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“They never called me,” director David Lynch explains with more bemusement than anger. Lynch is still pondering how his aborted ABC series Mulholland Drive became one of the most talked about films of the Cannes Film Festival.
“When I heard that they hated the pilot---they never told me that personally--they never called me, they never talked to me. Whether they knew it or not, they were playing a very important role in this becoming a feature, and their role was to allow it to go in an open ended direction."
Failed TV shows rarely rise from the dead and dead was just how ABC viewed Mulholland Drive. For Lynch, however, it was not a project he was ready to abandon.
“You are in a strange place because it’s dead, like a body with no head, but, we get to see there is some life in it and Canal Plus comes in and allowed me to make it into a feature.
Still, Lynch faced the challenge of reworking the open-ended plot lines of a TV series into the compact structure of a film.
”Because this body has no head, you have to get some ideas for the head--and those ideas affected the entire body,” Lynch notes. “I was lucky one night to get these ideas because without them it would have been dead and couldn’t have gone further; so ABC did me two great favors.”
Critical to the process was that the reworking of Mulholland Drive’s ideas couldn’t be apparent to the audience if the transition was to be successful. Lynch’s likens to process to one of his other passions--painting.
“Paintings take so many strange courses before the painter says; ‘This is finished.’ For an audience to go into a film and say ‘Oh this is the scene that came first,’ or ‘This was an added scene,’ is so horrible!”
As for being dropped by ABC, perhaps Lynch’s bemusement at the machinations of the showbiz world come from his personal experience of living in L.A., yet working outside the glad-handing element of Hollywood.
“I’m not in a Hollywood system,” Lynch remarks. “I’ve never made a studio picture. I live in Hollywood, I love Hollywood; there is no such thing as the Hollywood system. It is always changing, and I’m surprised I have been so fortunate to be able to keep making films, but I am not in the system.”
He may not be part of Hollywood, but with Mulholland Drive Lynch certainly takes a razor and cuts to the heart of a town run by both vanity and chance.
Laura Elena (Exit to Eden) Harring plays Rita, a car accident victim turned amnesiac. After she takes refuge in the apartment of aspiring actress Betty--played by Naomi (Dangerous Beauty) Watts—the duo try to unravel the mystery of Laura’s true identity.
As with Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive peels off multiple story lines like layers of an onion. In addition to Rita and Betty there is Adam--a Hollywood director, played by Justin (American Psycho) Theroux, who finds his life turned upside down after he refuses to comply with requests to cast an actress for his upcoming film.
It’s a story that is a tangle of fantasy vs. reality, and the audience must decide what to make of its message, or even if there is a message.
Lynch looks at Mulholland Drive’s mysteries as part and parcel with life’s tapestry, which never prematurely reveals what is around the next corner.
“Eventually life seems to make sense even though at a lot of times it didn’t seem to make sense,” Lynch says. “I think with the human mind and intuition going to work, there is a feeling your way to knowing what every character is.”
What there always with Lynch is style, which for him is never gratuitous or frivolous, but follows from his wellspring of ideas.
”Style comes out of ideas, pace comes out of ideas, locations, characters, everything. Never go against ideas; stay true to the idea it will always tell you the way to go,” Lynch intones. “When you make a feature film there are ideas that come--like on a Tuesday--and ideas that may come three months later that go in the story before the ideas that you got on Tuesday, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that one-day the whole thing is done; how it got there is made up of so many strange things it isn’t funny. It’s just a blessing that it’s done and you feel good about it. That’s the way anything happens.”
As with his past work, Lynch has again taken on actors that are not on the Hollywood “A” list. It is in keeping with a director who steers his ship by talent rather than just marquee value.
“Everyone that’s known was at one point unknown,” Lynch observes. “There is a huge wealth of talent and they have to wait until they marry up with the role in someone’s film. It’s a hard life for an actor.”
When Lynch does cast a name, it is often part of an idiosyncratic process that is equally at home with Ann “The Queen of Tap” Miller and country singer Billy Ray Cyrus.
“I saw Billy Ray in an interview and hearing him talk--I was surprised--I suddenly say Billy Ray in this role and that was it,” Lynch says.
As to how he works with his actors, Lynch feels it is important not to let the actor know the whole story, or even the ending of the film.
“What’s important is that they get all they need to go forward with their character. Just like we are all going through the world, we all don’t know all there is to know about the world, but we know our role to a certain degree.” Lynch adds, “It’s partly to protect the whole thing. Sometimes when you say things out loud, some power leaks out of it.”
In the end, Mulholland Drive is driven by ideas, even if those ideas may elude some of the audience. And it is the pursuit of those ideas that is at the core of Lynch’s filmmaking.
“If I stay true to those ideas that were thrilling to me, I hope others have that same thrill. The beauty is I enjoy catching the ideas, I enjoy translating them, and I enjoy sharing them.”
Shara Rosen
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