DAVID lYNCH
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Biography
bsurdity is what most in life, and ’s humor in strugin ignorance. If you a man repeatedly ng into a wall until as a bloody pulp, afwhile it would make augh because it bees absurd.”
David Lynch, of course, is best known as the vanguard director of dreamlike and disturbingly allegorical films such as Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and Mulholland Drive (2001)—movies that are as idiosyncratic and independently spirited as movies come, yet consistently flirt with a kind of mainstream Americana. Films like Wild at Heart (1990) and Lost Highway (1997) teem with sex and violence that is anything but cartoonish, while Lynch’s heartland tale, The Straight Story (1999), proved clean enough to earn a G rating. He has consistently coaxed vivid, career-defining performances out of his female leads, including Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern, and Sherilyn Fenn. In 1990, well before shows like The Sopranos or Mad Men transformed series television into a creative hotbed, Lynch revolutionized the medium with Twin Peaks, a stark, surreal serial about the investigation into the death of a homecoming queen in a small town in Washington. He was also an early adopter of the Internet as a forum for creative work, producing a set of online shorts dubbed Dumbland, as well as a sitcom, Rabbits, about a family of humanoid bunnies. Lynch’s career, though, has, in many ways, embodied the great dichotomies in his work. As a director, his characters are almost neoclassical, wholesome archetypes that one might find in the movies of the ’50s and ’60s by directors like Nicholas Ray and Billy Wilder; yet his films are also uncompromising explorations of the societal id and the dark underside of American dreaming. And as much as he has created within the confines of popular culture, he has continued to be an outlier; he has been nominated for three Academy Awards for directing—most recently in 2001 for Mulholland Drive, for which he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and which helped launch the career of yet another of his leading ladies, Naomi Watts—then, just five years later, he opted to self-distribute his next film, Inland Empire (2006).
Early Years Born in Montana in 1946, famed filmmaker David Lynch studied art before experimenting with film in the late ‘60s. In 1977, his first feature, Eraserhead, made its debut, going on to become a cult classic. He next directed The Elephant Man, for which he received two Academy Award nominations among a host of others for the film. Lynch has also directed Blue Velvet and created the acclaimed television series Twin Peaks. A vocal proponent of transcendental meditation, Lynch has added to his film ouevre with works like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.
“Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.” — David Lynch
David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946. Lynch moved frequently as a child due to his father’s work as a research scientist. While still a student at a high school in Virginia, he began taking art classes at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. After high school, Lynch made his way through Boston, Europe and Philadelphia to study art further. The Filmmaker In the 1960s, David Lynch began making short films, beginning with the animated Six Men Getting Sick (1966) and The Alphabet (1967), a combination of animation and live action. The Grandmother (1970) was Lynch’s first completely live-action short film. In the early 1970s, Lynch started work on his first feature film, Eraserhead, which premiered in 1977. The bizarre movie had a dark worldview, disturbing subject matter and a surreal tone, but it garnered enough attention to land Lynch the job of directing The Elephant Man (1980), starring John Hurt. That film received eight Academy Award nominations, including two for Lynch in the categories of directing and adapted screenplay.Lynch’s next directing gig wouldn’t go quite as well, as he was picked to helm the science fiction film Dune (1984), an adaptation of a well-loved book starring Kyle MacLachlan and Sting, among many others.
The movie was plagued with production problems and received scathing reviews upon its release. Chilling ‘Blue Velvet’ In typical Lynchian fashion, the director recovered by turning back to his own vision, coming out with Blue Velvet in 1986. The film, which starred MacLachlan, Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini, took a chilling look at small-town life. Though its darker moments led to some outraged reactions, Lynch received critical accolades and a second Academy Award nomination for directing. Lynch would continue in a similar vein with the violent Wild at Heart (1990). This controversial film won the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Lynch took his unique vision to television with the series Twin Peaks, which first aired in 1990 and featured muse MacLachlan as FBI agent Dale Cooper. Like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks took a deep dive into small-town America and found hidden horrors that had previously been unexplored.
Stories should have the suffering October 15, 2014
‘‘It’s better not to know so much about what thing mean or how they might be interpreted or you’ll be too afraid to let things keep happening.’’
Mr. Lynch, did you learn transcendental meditation because you had an anger problem? No. I noticed I did have an anger. Many people have anger and I was one of them. People direct anger at certain people they can get away with – I would take it out on my first wife. What happened was, I started meditating and two weeks later she came to me and said, “What’s going on?” I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “Where is that anger?” She didn’t see it anymore. A lot of times when people start meditating they don’t see the change as soon as the others around them. The others around them notice the change. Why did you start practicing meditation then? I picked it up in 1973. It was the idea that the human being can gain enlightenment. It was driving me crazy, because you hear we only use five or ten percent of our brains. What is the other part for? How do you get more and more and what is the most you can get? A lot of people said meditation is like jogging or like lying in the sun on the beach. This shows a huge misunderstanding about what meditation is. Meditation is a way to go within, all the way within to the deepest level of life, the transcendence, the absolute, the totality and reality, and experience that. The human being is built for it.
Do you think you are a better artist because your movies are driven by a higher consciousness? I don’t know. You can catch ideas at a deeper level when you start meditating. Intuition grows, and intuition is the number one tool for an artist – feeling and thinking combined. When you are working on a painting, it’s like you know, and you enjoy the doing so much. It’s the same way with films. The enjoyment of working increases, the enjoyment of everything increases. The ideas are flowing, and the feeling that you can get it to feel correct. You know what that is. It’s a knowingness that grows. It’s really beautiful. Do you still get upset or depressed from time to time? You can still get a wave of depression or hate. And it’s all relative. The degree of it is less and less. So suffering begins to go away. Mankind was not made to suffer. Bliss is our nature. We are supposed to be happy. It is entirely possible to be packed with happiness. Real, deep bliss, wide awake, happy in the doing of things. And it’s the doing of things, the enjoyment of living, that is so much more intense when you have this bliss growing.
Can you be more specific how that affects your daily life? The events of the life stay the same but how you go through them certainly gets better. On my film Dune, that experience could have finished me. It was so horrible. I identify so much with my films – and I knew I sold out – and meditation kept me from jumping off the cliff. There is a saying: The world is as you are. You can wear dark-green dirty glasses, and that’s the world for you. Or you start diving within and experience the unbounded ocean of pure bliss consciousness, creativity, intelligence, all these beneficial things, and you start wearing rose-colored glasses. And that’s the way the world looks for you. And it gets better. I would say your films seem to look at the world through the dark glasses. Why is that? If you saw a film and the beginning of the film was peaceful, the middle was peaceful, and the end was peaceful – what kind of story is this? You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people. How does an idea for one of your films come together? I always say ideas drive the boat. Ideas are a huge, huge blessing. That’s the thing you try to catch – an idea that you fall in love with. Every time that I have made a film that’s not from a book or somebody else’s screenplay, it happens the same way. The whole thing doesn’t come at once, but fragments of things come and these fragments form themselves into a script. You write the idea down and save it until the next idea comes, and little by little the majority of ideas find themselves in a script – which is organized ideas. Then you go and shoot that script and edit it and you mix sounds and music. It’s a process. An idea can give a story that is more abstract and not so straight-ahead, and sometimes it gives you a story that is more straight-ahead.
Which do you prefer? I like all different kinds of cinema. There are no rules. Some abstract things don’t move me at all and some move me like crazy. Some straightahead movies don’t do anything for me, whereas others really light my fire. It’s cinema, it’s billions of elements. Cinema, they say, combines seven arts. It’s a very complete medium, so it shouldn’t stop you from going other places – if the ideas come along. Cinema is a mighty special, beautiful medium. Are there movies that you oriented yourself on? Everyone should find their own voice. It’s not about copying. But Godard, Fellini and Bergman were my heroes. Sunset Boulevard, Rear Window, 8 ½, Jacques Tati’s My Uncle or Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Rear Window, all of Kubrick’s movies, all of Fellini’s movies, probably all of Bergman’s movies – there have been so many great films that were an inspiration. Have those films subconsciously influenced your work? One could say the concept of voyeurism in Blue Velvet was influenced by Rear Window, for instance. I don’t know if that is true. There have been 110 or more years of cinema, and it’s impossible for any one of us to make a film that can’t be compared to something that has come before. To me Blue Velvet is Blue Velvet and Rear Window is Rear Window. You could say that Sunset Boulevard or Rear Window has conjured an idea for me, but even though I love them or am inspired by them, life is a 24/7 movie. Ideas come out of that all the time. It’s hard to say it’s cinema that conjures ideas. It’s altogether. There are billions of ideas swimming around, you just have to catch them.
“You know, I’ve always said cinema combines so many different art forms.”
IN CONVERSATION, THE 69-YEAROLD LYNCH PROVES TO BE A LIVING, BREATHING ANALOG TO HIS ART: A BEGUILING COMBINATION OF THE COSMIC AND THE MUNDANE, THE SURREAL AND AN ABNORMALLY NORMAL-SEEMING NORMAL. WE SPOKE IN LOS ANGELES, WHERE LYNCH LIVES. MATT DIEHL I’ve noticed a thread throughout your recent activity. You’ve made a new album, you helped put together a new nightclub, you have the comprehensive Works on Paper book that brings together all the strands of your visual art, you’ve taken film distribution into your own hands. Adultery is something of a prominent theme in your films, and you currently seem to be in a moment of creative promiscuity, philandering between genres and mediums. DAVID LYNCH [laughs] Right. You know, I’ve always said cinema combines so many different art forms. As a kid, I was always building things. My father had a shop in the house, and we built things—we were kind of a project family. I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema, and in cinema, you get to build so many things, or help build them. Then cinema led to so many different areas—it led to still photography, music . . . Furniture is also a big love of mine. I started building these kind of sculptural lamps. Then I got into lithography at this printing place in Madison, Wisconsin, called Tandem Press. For the last four years, I’ve been working on lithography in Paris at a great, great printing studio called Idem. And I’ve always been painting along the way, as well as doing drawings and watercolors . . . There are just so many things out there for us to do. DIEHL As I understand it, when you originally got into film, it was to try to make your paintings move. Is that correct? LYNCH Yes. I wanted to make a moving painting. DIEHL It’s funny because I recently watched The Alphabet [1968], one of the early shorts that you made in art school, and it reminded me exactly of that: it was as if a Francis Bacon painting had come to life. LYNCH Ah, well, Francis Bacon is one of my giant inspirations. I just love him to pieces. DIEHL Speaking of inspirations, the membersonly nightclub you recently opened in Paris, Silencio, was inspired by the fictional nightclub in Mulholland Drive, wasn’t it? LYNCH The name was inspired by it, but not the actual club itself. What happened was, they asked me if I wanted to help design this club in Paris. It was a strange place—it was way underground and the space was fairly small. But now the club seems very big—it seems a lot bigger than it did when I first saw it. I designed the walls, floor, and ceilings. In this one particular room, the walls curve into the ceiling. My whole idea was to make a place that you felt good being in. I designed many different things—the
stage and the movie theater, which is spectacular. You can go from hearing the loudest music into this very beautiful, comfortable theater to watch a film. I also designed what they call a “yellow forest”: it’s a smoking room in the club, with these steel yellow trees that go from floor to ceiling with these little lights coming off them, with pods that you can sit on. It was important to me that everything feel very warm, so we created this wall treatment out of wood blocks covered in different types of gold, which catches light in a really beautiful way. I’m real happy with that. I also designed this sink for the restrooms—I’m really happy with that sink. These things, you just don’t know what’s going to come next. It’s great to be given the possibility of designing a sink; ideas start coming that you never thought about before. A person doesn’t really think too much about a sink, but when you do, ideas come that are really beautiful. So the club has a great feeling now. It’s very beautiful to be inside this club, Silencio. DIEHL From what I understand, the location of Silencio is historical. The building, on the rue Montmartre, was designed by the creators of the Eiffel Tower. LYNCH I don’t know the whole history of it, but there’s metalwork in there that would make you think of the Eiffel Tower. DIEHL Since it opened last October, Silencio has hosted performances by the likes of The Kills, Lykke Li, and parties for Kanye West and Chanel, among other events. The New York Times wrote that “it has been compared to the Dadaists’ Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York, and the existentialists’ Café Flore on the Left Bank.” It seems intended to be a kind of hub for new bohemian culture. When I first heard about it, it reminded me of the golden age of New York City nightlife, where you had places like the Mudd Club, where you had all of these disparate people—artists, professionals, people with money, people with no money—meet and exist in the same space. LYNCH Well, I don’t know about bohemian . . . It’s a club that people have a good time in. I’m not sure who the clients are all the time, although they seem to be a good bunch. But Arnaud [Frisch], the owner—that’s what his whole wish was, that Silencio would be a meeting place for all different types of people. That’s the feeling it has. Paris is now the second-best city in the world for me. The French have been my great friends, and they believe in a director having final cut. They don’t understand any other way. They protect the artist. DIEHL You’ve always been considered an auteur as a filmmaker, but it seems like you’ve become an auteur of many things. I heard that you now even have your own brand of coffee beans. LYNCH That came about with these two guys I work with, Eric and Erik. I hate making coffee, but one of them started getting heavy into making signature designs on the foam of the cappuccinos, and then the other started telling me I should have my own brand of coffee. So one thing led to another, and it happened.
DIEHL You’ve always been considered an auteur as a filmmaker, but it seems like you’ve become an auteur of many things. I heard that you now even have your own brand of coffee beans. LYNCH That came about with these two guys I work with, Eric and Erik. I hate making coffee, but one of them started getting heavy into making signature designs on the foam of the cappuccinos, and then the other started telling me I should have my own brand of coffee. So one thing led to another, and it happened. DIEHL You make sinks, you make coffee—is it possible that you might someday have a kind of David Lynch version of IKEA, where everything necessary for everyday life is created with your vision? LYNCH No, no—I’m not doing that! I’d have to quit everything and just design away . . . But it would be kind of fun. DIEHL You’ve been making music for years, starting with the soundtrack to Eraserhead. But last year you released your first proper solo album, Crazy Clown Time. LYNCH Right. I worked on that with my friend and engineer “Big” Dean Hurley. We pretty much did everything together except for the track “Pinky’s Dream,” which we did with Karen O. DIEHL Many tracks on Crazy Clown Time have a surprising dance-music influence. A lot of them would weirdly work in a DJ set at a club. LYNCH My music agent, Brian Loucks, always brings people up for a coffee, then we talk, and then sometimes it forms into a collaboration. Brian has brought up some great people over the years. So I had been working on music, and one of the first people Brian was going to bring up to meet about it was into dance music. After that, I started thinking about dance music, and all of a sudden some lyrics and a little tune came. The next day, Dean and I started working, and out came the song “Good Day Today.” We played it for Brian, who loved it, and he gave it to Jason Bentley [music director of Los Angeles radio station KCRW], and the story goes that Jason thought the song was by Underworld. DIEHL I heard that as it was happening. He played “Good Day Today” on his radio show and introduced it as the new Underworld single. LYNCH Not only did he play it on the radio, but Jason took it to Ibiza and played it for two guys named Ben Turner and Rob da Bank. They liked it so much, they said, “We want to put this out on our label, Sunday Best.” It’s a tiny company, but they got that music out in a big, big way. Then they came to me and said, “We’d love to do an album. Do you have more songs?” And we had a bunch, and that’s what became Crazy Clown Time. DIEHL Where did the title come from? LYNCH The title came from the song “Crazy Clown Time.” The lyrics tell a story of the time . . . It’s a traditional backyard story that involves girls and guys and beer.
DIEHL In addition to the club grooves, many of the songs are deeply rooted in the blues tradition. What do the blues mean to you? LYNCH Well, I love the dirty, rough-running power of the blues-based electric guitar. I like the idea of a gasoline-powered guitar, where you’ve got an accelerator, and you can push down on it and it just revs up. The great blues music is very simple, but sophisticatedly so. It’s so beautiful, this world that the great blues men and women conjured up. It’s got such a mood and a way of moving, and that was a big inspiration. DIEHL I know you were initially drawn to art by expressionist painters like Oskar Kokoschka and Francis Bacon, who in a weird way were doing a kind of European, visual expression of blues emotion. LYNCH That’s exactly right. There are so many similarities between the blues and a lot of painting. DIEHL I was also intrigued by Karen O’s appearance on the record. That’s the only outside collaboration on the album, and the only song that you don’t sing. How did that come about?
LYNCH Several years ago, Brian introduced me to Karen O. On that trip, nothing happened, but then last year, Karen O appeared again. She came in, and I gave her the lyrics, then she listened to the track over and over. She kind of sat there, you know, thinking, going over things in her mind. It was quite a comfortable situation. Then, at a certain point, Karen went into the booth and knocked the song out of the park. DIEHL Had you known about Karen O’s work with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and her other music? LYNCH Sure, but I felt like this was kind of its own thing. The way Karen O says the word pinky, it brings Pinky, as a character, alive. Pinky was in my mind, but not as good as that. Karen made Pinky a character that you kind of know and really care for. DIEHL You have a sort of magic with female characters. I found it kind of genius that you included that feminine energy in there. Karen O serves as a kind of presence in your music the way, say, Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive or Laura Dern in Wild at Heart exist as the heroines and femme fatales of your films. LYNCH Yes, you’re onto something. [laughs] Well, there are different types of music, and sometimes Dean and I will do a track and we know right away it’s not for us–that it’s gonna go to some girl because it’s just that kind of thing. I also work on music with this other girl, Chrysta Bell, and she’s a real leading lady. She’s gonna be big, I hope, one day soon. But I love women. I can kind of sit and go into a world where the women . . . Talk to me.
DIEHL Jean-Luc Godard once said, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” LYNCH Nope, you don’t need much more than that. DIEHL The tagline to your last film, Inland Empire, was “A woman in trouble,” which I also thought could be the tagline to many of your films. In so many of them, the women become the emotional pivot for the action. LYNCH There are men and women in the world, and they’re different in many ways. It’s really beautiful and interesting when the two meet. When a certain girl and a certain guy get together, certain things are going to happen. It’s always these combos and different characters coming together in a story that make certain things happen. These things are what kind of makes it, and the women play a huge role. DIEHL It’s interesting because there are frequent connections between the way some of the women look in your films—that sort of ’50s- or ’60s-inspired, all-American aesthetic—and what’s going on in contemporary fashion. I remember those hairstyles and jewel tones from Blue Velvet suddenly became a look, as did the extreme rockabilly style in Wild at Heart. Prada’s Spring 2012 collection really echoes the way some of your characters dress. A couple of years ago, I know that you also made a short film, Lady Blue Shanghai, for Dior starring Marion Cotillard. We know that your work has been an influence on fashion, but does fashion play a role in your work?
‘‘NEGATIVITY IS THE ENEMY OF CREATIVITY” LYNCH Well, the women dress a certain way for my films, for the world. I want to say one thing about that look: I work with this woman, Patricia Norris, with whom I started working on The Elephant Man. I loved the ’50s and early ’60s and that sort of started the style of Blue Velvet, but Patty deserves all the credit for the way people dressed in it. She has a knack for putting clothes on people that really fit them in every way. The way she dressed Dennis Hopper, too . . . Well, the way she dressed everybody was perfect, and it has to be. If that part of the movie is wrong, then it’ll jump out and bite you. DIEHL You’re known for having so many key long-standing collaborators, like Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan, and the late Jack Nance, for example. You’ve also transformed people’s careers at unlikely moments, like Dennis Hopper [in Blue Velvet] and Robert Blake [in Lost Highway]. How do you choose whom to work with? LYNCH There are so many people I’ve loved working with, but you’ve got to get the right person for the project. Sometimes a person can be your dearest friend, but there’s just not a role for them in the next film. That’s kind of a hardship. If they’re right for the part, though, you rejoice, because you not only love this person, but you’ve worked with them before and developed a shorthand. It’s a beautiful ride. DIEHL There’s a song that you sing on the soundtrack to Inland Empire . . . LYNCH That’s the song “Ghost of Love.” I had sung before that, but that one is where I got more comfortable. That song, I really love. It did start something ...When a certain girl and a certain guy get together, certain things are going to happen. DIEHL At one point while watching Inland Empire, I realized that I was watching a movie conceived by David Lynch, with a song sung by David Lynch, over a scene conceived by David Lynch. It was like full immersion, visually and aurally, in that moment. LYNCH That’s beautiful. DIEHL And then on top of that, I learned that you self-released the film. You took charge of every aspect of that movie, from its creation to its distribution.
LYNCH Well, everybody knows that the art houses are pretty much gone. It’s the mainstream films that get the theaters now, and theaters can’t survive if nobody’s coming to them, so it’s big advertising and big money that talks. We didn’t have the big money, so we figured that if we could go and book theaters and do it on our own, then it might be the best way. I don’t know if it was, but that’s what happened with Inland Empire.
lutely have to have it. Otherwise, you’re gonna die. But there’s always a way. Sometimes restrictions are a big blessing. When you have to build something yourself, ideas start coming that never would’ve come otherwise. New ideas flow in. Happy accidents do occur.
DIEHL In your best-selling memoir, Catching the Big Fish, you say, “For me, film is dead.”
LYNCH Well, it’s a very big freedom to have lightweight equipment and a smaller crew. The pressure is so much less. Pressure equates to money, so it’s really, in a way, a blessing to go low budget.
LYNCH I meant that celluloid, the actual film that runs through the camera, is dead. That’s gone, and now digital is here. But storytelling with cinema never will die—ever, ever, ever. The way the stories are told may change, but it will always be. DIEHL It might, though, be the death of film as a director’s medium, where the artist gets final cut. It’s interesting how so many filmmakers with established oeuvres and visionaries who have changed how we perceive cinema—people like you, John Waters, Gus Van Sant, and even Martin Scorsese— often still struggle to set up projects today. LYNCH Thousands of other filmmakers out there would agree with that. The studios are superreluctant to give final cut. They have so much money riding on these things, so they want a committee to go and rule the roost. The poor director just dies a death. More and more, when a committee at a studio sees something that maybe people won’t understand, they’ll kill the thing quickly. It’s an insult. I don’t know why anyone would make a film if they couldn’t make the film they wanted to make with all the freedom and the support they needed. But it happens every day, so you have to be independent. You have to not only find enough money to make the film, but you have to have final cut—you abso-
DIEHL With Inland Empire, you seemed liberated to run with your vision like never before.
DIEHL Mulholland Drive started out as a TV pilot at first. But when that failed, it actually opened the door for it to become a theatrical film. LYNCH It was a closed-ended pilot, and then the ideas came to make it into a feature. I was meditating, and all these ideas just flowed in, in one meditation— all the ideas to finish that into a feature. DIEHL You’re a devotee of Transcendental Meditation, which you’ve practiced for more than three decades. What does it do for you? DIEHL You’re a devotee of Transcendental Meditation, which you’ve practiced for more than three decades. What does it do for you? LYNCH Meditation does open up a kind of an understanding that grows. The Elephant Man was such a gift to me. I was a kid from Missoula, Montana, who had made one film at that point that was considered very strange by most people, and here I was in London, England, making a Victorian drama with some of the greatest actors in the world; a lot of people thought I was really.
‘‘IDEAS COME UP WHEN YOU PAY ATTENTION’’ LYNCH Several years ago, Brian introduced me to Karen O. On that trip, nothing happened, but then last year, Karen O appeared again. She came in, and I gave her the lyrics, then she listened to the track over and over. She kind of sat there, you know, thinking, going over things in her mind. It was quite a comfortable situation. Then, at a certain point, Karen went into the booth and knocked the song out of the park. DIEHL Had you known about Karen O’s work with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and her other music? LYNCH Sure, but I felt like this was kind of its own thing. The way Karen O says the word pinky, it brings Pinky, as a character, alive. Pinky was in my mind, but not as good as that. Karen made Pinky a character that you kind of know and really care for. DIEHL You have a sort of magic with female characters. I found it kind of genius that you included that feminine energy in there. Karen O serves as a kind of presence in your music the way, say, Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive or Laura Dern in Wild at Heart exist as the heroines and femme fatales of your films. LYNCH Yes, you’re onto something. [laughs] Well, there are different types of music, and sometimes Dean and I will do a track and we know right away it’s not for us–that it’s gonna go to some girl because it’s just that kind of thing. I also work on music with this other girl, Chrysta Bell, and she’s a real leading lady. She’s gonna be big, I hope, one day soon. But I love women. I can kind of sit and go into a world where the women.Talk to me.
DIEHL We live in a moment where violence is pervasive in pop culture. When you made films like Wild at Heart and Lost Highway, you came under fire for the graphic depictions of violence that they contained. But I always felt you were bringing that violence to the screen so we could transcend it, in a way. LYNCH Most films reflect the world, and the world is violent and in a lot of trouble. It’s not the other way around. The films don’t make a peaceful world violent—the violent world made the films. LYNCH Well, you’re swimming in the transcendent twice a day, and when you swim there, the world gets bigger, and you get wet with that, and the creativity grows. The Beatles, who did Transcendental Meditation, always talked about how the ideas for all those great songs came to them when they were working with the Maharishi. I always say it’s not Transcendental Meditation that does it, but the great treasury within—the great field at the base of all matter and mind. But you need to transcend to get to that field. People have a lot of different, strange ideas of what meditation is. I meet people who say, “My form of meditation is jogging,” or “I lay in the sun. That’s my form of meditation.” But that’s not meditation. You need a mental technique that truly gets you to a field that is beyond the field of relativity. The key word is transcend. Transcendental Meditation is like a key that opens the door to that deepest level of life, that ocean of pure consciousness. DIEHL You’ve said meditation helped you in the making of The Elephant Man, which was really your breakthrough film.
DIEHL In a way, though, the way you’ve reflected the very surreal world in which we live in your films has helped make surrealism itself a part of the popular cultural discussion. LYNCH Well, I don’t know. I love the surrealists, and I sort of understand what they’re saying, but I just think that maybe things aren’t always surreal. To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can’t be said so well with words. They’re intuited. They’re understood in a different way, and cinema can do those things. Cinema is a great, great language for concrete stories, and concrete stories that hold abstractions, and abstract stories. It’s so much like music in that way. DIEHL Except for Dune (1984) and The Elephant Man, all your movies are set in America—and often a mythic America of your own making. What is the myth of America that intrigues you now? LYNCH I’m an American, and I love America, even with the problems we’ve got. Stories come out from where we live and what we hear and see and feel, so I don’t know what will come next. It’s like fishing: You just wait . . . I’m starting to catch ideas for the next film, but I don’t know what it is yet. It’s like I always say, “The chef cooks the fish, the chef doesn’t make the fish.” Desire is the bait, the fish is caught, and then the chef cooks it. Ideas are like fish. They just come to you sometimes, and when you’re really lucky, you fall in love with them and know exactly what to do.
Matt Diehl
DAVID LYNCH &DAVID BOWIE
“Bowie and Lynch share many of the same influences - surrealists like Bunuel, writers like Burroughs, Joyce and Beckett, Dadaists like Duchamps.” Many writers have pointed out the similarities in the approaches of David Bowie to music and Lynch to film. Bowie is a very cinematic songwriter: many of his songs come across like scenes from a movie “Five Years” for example, many of his songs have been used to wonderful effect in movies (“Heart’s Filthy Lesson” in Se7en, “I Can’t Read” in The Ice Storm, and most particularly “I’m Deranged” in Lost Highway) and he often draws inspirations (and song titles) from movies. Lynch is an unusually musical film director - his passion for music almost matches his love of film, and music plays an integral part in his work. But the similarities between Bowie and Lynch go way beyond the fact that one is a musician strongly influenced by film and the other a director strongly influenced by music. Bowie and Lynch share many of the same influences - surrealists like Bunuel, writers like Burroughs, Joyce and Beckett, Dadaists like Duchamps. Lynch likes to use characters that are more archetypal than realistic, in the same way as Bowie’s personas are essentially archetypes (as indeed is his central persona - David Bowie). Both men know that a blank archetype allows the audience to project what they will onto the character, and this approach - encouraging an audience response rather than than preaching to the audience - lies at the heart of the art of both men.
The works of both men with the most glaring similarities are 1. Outside and Lost Highway. Both are neglected masterpieces with a subject matter too weird (gruesome murder with no easy explanation or morality) and a structure too confusing to score with a mass audience. It is therefore fitting that the central song on 1. Outside, I’m Deranged (which one critic suggested would have been a better title for the album) bookends Lost Highway. There has never been a more effective use of a Bowie song than the one Lynch puts I’m Deranged to. At the start, the hurried derangement of the song introduces us to a car speeding along a highway. At the end, Bowie’s unaccompanied voice breaks through the car chase to jar us out of our perception of how the film is ending. When I went to see the film in the cinema (twice), 90% plus of the audience remained through the final credits to hear the last note of the song (something I’d never witnessed before in an Irish cinema), perhaps recognising that the song is an integral part of the film, not just soundtrack. Lynch has stated that I’m Deranged inspired Lost Highway. As he listened to it on 1. Outside, the first and last scenes of the movie suddenly appeared to him. When I saw the film, I didn’t know this, and I was unsure as to what to make of the double use of the song. My first impression was that it served a “riverrun past eve and adam’s” function - to illustrate that the time structure of the film we have just witnessed is circular, not sequential. But what does the film mean? I don’t think the film really has an intentional plot. As my brother said to me, any film which requires you to either conclude that one half of it is a dream, or you have an unreliable (in this case insane) narrator can be made to mean anything, and therefore has no correct interpretation. With this film, I think Lynch’s thing was to take the idea that “the artwork isn’t finished until the audience has participated” to the ultimate.
“The main character is unreliable, because he’s insane. He’s on Death Row awaiting execution, and his mind is frantically beating around trying to come to terms both with his own impending demise and with what he’s done”
David Bowie as Tilda Swinton and Tilda Swinton as David Bowie
I don’t think the film really has an intentional plot. As my brother said to me, any film which requires you to either conclude that one half of it is a dream, or you have an unreliable (in this case insane) narrator can be made to mean anything, and therefore has no correct interpretation. With this film, I think Lynch’s thing was to take the idea that “the artwork isn’t finished until the audience has participated” to the ultimate. By supplying you with no coherent plot, and very little useful information on the main characters (all the most interesting characters in the film are essentially ciphers), Lynch causes your mind to flounder around searching for meaning, and either give it up as a bad job, or supply your own, which is essentially independent of his vision of the film (if he has any) and purely a result of your (the viewer) own view of it. In essence, Lynch’s methods are like Bowie’s when he sings nonsensical cut-up lyrics: the aim is not to impart meaning (for there is none) but to encourage the listener (or viewer) to supply their own. Having said all that, here’s my own interpretation of the film. The main character is unreliable, because he’s insane. He’s on Death Row awaiting execution, and his mind is frantically beating around trying to come to terms both with his own impending demise and with what he’s done (ie, kill his wife in an insane jealous rage). Effectively, he’s rewriting his personal history, and that’s what we see in the film. We see two versions of the same story. The first is a sanitised version of what happened - we see it pretty much as it did happen, except Fred won’t admit he did kill his wife, so that part is hazy.
The film splits in two around the prison scene. In the second half of the film, we see the final draft of Fred’s rewrite of the story. Now, instead of an insanely homicidal husband, Fred casts himself as a virile young hero, out to save a gangster’s moll. Mystery Man is Fred’s id (Lynch has actually confirmed this bit in an interview), nagging at him. But though the story Fred concocts for himself is superficially convincing, Fred never fully convinces himself. We see this from the elements that are repeated in both parts of the film, that remind Fred (and through him us) that this is not the real story, but a reflection or rewrite of it. Though Fred re-invents himself as a totally different person in the second part of the film, the woman is played by the same actress, she says some of the same lines in both parts of the film (“He told me about a job”), and
the sax music he plays in the first part of the film pops up on the radio in the second part (and upsets him). His subconscious won’t let him forget the true story entirely. There’s also the cue of “I’m Deranged” which both starts and ends the film. In the final scene, Fred is actually frying in the electric chair, but has managed to block himself off from reality so successfully that he thinks he’s in a car on a highway, being chased by police. Thus, the song “I’m Deranged” is a jokey clue to the fact that we are seeing the film through the eyes of a deranged and therefore unreliable narrator, and the key line of dialogue Fred utters in the film is when he says (to the policemen) “I like to remember things the way I remember them. Not necessarily the way they really happened”.
Dara O’Kearney
1h 29min | Drama, Terror
Eraserhead 1977
Henry Spencer é um impressor de férias que vive em um pequeno apartamento na área industrial de uma cidade abandonada. Um dia, Henry vê o Homem no Planeta, que vive no prédio ao lado, operando alavancas. De repente, uma criatura fantasmagórica, semelhante a um flagelo, emerge da boca de Henry e desaparece no Espaço, em meio a imagens de pedras, líquidos e um círculo. Um dia, ao voltar do supermercado, Henry conhece sua nova vizinha, a Moça Bonita do Apartamento ao Lado, que o avisa que a ex-namorada de Henry, Mary X, o convidou para um jantar com a família. Na casa de Mary, seu pai, Senhor X, fala sem parar sobre encanamentos, e sua mãe escova compulsivamente o cabelo da filha. Henry, durante o jantar é praticamente forçado a cortar um frango minúsculo que se debate e verte uma gosma.
Director David Lynch Elenco Jack Nance Charlotte Stewart Jeanne Bates Allen Joseph
The Elephant Man 1980 2h 4min | Biográfico, Drama
Baseado em manuscritos do dr. Frederick Treves , o anatomista que o descobriu em um circo de aberrações e o internou em um hospital, vivido nas telas pelo premiado Anthony Hopkins, traz John Hurt no papel principal e Anne Bancroft, como a Sra. Kendal, outro importante personagem na vida de Merrick. Na trágica história Merrick foi descoberto pelo doutor Treves sendo exibido como aberração num circo na Londres vitoriana, onde se alimenta apenas de batatas e é seguidamente espancado. Era apresentado como “a versão mais degradante do ser humano”, e causava repulsa em todos que encaravam aquele corpo humano 90% deformado por uma doença de nascença que só foi diagnosticada como “Síndrome de Proteus” em 1996, após exames no esqueleto de John Merrick. Entretanto, testes de DNA conduzidos pelo Dr. Charis Eng em amostras de cabelo e ossos de Joseph não mostraram mutações no gene PTEN. Portanto, não há ainda prova definitiva de que Joseph Merrick sofria da síndrome de Proteus. Director Elenco
David Lynch Anthony Hopkins John Hurt Anne Bancroft
2h | Drama, Misterio, Thriller
Director David Lynch Elenco Kyle MacLachlan Isabella Rossellini Laura Dern DennisHopper Dean Stockwell
Blue Velvet 1986
2h 17min | Ação, Aventura, Sci-Fi
Dune 1984
Em 10.191 D.C a humanidade se espalhou pelo universo mas, politicamente regrediu para um regime feudal. A moeda do universo é a chamada especiaria, um produto com capacidade de aumentar a expectativa de vida e os poderes de presciência de alguns usuários. Neste universo cheio de intrigas e batalhas, no planeta Arrakis, único lugar onde a especiaria pode ser colhida, entram em conflito os interesses de diversas casas nobres pelo controle da produção da Especiaria Melange, logo controlando todo poder do Universo.
O lado mais negro da vida numa pequena cidade norte-americana, por David Lynch. “Veludo Azul” é a obra mais aclamada deste cineasta. Trata-se da perda da inocência trazida pela mão do estudante Jeffrey Beaumont na suburbana cidade de Lumberton. Tudo começa quando Jeffrey encontra uma orelha humana num campo deserto. Pede ajuda a Sandy, filha inocente de um polícia, para encontrar o corpo ao qual pertence. A chave do mistério é Dorothy Vallen, cantora num clube nocturno. O marido e filho foram raptados pelo demoníaco Frank Booth, que atormenta sexualmente a cantora em troca da segurança da família. É um filme brutal que não evita a exposição dos mais variados tabus: sadismo, perversões, fetichismo, violência e abuso de drogas, que se balançam com a inocência dos dois jovens. David Lynch foi nomeado para o Óscar de melhor realizador em 1987.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me 2h 15min | Drama, Fantasy, Horror
O agente do FBI Chet Desmond (Chris Isaak) e seu parceiro Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) investigam o assassinato da garçonete Teresa, em uma pequena cidade do estado de Washington. Após descobrir uma pista do misterioso crime, Chet desaparece a alguns quilômetros da cidade de Twin Peaks. Um ano depois, outra morte parece estar conectada a este acontecimento: o assassinato de Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), uma adolescente problemática e viciada em drogas. Os últimos dias de vida da garota podem ajudar a solucionar os mistérios deste crime. Director David Lynch Elenco Sheryl Lee Kyle MacLachlan David Bowie
Director David Lynch Elenco Bill Pullman Patricia Arquette John
Wild at Heart 1990 2h 5min | Crime, Drama
Marietta Pace Fortune é uma sulista rica e de comportamento instável que não aceitava que Sailor Ripley namorasse sua filha Lula Fortune, mas não por se preocupar com ela e sim pelo simples fato de que Marietta queria tanto transar com Sailor que foi ao banheiro masculino para tentar seduzilo. Mas como ele a repudiou categoricamente, ela imediatamente mandou Bob Ray Lemmon, um capanga, para cumprir uma ameaça dita no banheiro. Entretanto, Sailor reagiu prontamente e, com as mãos limpas, matou Bob Ray. Quase dois anos depois ele foi posto em liberdade e, juntamente com Lula, viaja para a Califórnia, fazendo com que Ripley quebre sua condicional. Durante o trajeto ele dá vazão à fixação que tem por Elvis Presley, eaquanto Lula tem obsessão por “O Mágico de Oz”.
Director David Lynch Elenco Nicolas Cage Laura Dern Willem Dafoe Diane Ladd
2h 14min | Misterio, Thriller
Lost Highway 1997
Fred Madison é um saxofonista de jazz vanguardista que é casado com Renee. Fred suspeita que Renee pode ser infiel a ele, mas percebe que tem coisas maiores para se preocupar quando alguns vídeos aparecem na porta da sua casa, provando que alguém está observado a casa por fora e por dentro (um vídeo mostra-o a dormir com Renee). Quando Renee é encontrada morta, Fred é preso e condenado por homicídio em primeiro grau. Entretanto em uma manhã não está mais em sua cela e se transformou aparentemente em Pete Drayton, um jovem mecânico de automóveis que é libertado mas tolamente se envolve com a mulher de Dick Laurent, um gangster, chamada Alice Wakefield, uma loira bem sensual que é exatamente igual a Renee. Quando as fitas começam a ficar mais preocupantes eles chamam a polícia, que não se mostra muito preocupada com o ocorrido. É neste momento que temos uma mensagem singela, porém fundamental para a compreensão do filme. A mensagem se da quando um dos detetives pergunta para o casal se eles possuem uma câmera de vídeo em casa e eles explicam que não, pois Fred prefere se lembrar das coisas do seu jeito, e completa depois: “do jeito que eu lembro, não necessariamente como elas aconteceram”.
The Straight Story 1999 1h 52min | Biográfico, Drama
Aos 73 anos, Alvin Straight recebe um telefonema que o põe a par do delicado estado de saúde do seu irmão. Há mais de dez anos que Alvin e Lyle estão de relações cortadas. As últimas palavras que dirigiram um ao outro na altura foram ditas no calor de uma terrível discussão e, desde aquele momento, as centenas de quilómetros que os separavam tornaram-se ainda maiores. A fraqueza nas pernas obriga Alvin a apoiar-se em canadianas para andar e a falta de vista não lhe permite ter a carta de condução. Mas, apesar disso, liga a sua máquina de cortar relva e faz-se à estrada, ao encontro de Lyle. O longo caminho vai permitir-lhe conhecer personagens muito interessantes... “Uma História Simples” valeu ao controverso Lynch uma nomeação para a Palma de Ouro em Cannes e Richard Farnsworth viu o seu nome indicado para um Óscar. Director David Lynch Elenco Sissy Spacek Richard Farnsworth Harry Dean Stanton Everett McGill
Director David Lynch Elenco Noami Watts Laura Harring Justin Theroux
Mulholland Dr. 2001
2h 27min | Drama, Misterio, Thriller
Uma mulher morena é atacada por um assassino profissional, mas escapa após ambos se envolverem em um acidente de carro na Avenida Mulholland em Hollywood, onde apenas a mulher sobrevive. Ela anda até Los Angeles, onde entra em um apartamento recentemente desocupado por uma mulher ruiva. Uma aspirante a atriz chamada Betty Elms chega ao apartamento e encontra a morena, que está com amnésia e não se lembra de quem é, adotando o nome “Rita” após ver o pôster de um filme estrelado por Rita Hayworth na parede. As duas decidem olhar na bolsa de Rita em busca de pistas e encontram uma grande quantia em dinheiro e uma chave azul. Paralelamente, em uma lanchonete, um homem conta a seu amigo que teve um pesadelo em que havia um monstro nos fundos da lanchonete. Os dois decidem investigar, e a criatura aparece, deixando o homem que teve o pesadelo paralisado de medo.
Cine-teatro Constantino Nery
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Ter 6 Eraserhead 1977 Qua 7 The Elephant Man 1980 Qui 8 Dune 1984 Sex 9 Blue Velvet 1986 Sáb 10 Wild at Heart 1990 Ter 13 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me 1992 Qua 14 Lost Highway 1997 Qui 15 The Straight Story 1999 Sex 16 Mulholland Drive 2001 Sáb 17 Inland Empire 2006 6-17 18:30 + 22:00 Sex + Sáb 24:00 Exposição de cartazes Foyer do Teatro Todos os dias
17 Junho 2017