academy Award nominations and won several Cannes prizes doesn't seem to move the money men.
"It's a three-hour film, somewhat difficult to understand maybe, so distributors weren't racing to my door," he shrugs. So he decided to take it on himself, peddling his wares like some latter-day travelling showman.
Anyone who has seen Mulholland Drive will recognise many of the key story elements and visual symbols in the new film, although they are - somewhat incredibly - rather more impenetrably scrambled in Inland Empire.
None of this feels like repetition, however, still less that Lynch has run out of ideas.
There is, rather, a sense of the artist working once again with his chosen materials. Laura Dern plays a sunny-natured actress, not unlike the ingenue played by Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive, whose genial character begins to fracture into different identities in the same way Watts's did. One moment she is a cheesy, breezy American sweetheart; the next, she is a trashy tart telling the camera about the men she has sent packing.
Once again, too, the plucky female protagonist stages a climactic showdown with a lover who is rejecting her. Another empty theatre appears to hold the key to a mystery; the mystery, again, appears to be Los Angeles itself, which is cast as seething with seamy stories beneath its superficial glamour.
The title of Inland Empire refers to the suburban sprawl east of the city, while a long sequence with street prostitutes at the end of the film is set on the star-encrusted Walk of Fame. Dern - in her bedraggled, tarty persona - hangs out with them. "There is something about Hollywood and what happened there, the Golden Age of cinema, that has lit the dreamworld of billions," Lynch says. "It's got so much glamour and hope and, you know, despair and horror. The whole thing is beautiful!"
This story is confounded, however, with other elements that work in entirely mysterious ways. A girl weeps as she watches television, often gazing merely at snow; a violent man torments a prostitute, shouting at her in Polish. These sequences were shot in Lodz, a Polish city Lynch took to his heart when he went there for the city's film festival. "The festival takes place in the winter, so it was the winter light, the architecture, these clouds, the people and just a mood in the place I loved," he says.
Some other scenes cut to a stage set with humans in rabbit suits acting out banal kitchen sink dramas interspersed with canned laughter. These are taken from short films, all with rabbits, that Lynch made immediately after Mulholland Drive and has shown for years on his website. That's the way he has always worked, Lynch says; sometimes he can nurse an idea for 10 years until something else comes along that, at some subliminal level, somehow matches it.
"The feeling I have," he says, "is that someone is in another room with a completed puzzle and they keep flipping pieces in to me and as I get them and see them and feel them, I write them down until a whole thing starts revealing itself."
It is true, he admits, that Inland Empire is more of a mosaic than any of his previous films. He was writing scenes and shooting them one by one, for the first time, using digital technology that is cheap enough to allow that kind of randomness.
"I would get an idea and shoot it, not knowing I was building a feature at first. I was just building up scenes. Then the story came more, and I saw how those scenes were relating to each other. And then because so much more came, I wrote more."
He felt himself to be following the lead of the Surrealists he has always admired, throwing ideas up in the air and following wherever they fell.
He does not, as people often assume, work from dreams. "NO! I hardly EVER get an idea from a dream!" he insists. "But I have to say that I love this dream logic. Sometimes an idea comes that holds that dream feel, an abstraction that is not able to be said so well in words - at least not by me, although maybe it could by poets - but cinema is this beautiful language. You can say abstractions and cause wonderings and thinkings and feelings in the cinema that can't be gotten any other way."
That doesn't mean, in his view, that he is moving away from narrative structure. "NO!" he says firmly. "I believe in narrative but there's different narratives. So I like a story but I like a story that holds abstractions. All of them had that but this one maybe more than most."
If it is mysterious, that is what life is like too. "For sure! We are all detectives," he says happily. "We are all looking and feeling and intuiting things and wondering about them."
He is quite clear, within himself, about the story he has told. "But why do I need to worry about saying the words?" he demands. "The words just reduce it. It's the film that is the thing."
Inland Empire opens on November 15.
Twin Peaks seasons 1 and 2 (Paramount) is released on DVD the same day.
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