These days, everything divides into
pre- and post-Sept. 11.
I talked with director David Lynch in a Toronto
hotel room during the Toronto International Film Festival. It seems as if
our conversation took place a decade ago. In reality, it happened the day
before we were shocked into trembling, new awareness by attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
I remember wondering whether Lynch would be a
tough interview, tough as in evasive. After all, Lynch's Mulholland Drive
stands as a baffling beauty of a movie. It's about a young woman (Naomi
Watts) who arrives in Hollywood to chase movie-star dreams, to pick only
one of its multiple layers.
A publicist escorted me into the room and
introduced me to Lynch. The director extended his hand and offered a
greeting that sounded like something out of a car dealers' convention, "Hi
ya, buddy.''
Cigarette smoke clouded the room. A butt
dangled from the corner of Lynch's mouth, as if he were some piano player
in a bar scene from a '30s film noir. By way of contrast, his dress was
standard-issue Lynch, a Navy blazer and tan slacks with a food stain on
one of the legs.
First off, Lynch wanted to know whether, as a
Denver journalist, I have a theory about the JonBenet case.
"Are you looking to make a movie out of it?'' I
asked.
"No,'' Lynch said, "but whether or not I want
to make a movie of it, it's pretty compelling.''
"You know,'' I said, changing the subject, "the
first time I saw Mulholland Drive I had a strange reaction. I thought: 'I
don't know where this is going. I'm not even sure where it's been, and I
couldn't care less. I'm going along for the ride.''
"That's a beautiful thing,'' Lynch said. "It's
called rolling with the flow, sinking into a world and seeing where it
will go in the safety of a movie theater. All films are that way, really.
You enter another world and have a new experience. It's just
beautiful.''
In a way, Mulholland Drive is a dreamy, porous
commentary on Hollywood. I wondered whether Lynch had been at all inspired
by Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. "Sunset Boulevard is one of my
favorite films, but just as it isn't the whole truth about Hollywood,
neither is Mulholland Drive,'' he said.
When Lynch discusses his creative process, he
sounds like a deep-sea fisherman. He sits quietly by the shore of
consciousness, waiting for ideas to bite.
"In The Straight Story (his 1999 film starring
the late Richard Farnsworth), all the ideas were in the script,'' he said.
"I didn't write that script. I just read it. The mind was involved, but it
was the emotions that were really engaged in that film. That's why I
wanted to do that film.''
Mulholland Drive came from another
place.
"I believe there's an ocean of ideas and you
can catch those ideas,'' he said. "If there was a way to pick those ideas,
it would be great, but they come along based on a desire for them. The
desire for them is a kind of focusing, like bait.
Sometimes, a
little time goes by. Sometimes, a lot of time goes by before the idea
jumps into the conscious mind and you see it -- like in a flash of
electricity.
"It may be a fragment of the whole, but it
comes with so much power and you know it all at once -- sort of. Now, you
either say, 'That's not an idea for me,' and throw it back, or you fall in
love with it and it drives you crazy. Once you've got that fragment,
you're really a long way down the road. Focusing on that pulls the other
pieces of the puzzle into place. They kind of string themselves together
and show you a story.''
I figured I'd better swim out of the ocean of
consciousness and get to something more concrete before we both drowned. I
mentioned my favorite moment in Mulholland Drive. It's when Rebekah Del
Rio sings an a cappella version of Roy Orbison's Crying. Lynch planned to
use Crying in Blue Velvet but opted instead for Orbison's In Dreams. After
Blue Velvet, he worked with Orbison a bit.
"I got to meet Roy Orbison
and it was a beautiful thrill,'' he said. "In the beginning, Roy had seen
Blue Velvet and felt terrible about the use of In Dreams. Then some of his
friends told him he should see it again. He did. When we met, he told me
didn't like it at first and but changed his mind.''
Later, someone brought Del Rio to Lynch's music
studio.
"She really didn't want to sing in front of the
microphone, but just to sing,'' he said. "So she stepped into the booth.
Five minutes off the street, she sang exactly what's in the movie. That's
the same thing she recorded that morning. She sang it a cappella. Never
drifted an iota out of key.''
Mulholland Drive began as a pilot for a TV
series. After Disney rejected it, a group of French investors offered
Lynch money to turn it into a feature.
"It's like a scientist in a laboratory mixing
up certain things, thinking he's making a certain thing and measuring
everything perfectly,'' he said. "Unbeknownst to him, a mouse kicks over
some powder and it goes into the mixture and a brand-new thing is
invented.''
Lynch said Disney did him a favor by rejecting
the pilot, forcing him to devise something different from what was
initially planned: "Once it changed, everything was seen from a different
angle and therefore completely restructured. ... It was a whole new
ballgame.''
When Mulholland Drive opened, I began receiving
e-mails that offer interpretations or confess to total confusion about the
movie's ending. Anticipating such discussions, I asked Lynch whether he
understands everything in his movies.
"Yeah,'' he said. "Pretty much everything. It's
surprising. Ideas are like seeds in a weird way. They can surprise you. A
year later, you can look back and see maybe even more of the truth of the
seed.''
I guess I understand, but then it doesn't
really matter, because Lynch is an artist who never nails everything down.
It's not a Lynch movie unless there are loose ends flapping, unconscious
meanings to plumb, a sense of mystery wrapped around a lucid emotional
core.
"The thing about movies is that the whole is
bigger than the sum of the parts,'' he said. "You put in the parts and
then a magical thing pops up.''
When the publicist came to retrieve me from
Lynch's smoke-filled den, I'm sure only that this visionary artist
probably requires as much interpretation as his movies, that his open-book
demeanor puts you at ease even if it doesn't explain much.
"You know,'' I told him, "I used to sit across
from someone at work and when things got difficult, I'd look over and
quote a line from Eraserhead (Still possibly Lynch's strangest movie). 'In
heaven, everything's fine,' I'd say, and she'd nod and we'd
laugh.''
Lynch looked at me for a moment and
smiled.
"That's great, buddy,'' he said. "That's
great.''