2015-04-26



David Lynch in Los Angeles, August 2014. Photograph: Just Loomis.

On Thursday 26 March 2015 at 7pm, I presented a one-hour special on David Lynch and the David Lynch: Between Two Worlds exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. The special was broadcast during the Max Headroom show on radio station Triple R (3RRR 102.7FM). I discussed Lynch’s career as an artist and a filmmaker, played some of the recorded audio of Lynch speaking at the exhibition’s press conference, and played some of the music that Lynch has either helped to create or used in his films.

Below is a full transcript of the special, and the original audio is available via Triple R’s Radio On Demand service and here:



When David Lynch first heard Bobby Vinton’s 1963 cover of ‘Blue Velvet’ he found it schmaltzy and not his cup of tea. Sometime later he heard it again and that time he saw ‘green lawns, red lips… at night’. Then came the idea of a severed ear. And then ants. This was the genesis of the 1986 film Blue Velvet; the film that for many defines Lynch as a filmmaker, along with the cult television series Twin Peaks, which may or may not return to our screens in 2016. When Blue Velvet premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival Lynch got to dance with Giulietta Masina, the wife and muse of Federico Fellini. Fellini is one the filmmakers, along with Stanley Kubrick and Jacques Tati among others, who Lynch has at some point cited as an influence. Fellini’s nostalgic, surreal, affectionate and satirical vision of Italy certainly makes him something of an artistic predecessor to Lynch whose films cast a similarly fond, but critical and cautionary eye over America.

The image of the green lawn and red lips, the story about dancing with Masina; such anecdotes are often all the information that any interviewer has ever drawn out from Lynch during his 50 year career as a visual artist then filmmaker and more recently musician. Lynch is not being deliberately belligerent or obtuse, he just doesn’t like explaining his art as he told the sold out crowd at the Concert Hall at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Brisbane on Saturday 14 March 2015. Making his first and only ever public appearance in Australia in a one hour In Conversation event with film critic David Stratton, Lynch explained that while he thinks it’s beautiful that people analyse and critique his films, he feels it’s not up to him to explain his films because ‘a film should work on its own’. He’s thrilled that his films are so discussed, debated and open to interpretation, saying that ‘When things get abstract… there’s room for many interpretations’.

With perfectly styled silver hair, dressed in a black suit, black tie and white shirt, and making a reference to coffee in the first five minutes of the In Conversation event, Lynch characteristically looked like so many of the characters he has created for the screen, including FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks, a role he played himself. He spoke deliberately and politely, but with the reassuring intensity of a determined schoolteacher who wants nothing more than to share their passion and insight with their students. Often he would squeeze his eyes shut and chop the air with his hands as if he was concentrating on delivering the most honest and pure answers possible. Right before describing the pigeon shit on the set of The Elephant Man he asks the audience to excuse his French.

Lynch was in Brisbane for the opening of the David Lynch: Between Two Worlds exhibition, which is on display at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) until 7 June 2015. The exhibition consists of paintings, sketches, photography and sculptures by Lynch as well as samples of his work in other media including animation, comic strips, web videos, music videos as well as the film and television projects he is best known for. As the exhibition’s curator José Da Silva explains, the idea behind the exhibition is to introduce audiences to Lynch’s work as an artist and to link his art to his films. Lynch did begin as a painter; he’s been a prolific artist his entire career and before making any films he was a painter. At the GOMA media conference, which was held the day before the In Conversation event, Lynch was asked about his background as a painter and how it all began.

My father would bring home paper from the office that was going to be thrown away, and it had the blank side at the back. And I would draw and I liked to draw knives, guns, airplanes, and my favourite thing was the Browning Automatic Watercooled Submachine gun. And I love to draw, but I had this thought in my mind that when you grew up you couldn’t do those things. I was in the 9th grade in Alexandria, Virginia, on the front lawn of my girlfriend’s house and I met a kid who was going to private school – I met him for the first time that night – and I was talking to him and he said his father was a painter. And at first I thought he might have been a house painter and then he said, no, fine art painter. And a bomb went off in my head and from then on all I wanted to do was be a painter. And I still really basically… all I want to do is paint. But that’s how it started.

In 2007 the exhibition The Air is on Fire at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, France, was the first comprehensive presentation of Lynch as a visual artist and even came with its own custom designed industrial soundscape that visitors could play as they pressed buttons found among the artworks. Between Two Worlds isn’t as exhaustive as The Air is on Fire, but it does contain very carefully chosen pieces, including works done since the Paris exhibition, in order to best represent Lynch’s most prevalent and compelling artistic themes. And rather than having all the artwork arranged chronologically, they are displayed thematically, although the three themes chosen by Da Silva do roughly reveal the chronological development across Lynch’s film career.



David Lynch, United States b.1946 / Man On Wire 1998 / Archival gelatin silver print, 27.9 x 35.5cm / Courtesy: the artist / © David Lynch

The first theme is ‘Man and Machine’ and speaks to Lynch’s fascination with the way that factories and the human body are both in a constant process of creation, transformation and decay. Lynch’s father was a research scientist who worked in agriculture, exposing Lynch to a scientific perspective of decay and disease in the natural world. His mother taught English and encouraged self-expression so at the age of 19 Lynch went to art school in the industrial city of Philadelphia, a city that at the time was in decline and filled with fear, hopelessness, crime and sadness. Lynch has described his time in Philadelphia as terrifying, thrilling and one of the biggest influences on his career.

Philadelphia, I always say, was my biggest inspiration. I went there at the very end of 1965 and I stayed there until 1970 and it was a very sick, corrupt, filthy, fear-ridden city with insanity and fear and negativity in the atmosphere. And at the same time I really loved that city. There was a mood in Philadelphia that I caught and it stayed with me. And it’s a mood of a kind of a factory town. I fell in love with the architecture – these row houses and the proportions of these rooms, and the colours they would use and how it would conjure a mood. And the city really made me dream. It was a beautiful experience.

The intertwining of nature and industry is throughout so much of Lynch’s art and his films. Then there are various works made from food and left to decay as well as pieces such as Chicken Kit (1983) where a dissected chicken is accompanied by instructions on how to reassemble it, as if it were a model aeroplane kit. Included in the exhibition are paintings of factories, selections from his photographic series documenting abandoned factories from around the USA and Europe, not to mention his 2007 lithograph ‘Factory at Night with Nude’. As he tells us during the In Conversation event, ‘I love factories and I love nude women’. Here’s some more from the media conference where Lynch talks a bit further about the things he loves:

I love smoke and fire and machines, and these factory buildings make me dream. I love oil-impregnated earth – I don’t know why, but I love it. So many things I love are not necessarily good for the environment, but they’re beautiful in another way. Now the factories are little, they’re very efficient, all the machines are tiny, and they don’t make the same sorts of sounds. I’m sure they’re more powerful, but they don’t appear to have any power. So it’s a little bit depressing to me. I don’t know what will come of it, but I do get a lot of inspiration from people’s behaviour and the absurdity of the problems we have these days. I kind of like the problems – I don’t like people suffering – it conjures ideas, people’s behaviour.

The blend of nature and machinery is pronounced in Lynch’s early film career when out of a desire to see his paintings move he began making short experimental narrative films. One of these films was The Grandmother in 1970, where the creation of life was represented as being mechanical and plant-based. Then in 1971 Lynch moved to Los Angeles and began working on his first feature film, which he would finish 6 years later in 1977. Inspired by his experiences in Philadelphia and clearly expressing deep anxieties over having recently become a father, Eraserhead is set in an otherworldly space dominated by factories and warehouses where a deformed man pulling giant levers inside a shed represents the creation of life. At the centre of this industrial world in Henry Spencer, a hapless and awkward young man who is not at all adjusting well to the responsibilities of parenthood. Lynch informs the audience that he identifies with Henry, but he is not him. Henry was played by the late Jack Nance, who appeared in nearly every one of Lynch’s films until his death in 1996, including playing the much loved Pete ‘She’s Dead, Wrapped In Plastic’ Martell in Twin Peaks.

If Lynch were able to find the most potent nightmares possible within the factory world of Eraserhead, in the mechanised world of London, England, during the Industrial Revolution, he found tremendous beauty in The Elephant Man, the sad and moving film about a man in the 19th century whose extreme deformities were originally exploited by a travelling freak show, before he found his way into the care of the staff at the London Hospital.

As Lynch tells it, he was part of a creative team who were pitching the project to the recently formed production company Brooksfilms, a company created by Mel Brooks to allow him to produce films that wouldn’t be associated with his reputation for comedy. The rest of the team successfully pitched and were hired, but Lynch was an unknown. So a private viewing of Eraserhead was arranged for Brooks with Lynch to wait outside the viewing room until the film was finished. Lynch was sure that would be the end of that, but when the film finished Brooks burst out of the theatrette and said to Lynch, ‘I love you, you’re a mad man’. Lynch would later describe Brooks as ‘an abstract thinker’, which of course is the highest compliment possible coming from Lynch.

Lynch describes working on The Elephant Man as a ‘baptism of fire’, but recounts that once he stood in the setting among the old hospital beds and imagined himself present in 19th Century London, he was able to feel complete ownership over the material and that confidence made the film possible.

Lynch has been a practitioner and advocate of Transcendental Meditation for the past 40 years, using it to travel deep within himself to tap into a pure consciousness that will deliver true happiness and a treasury of ideas. The deeper a person can go within themselves, the more powerful, abstract and pure the ideas will be and remaining true to these ideas without restrictions is what drives Lynch artistically. As he says, ‘Any restrictions is a sadness and can kill creativity’. Lynch spoke at length at both the In Conversation event and the media conference, about Transcendental Meditation and its importance to him.

I’ve been doing Transcendental Meditation as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for 41 years. I’ve been meditating twice a day, never missed a meditation in those 41 years. Transcendental Meditation is a mental technique, an ancient form of meditation brought back by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for this time. Transcendental Meditation is not concentration, it’s not contemplation; it’s a unique meditation in that it allows you to dive within – all the way within – and experience the unbounded eternal ocean of pure consciousness, within each one of us human beings. And when you transcend and experience that ocean of consciousness…POW… it’s an incredible experience and every time you experience it you infuse some of that and you really truly start expanding whatever ball of consciousness you had to begins with. Tied to consciousness is intelligence, creativity, happiness, love, energy and peace – all positive within. And you start growing that positivity – those qualities – the side effect is negativity starts to lift away. Stress and traumatic stress, anxieties, tension, depression, hate, anger, fear – all this starts to lift away. And it’s like a huge weight lifting.

So it affects not only your work, but your whole life and all your relationships. It affects everything in a beautiful way. You’ve got more energy – people are so fatigued these days and there’s so much negativity, so much hate in this world. Let them dive within. Another name for that ocean of consciousness within is Ātman, it’s a Vedic word meaning ‘the self’ – know they self – that’s right there. Another name for that deepest level is the Kingdom of Heaven – ‘First seek the Kingdom of Heaven that lies within’. It’s all there within us. And this technique gets you there, first time, every time, and it’s easy and effortless. It’s a beautiful, beautiful blessing this thing. And the answer is, yeah, it really affected my life and my work!

The Elephant Man was Lynch’s first Hollywood studio film. The second and the last studio film was Dune, which he went into knowing that he wouldn’t have final cut, but assuming it would work out okay in the end anyway. It didn’t. Not according to Lynch anyway. When asked during the In Conversation event if he wanted to say anything about Dune, Lynch replied ‘not a lot’.

An adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sprawling cult science-fiction novel, Lynch’s version of Dune actually has considerable merit. Lynch’s realising of the mutated Spacing Guild and the incredibly grotesque scenes involving Baron Vladimir Harkonnen’s doctor treating the sores on his face fit into Lynch’s preoccupations with mutable bodies. The production design is stunning and for at least the first half of the film it conveys a lot of the novel’s complex ideas in an engaging and intelligent way. But it is also a film that has been clearly cut up and rearranged by somebody other than Lynch and his frustration with it and desire to simply chalk it up to experience are very much on the record. Later when asked about creative freedom Lynch said, ‘I’ve been free since Dune’.

But Dune should also be credited for starring the then unknown actor Kyle MacLachlan, who would go on to star in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. Dune was also produced by Dino de Laurentiis who would then produce Blue Velvet. Despite disagreeing with so many of the choices de Laurentiis made on Dune, Lynch still regarded him as a friend and had a lot of respect for him. But for Blue Velvet, and every film Lynch worked on since, he would insist on having final cut. When asked how he got final cut for Blue Velvet, Lynch answered, ‘I asked for it.’

David Lynch, United States b.1946 / Woman with Dream 2007 / Lithograph on Japanese Bunko-Shi paper, 66 x 98 cm / Courtesy: The artist / © David Lynch

The second theme explored in the Between Two Worlds exhibition is ‘The extra-ordinary’ where everyday objects and experiences are made strange or beautiful or terrifying or mysterious. This is David Lynch at the GOMA press conference, speaking a bit about dream logic:

I’ve never really gotten many ideas from dreaming – night-time dreaming – but I love daytime dreaming. I love to sit in a chair and dream about things, and go on a daydream and sometimes ideas come when I do that. I always say I love the idea of dream logic – how dreams can go, and how even though they’re very abstract, you can understand them. So this dream logic is something I really like to think about.

The opening sequence of Blue Velvet contains images and scenes direct from how Middle America is idealised to be, before the camera plunges into the dark undergrowth to show a whole other world of insects working away. This was Lynch’s experience as a child; growing up in an idyllic suburban environment in a stable family, but underneath the white picket fences, blue skies and green lawns was a darker underbelly.

The focus on the everyday and small details result in some of the more recent digital experimental works on display in the exhibition, where tiny details from existing photographs and paintings are magnified. But mostly this concept of finding the unusual in what was presumed normal is used by Lynch to exaggerate the mundane to generate droll humour or uncomfortable horror as in both cases the viewer is seeing something recognisable but in a way that is unfamiliar. Within the exhibition are samples from two of the 2002 web series Lynch developed – the crude animation Dumbland and the sitcom/soap opera Rabbits where all the actors are dressed as giant Rabbits. The family unit and the format of the shows are recognisable, and their strangeness provides laughs and uneasiness.

The focus on things not seeming to be the way that they are is most potent in the image of the house that occurs in a lot of Lynch’s artwork with titles such as “Shadow of a Twisted Hand Across My House” (1988), “Someone Is In My House” (2014) and “I Take You To My House (2013), which depicts an aggressive looking man carrying a vulnerable and naked woman. For somebody who is so against explaining his films, many of Lynch’s paintings are surprisingly literal with their overly descriptive titles that are usually painted directly onto the canvass, often with other pieces of explanatory text. However, it seems to be part of the childlike quality he gives to his paintings. The end results suggest the terrified perspective of a child who doesn’t understand what they are witnessing.

The ideals of the happy nuclear family unit and the family home as being somewhere safe are frequently undermined in Lynch’s films often through the way he portrays violence against women. And that violence is predominantly from men and in Blue Velvet and the Twin Peaks television series and film, that violence is portrayed as not external, but from within the community. In Blue Velvet the violence comes from Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), in Twin Peaks it comes from a whole host of members of the community who engage in acts of domestic violence, sexual assault and murder. The truth behind the show’s central mystery of who killed Laura Palmer is so confronting that Lynch was compelled to make the sort-of prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) to explore the issues without the classification restraints of television at the time.

While The Elephant Man was a success, it was Blue Velvet that delivered Lynch mainstream attention. For all its darkness and disturbing subject matter, it is still a film filled with likeable characters, an intriguing mystery and that offbeat, droll and weird quality that became known as Lynchian. It established Kyle MacLachlan as Lynch’s leading man, and it was also the first time Lynch would work with actors Isabella Rossellini and Laura Dern. It was also the beginning of Lynch’s musical relationship with composer Angelo Badalamenti and singer Julee Cruise, and all three would soon work together on the soundtrack of Twin Peaks.

During the media conference Lynch was asked what is his favourite collaboration with Badalamenti.

‘Laura Palmer’s theme’, I think. Angelo can write some of the most beautiful, beautiful music, but Angelo also is fairly lazy. I like to think Angelo could go down into his basement to his keyboards and write music everyday, but he doesn’t do that. So he needs some pushing and when we work together I sit next to him – I’ve also told this story a bunch of times – but it’s the way we work. I sit next to him on the piano bench or near him, and I talk to him in words to conjure a mood in him, and he plays my words. And if I don’t like what he’s playing, I change the words. And it just goes along like that. And then he’ll catch something and this one day he… he had an office (he doesn’t have it anymore) he had an office across from Macy’s department store in the centre of New York City. And this office was a small apartment. He had no furniture in it. It was terribly drab. I was a depressing little place. And he just had a Rhodes keyboard and the cheapest little cassette recorder, and he’d sit there and I was talking to him on this day in this little office, and he caught a thing.

He caught a thing and started playing. And I started falling in love immediately, but I didn’t know where it was going to go so I couldn’t fall out. But I didn’t fall out. And it kept getting more and more. And I kept falling deeper in love, and it kept getting more and more. And this thing just flew out of Angelo. It was amazing! It was so beautiful. And I started crying, it was so beautiful. Angelo didn’t really understand. He said, ‘David, what is the deal, I don’t… I don’t… it’s not that special I don’t think.’ I said, ‘Angelo, it is special’ and later he kind of agreed.

After seeing Blue Velvet, television executive Tony Krantz pursued Lynch to get him to work with Hill Street Blues writer Mark Frost to develop a television series. Lynch had no desire to work on television, but as he’d worked with Frost on a couple of projects that never came to fruition he agreed to meet with him. During this meeting they had the image of a dead girl and that’s where it all started. Lynch made the pilot for Twin Peaks like a film and subsequently treated every episode like a mini-film, elevating American television to new heights, not just in thematic complexity, but also in production values. It is difficult to imagine any of the long form adult dramas that are now binge watched and endlessly discussed on lunch breaks, without Twin Peaks paving the way first.

The dead girl that Lynch and Mark Frost came up with was Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) the popular high-school prom queen whose murder attracts the attention of the FBI. Throughout the investigation into her death not only do the dark secrets of the town get exposed, but also the series gradually introduces supernatural themes concerning a shadow place to our world. Combining characters and storylines lifted from soap operas, sit-coms, detective stories, science fiction, and horror, Twin Peaks was initially a huge hit and embraced as the ultimate example of post-modern hipness. Although in hindsight, much of what may have once been considered ironic could possibly have been sincerity all along. Within each episode there are plenty of scenes and situations the express Lynch’s belief in and hope for family, friendship, love and community. Here’s Lynch now, talking about love:

Well, I had a girlfriend in nursery school, but I don’t remember her too well. And in the second grade I had a girlfriend named Alice Bower. On time we went on a school outing. This was in Durham, North Carolina. All he kids in the second grade… We had a teacher named Mrs Crabtree, just like in The Little Rascals, and we rode in the back of a flatbed truck to a dairy and Alice and I held hands. It was so fantastic. At the dairy we got these small bottles – real thick glass with complicated snap-off tops – of thick unbelievably great tasting chocolate milk. That was a wonderful outing.

And as for the 3rd season that was presumed to be happening in 2016, 25 years after the second season was cancelled? Lynch and Frost have been developing the scripts for the past for years, but Lynch wanted to make it clear that there are no guarantees at this point.

During the early 1990s, around the time of Twin Peaks, Lynch was extremely busy, working on Julee Cruise’s first two albums, staging the musical play Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted, with Cruise and Badalamenti’s music, developing other short lived television projects and continually creating visual artwork. He was approached by his producer friend Monty Montgomery, who wanted Lynch to take a look at a novel by American writer Barry Gifford that Montgomery wanted to direct. Lynch soon realised that this was something he wanted to direct so Montgomery became a producer, Lynch cast Laura Dern whom he knew from Blue Velvet and Nicholas Cage who he considers fearless in the lead roles of a wildly in love couple on the run and the result was Wild at Heart. An ultra-stylised road movie filled with black humour, violence and pop-culture references to Elvis and The Wizard of Oz, it is was both booed and applauded when it won the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Lynch would later cast Monty Montgomery as the mysterious cowboy in Mulholland Drive as well as arrange and produce a 1988 album by Montgomery’s then girlfriend/now wife Jocelyn Montgomery. Based on the compositions of the 12th century writer, philosopher and mystic Hildegard von Bingen, Lux Vivens: The Music Of Hildegard Von Bingen incorporates Montgomery’s haunting vocals with Lynch’s dark soundscape. Despite producing and writing a lot of the lyrics for the Cruise albums, Lynch regards Lux Vivens as his first major music project that was born out of his collaborations with Badalamenti. Through Badalamenti Lynch got to know musicians and developed a love for being in the studio, so built his own studio and started experimenting with sound. He’s since collaborated with other musicians such as John Neff, Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, Lykke Li and Chrysta Bell, and in the past few years has released his own solo albums, Crazy Clown Time in 2011 and The Big Dream in 2013. And yet as Lynch tells us while in Brisbane, ‘I am not a musician and I am not a singer, but I do make music and I sing.’

David Lynch, United States b.1946 / Boy Lights Fire 2010 / Mixed media on cardboard, 182.8 x 274.3cm / Courtesy: The artist / © David Lynch

I think a lot of Taoism is right on the money and all throughout time people have talked about this reality, that there is this field within. They may have used different words for whatever for the people they’re talking to at the time, but the reality is that – the truth is that – and many many cultures, many many religions, many many philosophies there have been many many people saying about this through out time.

The final section of the Between Two Worlds exhibition is ‘Psychic Aches’ referring to the shadowy hidden versions of our selves that embody our fear and aggression. It’s an abstracted self that is frequently literalised in Lynch’s work as a dark, sinister and unwelcome figure in both his paintings and his films. This malevolent version of the self is present in paintings such as ‘My Shadow Is A Monster’ (2011), ‘Please Go Away From Here’ (2014) and ‘Bob’s Second Dream (2011), which features severed body parts and a figure saying ‘Everything is fucking broken’. Several of the paintings feature a figure identified as Bob (Frank Silva), including a 2010 painting titled ‘Bob Lights Fires’ where the figure appears to be throwing matches, not unlike the demonic entity Bob from Twin Peaks was reported to have done to Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) when he was a young boy.

The nature of the character Bob in Twin Peaks fits in with the ‘Psychic Aches’ theme since he is the manifestation of ‘the evil that men do’. Rather than suggest that Bob possesses blameless men in Twin Peaks to inflict evil through them, he is a symbol for the collective horrors of male violence. Bob also represents the way that both perpetrators of horrific violence and victims of abuse are know to use forms of dissociation as a coping mechanism where they imagine themselves or their abuser to be somebody else. The idea is explored even further in the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which seems designed to convey to the viewer the confusion, terror and betrayal of a family abuse victim. Bob also represents the potential for seemingly good men to also become violent and abusive, an idea that is strongly asserted in the devastating series finale.

The notion of the shadow self is even more pronounced in Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway, written by Wild at Heart author Barry Gifford. While like most of Lynch’s films it is heavily open to interpretation Lost Highway contains three male characters who could all be fragments of the same identity. There’s Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) who is Fred’s idealised or fantasy version of himself and there’s The Mystery Man (Robert Blake) who like Bob in Twin Peaks is the figure who inflicts the violence that Fred doesn’t believe he is capable of.

With Lost Highway beginning what is now referred to as Lynch’s ‘LA Trilogy’ Lynch next took a detour from the types of films people had come to associate him with to make what he describes as his most experimental film. Like Wild at Heart, The Straight Story (1999) is a road movie, but there are not too many similarities beyond that. Based on the true story of an elderly man who travelled across America on a ride-on lawn mower to reconcile with his brother, The Straight Story is family-friendly and nostalgic. It’s the only feature film Lynch hasn’t written himself and he describes it as experimental for him as it was the first time he had to tease the emotional reactions out of the script, rather than his emotions coming first. As much as The Straight Story may seem like an anomaly for Lynch it possesses a strong degree of heartfelt sentiment regarding family, tradition and America, which is something that has been present in previous work.

Despite vowing to never again work in television, Tony Krantz once again convinced Lynch to do so, and the result was the pilot episode of Mulholland Drive. When asked about working with Australian actors Lynch was full of praise for the professionalism of Australian talent and their ability to be ‘straight shooters’. However, the person he seemed most enamoured with was Naomi Watts who got her break in Mulholland Drive playing one of the lead roles. As Lynch explains, at that time big movie stars didn’t do television, as they weren’t able to sign on for the lengthy period of time required to make a television series. As Naomi Watts wasn’t a big star at the time she was part of the pool of actors who Lynch normally didn’t choose from when casting for a film, but was available to him since he was casting for what he thought was going to be a television series.

It’s now well known that Mulholland Drive never became a television series and according to Lynch a big part of the problem was that the person with the power to green light the show, watched the pilot episode at 6am in the morning while standing up and drinking their coffee on the other side of the room to their screen. They hated it and they passed. When approached to turn the pilot into a feature film Lynch confessed to being in a rare terrifying situation of having zero ideas, but after using his Transcendental Meditation training and techniques, the ideas started flowing in and he was able to do the required additional shooting. As at least one year had elapsed between the pilot being made and the reshoots beginning, he had the additional challenges of no longer having many of the sets, costumes and props, not to mention some of the actors were no longer available. Despite Lynch’s claims about working best without restrictions, he worked under extreme restrictions with Mulholland Drive with the result being one of his most highly acclaimed films. It would also be the third film of his, after The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet, which he would pick up an Oscar nomination for Best Director. And it launched the career of Naomi Watts and with a rare hint of pride Lynch states how happy he was to see her go on to do so much other great work and demonstrate that she has ‘the stuff’.

Similar to Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive is non-lineal, constantly blurs the boundaries between fantasy and reality, and is highly open to interpretation. It also features a lead character who is split between two identities, both played by Watts: bright eyed aspiring actor Betty Elms fresh off the bus in Hollywood, and bitter failed actor Diane Selwyn who may or may not have murdered her lover. Lynch’s preoccupation with other worldly character or places that represent humanity’s darkest nature is this time reserved for Hollywood, the greatest illusory world of all that destroys far more souls than it makes dreams.

The fractured identity and Hollywood-as-exploitive-nightmare-factory themes were pushed even further in Inland Empire (2006), Lynch’s final narrative feature film to date, as much as it can be regarded as a narrative film. Lynch reunited with Laura Dern to take the lead role of Nikki Grace, an actor attempting a comeback by appearing in a cursed film. Nikki’s identity increasingly begins to blur with the character she is playing and then a subplot about a Polish girl is introduced. Lynch’s most open-to-interpretation film to date, it’s never too sure who is dreaming of whom. Perhaps most dramatic of all is the extent to which Lynch embraces digital filmmaking for Inland Empire. As the film began as a loose collection of scenes, many of which were originally shot for Lynch’s website on a low-resolution camera, Lynch committed to making the film on digital cameras and wrote scripts daily in response to what had been filmed the day before.

It’s a bold approach for a filmmaker who tells the audience in Brisbane that he doesn’t allow for improvisation and always sticks to the script in order to be true to the ideas that have come to you. Then again, Lynch also values ‘keeping a fresh eye’ and will always try to watch his films with an audience of people not connected to the film to gauge their reaction just by being in the same room with them. He is also open to accidents and surprises, and shares a wonderful anecdote from Blue Velvet concerning the use of the Roy Orbison song ‘In Dreams’. Dennis Hopper was supposed to sing the song in character as Frank Booth, but couldn’t remember the lyrics. So Hopper asks his friend, actor Dean Stockwell, to help him learn the song. They asked Lynch to watch one of their rehearsals where Stockwell lip-synched the lyrics and Hopper attempted to sing. Lynch loved what he saw and ended up changing the entire scene and writing a part for Stockwell in order to recreate that beautiful accident in what has become one of the defining scenes from Blue Velvet.

Inland Empire was ten years ago, but Lynch has continued to make short experimental digital films, visual art and music since then. He even directed a concert film for Duran Duran. And of course, there are those new episodes of Twin Peaks. When asked about how he knows when to finish a film he answers that while ‘nothing is ever really perfect, it is finished’. Given the extent of the work on display in Between Two Worlds it seems like Lynch is far from finished and despite his warning not to get our hopes up too high for a new series of Twin Peaks, it is clear that he’s not done with it yet.

One of the key lines from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is ‘We live inside a dream’ and it’s as good a way as any to understand and explore the dreamlike and mysterious world of David Lynch. Lynch is asked half jokingly if he thinks such a line is somewhat Lynchian and he replies that ‘it’s sort of the truth’. He says this with complete sincerity and commitment to the idea behind it. Now that’s Lynchian.

Yeah, I always say you go where the ideas lead you. So it’s all based on ideas that you fall in love with. You get fired up and you go do those things. So if you’re in love with a cinema idea, you do that and the difference is… films take a long time to make, so during that time you don’t have so many opportunities to paint or work in other mediums, but it’s all these fantastic things called ideas that drive the boat. And love.

David Lynch: Between Two Worlds will be showing at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia, from 14 March until 7 June 2015.

Thank you Triple R for broadcasting the special, and thank you Ramona Telecican for supplying the audio from the press conference.

Content from this transcript was used for an article that appeared in The Big Issue, No. 481, 2015.

Playlist

‘Blue Velvet’

Bobby Vinton

‘Lumberton U.S.A. / Going Down to Lincoln – Sound Effects Suite’

Angelo Badalamenti

‘Fat’s Revisited’

Angelo Badalamenti

‘Up In Flames’

Julee Cruise

‘Eraserhead: Side A’

David Lynch & Alan R. Splet

‘In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)’

David Lynch & Alan R. Splet

‘The Elephant Man Theme’

John Morris

‘Prophecy Theme’

Brian Eno

‘Main Title (Dune)’

Toto

‘Dark Mood Woods / The Red Room’

Angelo Badalamenti

‘Laura Palmer’s Theme’

Angelo Badalamenti

‘Twin Peaks Theme’

Angelo Badalamenti

‘Just You’

Angelo Badalamenti

‘Wicked Game (Instrumental)’

Chris Isaak

‘O Tu Illustrata’

Jocelyn Montgomery with David Lynch

‘Rabbits Theme’

David Lynch

‘I’m Deranged’

David Bowie

‘Nostalgia’

Angelo Badalamenti

‘Mountains Falling’

David Lynch and John Neff

‘Roy Orbison’

In Dreams

Thomas Caldwell, 2015

Filed under: Director profile Tagged: David Lynch, David Lynch: Between Two Worlds, Dune, Eraserhead, INLAND EMPIRE, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, The Elephant Man, The Straight Story, Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Wild At Heart

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