Xixax Film Forum

The Director's Chair => David Lynch => Topic started by: MacGuffin on May 11, 2005, 04:50:02 PM

Title: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on May 11, 2005, 04:50:02 PM
Lynch's 'Empire' building backed by StudioCanal
Source: Hollywood Reporter

CANNES -- French sales and distribution company StudioCanal is backing the upcoming project from David Lynch titled "Inland Empire," sources in Cannes confirmed Wednesday.

StudioCanal, a division of Vivendi Universal's French pay TV company Canal Plus, declined to talk about the project, which it has been trying to keep top secret. Even posters for the film on the Croisette and around the Cannes market have been covered until a grand unveiling scheduled for Thursday.
 
StudioCanal is expected to handle world sales on the title, with its French distribution company Mars Films handling theatrical in France. It is unclear whether any cast is attached to "Inland Empire." Buyers already looking at the project say details remain hazy, in typical Lynch fashion. "It's about a film within a film. There's nothing to see, there's no script," one top international buyer said.

"But when have you ever seen a David Lynch script in advance?" said another, implying that this did not affect the project's attractiveness.

StudioCanal financed Lynch's movies "The Straight Story" and "Mulholland Drive," both of which unspooled In Competition at Cannes, with Lynch picking up the best director prize for the latter.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Ghostboy on May 11, 2005, 05:37:44 PM
YES!!!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on May 11, 2005, 06:39:55 PM
SWEET!  the last time he made a movie i was too dumb to appreciate it (even though i saw it in theatres)!  now i'm a convert!   :yabbse-thumbup:  :yabbse-thumbup:
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Brazoliange on May 11, 2005, 08:07:38 PM
hahahahaha yes

my night is made, thanks MG
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: SiliasRuby on May 11, 2005, 08:15:44 PM
Great.  :yabbse-grin:  Neon is going to love this news.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Weak2ndAct on May 11, 2005, 09:05:46 PM
:onfire:  :onfire:  :onfire:  :onfire: :onfire:  :onfire:  :onfire:  :onfire:

From Variety:

Lynch invades an 'Empire'
Digital pic details a mystery


By ADAM DAWTREY
David Lynch is making a new movie with StudioCanal. In fact, he's already been shooting it under the radar for two years.

Titled "INLAND EMPIRE" (in capitals, though Lynch doesn't explain why), it stars Laura Dern, along with Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, Jeremy Irons and a host of others Lynch won't specify.

In fact, there's still very little the enigmatic Lynch is comfortable to reveal about the movie.

"It's about a woman in trouble, and it's a mystery, and that's about all I want to say about it," he comments diffidently.

The title refers to the bleak residential area on the edge of the desert near L.A. -- the antithesis of the tony locale of his last movie "Mulholland Drive."

Lynch has shot much of his latest film in Poland with local actors, after making friends with the organizers of the Camerimage festival in Lodz. He's now back shooting in and around Los Angeles.

Even at this relatively advanced stage of production, Lynch is cagey about when it will be finished. But it's understood that StudioCanal is aiming for a world preempreem at Cannes next year.

"Making a film is a beautiful mystery," Lynch says. "You go deep into the wood, and you don't want to come out of that wood, but the time is coming very soon when I will have to."

Lynch has financed the production to date from his own resources, with his wife and longtime artistic collaborator Mary Sweeney producing. The budget is unknown.

StudioCanal, which financed "Mulholland Drive""Mulholland Drive" and "The Straight Story," has come aboard "INLAND EMPIRE" to handle worldwide sales.

Digital convert

What Lynch will reveal -- and indeed, waxes lyrical about -- is the fact that he's shooting the movie on digital video.

"I started working in DV for my Web site, and I fell in love with the medium. It's unbelievable, the freedom and the incredible different possibilities it affords, in shooting and in post-production."

"For me, there's no way back to film. I'm done with it," Lynch says. "I love abstraction. Film is a beautiful medium, but it's very slow and you don't get a chance to try a lot of different things. With DV, you get those chances. And in post-production, if you can think it, you can do it."

DV has clearly given Lynch the freedom from having to clarify his intentions -- to financiers, or even to himself -- before he starts shooting.

"The explaining of things in words is always a huge problem," he confesses.

He characterizes the DV production process as a journey of "huge exploration" to discover what his film will be.

"I'm writing as I go," he says. "I believe in the unity of things. When you have one part, and then a second part that doesn't relate to that first part, it's very curious to find that they do relate after all. It's a most beautiful thing."

He also believes that it produces a different kind of performances from actors. "When you run out of film, you have to stop and reload, and during that time the heat sometimes goes off. But with this medium you can keep that heat, and it builds, and it's beautiful to see."

He says that Dern, in particular, has benefited from this freedom. "She's the most incredible actress. Some people get roles and do their thing, but some have a lot more inside and don't usually get the chance to show it."

As for the quality of the DV image, Lynch says, "It looks different. Some would say it looks bad. But it reminds me of early 35mm, that didn't have that tight grain. When you have a poor image, there's lots more room to dream."

"But I've done tests transferring DV to film, and there are all kinds of controls to dial in the look you want."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on May 11, 2005, 11:16:04 PM
i hope i'm not one of the 'some' who would say it looks bad.  bad dv bugs me.  thats insane he's been shooting this already with recognizable actors and word had never leaked.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Fernando on May 12, 2005, 03:52:35 PM
Quote from: Cinephile
This is me on a normal day-to-day basis: :multi:


This is me after I learned of another Miyazaki Lynch:  :onfire:
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: soixante on May 15, 2005, 04:21:39 PM
The only drawback is that I thought the new film would be sneaked into Cannes this year.  Now, 2006 is shaping up to be a big year.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: No Hay Banda on May 16, 2005, 01:09:12 PM
Quote from: themodernage02i hope i'm not one of the 'some' who would say it looks bad.  bad dv bugs me.  thats insane he's been shooting this already with recognizable actors and word had never leaked.
Well, uh, it may have been "leaked", in a manner of speaking.

I believe I heard about Lynch shooting a film in Poland a while back. At the time, it was called "The Green Room in Lodz", but I really couldn't get any more specific if I tried. It was quite a while ago (a few months), so my memory is kinda foggy.

Anyway, it good to see some more news about a new Lynch movie. Kinda disappointing to hear he's shooting on DV, but then again, Collateral looked pretty damn good. Lynch should be one of the people who can make DV look good, so I've still got high expectations, myself.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: cowboykurtis on May 16, 2005, 01:59:22 PM
Quote from: No Hay BandaKinda disappointing to hear he's shooting on DV, but then again, Collateral looked pretty damn good. Lynch should be one of the people who can make DV look good, so I've still got high expectations, myself.

Collateral was shot on HD - a very different medium than mini DV
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on May 21, 2005, 03:06:06 AM
hmmm. lynch on dv. it works quite well for his internet shorts, but i picture lynch films to be lush and beautifully shot, with amazing colors and shadows. you really can't get that "lynch-look" on dv, and it upsets me that he says he never wants to go back to film.

however, on the other hand, lynch can do no wrong. barring dune. that doesn't count.

what the fuck is this post? this isn't me.

HOLY SHIT! LYNCH IS MAKING ANOTHER MOVIE AND LAURA DERN'S GONNA BE IN IT! FUCKING SHIT YES!

that's better.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: cowboykurtis on May 21, 2005, 01:32:42 PM
Quote from: bonanzatazhmmm. lynch on dv. it works quite well for his internet shorts, but i picture lynch films to be lush and beautifully shot, with amazing colors and shadows. you really can't get that "lynch-look" on dv, and it upsets me that he says he never wants to go back to film.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on May 24, 2005, 09:38:45 AM
..................




oh my, when i first read this mac's post i was starting to tear up  some.  and i got chills up and down me.  i cant say enough about this.  i was about to start a new thread in this forum "proof that he has to much time on his hands"...like the quentin one b/c of his weather reports.  but come to find out hes been working on this for two fucking years........a.w.e.s.o.m.e.

love the cast [irons & theroux] :yabbse-thumbup:  :yabbse-thumbup:

and you gotta laugh some at his premise "its about a woman and its a mystery"

same could be said for:

twin peaks
certian segments of hotel room
fire walk with me
lost highway
blue velvet
mulholland dr.


as for the dv thing.. its fine by me it it gives lynch more freedom to work with.  i can only imagine what he will do....... :bravo:


i expect you guys to work extra hard in this thread and bring us fast, accurate news concerning this film... :yabbse-wink:
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on July 01, 2005, 11:03:44 PM
yo! i read/heard somewhere that on the cover of one of the issues of variety [cannes issue?] that there is the first "image" of inland empire... can someone [mac  :yabbse-wink: ] find out if this is true?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Brazoliange on July 04, 2005, 06:53:15 AM
any new news? *begs*
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on July 07, 2005, 10:13:37 AM
Quote from: Brazoliangeany new news? *begs*


i found something!... :yabbse-grin:

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fphotos.friendster.com%2Fphotos%2F58%2F45%2F6685485%2F12645921560290l.jpg&hash=f77c072dc9225d1b030528844b8bb9f05d677c5f)

not sure if its anything to get excited about though.  but i do like this image..also, i have some peeps who live in la la land and i asked them about inland empire.and they said it was the "meth capitol of california"...and its full of factories/industrial shit....
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: hedwig on July 15, 2005, 09:54:50 AM
that is a very nice image
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pas on July 21, 2005, 05:04:49 PM
I heard from some guy who knows a guy that worked with a guy .............. that he somehow managed to make his DV image feel as warm as his other stuff. Anyway, maybe I just believed some random bullshit from a random bullshitter.

Thank god thank the precious gods that Lynch gives next to nothing on his film... hype prevention is so underrated.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on July 21, 2005, 05:08:12 PM
There are some new photos up over at Chrysta Bell.com (http://www.chrystabell.com/) in Gallery 4 of a Video Shoot with David Lynch. Could these possibly be from a scene in Inland Empire? Only time will tell.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fdugpa.com%2Fpics%2Fbelllynch1.jpg&hash=37eb83645abe1409850a34236f6eeedd336cb96e)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: skye_thorstenson on August 01, 2005, 06:39:34 PM
"David Lynch retains his marquee value by keeping audiences waiting. Studio Canal was screening a Cannes promo reel for his new "Inland Empire," featuring a cast wearing rabbit heads."

read that blurb from an old article in the hollywood reporter. link below.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/columns/risky_business_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000929026
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 17, 2005, 12:09:55 AM
Inland Empire Update

Dark Horizons has a brief report from the set of Lynch's new film, Inland Empire. Here it is:

"Inland Empire" Eyewitness Report
Posted: Tuesday August 16th, 2005 2:12pm
Source: Dark Horizons
Author: Garth Franklin

'ME' just completed two days as a featured extra on the new film, "Inland Empire" directed by David Lynch and starring Harry Dean Stanton, Laura Dern and newcomer Terryn Westbrook. Here's his full report:

"The film has been filming since 2003, at which time my sister-in-law was an extra. Having taken off time from work to have a baby, she only did the couple of days In Dec '03 when Lynch shot for several days just out of LA (most of the film was shot in Poland) and did no more. When the opportunity arose for extras again - she declined, but I decided to look into it. What do you know? I got two days work.

I didn't get the script, we were only given a BREAKDOWN of our scene, and that's all. Lynch said very LITTLE to us on both days. The DP was more sociable, and the casting director was lovely. What I can gather is that it's a Twin Peaks-like mystery about a woman that dissapears near the San Gab mountains.

We did auditorium scenes - crowd, typical red-robed curtains behind lounge act - which went over three days, though I was only available for two. The task was to basically sit, in awe, of the performance in stage - played, comically - though I'm assuming my smile will be overshadowed by my look of awe. Not that you'll see my in the finished cut, I'm row P - right-back, near entrance. It's a REALLY dark theatre (though not theatre, just a set near San Gabriel mountains here) too.

We do hear music BUT it's not coming from the singer's mouth. She lip-synches, and I believe they fix it all later - - - or something. I didn't recognize the singer/actress. An older man was there directing ? her music.

The film was shot on Digital Video, so I imagine it's going to look VERY cool. It's an experimental film for Lynch, so it is hard to say how it will go (and at one stage I believe it was going to be made for DavidLynch.com only), but it will be interesting to see the finished product - no less.

Laura Dern was on the set on the second day, I think she's going to be playing a role in the film too - maybe even a starring one? - and Kyle MacLachlan (barely recognizable, because of his SILVER hair!) turned up too late afternoon on the Thursday.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on August 19, 2005, 11:50:23 PM
cooper?, silver hair?,  twin peaks spinoff? sounds great..

thanks mac....
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: 72teeth on August 20, 2005, 04:19:24 AM
I just hope the Silver Hair is over something traumatic and not just cause he's over the hill...
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Just Withnail on August 24, 2005, 11:51:46 AM
Apparently Justin Theroux likes spilling beans. (http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0534,lim,67107,20.html)


The link'll take you to a great Village Voice interview with Theroux, which not only contains the following saliva inducing IE tidbits:

Quote[...] enthusiastic about Inland Empire, though the Lynch process apparently isn't any less baffling the second time around. "You're so used to directors who have a clear idea what they want, but with David, you have to be flexible enough to just trust him—and it's more fun, it frees you up from all that actor bullshit baggage." As for details, Theroux says, "David's playing his cards typically close to his chest." He reveals that the movie contains "some completely bizarre sex scenes," but adds, "I couldn't possibly tell you what the film's about, and at this point, I don't know that he could. It's become sort of a pastime—Laura [Dern] and I sit around on set trying to figure out what's going on.

"I do know that something David really liked about Mulholland Drive was that it had this previous life as a TV show—he equates it to doing a painting that's shelved, someone gives you money to finish it and says, here's three more feet of canvas. With this one he's just giving us scenes—and me, Laura, and Jeremy [Irons] have to justify and make sense of whatever that is. Sometimes someone will show up on set you didn't even know was in the movie. Julia Ormond showed up two weeks ago and David hands me a scene where she's my wife! I'm like, I wish I'd known that! But in a weird way you're glad you didn't."


but a pretty funny Magnolia reference as well.

QuoteThis fall, he'll direct his first film, a "simple three-hander" called Dedication: "It's not particularly heavy lifting. I don't want to try and make Magnolia, which I think a lot of first-time directors do."

(Oh, and it's got some info on his new film The Baxter (http://www.xixax.com/viewtopic.php?p=199283#199283).)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Fernando on August 24, 2005, 12:03:03 PM
Quote from: Justin TherouxSometimes someone will show up on set you didn't even know was in the movie. Julia Ormond showed up two weeks ago and David hands me a scene where she's my wife! I'm like, I wish I'd known that! But in a weird way you're glad you didn't."

:laughing: That's awesome, got to love Lynch for that.

Thanks for the link.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on August 24, 2005, 02:15:26 PM
Quote from: Just WithnailHe reveals that the movie contains "some completely bizarre sex scenes,"

haha..cool  thanks just[in] & withnail


makes me thinks of the already bizarre lynch sex scenes:

eraserhead-  milk sex
elephant man- elephant sex
dune-  ?  
wild at heart-  redneck sex over the rainbow and "say fuck me"
straight story- ?
lost highway-  bullet-time sex, skanky, hot car sex, and from here to  eternity sex
fire walk with me-back at one-eyed jacks sex, nicotine sex
mulholland dr.-  delicate and passionate lesbian sex...btu soem evil fingering
blue velvet-"daddy wants to fuck", fabric[ated] oral sex, and dragon noise sex
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: 72teeth on August 24, 2005, 02:21:26 PM
Quote from: NEON MERCURY
straight story- ?

I'm sure Farnsworth got off at least once from all the John Deere vibrations...
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on August 24, 2005, 02:24:28 PM
and now he's dead.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: 72teeth on August 24, 2005, 02:34:40 PM
:laughing:
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on September 21, 2005, 01:40:21 PM
INLAND EMPIRE News from Poland

According to Marek Żydowicz,  President of Camerimage, “INLAND EMPIRE” will be shooting in Lodz Poland during the month of December. Filming is expected to last 7 to 9 days. The film will be co-produced by Tumult Foundation, the founder of Camerimage. “INLAND EMPIRE” is based on a short story which David directed during Camerimage with Krzysztof Majchrzak and Karolina Gruszka called “The Green Room in Lodz”.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Garam on September 30, 2005, 10:43:46 AM
Apparantly ze Mars Volta are on board to do the soundtrack.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: I Don't Believe in Beatles on September 30, 2005, 03:24:06 PM
Quote from: GaramApparantly ze Mars Volta are on board to do the soundtrack.

Where'd you hear that?  Interesting if it's true.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Gamblour. on September 30, 2005, 04:07:55 PM
My god, that'd be an indie, scene kid's wet dream.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Sigur Rós on October 11, 2005, 02:21:39 PM
Quote from: GamblourMy god, that'd be an indie, scene kid's wet dream.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg78.imageshack.us%2Fimg78%2F2271%2Fcumshot19mk.gif&hash=1b44c6ef28478f097f0afedcfb7b8b3f0a28a580)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Gamblour. on October 11, 2005, 03:50:01 PM
haha how crude, make them look scene, play some indie music, and i think you've captured it.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: I Don't Believe in Beatles on January 07, 2006, 09:45:18 PM
Some pictures are up here (first post, it's misdated as 2005):

http://www.lynchnet.com/
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on January 07, 2006, 09:54:02 PM
 :bravo:thank you ginger!!!!! :bravo:



(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lynchnet.com%2Fie%2F3.jpg&hash=28a5bec8bf5bd83a222aa922fa5b7df8bd7ba89a)
lynch is just fucking cool!!!

great pics...whats up w/the horse and the upside down lady?


everytime i get more info about this my eyes start watering and i get chills........oh, please come out in 2006
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: hedwig on January 07, 2006, 09:54:55 PM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lynchnet.com%2Fie%2F4.jpg&hash=b2c424a1748e271de78cd9ed6222df916a16c2c6)
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.homerize.com%2Fframegrabs%2F3G02%2Ffg_119.jpg&hash=adb9ba9bf3a9ca01eb4e40648033256aa373f4dd)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on January 17, 2006, 01:51:03 AM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lynchnet.com%2Fie%2F10.jpg&hash=c7af8b541041c0462bbdd6d69de3b99986fa61c7)

FILM?!

and is the other camera a panasonic dvx-100a? looks it... very interesting.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 23, 2006, 10:26:09 PM
More Inland Empire News

Cineuropa.org has an update on the latest with Inland Empire. According to the article, Lynch is back in Poland for filming, and the film is still scheduled to premiere at Cannes. Here's the full text:

Shooting – Pologne
Lynch at Lódz
David Lynch arrived in Poland to complete filming on Inland Empire, his new film whose screenplay is still shrouded in secret. The title does not give much away – referring to the four neighbourhoods of Los Angeles close to the Californian desert. "It’s the story of a woman in deep trouble. The story also has a hidden mystery, that’s all I will say on the subject," declared David Lynch with regard to his film.

The first visit by Lynch to Poland was in 2000 when the director was invited to the Camerimage festival at Lódz. His fascination since then for this town, headquarters of the famous film school, brought him back two years later. That’s when the project began – in a little bedroom painted green, the first images were taken.

Many Polish actors are in the cast, notably Karolina Gruszka, Krzysztof Majchrzak, Leon Niemczyk, Piotr Andrzejewski. But the main roles are taken by Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Santon.
This time the crew is filming in the Lódz hotels and in Manufaktura, former factories transformed into a modern commercial-cultural complex.

Production on Inland Empire was not officially announced until the last Cannes festival, by Studio Canal – one of the co-producers of the film. The Polish end of the production is being handled by Marek Zydowicz, director of the Camerimage festival, in coopération with Fundacja Tumult.

The film’s première is scheduled for the next Cannes festival. In Poland, the film will probably come out in the autumn, and Kino Swiat will be the distributor.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Sal on April 20, 2006, 02:58:26 PM
This is (presumably) a scene from INLAND EMPIRE.

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=1981

Personally I think it's awful, and am doubtful that it's Lynch.  But if it is, I'm not too thrilled.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Ghostboy on April 20, 2006, 03:29:51 PM
It's from this (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=8659.0). I, too, hope (and believe) that it's not from INLAND EMPIRE.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on June 21, 2006, 02:11:55 PM
Venice Gets Lynched
Although he hasn't formally accepted the invitations, the Venice Fest has announced David Lynch will be honored with a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
By Dennis Michael, FilmStew.com

Well, if you missed Cannes this year, there's always Venice, and it's beginning to look like quite a film festival.

Daily Variety reports David Lynch will probably be a major presence this year, especially if he decides to attend. His mystery Inland Empire will screen out of competition there, but he's also been named the winner of a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. He hasn't yet formally accepted the invitation.

Kenneth Branagh will bring his new film version of Mozart's The Magic Flute.

The official list of films will be announced at the end of July, but the probables make quite a tantalizing list: Woody Allen's new comedy Scoop is considered likely to show at Venice, as is Brian De Palma's long-awaited adaptation of the James Ellroy novel The Black Dahlia. Irwin Winkler's Iraq-themed drama Home of the Brave is expected, as well as Oliver Stone's most likely controversial World Trade Center, and Alfonso Cuaron's science fiction film Children of Men.

The Venice film festival begins on August 30, and runs through September 9.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Sunrise on June 21, 2006, 02:21:23 PM
That's GREAT news!! Let's hope a US release of Inland Empire follows shortly after Venice.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on July 25, 2006, 04:27:41 PM
Justin Theroux Dishes on David Lynch's Inland Empire     
Source: Now Playing Magazine

He may be moonlighting on screens alongside Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx in this week's big screen re-up of Miami Vice, but Justin Theroux has another movie coming out this year that in some circles is even more hotly anticipated — namely, David Lynch's Inland Empire, the visionary filmmaker's first big screen work since 2001's Oscar-nominated Mulholland Drive.

"I love it!" exclaims Theroux when asked about the film and his experience on it, which involved breaks of several days while he was simultaneously on call for Miami Vice duty. "It's loosely a mystery [but] I have no idea what kind of movie we're going to have," says Theroux in an exclusive interview with Now Playing from the editing bay of his directorial debut, Dedication. "As far as what the movie is about, I could rattle off a couple scenes, but it's difficult to describe. I play an actor who sort of gets cast in a large movie, and in that movie I play a Southern gentleman, and that's about all I know. And then there are tons of scenes within that, but I don't know how he's going to use those scenes, you know?" Theroux estimates the director could have literally hundreds of hours of usable footage.

While Lynch always exerts an exacting stylistic control over his films that often renders flat narrative description or attempted plot synopses rather moot, the tightly controlled and digital video-shot Inland Empire production marks a further descent into the type of beautiful, slurry mystery the director indulged after Mulholland Drive — in which Theroux also starred — morphed from a failed ABC television pilot into a stand-alone feature film. Eschewing a completed screenplay, he instead parceled out bits days before filming. "David never really gave us a script, he just gave us scenes, these little 10-page packets," recalls Theroux. "And then we'd go home and he'd hand us another one at the end of the night, or hand us three at a time. But they sometimes seemed really linked and sometimes didn't. So the actual process [of filming] seemed probably very similar to what it's going to be like to watch it, which involves sort of having to link it together as you go."

Regardless, it's the experience itself that Theroux most cherishes. "Working with David is probably the best time you'll ever have in your life," he notes. "Contrary to what anyone might think, when you're making a David Lynch movie you don't feel like you're making a David Lynch movie; you feel like you're making a Farrelly brothers movie or something. He's just a really, really fun guy to be around, and everyone that he works around and hires is just a blast. So you just go and have a goof and get serious for the work, but the rest is just gravy. It was really fun."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: I Don't Believe in Beatles on August 01, 2006, 06:54:51 PM
According to IMDB, this is 168 minutes long!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Sunrise on August 01, 2006, 07:28:32 PM
Quote from: Ginger on August 01, 2006, 06:54:51 PMAccording to IMDB, this is 168 minutes long!

The more Lynch the better...

Quote from: polkablues on July 29, 2006, 02:18:30 PM"No good movie is too long, just as no bad movie is short enough."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: I Don't Believe in Beatles on August 13, 2006, 09:00:23 PM
New picture:

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi10.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fa110%2FStonerSunRising%2F64001.jpg&hash=543657675d57b599a645537ab9f4dad51110909d)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Astrostic on August 17, 2006, 02:17:00 PM
INLAND EMPIRE will be a part of the 2006 New York Film Festival according to http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4943

The Inland Empire
David Lynch, France / USA
A Polish woman looks, intently, into someone or something ... an actress (Laura Dern) is warned that her new movie is cursed ... a rabbit-headed family perform sit-com actions on a stage set as if engaged in a solemn ritual ... Such are just a few of the elements and recurrent motifs of The Inland Empire, a mesmerizing surge through countless looking glasses that lands us on the far side of the land of nightmares. Lynch's first foray into high-definition video is just as visually stunning as his work in 35mm, but the long gestation period of his new film (he shot on and off over two years, and wrote as he went) has allowed him to give his own uniquely epic form to many of his primary concerns: the exploitation of young women, the mutability of identity, the omnivorousness of Hollywood.


the festival runs from sept. 29 to oct. 15 and tickets go on sale to the general public on sept. 10.  anyone else going? I'm going to school in Boston so I'm definitely going to be making the trip for this.  Pan's Labyrinth is the Closing night film, which, like everyone else who's seen it, I really recommend.


Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on August 17, 2006, 02:25:05 PM
HOLY FUCK!!!  i NEED to get tickets to this!

as you'll recall (from the Most Anticipated Films of 2006 thread)...

Quote from: modage on January 01, 2006, 07:54:50 PM
1. Inland Empire
because lynch has attained kubrick-like God status for me.  (what a difference a few years makes!)  when i first came to xixax, lynch was the only one of the directors with forums who i was not already in love with.  but after seeing all his films (and especially his show Twin Peaks) i became a convert.  so even though i saw Mulholland Drive in the theatre a few years ago i had no idea how special that was until much later.  so now, i'm dying for whats next.  a new lynch movie will trump all others this year, and the fact it's so 'secretive' makes it even more desirable.  i hope it finds a release before 07.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on August 17, 2006, 03:14:38 PM
Quote from: Astrostic on August 17, 2006, 02:17:00 PM
I'm going to school in Boston so I'm definitely going to be making the trip for this.  Pan's Labyrinth is the Closing night film, which, like everyone else who's seen it, I really recommend.

I might just have to make the trip as well.  Fung Wah bus anyone? 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Astrostic on August 17, 2006, 03:20:16 PM
Quote from: JG on August 17, 2006, 03:14:38 PM
Fung Wah bus anyone? 

holla
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on August 17, 2006, 09:27:23 PM
Quote from: Astrostic on August 17, 2006, 02:17:00 PM
a rabbit-headed family perform sit-com actions on a stage set as if engaged in a solemn ritual
so he's recycling Rabbits? that would be cool to see it as part of something bigger..
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: sickfins on August 18, 2006, 05:39:20 PM
anyone know if this is playing at the toronto international film festival?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 18, 2006, 06:12:16 PM
Quote from: sickfins on August 18, 2006, 05:39:20 PM
anyone know if this is playing at the toronto international film festival?

I don't think it's scheduled to, but the complete list of films screened will be released on the 22nd.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on August 26, 2006, 08:14:24 PM
the film is 168 min and will screen Oct 8th and 9th at the NYFF.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on August 27, 2006, 10:25:08 PM
newer pic:



(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cinemovies.fr%2Fimages%2Fdata%2Fphotos%2FG10449408387568.jpg&hash=7801bc97406ce292c2de6120fb4a7b1ec250d9f5)


where is the poster...
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on August 28, 2006, 08:38:43 AM
according to Rolling Stone this will premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Sept 6th and will "open this fall"
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on August 28, 2006, 01:15:09 PM
open wide before the nyff? 

if not, i'm there. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Astrostic on August 28, 2006, 11:02:43 PM
i got 4 tix to the oct. 8 showing today.  I'm so pumped for this.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on August 31, 2006, 11:38:17 PM
wait, how? are you a lincoln center member?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Astrostic on September 01, 2006, 08:32:50 AM
yes i am, I joined specifically so I could order tickets early, and the subscription to Film Comment is a nice bonus.  but yeah, I faxed my order to them and within the day my order appeared on my online credit card bill, so I knew that I'd gotten all of the tickets that I ordered.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on September 05, 2006, 12:42:38 AM
Quote from: Ginger on August 01, 2006, 06:54:51 PM
According to IMDB, this is 168 minutes long!

Quote from: modage on August 26, 2006, 08:14:24 PM
the film is 168 min and will screen Oct 8th and 9th at the NYFF.

INLAND EMPIRE Adds 4 Minutes to Runtime

From the Venice Film Festival's site:
Sept. 6th at 6:30 p.m. SALA GRANDE
Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to David Lynch followed by:
INLAND EMPIRE by David Lynch (USA, 172') cast: Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Julia Ormond.

Quote from: Sunrise on August 01, 2006, 07:28:32 PM

The more Lynch the better...

Quote from: polkablues on July 29, 2006, 02:18:30 PM"No good movie is too long, just as no bad movie is short enough."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on September 06, 2006, 11:30:13 AM
Venice honors David Lynch

Understanding director David Lynch's films is never easy.

But with his new picture "Inland Empire" the master of mystery and the macabre is more impenetrable than ever, prompting a journalist to jokingly ask after his mental health.

In his latest collaboration with actress Laura Dern, Lynch, who receives a Golden Lion lifetime achievement award from the Venice Film Festival later on Wednesday, blurs the boundaries between one story and the next, and between dream and reality.

Nearly three hours long, the most obvious plotline centers around the making of a movie and how the lead actress fears the wrath of her husband when she has an affair with her co-star.

But where that story begins and others, including one set in Poland, begin, is impossible to tell.

Asked if the film was supposed to make sense, Lynch told a news conference following a press screening: "It's supposed to make perfect sense."

Lynch relies heavily on the score to create tension and atmosphere, and the movie features a series of claustrophobic scenes following characters down darkened corridors and fearfully entering darkened rooms.

Lynch was in no mood to help journalists fathom the film's meaning.

When asked to explain the appearance of three actors wearing rabbits' heads, one of whom stands in the corner doing the ironing, the 60-year-old replied: "No, I can't explain that."

Another reporter asking about a different aspect of "Inland Empire" was told:

"I really would like to be able to explain, but the film ends up being the explanation. That's what's so terrible about press conferences. It's all about the film, not about the words."

And in reply to a question about his wellbeing, he said: "Thank you for asking. I'm doing really well."

KING OF WEIRD

The director of cult classic like "Eraserhead," "The Elephant Man" and "Mulholland Drive" and a television series that spawned a generation of copycats -- "Twin Peaks" -- suggested audiences tend to try too hard to find exact meaning in his work.

"You should be not afraid of using your intuition and feel, think your way through," he said. "Have the experience and trust your inner knowing of what it is."

Lynch explained how he launched into his latest project without knowing exactly what he wanted to do next, and Dern, who has starred in previous Lynch movies "Blue Velvet" and "Wild at Heart" called the experience "unique."

"We worked over the course of about 2-1/2 years and each day was a different direction, each day was a different idea because we did not have a script we were following," she said.

Lynch added: "Little by little by little it started revealing itself."

He stressed the importance of sound in making a picture, and attacked the now common practice of dubbing over films after they have been shot on camera.

"Cinema to me is sound and picture rolling along together in time and it's so important, the sound, how it goes with the picture, how it marries.

"I think that this dubbing of pictures has got to end. It ruins the picture, completely and totally ruins the picture."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

INLAND EMPIRE Press Conference
Audio and photos from the INLAND EMPIRE Press Conference can be found here:

http://www.kafard.com/davidlynch/davidlynch_conferencevenice.html

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

INLAND EMPIRE Exclusive Photos from the Venice Film Festival Pressbook

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dugpa.com%2Fpics%2Fie1.jpg&hash=1ec9f657b3ea10c75431195dbb93b353bf288d9f)
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dugpa.com%2Fpics%2Fie2.jpg&hash=6de3c3b41bcae9d2fe6fd04d43e0e1b50ce6abf8)
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dugpa.com%2Fpics%2Fie5.jpg&hash=10ab83b54052c706b021a87e1d6dfc009c289df0)

http://blogvetriolo.blogspot.com/
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Astrostic on September 06, 2006, 12:04:56 PM
that last photo is so gorgeous, almost looks like an outtake from Mulholland Dr.  I'm glad to see that the move to video hasn't sacrificed anything in the quality of his image, at least based on these stills.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Fernando on September 06, 2006, 12:17:13 PM
For Neon's pleasure, a good pic from Venice.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi7.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fy251%2Ffbv%2F2459870.jpg&hash=f7d74c9c5e4d3d1b5c29a2126d6e095956be01e2)
One happy family.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on September 06, 2006, 08:45:57 PM
David Lynch puzzle premieres at Venice

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fd.yimg.com%2Fus.yimg.com%2Fp%2Fafp%2F20060906%2Fcapt.sge.kvf45.060906194747.photo00.photo.default-394x512.jpg&hash=87448a97a2eeae0417b5c45f666fb7a7ce80a5a5)

Enigmatic US director David Lynch presented his first movie in five years Wednesday at the Venice Film Festival, where the 60-year-old will become the youngest recipient of a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement later this week.

Five years after his 2001 movie, "Mulholland Drive", Lynch returns to taunting his audience with a diabolical three-hour puzzle entitled "INLAND EMPIRE".

Lynch's dark tale is a movie within a movie in which he takes us through the nightmarish labyrinth of the inner life of a Hollywood actress, played by Laura Dern, who co-produced the film.

"It's supposed to make perfect sense," Lynch said with a mischievous smile during a news conference in Venice to present his movie.

Shot in Los Angeles and Poland, the film switches back and forth between reality and fantasy, between the real-life actress and her character, and is stuffed with nightmarish images, jarring noise and dark predictions.

Lynch is aware the film's viewers will have to work, and doled out advice to fans when pressed by journalists on how to interpret this jigsaw puzzle without instructions.

"Every film is like going into a new world, going into the unknown. But you should be not afraid of using your intuition, and feel and think your way through," said the director.

"Cinema is such a beautiful language. Cinema is the thing that deals with things beyond words, and it's so beautiful. So to go with cinema is like going with music, your intellect travels along with it, it's so fantastic. Go in and have an experience in a different world."

Lynch, a breaker of cinematic rules, makes demands on the viewer with constant switchbacks and jarring imagery, and admits he often did not know where to go next in the shaping of the film, shot out of sequence.

"The cut to next can be so surprising and that's just the miracle of cinema -- how we go from one place to another and the possibilities of those places to go to are kinda infinite. How we can see ourselves and find ourselves in there is kinda what gets me going."

Justin Theroux, who plays the lover of the Dern character in the movie, said he always thought of a David Lynch movie "as buying a new jazz record. The best way is to let the film wash over you. Sit back and go on that ride."

Dern, who previously worked with Lynch in "Wild at Heart", puts in a powerful performance. "My experience on this film was very moving to say the least.

Working on and off over two and a half years, the actors had to work without an overall script. "Each day a different direction, each day a new idea," said Dern.

"All of us, like you, were experiencing David's vision for the first time because there wasn't a laid-out linear script or plan from the outset. The film rolled over us and our experience of it was very like yours."

Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux and Harry Dean Stanton also star in the movie, which features the voice of Naomi Watts.

Dern herself will see the movie for the first time at the world premiere Wednesday night.

"The truth is I didn't know who I was playing and I still don't know who I play, and I look forward to seeing the film tonight to know more."

Lynch, who will receive his Golden Lion on Saturday, writes and performs one of the songs on the soundtrack.

"I'm really honoured to get this award. It's strange. Just yesterday, I was 19 and now I'm getting this award today," he told a packed news conference.

The director, who shot to international fame 15 years ago with the hit TV series "Twin Peaks", said he still could not understand the series' worldwide appeal.

"I don't understand. There was no real logical reason why it was a success all around the world. It just turned out to be that way. I have zero desire to go back into TV."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Sunrise on September 07, 2006, 08:13:47 AM
Quote from: MacGuffin on September 06, 2006, 08:45:57 PM...

"Every film is like going into a new world, going into the unknown. But you should be not afraid of using your intuition, and feel and think your way through," said the director.
...

"The cut to next can be so surprising and that's just the miracle of cinema -- how we go from one place to another and the possibilities of those places to go to are kinda infinite. How we can see ourselves and find ourselves in there is kinda what gets me going."

I could listen to him talk about film all day. His enthusiasm is infectious. Jealously cannot describe how I feel about those of you lucky enough to be seeing this well before the rest of us.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 01:07:25 PM
The reviews that have been trickling in have been pretty negative. And while I don't ever trust initial reviews from festivals, they are something of a barometer of what to expect. Thus, I predict that:

Modage will hate this.
Neon will like/love it.
Pubrick will be perplexed, but will come to realize he loves it.
I will dismiss it, even as I admire parts of it.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: RegularKarate on September 07, 2006, 01:21:20 PM
Quote from: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 01:07:25 PM
The reviews that have been trickling in have been pretty negative. And while I don't ever trust initial reviews from festivals, they are something of a barometer of what to expect. Thus, I predict that:

Modage will hate this.
Neon will like/love it.
Pubrick will be perplexed, but will come to realize he loves it.
I will dismiss it, even as I admire parts of it.


Hey Nostradamus, how about some links?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: grand theft sparrow on September 07, 2006, 01:50:42 PM
I had a feeling that was going to be the case.  3 hours long, long shoot, no script, it just seems like it was designed to be his critical failure since Dune.

I still want to see the shit out of it though.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 02:17:34 PM
Quote from: RegularKarate on September 07, 2006, 01:21:20 PM
Hey Nostradamus, how about some links?

Sorry - there I was counting on MacGuffin to do the work for me!

Variety: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117931480?categoryId=31&cs=1

Screen Daily: http://www.screendaily.com/story.asp?storyid=27546&r=true

The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1866291,00.html
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: grand theft sparrow on September 07, 2006, 02:30:37 PM
Quote from: VarietyRunning time: 179 MIN.

Quote from: ScreenDaily.com189mins.



:shock:

The running time changes again.  I know it's just inaccurate timing but I want to believe he's cut different versions of the movie and is screening them in different places.  Or better yet, that it just runs longer for some people than others, even if they're at the same screening.

And what is the likelihood of there still being tickets for the NYFF screening?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: RegularKarate on September 07, 2006, 02:59:40 PM
Quote from: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 02:17:34 PM
Quote from: RegularKarate on September 07, 2006, 01:21:20 PM
Hey Nostradamus, how about some links?

Sorry - there I was counting on MacGuffin to do the work for me!

Variety: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117931480?categoryId=31&cs=1

Screen Daily: http://www.screendaily.com/story.asp?storyid=27546&r=true

The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1866291,00.html

Disapointing, but I think I can still go in fresh with this one.  I can't trust anyone anymore anyway.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on September 07, 2006, 03:33:54 PM
Quote from: hackspaced on September 07, 2006, 01:50:42 PM
I had a feeling that was going to be the case.  3 hours long, long shoot, no script, it just seems like it was designed to be his critical failure since Dune.
I still want to see the shit out of it though.
thats my feeling as well. 
Quote from: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 01:07:25 PM
Modage will hate this.
i'm going to go in with my mind at its most open.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: godardian on September 07, 2006, 04:49:28 PM
Variety says it looks awful, but the photos I see in this thread are rather beautiful. I think that, for better or worse, it will have to be seen to be believed.

I think I'm going in the right direction by preferring The Guardian's opinion to Variety's, though.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: hedwig on September 07, 2006, 07:00:51 PM
Quote from: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 01:07:25 PM
The reviews that have been trickling in have been pretty negative. And while I don't ever trust initial reviews from festivals, they are something of a barometer of what to expect. Thus, I predict that:

Modage will hate this.
Neon will like/love it.
Pubrick will be perplexed, but will come to realize he loves it.
I will dismiss it, even as I admire parts of it.
you forgot one..

Hedwig will consider it lynch's best movie. i'm basing this prediction partly on the reviews (including the negative ones), interviews, "story" descriptions, the lack of script. i predict it will be the high point of the astonishing evolution we've witnessed lynch undergo as a filmmaker throughout his career. i also predict modage will really like it, and you will love it.

then again it's possible that
Quote from: Ghostboy in the King Kong thread on January 05, 2004, 12:07:59 PM
I just have too much blind faith/optimism for my own good
but i doubt it. predicting is fun.  :(
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on September 07, 2006, 07:05:10 PM
these reviews mean nothing.  i need to get tickets to the film forum the eigth though.  absolutely. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 07:55:40 PM
I think my opinion is based entirely on that awful Avid thing - which, even if it's not a part of the film, became entrenched in my head as what a Lynch film shot on DV might be like. I really really hope I'll love it, but I'm worried that the grand peak of his evolutionary streak was Mulholland Drive, and that this will be nothing more than beating around the same bush ad nauseum.

But still, I'm full of hope, and full of envy for those of you who are seeing it in NY.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on September 07, 2006, 09:32:40 PM
Quote from: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 01:07:25 PM
Pubrick will be perplexed, but will come to realize he loves it.
haha i don't know how you did it but i've just thought about it and you might be right. i'm not gonna read the reviews even tho it probably doesn't matter due to the nature of Lynch.

i didn't like the avid dvd either, the movie looked embarrassing, but i expect what lynch has been saying is quite telling: to forget what you think you know about video narrative and follow yourself into the film as if it's a completely open (GAPING if you will).. uh, ocean of dreams? i'm trying to use his terminology here. i think mully d stayed close to the shoreline compared to what this will be. in the same way that kubrick was a journey of day through night, i feel lynch becoming a story of land through ocean.

one more prediction: hedwig will overdramatize his review with too many adjectives in an effort to rebalance the thread pre-emptively, while everyone else will mostly not bother with any substantial review beyond "eh i liked it, i felt cold cos i was under an air conditioning unit, my hand felt warm cos i was sitting on it, i hav a slight cough and my throat itches. then i ate a burrito, i don't know why."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pwaybloe on September 08, 2006, 03:15:14 PM
Quote from: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 07:55:40 PM
I think my opinion is based entirely on that awful Avid thing...

Quote from: Pubrick on September 07, 2006, 09:32:40 PM
i didn't like the avid dvd either...

Hmmm.  Was this a short you saw on davidlynch.com, his shorts dvd, or something altogther different?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: hedwig on September 08, 2006, 03:23:35 PM
Quote from: Pwaybloe on September 08, 2006, 03:15:14 PM
Quote from: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 07:55:40 PM
I think my opinion is based entirely on that awful Avid thing...

Quote from: Pubrick on September 07, 2006, 09:32:40 PM
i didn't like the avid dvd either...

Hmmm.  Was this a short you saw on davidlynch.com, his shorts dvd, or something altogther different?

http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=8659.0
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pwaybloe on September 08, 2006, 03:27:35 PM
Well, great.  I swear I did a search for this beforehand. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on September 10, 2006, 12:58:53 PM
fuck. all sold out. looks like plan b is in order.

see you all there with my snakeskin jacket and a handmade sign that stinks of desperation.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: grand theft sparrow on September 10, 2006, 02:38:19 PM
I'll be right next to you.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on September 10, 2006, 02:49:34 PM
Quote from: hackspaced on September 10, 2006, 02:38:19 PM
I'll be right next to you.

Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on September 10, 2006, 07:38:18 PM
Quote from: bonanzataz on September 10, 2006, 12:58:53 PM
fuck. all sold out. looks like plan b is in order.

see you all there with my snakeskin jacket and a handmade sign that stinks of desperation.

haha, fuck plan b, i pulled some strings and got a press pass instead! get to go backstage and everything!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: meatwad on September 10, 2006, 10:36:23 PM
can i borrow your snakeskin jacket? i need to steal your plan b

unless someone here knows a way i can get a ticket, without paying a shit load of money
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on September 13, 2006, 01:41:38 AM
Negative reviews of a Lynch movie are about as relevant as A.O. Scott reviewing paintings. Most critics have no clue how to approach a Lynch film, let alone understand (I use that word loosely) or appreciate one. Lost Highway is a pretty good litmus test (note the 47% Rotten Tomatoes score), and it looks like this will get a similar reaction. A healthy majority of the thumbs-down critics will respond with infantile "it doesn't make sense" arguments, and we will ignore them.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Gold Trumpet on September 13, 2006, 02:28:20 AM
I just have one request for this film: Someone give me an argument!

I have no clue how I will respond to Inland Empire, but I don't think the film will just flow over me. I think there will be arguments and points to be made. See, I'm asking for an argument because I fear this film will drift into oblivious appreciation. Everyone will love it but no one will say why and only a few people will give anyone the time of day who has any inkling of disagreeance. I'm still not over the flagarant look over I got from a specific person in the discussion for Elephant. I sincerely argued that film and someone who use to actually discuss films announced the film should be only applauded because no one could muster an argument against it. Well, my words because I can only paraphase what I remember. Either way, I'd hate to see this film fall through the cracks of discussion. I'd also hate to see people only anticipate my disagreeance. I loved The Straight Story and highly appreciated Muholland Drive. I do still expect good work from Lynch. I still have a lot of admiration for him.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on September 13, 2006, 06:06:01 AM
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on September 13, 2006, 02:28:20 AMI'd also hate to see people only anticipate my disagreeance.
it's disagreement, and isn't that what you're actively requesting?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on September 14, 2006, 09:28:08 PM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fphotos1.blogger.com%2Fblogger%2F4361%2F3628%2F1600%2FIE005.jpg&hash=47b7365a2cb18ce5dfd0c50b0745eddc0cb599e3)

i love this pic...the smoke motif survives for another film


Quote from: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 01:07:25 PM
The reviews that have been trickling in have been pretty negative. And while I don't ever trust initial reviews from festivals, they are something of a barometer of what to expect. Thus, I predict that:

Modage will hate this.
Neon will like/love it.
Pubrick will be perplexed, but will come to realize he loves it.
I will dismiss it, even as I admire parts of it.

hmm, yeah..i know i will love...i've been pretty quiet lately on this film...partly b/c i am running out of adjectives and i feel that the way i write is pretty awful...i am not half as grammatically educated as most here..so, sorry for the shitty verbal stuff...i been reading most if not all reviews..i dont mind reading them b/c they really dont spoil a lynch film....and plus i found out that will macy, zambriski, watts are in this thing...well, watts voice...plus, david takes a top 40s type song and  scores it in a scene with his unique vision...word is its creeppy....i actaully like the negative reviews..for a lynch film that great! ...as blackman mentioned lost highway was panned..and on some days its better than mulholland dr....i was never worried about the dv stuff....i know he can make it work...and maybe start a revolution...i was never sold on laura dern as a great actress but lynch keeps saying shes the shit...but i think hes just being nice..b/c she sucks imo....but reviews have said that shes killer...i'm game to see.....and theroux...it guess it goes like this:

scorcese:dicaprio:lynch:theroux

fine by me....i've had my hetero eye on him since am. psycho....i'm also jazzed that people are saying this is his most "confusing"[which to me equals "exciting"]film...hopefully the fat guy is right and i can see this in november.......and i do have a new fun fact that i found while watching mulholland..in the brief scene with the two guys and that sort of hot chick from showgirls w/the hard nipples..., the scene where the thug guy lights the cigarette and eats hot dog..if you look in the background you will notice a dude carrying a red oversized pole...just like in wild at heart..neat.........

but i talk more later..
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on September 27, 2006, 02:21:32 PM
INLAND EMPIRE gets a US Distributor
According to an article at Coming Soon.net, INLAND EMPIRE will be distributed in the US by Magnolia Pictures and will be released theatrically sometime next year.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Sunrise on September 27, 2006, 02:30:20 PM
If true, that is just awful news.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on September 30, 2006, 11:40:25 AM
Lynch's Inland Empire

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Village Voice film editor Dennis Lim talks to David Lynch about Inland Empire, which will show October 8 and 9 at the NYFF. It sounds like this DV experiment will make Lost Highway look positively mainstream:

Not one for understatement or half measures, Mr. Lynch takes a giant leap into the post-celluloid future with the three-hour "Inland Empire," his first feature since "Mulholland Drive" in 2001, his 10th overall and the first to be shot on the humble medium of digital video. The movie had its premiere last month at the Venice Film Festival, where Mr. Lynch, who turned 60 in January, was awarded a Golden Lion for career achievement. It will have its first North American showings at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 8 and 9...

A thoroughly instinctual filmmaker, Mr. Lynch could never be accused of overthinking things. Or of overtalking them. In discussions of his work he reverts to affable stonewalling tactics, deflecting detailed or analytical probes with a knowing vagueness.

The vertiginous "Inland Empire" is sure to provoke questions about meaning, literal and metaphoric. Still without a United States distributor, this may be his most avant-garde offering since "Eraserhead." In tone and structure the film resembles the cosmic free fall of the mind-warping final act in "Mulholland Drive."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on September 30, 2006, 11:14:40 PM
lynch is obviously taking advantage of the fact that dv is cheap and so the film must've cost heaps less than a normal feature. at that running time, i think he's going further than anyone else has in a major arena to push the limits of what technological freedom can allow an artist to explore. sure ppl hav made avant garde work before, and von trier gets mad credit for his work on video, but nothing major has been as form-shattering as what lynch has apparently done here.

and i don't think it's a bad thing that i can almost certainly know what to expect of this film. knowing that your mind will be blown is entirely different to the reality of your mind actually being blown.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on October 02, 2006, 01:36:47 AM
Entire article from above:

David Lynch Returns: Expect Moody Conditions, With Surreal Gusts
Source: NY Times

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TO hear him tell it, David Lynch has spent the last five years killing the thing he loves, for fear that it will kill him first.

"The sky's the limit with digital," he said in a recent conversation, his voice approaching foghorn pitch. "Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit. People might be sick to hear that because they love film, just like they loved magnetic tape. And I love film. I love it!"

He contorted his face into an expression that suggested pain more than love. "It's so beautiful," he said. But "I would die if I had to work like that again."

Not one for understatement or half measures, Mr. Lynch takes a giant leap into the post-celluloid future with the three-hour "Inland Empire," his first feature since "Mulholland Drive" in 2001, his 10th overall and the first to be shot on the humble medium of digital video. The movie had its premiere last month at the Venice Film Festival, where Mr. Lynch, who turned 60 in January, was awarded a Golden Lion for career achievement. It will have its first North American showings at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 8 and 9.

On this clear Los Angeles morning, his first at home after three weeks in Europe, Mr. Lynch was knocking back a huge cappuccino in his favorite corner of his painting studio, a scatter of stale cigarette butts on the cement floor around his Aeron chair.

"It's actually cleaner that I thought it would be," he said, looking around. The sunlit atelier is perched atop one of the three sleek concrete structures that make up his compound in the Hollywood Hills. He lives in one building; another is the office of his production company, Asymmetrical. This one, the hub of creative activity, served first as a location for his 1997 film "Lost Highway" and was later converted into a production facility with a recording and editing studio and a screening room. (Mr. Lynch's chair, off limits to anyone else, can be identified by the sizable ashtray on the armrest.)

The moods and objects throughout inevitably bring to mind that most resonant of eponymous adjectives: Lynchian. Corridors and stairwells are minimally lighted. One room has the signature red curtains. Propped against one wall is an Abstract Expressionist canvas by Mr. Lynch, a brown expanse with a violent splotch of blue and the inscription "Bob loves Sally until she is blue in the face." A photograph of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Transcendental Meditation guru, sits on a conference table, sunlight illuminating a single cobweb that hangs from its gold frame.

Lately Mr. Lynch has emerged as a keen proponent of Transcendental Meditation, which he said he has practiced twice a day since 1973 without missing a session. Last year he established the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace with the goal of raising $7 billion to create "universities of peace." He also went on a campus tour, promoting the benefits of "diving within" with the help of a meditating assistant hooked up to an electroencephalograph.

His other consuming passion of recent years has been the Internet. Mr. Lynch grasped the potential of streaming media earlier and took to it with greater enthusiasm than filmmakers half his age. His sprawling Web site, davidlynch.com, begun in 2001, carries merchandise (mugs, photos, alarming ring tones) and subscriber-only content (original music, experimental vignettes, the animated series "Dumbland"). On the home page he delivers the daily weather report for Los Angeles direct to Webcam.

As it turns out, some of Mr. Lynch's online experiments found their way into "Inland Empire," which, despite his claims for the speed of direct video, took three years to make. It was shot in fits and starts and, for the longest time, on his own dime and without a unifying vision. At the outset, "I never saw any whole, W-H-O-L-E," he said. "I saw plenty of holes, H-O-L-E-S. But I didn't really worry. I would get an idea for a scene and shoot it, get another idea and shoot that. I didn't know how they would relate."

Only after the project was well under way did he contact the French studio Canal Plus, which financed the transformation of "Mulholland Drive" from a rejected television pilot into a feature film. Canal Plus signed on to "Inland Empire" even though, Mr. Lynch said, "I told them two things: 'I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm shooting on D.V.' "

Eventually the grand design revealed itself. In interviews Mr. Lynch has repeatedly advanced a poetic, democratic notion of ideas as independent of the artist, waiting to be plucked from the ether, or, in his preferred analogy, reeled in: he's working on a book about the creative process titled "Catching the Big Fish." With "Mulholland Drive," he said the eureka moment came while he was meditating. With "Eraserhead," his indelible debut in 1977, inspiration came while reading the Bible. (He declined to specify the passage.) There was no equivalent lightning bolt on "Inland Empire," but in due course "something started to talk to me," he said. "It was as if it was talking to me all along but I didn't know it."

A thoroughly instinctual filmmaker, Mr. Lynch could never be accused of overthinking things. Or of overtalking them. In discussions of his work he reverts to affable stonewalling tactics, deflecting detailed or analytical probes with a knowing vagueness.

The vertiginous "Inland Empire" is sure to provoke questions about meaning, literal and metaphoric. Still without a United States distributor, this may be his most avant-garde offering since "Eraserhead." In tone and structure the film resembles the cosmic free fall of the mind-warping final act in "Mulholland Drive."

"Inland Empire" refers on one level to the landlocked region east of Los Angeles but also evokes the vast, murky kingdom of the unconscious. Like "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive," the new movie is hard-wired into its protagonist's disintegrating psyche, a condition that somehow prompts convulsive dislocations in time and space.

Laura Dern, who worked with Mr. Lynch on "Blue Velvet" and "Wild at Heart," plays an actress who lands a coveted role, only to learn that the movie, a remake, may be cursed: the original was aborted when both leads were murdered. Actor becomes character. Fiction infects reality. The various narrative strands — plagued by déjà vu, doppelgängers and the menacing ambient drone of Mr. Lynch's sound design — start to unravel. Shuttling between California and Poland, the movie folds in a Baltic radio play, a Greek chorus of skimpily dressed young women and a ghostly sitcom featuring a rabbit-headed cast and an arbitrary laugh track.

Asked to elaborate on some of the film's themes, Mr. Lynch was illuminating, if not always in expected ways. On his apparent conception of the self as fragmentary, he said: "The big self is mondo stable. But the small self — we're blowing about like dry leaves in the wind." Regarding the essential elusiveness of time, he declared, "It's going backward and forward, and it's slippery."

He brought up wormholes, invoked the theories of the quantum physicist (and fellow meditator) John Hagelin and recounted a moment of déjà vu that overcame him while making "The Elephant Man." "There was a feeling of a past thing and it's holding, and the next instant I slipped forward" — he made a sound somewhere between a slurp and a whoosh — "and I see this future."

A nightmare vision of the dream factory, "Inland Empire" belongs to the lineage of Hollywood bloody valentines that runs from "Sunset Boulevard" to "Mulholland Drive." In one scene a character, stabbed in the gut with a screwdriver, runs down Hollywood Boulevard, leaving a gory trail on the Walk of Fame. Like "Mulholland Drive," the film is at once a tribute to actors, especially those chewed up and spit out by the industry, and a study of the metaphysics of their craft.

Acting, Mr. Lynch suggests, is a kind of out-of-body experience. Like Naomi Watts in "Mulholland," Ms. Dern summons an almost frightening intensity in a performance that requires her to inhabit three (if not more) overlapping parts, lapsing in and out of a Southern drawl.

"I thought of it as playing a broken or dismantled person, with these other people leaking out of her brain," Ms. Dern said in a telephone interview. She said she held as a mental touchstone Catherine Deneuve's portrait of psychosis in Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" and noted that the stop-start shoot had its advantages: "It's unbelievably freeing. You're not sure where you're going or even where you've come from. You can only be in the moment."

One of the pluses of video was that the moment could be extended. Despite the overall lack of continuity, the lightweight camera and longer takes allowed for more freedom in individual scenes. "When you don't have to stop and spend two hours relighting, you're just able to boogie together," Mr. Lynch said.

The genesis of "Inland Empire" was a 14-page monologue he wrote for Ms. Dern. They shot it once, in a 70-minute take, on a set built in his painting studio. The scene is carved up and strewn throughout the film but remains its dark heart.

Watching "Inland Empire," which makes little attempt to temper the harshness of video, it's hard not to miss the tactile richness of Mr. Lynch's celluloid images. Instead of a state-of-the-art high-definition camera, he used the Sony PD-150, a common midrange model.

"Everybody says, 'But the quality, David, it's not so good,' and that's true," Mr. Lynch said. "But it's a different quality. It reminds me of early 35-millimeter film. You see different things. It talks to you differently."

Mary Sweeney, Mr. Lynch's longtime producer (and ex-wife), called the new film a return to the obsessive experimentation of "Eraserhead," which he also shot piecemeal over several years. "David got very excited about the ways the new technology could liberate him," she said. "I think it took him back to a pure and fearless way of working."

Mr. Lynch also stressed the importance of fearlessness. "Fear is like a tourniquet on the big tube of creative flow," he said. And thanks to meditation, "negative things decrease," he added. "You get more ideas. You catch them at a deeper level."

The dissonance between this upbeat philosophy and the abysmal terror of his films is not lost on him. "You can understand depression much more when you're not depressed," he said. "You go to this ocean of knowingness. That's what you use."

His body of work may be, short of Hitchcock's, the most psychoanalyzed in film history, but Mr. Lynch once forswore psychotherapy, fearing it might inhibit his creativity. Most things, as he sees it, are best left uninterrogated.

"As soon as you put things in words, no one ever sees the film the same way," he said at one point, when the line of questioning turned too specific. "And that's what I hate, you know. Talking — it's real dangerous."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on October 06, 2006, 12:38:32 AM
INLAND EMPIRE Photos Online
Here's another website that has posted some INLAND EMPIRE press photos including ones that haven't been seen previously.

http://outnow.ch/Media/Img/2006/InlandEmpire/

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David Lynch's obsessive, surreal "Inland Empire" is the New York Film Festival's hottest ticket.
Source: Salon

How do we explain the unlikely cultural status of David Lynch? There is no hotter ticket at this year's New York Film Festival than the North American premiere of Lynch's new picture, "Inland Empire." I know two movie buffs in their early 20s who are planning to hang around outside Alice Tully Hall on Sunday night and buy tickets from scalpers (if they can find them), and they certainly won't be alone.

What will they see if they get in? An obsessive and surreal three-hour picture, almost totally lacking in conventional plot, shot on high-definition video by a 60-year-old director. You could say, I suppose, that "Inland Empire" is about an actress (played by Lynch favorite Laura Dern) in a Hollywood film that's been cursed by Gypsies. But that's like saying "Ulysses" is a story about a guy who sells newspaper ads, or, more to the point, that the dream you had where you flew over the Atlantic Ocean with your second-grade teacher and Marilyn Manson was about air travel.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on October 06, 2006, 03:47:47 PM
At the New York Film Festival, a Global Glimpse of the State of the Cinema
By MANOHLA DARGIS; NY Times

In its second week the New York Film Festival settles down to serious cinematic business. For the most part, the 13 selections in this part of the program are worthy of the festival's past offerings and justify the program director Richard Peña's claim that the event represents a kind of "state of the cinema."

Among the must-sees from now until Thursday is David Lynch's sadistic, fitfully brilliant "Inland Empire," a plunge down the rabbit hole of the director's imagination and a spellbinding companion piece to his masterpiece, "Mulholland Drive." Nearly as surreal a venture is the Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter's "Our Daily Bread," a documentary, by turns affecting and wrenching, about contemporary food production. Other highlights include Bong Joon-Ho's monster movie "The Host" and Johnnie To's gangster film "Triad Election," two genre pictures that boast some of the best filmmaking in the festival. Like Pedro Almodóvar's "Volver" and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's "Climates," also playing this week, these are films that feed and sometimes blow your mind.

Mr. Lynch's latest cinematic head trip is certainly the biggest mindblower. Shot in digital video, though it is being presented on 35-millimeter film, "Inland Empire" is his most experimental feature since "Eraserhead." With this new work Mr. Lynch is simultaneously looking back at the past (both his and that of Luis Buñuel, whose influence looms large here) and to the future. Like Michael Mann, whose recent work explores the new aesthetic possibilities opened up by advanced digital technologies, notably by doing away with the image's vanishing point, Mr. Lynch isn't trying to imitate the look of celluloid. Rather, he is exploiting the specific visual textures of digital video, creating images as grubby as those from a building surveillance camera and as cruelly hyper-real as a Chuck Close portrait.

The story spins a familiar Lynchian fairy tale: a blond actress (Laura Dern, in a career-defining performance) lands a coveted film role and spirals down into a hallucination in which dreams become nightmares, and her leading man (Justin Theroux) wears a doo-wop swoop like Mr. Lynch, like Nicolas Cage in "Wild at Heart," like Balthazar Getty in "Lost Highway." There are whores, of course, with laughing and lurid mouths, and shadowy corridors that, in suggestively female anatomical fashion, lead to dark rooms. Mostly, though, there is Mr. Lynch, whose shards of dream logic sometimes achieve the convulsive beauty that André Breton wanted for Surrealism and, at other times, feel like the disgorged bile of an artist who has taken the brakes off his sadism.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: godardian on October 06, 2006, 04:19:08 PM
Quote from: MacGuffin on October 06, 2006, 03:47:47 PM
Mr. Lynch isn't trying to imitate the look of celluloid. Rather, he is exploiting the specific visual textures of digital video,

I'm sure that it will be at least "fitfully" brilliant, but of course Mr. Lynch is not the first to take this approach:

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Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on October 08, 2006, 11:33:04 PM
Inland Empire was
the craziest movie
i have ever seen
in my entire life.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: hedwig on October 08, 2006, 11:37:59 PM
sweet. that's not a bad thing so i guess my prediction was closer..

Quote from: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 01:07:25 PM
Modage will hate this
Quote from: Hedwig on September 07, 2006, 07:00:51 PM
modage will really like it

to everyone who saw it, stop hyperventilating and give us your spoiler-labelled reviews!  :shock:
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on October 08, 2006, 11:44:09 PM
I HATE EVERYONE WHO SAW THIS. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on October 08, 2006, 11:50:48 PM
Quote from: JG on October 08, 2006, 11:44:09 PM
I HATE EVERYONE WHO SAW THIS. 
does that include Mr. Lynch, Laura Dern & Justin Theroux who were all in attendance?  :yabbse-grin:
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on October 09, 2006, 01:07:15 AM
Lynch has plenty of criticism for film biz as 'Empire' screening looms
Source: Hollywood Reporter

NEW YORK -- David Lynch criticized standard methods for distributing film -- and even film itself -- as he prepared to screen his newest work, an epic fever dream "Inland Empire," at the New York Film Festival, where it will have its North American premiere Sunday night.

"The world is changing and the old ways are going quickly," Lynch said in an interview Friday after the film's press screening. "People are thinking of new ways to begin a film, new ways of shooting, new ways of post production, and you've got to come up with new ways of distribution." While Lynch acknowledged "there are a lot of rumors flying about" concerning "Empire's" theatrical release, with several indie distributors said to be closing in with offers, he said he hopes to announce his release plans for "Empire" early next week.

Not that Lynch appeared very concerned about the film's commercial prospects. "I would like it to be a summer blockbuster, but I'm realistic," he said, adding facetiously that his target audience is "14-year-old girls in the Midwest." No one would mistake that for a serious statement after viewing the three-hour film, which had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival and which has sharply divided critics because of its often inscrutable scenes.

"Empire" begins with two interwoven stories of an actress, played by Laura Dern, who is making an onscreen comeback in a Southern melodrama she's filming called "High in Blue Tomorrows." But the film soon branches off to follow a third abused and abusive character also played by Dern. "I figure I have at least three roles, maybe a few more," she laughed in an interview.
 
Each plotline deals with issues of betrayal in relationships, but the film soon veers off those tracks as it showcases musical dance sequences and dramatic episodes with actors speaking Polish. Perhaps only Lynch devotees will fully appreciate a monologue that describes a woman with both a hole in her vagina and a pet monkey that "shits everywhere."

The director created each scene individually before lacing them together thematically, but despite the film's winding road, he pooh-poohed talk that his film is too long. "A time restraint is so arbitrary and kind of meaningless," he said. "This is the length that feels correct."

Sitcom-style segments featuring a family wearing rabbit heads with an oddly timed laugh track are laced throughout the film. They're adapted from "Rabbits," a series of nine shorts that Lynch showed on his website in 2002. Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring and Scott Coffey, who starred in Lynch's last film, 2001's "Mulholland Dr.," filmed the original shorts on a sitcom-looking set and later re-enacted their scenes on the same set for "Empire."

"Empire" was shot digitally after the director became infatuated with a Sony PD150 camera he used to create the shorts, and he has since sworn off celluloid. "For me, film is completely dead," he said. "[It] gets dirty and breaks breaks and scratches, and the equipment is so heavy. It's like swimming through cold molasses. Digital is getting better every day."

Dern started on the project by shooting a 14-page, single-spaced monologue that belongs to the character of the violent woman. She was surprised that Lynch gave her a co-producer credit, which she discovered only when she saw the completed film. "I think it came from sticking with him for three years, being part of the creative process and and giving up other projects to go on this experimental adventure," she said. "There were some scenes where it was just David, me and the camera, which made it a very financially easy way to do it."

What the film lacks in budget -- Lynch will only say it cost "under $100 million" -- it made up for in time, taking nine months to complete in the editing room. It left the director feeling a bit drained. "There's always a vacuum when you finish a film, but I have a couple of ideas," for new projects, he says. "I'd like to do some painting first."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: samsong on October 09, 2006, 01:58:34 AM
possibly the most terrifying, beautiful, visceral moviegoing experience of my life.  there's no anticipating what it's like spending three hours in lynch's completely liberated vision.  to make a lazy/easy comparison, this is lynch's Fanny & Alexander... as far as scope and sheer size is concerned.   laura dern bears so much in what will (or should) be considered one of the greatest performances of all time. 

he introduced the film so well, too.  "[i don't remember the quote he read but it was about spiders as a metaphor for humanity]. ladies and gentlemen, Inland Empire."  that's it!  what a night. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Gold Trumpet on October 09, 2006, 02:13:35 AM
Quote from: samsong on October 09, 2006, 01:58:34 AM
laura dern bears so much in what will (or should) be considered one of the greatest performances of all time. 

Ah, even if its boring there could be some good nudity.

Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Astrostic on October 09, 2006, 08:20:35 AM
It was so intense.  It felt like it lasted about 5 hours, and I was dreading the end throughout the entire second half.  The Q/A at the end made me want to marry David, especially with his Ball of Flames comment.  Poor Laura Dern let her own little interpretation of the film slip and then turned to David and asked "is that right?" in a very please-don't-hate-me-for-saying-that sort of way.  Very cute.  Basically the film is the last 40 minutes of Mulholland dr. squared.  I kind of hated the digital for the first half of the film before falling completely in love with it.  Great lesbian moments, but nothing as important or drawn out as in Mulholland Drive.  "Yeah, Those are great tits."  Lynch has a way of making you feel deeply sad for his characters whether you have gotten to know them or not.  There's some hot 50's music, and the best Julee Cruise song in a Lynch film yet.  So sad to have to wait so long to see it again, so sad...
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on October 09, 2006, 09:41:57 AM
this was absolutely everything i expected and more. there are no words to describe the depths of my soul which this film touched. but i will try anyway. from the very beginning to the final shot (if you can even speak of this film in such a linear sense) i felt unravel at first the intellect, then the emotion, then the goddamn spirit of a human on film. at some point i realised that while some directors flourished in "film", the amount of patience and perserverance of vision required to make a statement in that medium is wasted when the same can be applied to a more immediate and fresh form. lynch has captured the results.

i don't know if it will give rise to a slew of copies, how can this be copied? poorly i suspect. but i fear there will be some who outright reject it, with every conservative will of their fearful hearts, they will resist the CHANGE this piece of work requires in you. nay, DEMANDS it, forces it. one second of consideration to its true intent, which is at once simple and evident in every impossible transition, will confront you with a new representation of ideas that you have not seen before. and it is a confrontation. what does it mean to encounter such fearlessness?

i am reminded of the line from Jacob's Ladder sampled in UNKLE's Rabbit In Your Headlights "if you're frightened of dying, and you're holding on, you see devils tearing your life away. But, if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the Earth..." this film is an angel, and i let it take me away. i can think of no other terms for it without attempting to produce a work of equal beauty.

i have not seen this movie.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on October 09, 2006, 11:45:33 AM
Quote from: Pubrick on October 09, 2006, 09:41:57 AM
i have not seen this movie.

clearly. i don't know what fuckin' movie these guys all saw.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: GSinNYC on October 09, 2006, 03:25:14 PM
Saw it today.  Lynch, Dern and Theroux in attendance...also Isabella Rosellini and Philip Seymour Hoffman in audience.

So much to think about, mull over, digest...but my first thought, before I come down:  Take one copy of Eraserhead, one of Mulholland Dr., throw into a blender and mix.  Pour and drip a la Jackson Pollock all over a blank canvas...and there's INLAND EMPIRE.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on October 09, 2006, 03:42:15 PM
yeah i saw Noah Baumbach there last night as well.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: RegularKarate on October 09, 2006, 03:51:12 PM
Quote from: GSinNYC on October 09, 2006, 03:25:14 PM
Take one copy of Eraserhead, one of Mulholland Dr., throw into a blender and mix.  Pour and drip a la Jackson Pollock all over a blank canvas...and there's INLAND EMPIRE.

reminds me of my review of Science of Sleep:

"Cut a DVD of Eternal Sunshine in half and glue it to half a copy of Gondry's director's label then put that in your iMac and rip it to an external drive and take that to Circuit city and let it play with Human Nature (if you can find it) then feed it three corn dogs and take it on a roller coaster and when it gets sick, collect the vomit and bury it under a magic oak tree.  Five years later, a small child will appear before you... that child is Science of Sleep"
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on October 09, 2006, 04:26:24 PM
So was the free DVD scene in the movie or not?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Astrostic on October 09, 2006, 04:50:45 PM
Not

but all three actors from that scene are in the film, and playing the exact same characters as from the DVD clip.  Basically, you could splice that scene just about anywhere into the final 2 hours of the film and it would fit perfectly.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: matt35mm on October 09, 2006, 04:54:34 PM
Quote from: Astrostic on October 09, 2006, 04:50:45 PM
Basically, you could splice that scene just about anywhere into the final 2 hours of the film and it would fit perfectly.

Oh no.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on October 09, 2006, 11:08:08 PM
so, people liked this movie? i'm sorry, but this film was just not very good. this film was a self-indulgent, three hour student film that seems to have been made by a lynch imitator rather than the man himself.

now, before people go knocking me and saying i didn't "get it," i would like to acknowledge the fact that before this film, i absolutely adored lynch. everything he did was magic for me. after i saw nearly every one of his films on home video, i would rewind it and watch it again immediately afterwards. this was not entirely because i didn't understand what was going on. i'm familiar with lynch's style and the language he uses in order to convey emotion/story/character/time/place etc. i would watch those films again because i couldn't believe the direction they went in. i couldn't believe that any film could effectively show such raw power and emotion. i couldn't believe that despite the twists and turns his films would take, no matter how far he asked his audience to go, i was always there with him every step of the way. and i was never bored.

then he says he's going dv. with a tiny bit of skepticism, i say the man must know what he's doing to make such a bold jump. he says he loves the freedom he's been given with the format. well, with this film, lynch shows us what a man can do with no restrictions whatsoever, and that's to make a three hour, self-indulgent film that is truly a test of endurance for its audience. nobody else in my audience could see that by the time the third hour began, the audience was fidgeting, coughing, going to the bathroom, being really uncomfortably silent? that was one of the most uncomfortable (and NOT in a good way) audiences i have ever seen. people left the theater! including laura dern and justin theroux! where the hell was his editor? even if you were completely lost during lost highway or mulholland dr, you could NEVER call either of those boring films. every person i talked to on the street told me how bored they were by the whole thing. i never looked at my watch once, and i kept thinking that THIS would be the end, then realizing i had a long long ways to go. after the film, there was a brief q&a in which he states that the whole movie, he would write a scene and then shoot it the next day. neither he nor the actors knew where the hell they were going with the film or what the hell they were doing and it showed. whereas all of his other films lead up to an emotional, frightening, and beautiful conclusion, this movie just seems to wander all over the place, meandering towards an unsatisfying end that so desperately aims to reach those goals. the movie, especially towards the end, seems intent to explain to you that it is brilliant, when it is anything but. it never wants to end, because it assumes its audience wants more. the scene that plays over the end credits of the movie is a scene that seems to revel in everything that has come before it. it is a celebratory dance, honoring the strange and macabre world that it has introduced to its audience. it's a wonderful moment, but the movie it is celebrating doesn't deserve it.

and then there are parts that are so inspired that i feel bad to be knocking this movie so hard. laura dern gives the performance of her career. considering the conditions she was working under, it's amazing what she brings to her role(s). theroux and irons are good as well, but they're not given too much to work with. harry dean stanton, in his (barely) ten minutes of screen time is hilarious, as are william h macy and diane ladd, but if you blink, you'll miss them. i was happy to see grace zabriskie back in lynchland, but her scene was too long and shot really awkwardly (lynch continually uses the same shooting style as he did in his internet short darkened room). certain scenes are written and handled with such poignancy and care, it's such a shame that the rest of the movie bogs these moments down. i'd say that in the three hours runtime, there's about 30-45 minutes that are simply amazing, but they're so few and far between it's hard to care. what i love about lynch films are his fabulous and carefully constructed set pieces. most of this film seems so slapdash and hurriedly thought up and put together. his use of music and sound (usually a strong point for him) is also piss poor. there's one scene that utilizes beck's "black tambourine" that's so out of place it's not even funny. it's sloppy, lazy, and too self-involved to care, and over the years, i've come to expect more from lynch.

as for the dv. half the time, the dv images are ugly. images are overexposed, characters blend into the background, and there is horrible pixellation, edge enhancement, and interlacing. the other half of the movie gets so much out of the format, it's mind-boggling to think that these images are part of the same whole. you can almost see lynch and the rest of his crew getting accustomed to the format (or perhaps the image looked good on the days that peter deming showed up to do some "additional lighting" as the credits stated). several shots are taken straight from the "rabbit" shorts while there are repeated references to axxon n. when somebody asked about this during the q&a, lynch (as he is wont to do) gave a very evasive answer. i'm going to assume that much of "inland empire" was meant to be "axxon n," but canal plus stepped in and said, "hey, why don't you make a feature out of this." perhaps that explains why sometimes the footage looks very amateurish while sometimes it looks very polished and professional (i found it remarkable how some of the darker stuff looked, as, anyone who's shot on dv can tell you, shooting in low light can kill your image).

whatever the reason, it further adds to my opinion that this is less a movie and more an artist's masturbation piece. its a unique experience to see pure, unfiltered lynch, but the movie simply has no ground. there was no time for any idea to fully marinate and as a result, most of the movie is dreadfully dull. with the freedom he was given, the man has run wild and lost all sense of control. i suppose some of you might take that as a good thing, but it was too much for me. maybe i was missing something and i desperately need a second viewing, but i couldn't see myself sitting through this again. there just wasn't anybody/anything that i could connect to and no emotional/spiritual resonance/core that could make me care.

i hope somebody out there can persuade me otherwise, but i highly doubt it.




EDIT: like, fuck, an hour after i wrote that, i went online to look at other reviews and i want to see it again. was it REALLY that bad? no matter what, because of the way the movie was shot, it will always be amateurish and disjointed, but all of the positive reviewers seem to have found that emotional core that i was looking for and couldn't find. i suppose i'm gonna have to see it again. if only for the fact that i can't turn my back on lynch that quickly. THERE NEEDS TO BE SOMETHING THERE AND I'M SO TERRIFIED THAT IT JUST ISN'T!!!
i expect a lot of reviews like this when the film opens domestically.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Astrostic on October 10, 2006, 10:16:12 AM
So I'm hearing rumors that Lynch's self-distribution strategy is going to give this film a similar release to what Crispin Glover is doing with "What Is It?" and that INLAND EMPIRE might be available to buy on his website by the new year.  I don't know how I feel about this, as I really want to see this again on the big screen, but the idea of getting to watch it on repeat and properly digest it (especially without rude fucking people in the audience who play with their phone in front of me and sick people sneezing on my neck) is very exciting.  I'm a little afraid that Lynch seems to be crawling into some kind of esoteric hole where eventually, he will create a 9 hour film that contains clips of every nightmare he's had in his life, and you can only see it if you show up to his house and ask nicely.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Gold Trumpet on October 10, 2006, 12:03:38 PM
He could be digressing to anonymity the way Jean Luc Godard did after the 1960s. Godard broke with his 60s cinema, called those films "bourgeoisie" and subsequently made films that were experimental video works. In the following 20 years, he was only occasionally seen on the big screen with a big screen esque film. If Lynch is as excited about digital the way he says he is I wouldn't be surprised to see him use his website and the internet to promote his films. Of course it would be a mistake. With every new film he would lose more funds to produce them because using the internet is basically refusing to make films that make money. I think he would turn to a cult filmmaker only. The perfect world says you can make any film you want, but as Orson Welles once said, if you talk films and don't mention money you're just a jackass.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on October 10, 2006, 10:49:09 PM
Lynch self-distributing 'Inland Empire'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

NEW YORK -- After a flurry of rumors pointing to just about every indie studio in the business, director David Lynch has worked out a deal with French producers Studio Canal to self-distribute his three-hour epic digital video feature "Inland Empire," in the U.S. and Canada. Producer Mary Sweeney said the plan will "explore a new model of distribution."

Lynch will work with well-known theatrical and home video partners to launch his epic fever dream of a film, retaining all rights to the low-budget project in each service deal. The partnerships will be announced within the next week. A release slated before the end of the year, as is an awards season campaign for star and co-producer Laura Dern.

"Basically we learned a lot from our experiences with 'The Straight Story' and 'Mulholland Drive,'" said Sweeney. "There was a lot spent on P&A. Those experiences, the new technologies of digital distribution available today, along with David's completely avant-garde attitude towards life make this the right film at the right time for this approach."

Sweeney notes that both digital and transferred 35mm masters of the film are available, so several options are open to get the film to the public via digital and conventional methods.

"Empire," which had its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival as Lynch picked up a Golden Lion lifetime achievement award, has sharply divided critics both abroad and at its New York Film Festival North American premiere. The three-years-in-the-making feature begins with two interwoven stories of an actress, played by Dern, who is making an onscreen comeback in a Southern melodrama she's filming called "High in Blue Tomorrows." But the film soon branches off to follow a third abused and abusive character also played by Dern. "I figure I have at least three roles, maybe a few more," she said in an interview.

Each plotline deals with issues of betrayal in relationships, but the film soon veers off those tracks as it showcases musical dance sequences, sitcom-style family scenes featuring people with rabbit heads and dramatic episodes with actors speaking Polish.

In an interview after a NYFF press screening last Friday, Lynch said "people are thinking of new ways to begin a film, new ways of shooting, new ways of post production, and you've got to come up with new ways of distribution."

He added facetiously that his target audience is "14-year-old girls in the Midwest ... I would like it to be a summer blockbuster, but I'm realistic."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: A Matter Of Chance on October 11, 2006, 03:56:44 PM
is it bad that i'm gay for david lynch?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on October 12, 2006, 12:29:14 PM
INLAND EMPIRE at AFI Fest on November 3rd and 6th in Los Angeles!!! Tickets On Sale TOMORROW!!!

Making it's rounds will be INLAND EMPIRE playing Fri, Nov 3rd 9:30 pm at the ArcLight Theatre 10 and Mon, Nov 6th 7:00 pm at the Cinerama Dome. Tickets will be $12.00 for the show on the 3rd and $25 for the show on the 6th. For ticketing information please phone 1.866.AFI FEST or email boxoffice@afi.com. Tickets will go on sale online and by phone this Friday, October 13th.

http://www.afi.com/onscreen/afifest/2006/tickets.aspx
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on October 13, 2006, 11:39:23 AM
indieWIRE clip from the NYFF:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yxpdweyEHA


Why it's named INLAND EMPIRE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OUdIWYDMS4&mode=related&search=


A few more reviews:

http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=reviews&id=7808

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews.php?id=666

http://www.indiewire.com/ots/2006/10/dispatch_from_t_4.html
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: SiliasRuby on October 13, 2006, 01:07:33 PM
Got my ticket for the 6th at the cineramadome.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on October 23, 2006, 02:59:58 PM
INLAND EMPIRE US RELEASE DATE?
Source: Dugpa

According to ComingSoon.net, INLAND EMPIRE will be in limited release in the US starting on December 15th, 2006. Some showtimes for some of the local theaters have been found, so it looks to be a done deal. The film will be distributed by Lynch via 518 Media.

http://www.laemmle.com/viewmovie.php?mid=2648
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on October 26, 2006, 02:05:24 AM
Lynch Discusses Babbling Bunnies, Dancing Hookers, Laura Dern
By Robert Hilferty

Oct. 25 (Bloomberg) -- David Lynch, the master of weird, perplexing movies, has directed his loopiest film yet.

``Inland Empire'' stars Laura Dern as an actress visited by a strange Polish gypsy. She soon gets lost in different dream worlds, shuttling between Poland's past and Hollywood's present, taking on several identities and having close encounters with talking bunnies and dancing prostitutes. She also finds one of her incarnations at the center of a murder mystery.

I spoke with the 60-year-old director earlier this month after the movie was screened at the New York Film Festival. (It will be released Dec. 15 in the U.S.) Lynch was dressed entirely in black and sported a graying doo-wopper hairdo.

Hilferty: Where does the title come from?

Lynch: It comes from a conversation I had with Laura Dern, who said her husband grew up in the ``inland empire.'' That's an area east of Los Angeles. As soon as she said it, I said, ``That's the name of this film.''

Later, my brother found a scrapbook covered with dust in my parent's log cabin in Montana. It was my scrapbook from when I was 5 years old, and on the first page there's an aerial view of Spokane, Washington, where I lived as a kid. Underneath it said, ``Inland Empire,'' so I figured I'm on the right track.

Suggestive Title

Hilferty: The title suggests an interior dream universe.

Lynch: ``Inland Empire'' conjures up a thing, but it doesn't really need to be talked about. It's a beautiful two words.

Hilferty: The move pushes the envelope of different states of consciousness, jumping around in time and space. How did you come up with this beguiling narrative structure?

Lynch: At first I didn't know how the idea for one scene related to the idea of the next scene. It wasn't until seven scenes that I saw the link, and the whole thing started to come together. It's not a normal way of starting a feature film.

Hilferty: This is your first time using digital video. How was that?

Lynch: It's lightweight. It has automatic focus and 40- minute takes. The crew is smaller. You move like lightning speed compared to film. I can drift in and out, and feel a thing. It's the most beautiful sense of freedom, getting deeper into a thing. It's a blessing. Digital is a beautiful miracle.

Talking Rabbits

Hilferty: There are several scenes of three people wearing rabbit outfits.

Lynch: Those are real rabbits.

Hilferty: They appear to be performing a play in front of an audience, which laughs at questions they ask like, ``What time is it?''

Lynch: When you stop to think about it, it's quite a funny question.

Hilferty: Why?

Lynch: Well, we won't go into that.

Hilferty: Your film plays with time.

Lynch: The word ``playing'' is a beautiful word, but it implies a frivolous thing, which this isn't. Time is so beautiful. There's always a past and a present, and an implication of a future. So cinema can go anyplace. Stories can hold all kinds of times. Time is your friend.

Hilferty: There's a Polish dimension to your film, and some of the music you use is by Lutoslawski and Penderecki, which lends the feeling of mystery and horror.

Lynch: I attended the Camerimage Film Festival in 2000 and fell in love with the city of Lodz, Poland. It used to be the textile capital of the world. Because of the beautiful location and the mood there, I started thinking, ``I should shoot a scene here,'' which I did. And so that led to many other things.

Hilferty: Hollywood also figures big. The famous hilltop sign is one of the first things we see. Laura Dern plays an actress. Is this movie in some way a parable of Hollywood?

Lynch: Not specifically. Ideas do pop up because of a place, and I've been living in Los Angeles since 1970. I love this town and the fictitious memory of the golden age of cinema.

Hilferty: After shooting with digital, will you go back to celluloid?

Lynch: Never. Our future is a digital future.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on October 27, 2006, 01:19:03 AM
he really reveals a lot more than ppl admit. just because he doesn't speak about everything, ppl think he doesn't speak about anything. the things he does say are quite revealing and truthful about what he's talking about. i mean, why must he say everything? it's just rude to expect him to. ok even more than rude, it's downright arrogant. his movies have a great effect because they play on things that words can't capture. so why try to make him talk about it?

it's fun to ask cos his answers are hilarious. i'm not laughing at him but he's gotta realise that it's a funny situation, this man being asked ridiculous things like "why do you think it's funny to ask what time is it" and then his reponse is the punch. you can call it aloof but he just doesn't feel the need to prove his intelligence or insight or whatever it is that ppl are trying to take from him. his silence is what separates him from pretentious ppl who talk too much. and his ability to manipulate symbols that speak intimately to us is what separates him from bullshit artists like matthew barney. we can deduce all this without asking him anything, it's why he loves words.

i've said too much.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on November 02, 2006, 11:48:35 AM
INLAND EMPIRE in Boston with Lynch Q&A
Boston will be getting a special screening of INLAND EMPIRE on Sunday, December 3rd with a Lynch Q&A session to follow. Details can be found here. (http://www.brattlefilm.org/brattlefilm/calendar.html#061203)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on November 02, 2006, 01:43:43 PM
except its already sold out!

oh well, they still have it playing through december.

still, if anybody going is willing to hook a brother up...
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on November 02, 2006, 09:15:39 PM
yeah, lynch must really like the brattle. they did a whole series of his films two years ago and i spent that whole week every day going there to catch them all. i think he helped them in getting prints, but only the dvd of eraserhead was screened at his request, which was a pain. i almost got a job at the brattle, but everytime i go there everybody working looks miserable for some reason. had i taken the job, i'd have gotten to meet the guy again. i'm glad it's screening there rather than at coolidge or kendall square. the brattle is a very unique theater and a good venue for this movie. i hope that this film is only distributed to small, struggling arthouse theaters. no way is inland empire going to be a cult hit like mulholland and it would really bring a lot of income and positive reputation to theaters like this. despite how much i disliked the movie, i'm excited to experience it again with an audience in a more intimate theater in an effort to resolve the issues i have with the film (only for lynch would i sit through a three-hour nonsensical masturbation piece twice).
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: A Matter Of Chance on November 03, 2006, 03:33:39 PM
Quote from: JG on November 02, 2006, 01:43:43 PM
except its already sold out!

oh well, they still have it playing through december.

still, if anybody going is willing to hook a brother up...

ALREADY SOLD OUT?!?!?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: SiliasRuby on November 07, 2006, 11:46:48 AM
Heavy Spoiler Review! (But Really What Is A Spoiler Review When It Comes To Lynch?)

This has got to be one of the most emotionally draining experiences of my life. I was crying through it a lot since so many images stood out and meant something to me. It really hit me hard. But GT is right when he might be going where Godard went after the 60's, really possible

Laura dern possibly gave the performance of her career so far. She does what most actress's wish they could do so easily.

My fav. moments: the "black tambourine" segment, Man, Beck fits so well with Lynch.
The Scene with the Asian, her African American Boyfriend and their other friend who has a cousin in pamona who's almost certain she can't get from hollywood to pamona is pretty funny, considering where Laura Dern is.
Grace Zebrieski's Scene

Harry Dean Stanton is Fucking Hilarious in this-his look to the actors is just priceless, asking an embarrising question with his quiet sullen features.
Mary Steenburgen achieves so much in 2 minutes and she does it so effortlessly.
I wanted more of William H. Macy.
I didn't want it to end and yet I was so fulfilled when the credits hit.

Afterwards, the Q and A was a bit bleh at best of course, but the highlight of the evening was meeting Lynch and talking to him about the distributing of his film. Saw him behind the cinerama just hanging out behind his body guard. He shook my hand, was pretty impressed on how much I knew on when it's going to get a wide release. My two friends and I tried to hold our composure, but it was pretty tough, it was quite a fucking night. Next on my list to meet, PTA. That's another post though.

Wheh, I'm still reeling from the experience.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on November 08, 2006, 01:00:01 AM
i'm worried about your emotional state, silias. no matter how many ppl ridicule you, including myself, remember that in your mind everything you do is perfectly normal. go with yourself. don't let the world get you down, ok? go with yourself.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on November 09, 2006, 01:36:03 AM
Lynch visits AFI 'Empire'
Helmer bows latest at fest
Source: Variety

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.variety.com%2Fgraphics%2Fphotos%2Fvpage2006%2FvEMP_lynchdern.jpg&hash=100d6cfed70ec9cfa33bbbed0d6ddfa92384d493)

HOLLYWOOD -- If a three-hour non-narrative pic is going to unspool at an AFI Fest Centerpiece Gala spread over two non-consecutive nights, it's fitting that said film be directed by David Lynch.

Eschewing any kind of red-carpet or reception for his "Inland Empire," helmer was on hand Friday for a brief intro and Monday for a post-screening Q&A, along with pic's Laura Dern and Justin Theroux.

Lynch identified his favorite tree (the ponderosa pine, with the Douglas fir in second place) but was typically elusive about the film.

"The thing came about in a strange way. I started on just a scene. I wrote the scene and got people together and we shot the scene. Then I got another idea for another scene and it didn't necessarily relate to the first. This process continued for a while until the whole came together," he explained."As an actor, having worked with David the majority of my adult life, I've learned to follow along for the ride," Dern said. "Regardless of the world he creates, you're free to stay honest and simple as can be."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on November 10, 2006, 12:54:04 AM
INLAND EMPIRE in NY on Dec. 06, 2006:


http://www.ifccenter.com/film?filmid=55508
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Sunrise on November 10, 2006, 08:56:37 AM
Best. Promotion. Ever.

http://www.defamer.com/hollywood/david-lynch/update-david-lynch-and-his-favorite-cow-team-up-to-drum-up-interest-in-inland-empire-213760.php
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: hedwig on November 10, 2006, 12:51:47 PM
Quote from: Sunrise on November 10, 2006, 08:56:37 AM
Best. Promotion. Ever.

http://www.defamer.com/hollywood/david-lynch/update-david-lynch-and-his-favorite-cow-team-up-to-drum-up-interest-in-inland-empire-213760.php
and here's the video (http://www.defamer.com/hollywood/david-lynch/david-lynch-and-the-cow-the-video-213927.php).
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: brockly on November 11, 2006, 02:57:33 AM
new pics: http://www.cinempire.com/multimedia/filmid3826/index.html

http://www.cinempire.com/multimedia/filmid3826/images/19.jpg

is that ben's house???
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fsjl-static1.sjl.youtube.com%2Fvi%2FXT92LTE3-l4%2F3.jpg&hash=459cdf3fdb93bb429a5e138b9dd0fa552ed9097f)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on November 11, 2006, 10:01:01 AM
below is a detail from this pic http://www.cinempire.com/multimedia/filmid3826/images/02.jpg

is this who i think it is?
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi5.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fy154%2Fpubrick%2FIE02who.jpg&hash=2a9ffb3c21b67a7e603c758ae7d20af497ddc3eb)
cos imdb doesn't seem to think so. (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0286022/)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on November 14, 2006, 10:02:02 PM
Lynch pacts with 518 Media
Absurda asks for help with 'Empire'
Source: Variety

David Lynch's distribution shingle Absurda has contracted 518 Media to assist in theatrical distribution for "Inland Empire," his surreal three-hour drama.
Lynch also announced Rhino Entertainment will distribute the DVD and retained PR awards specialist mPRm Public Relations, which handled Lynch's "Mulholland Drive."

Lynch bought the North American rights to "Inland Empire" last month from French producer Studio Canal with the goal of distributing the pic himself. "Empire" interweaves several plot strands, including a fictitious film project, a sitcom with characters in bunny costumes and Polish prostitutes.

Lynch said Tuesday he's enthused by the do-it-yourself element of the release.

"For the first time since 'Eraserhead' I can start meeting the theater owners again, the ones at the end of the chain that have played my films over the years and helped me out," Lynch said.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on November 15, 2006, 10:08:44 PM
INLAND EMPIRE Press Release and Website

A new website will be up that will give details on Theatrical Release Dates and Exclusive Clips.


http://www.inlandempirecinema.com/



Below are the current release dates from the Press Release (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061115/law102.html?.v=60).
 
INLAND EMPIRE OPENING DATES:

Wednesday, December 6, IFC Center -- NEW YORK
Friday, December 8, Brattle Theater -- BOSTON
Friday, December 15, Laemmle Sunset 5 -- LOS ANGELES
Friday, December 15, Laemmle Playhouse 7 -- PASADENA

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Interview:
http://www.kafard.com/mov/lynch/iehebdocinema.mp4

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dugpa.com%2Fpics%2Flynch-tower.jpg&hash=bf76514d9fd9eb2fb813929338af9bf75a08ad30)

David Lynch And The Cow Return
Source: Defamer

For those of you who found last week's David Lynch promotional stunt for Inland Empire too geographically inconvenient to attend, you have a second chance to catch the director, his trusty cow sidekick, and various signs celebrating Laura Dern's performance in person, where you can possibly absorb some of his cryptic wisdom on the origins of cheese. Alerts a reader apparently unaware that Lynch and his bovine prop previously graced a corner in Hollywood last Thursday:

"david lynch is on sunset and holloway right now, sitting on a corner in a director's chair with a cow next to him. he's apparently shooting something for his new Inland Empire movie with Laura Dern, and doesn't mind a bunch of people taking pictures."


(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dugpa.com%2Fpics%2Fvdavidlynch_lynch.jpg&hash=0aee4ab8857ddf2df0d860f241a1c8240fee65d1)


Lynch set to self-release 'Empire'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

NEW YORK -- David Lynch has sworn off movie studios forever. "A conventional distributor is a heartache, and I'm finished with that," the director said as he unveiled plans to release his psychodrama "Inland Empire" through his distribution company Absurda and 518 Media in December.

Lynch will embark on a 10-city theater tour to promote the film in January. With a cow. "I ate a lot of cheese during the film, and it made me happy," he explains. The tour, which had its first preview at the film's AFI Fest screening last week, also will serve as an Oscar campaign for star/co-producer Laura Dern. "I'm hoping the Academy members will be sick of 10 million trade ads and appreciate something a bit different," he said. Pianist Marek Zebrowski will accompany the director and play music featured in the film, which Lynch describes as "Polish night music."

"Empire," which features Dern as at least three characters and has different plotlines involving filmmaking, opens in Los Angeles, Pasadena, New York and Boston next month. Lynch signed a service deal with Rhino Entertainment to release the DVD with planned bonus footage alongside the three-hour feature. Rhino vp video Sig Sigworth said it's tentatively scheduled to hit stores in the summer after the film's theatrical run.

Lynch purchased rights to distribute "Empire" in October from the film's producer, StudioCanal, and will retain them in any future deals. Peter Langs, 518 Media CEO, is helping the filmmaker book "Empire" in theaters.

"With self-distribution I'm able to shape the outcome of the film so much more," Lynch said. "I'm looking forward to meeting theater owners and getting out among the people with the cow."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Astrostic on November 17, 2006, 11:21:56 PM
from http://filmick.blogspot.com/2006/11/inland-empire-to-feature-first-ever.html

I might call bullshit, but a VERY interesting rumor indeed.

Inland Empire To Feature First Ever Commentary Track From David Lynch

A little Rhi... er... bird tells me that the eventual DVD of Inland Empire is to feature the first ever audio commentary by David Lynch. Wow. From what I gather this is lesser Lynch - but hearing him talk, at length, about one of his films is surely a can't-miss proposition.

Now, more than ever, I'm hoping that Inland Empire, once it finally unspools before my eyes, makes me eat crow and retract my pre-emptive tutting.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Gold Trumpet on November 17, 2006, 11:39:40 PM
Quote from: MacGuffin on November 15, 2006, 10:08:44 PM
"With self-distribution I'm able to shape the outcome of the film so much more," Lynch said. "I'm looking forward to meeting theater owners and getting out among the people with the cow."

David Lynch paints an absurd scenario of himself before even Family Guy was able to!

But, I don't know. Lynch with a cow? For the entire press tour? Will anyone try to find an explanation rationalization that redeems this?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on November 17, 2006, 11:43:13 PM
fuck family guy and fuck rationalization.

anyway he already explained that cheese comes from milk.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: hedwig on November 18, 2006, 12:28:08 AM
Quote from: Pubrick on November 17, 2006, 11:43:13 PM
anyway he already explained that cheese comes from milk,
haha, i loved the reaction of the people in the video when he says that.. "oh i get it, i get it."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: pete on November 18, 2006, 01:04:43 PM
aw boston I miss you.  not a great place for filmmakers, but a great place for people who wanna see filmmakers.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on November 19, 2006, 03:12:34 PM
ATTN: NYC

if you missed your chance to see David Lynch / INLAND EMPIRE or you just want to see him / it again. 

Inland Empire
Series: Directors/Actors/Writers Series 2006
Director: David Lynch, Country: USA, Release: 2006

If you missed it at this year's New York Film Festival, here's your chance to catch up with one of the essential movie events of the year. David Lynch's Inland Empire will have its theatrical premiere at the Walter Reade Theater on Saturday, December 2 at 7:30 p.m., when the director and some special guests will be on hand to introduce and discuss the movie. Lynch's first foray into high-definition video, a mesmerizing surge through countless looking glasses that lands us on the far side of the land of dreams and nightmares, is just as visually stunning as his work in 35mm.

The lengthy gestation period of Inland Empire (he shot on and off over two years, and wrote as he went) has allowed Lynch to give his own uniquely epic form to many of his primary concerns: the exploitation of young women, the mutability of identity and the omnivorousness of Hollywood. And Laura Dern is altogether astonishing as the woman (or is that women?) at the center of the empire, giving more of herself to this film than most actors give throughout their entire careers.

https://tickets.filmlinc.com/php/calendar.php?event=8470&backurl=http://www.filmlinc.com/#8470
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Ghostboy on November 19, 2006, 03:15:34 PM
Quote from: modage on November 19, 2006, 03:12:34 PM
Lynch's first foray into high-definition video

Why do they keep saying that? He shot most (if not all) of it on a PD150, which is a prosumer miniDV camera that was already out of date two years ago. Lynch has said that he doesn't like hi-definition as much because it's too clean.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on November 19, 2006, 11:04:41 PM
Quote from: Ghostboy on November 19, 2006, 03:15:34 PM
Why do they keep saying that? He shot most (if not all) of it on a PD150, which is a prosumer miniDV camera that was already out of date two years ago. Lynch has said that he doesn't like hi-definition as much because it's too clean.
i'm sick of hearing it too. they keep saying it cos they don't know the difference.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on December 01, 2006, 01:04:48 PM
Quote from: MacGuffin on November 15, 2006, 10:08:44 PM
INLAND EMPIRE Press Release and Website

A new website will be up that will give details on Theatrical Release Dates and Exclusive Clips.


http://www.inlandempirecinema.com/

INLAND EMPIRE Website Goes Live
The Official INLAND EMPIRE Website has been updated. They now have links to Reviews, the Poster, Theatrical Schedule, Stills and soon an Official Trailer.


(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.inlandempirecinema.com%2FiePosterLarge.jpg&hash=6eae707480187dccdf0cf03c755e4a698e93c499)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Astrostic on December 02, 2006, 02:02:14 AM
the trailer is live and you need to download an FLV Player to watch it.  It is short and doesn't spoil too much, but if you haven't seen the film and you have already decided to see it, I don't recommend watching it.  It spoils a very scary moment in the film and plays one of Lynch's sung songs from the film.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on December 02, 2006, 11:55:11 PM
so i saw INLAND EMPIRE for the 2nd time tonite, again with Lynch, Dern and Theroux in attendance for a Q&A.  i was lucky enough to be able to ask him a question as well as meet mr. Lynch after the film where he signed my Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive DVD's.  i'll be seeing him introduce Vertigo on monday. 

as far as the film goes...  after the first viewing i felt somewhere between taz and samsong.  or maybe i felt both equally as strong.  it was one of the most incredible theatre experiences of my life on a purely viceral level but as a narrative film it was completely incomprehensible.  i thought anyone who would claim to 'get' the film was completely full of shit.  however on 2nd viewing i realized the first viewing as like taking a puzzle out of the box and spilling it onto the floor.  but the 2nd viewing i started to put the pieces together.  i'm still nowhere near completing it but i have started to make connections. 

more later.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on December 03, 2006, 12:13:06 AM
so you've seen it twice, both with david lynch?  thats just not fair to the rest of us.  any pics? 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on December 03, 2006, 01:28:55 AM
Don't want to download a FLV Player?


Trailer here. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4hFEDYmMcM)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on December 05, 2006, 01:28:45 AM
David Lynch wants to get in your bloodstream
The ''Mulholland Drive'' director talks about big bunny heads and his new coffee business
Source: Jeff Jensen; Entertainment Weekly

David Lynch is a movie director. You probably know that, even if you've never seen The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, or Mulholland Drive, each of which earned him an Oscar nomination and helped coin an adjective: Lynchian, akin to Kafkaesque, meaning bizarrely banal, or just plain trippy. He has worked in TV, having created the cult classic Twin Peaks, and is also a painter, cartoonist, computer animator, fine-art photographer, musician, professional furniture-maker, and amateur meteorologist. Every weekday morning at his website, Davidlynch.com — a repository of Lynchian strangeness — he posts a video of himself reporting on the weather outside his Los Angeles home, and he does it without a wink of irony. Yes, David Lynch is many things, and he's about to become a few more. On the eve of the release of his new movie, Inland Empire, an experimental psychological thriller starring Laura Dern, he's embarking on one of the most peculiar pursuits in his peculiar career.

He's getting into the coffee business (http://www.davidlynch.com/coffee).

''David Lynch Signature Cup,'' says the director, 60, his nasal twang pitched with pride. No joke: Lynch, who fetishized coffee in Twin Peaks (along with cigarettes, pie, lumber, old factories, and very sexy women), is taking on Starbucks. Available in espresso, decaf, and house roast, Lynch's beans will come packaged in stylish jet-black metal tubes that will include coasters emblazoned with Lynchian graphics including images from his freaky first feature Eraserhead. You'll soon find it at David lynch.com and at select movie theaters playing Inland Empire, too. ''I think it's going to be...good coffee for the people,'' he says with a hint of a smirk, as if he's just said something rather sly. ''You want a cup?''

The only answer to that question is yes. We are inside his painting studio, perched atop the sloping grounds of his Hollywood Hills property. He's got his work clothes on — white dress shirt flecked with green paint, buttoned to his neck and tucked into khaki pants. On his desk is a sculpture he's been gluing together (it looks like a bra cup mounted on a block of wood) and a cracked toilet seat. Deadpan, Lynch explains: ''That's just something I gotta fix.''

He's trying to fix some other things, too. Like Hollywood. And maybe his future as a filmmaker. With Inland Empire, Lynch is going more indie than ever, opting to distribute and market the movie himself. After premiering Inland Empire on Dec. 2 in New York and Dec. 9 in L.A., Lynch will take it city to city beginning in January. ''Just like Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter,'' he says. ''Throw the records in the car, we're hitting the road!'' Did Lynch embrace this unconventional strategy because his financiers, StudioCanal, couldn't cut a suitable deal with a U.S. distributor for a three-hour experimental film with dim commercial prospects? Yes. But with the movie industry struggling with shrinking profit margins and changing technology, Lynch believes that in order to continue exploring his interior worlds — his Inland Empire — he must dramatically change the way he does business, too.

''The world is really changing. Topsy-turvy,'' says Lynch, hands covering his face, eyes peeking through tobacco-stained fingers like he's watching a horror movie. ''I just read that studios are asking artists to lower their fees. This is just the beginning!''

According to Dern, who starred in Lynch's Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, Inland Empire captures that anxiety. She plays several characters, including an actress who begins to lose her mind while starring in an old-fashioned melodrama. Prostitutes, creepy Polish folktales, and giant rabbit heads are also involved. ''The film is a reflection of David's love for old Hollywood, and coming to terms with the death of what Hollywood represents for him, too,'' says Dern. ''It's a new day. For David, for film, for all of us.''

Hence, the coffee. And the Eraserhead ringtones as well, which you can also purchase through David lynch.com. Most of the revenues generated by these endeavors will help fund Lynch's bid for self-sufficiency. ''We're trying to create a David Lynch brand,'' says Eric Bassett, who heads up Absurda, the company Lynch has created to handle his business affairs. Ask Lynch what the David Lynch brand stands for, and the man who has spent his entire career refusing to define himself actually has an answer.

''Freedom.''

When the movie world last heard from Lynch, he had just completed the second major comeback of his career. The first came in 1986, when he erased the debacle of Dune with his disturbing masterpiece, Blue Velvet. After Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart in 1990, he imploded again with another indulgent mess, 1992's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the feature-film prequel to the TV series. But he began to change minds again with 1999's The Straight Story, shocking in its poignant linear normalcy. That same year should have also seen a new TV series starring an unknown actress named Naomi Watts, except ABC hated the pilot for Mulholland Drive and canned it. But one year later, during a session of Transcendental Meditation, Lynch came up with an idea to turn the failed pilot into the movie that marked his triumphant return to form.

''The road to Mulholland Drive was wonderful and weird,'' says Lynch, pulling a cigarette from his breast pocket and firing up. ''But the road to Inland Empire was even weirder.''

Like Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire wasn't even supposed to be a movie. It began as a series of experiments with a gadget that has radically changed Lynch's life, the thing he called ''my little bitty toy camera,'' a handheld Sony PD150 digital video recorder. It was the remedy for what he hated about shooting on film: the waiting — for lights to be set up, for the crew to turn the cameras around, etc. One day, about three years ago, Lynch called Dern and asked her if she would shoot a scene he had written for her. She did. Later, he wrote another scene, and asked Dern to do it. This happened many times.

Digital video was clearly firing Lynch's imagination. At his home, the director shot a surreal sitcom about a family of giant rabbits. ''I don't know what to say,'' he says, blowing cigarette smoke out of the corner of a crooked smile. ''It just felt correct.'' At the same time, he was falling in love with Poland after befriending the organizers of a film festival in Lodz. (''I said, 'I'll come to your festival, but could you set it up so I could photograph those old factories there? And some nude women, too?' And they did!'') On one trip to Lodz, he decided to shoot a scene he made up on the fly with some local actors. ''He was intoxicated with the process, freewheeling with this camera and his talent,'' says Lynch's longtime producer and former companion Mary Sweeney.

Lynch originally intended to use a lot of this stuff on his website. But one day, he decided to transfer the Dern scenes to film, just to see what it would look like. It was blurry and flawed — and Lynch liked it. It reminded him of old Hollywood films, ''when the picture wasn't as clear as today's film,'' he says. ''I think when something isn't so realistic, when the frame is dark or out of focus, the mind kicks, and you start to dream.''

And then he got an idea. When Lynch talks about getting ideas, he opens and closes his hands, like a radio tower broadcasting a signal. In this case, the idea told him that the Dern monologues, the rabbit sitcom, and the Poland stuff were adding up to something, a movie kind of something, which could be completed with some new footage. He considers the making of Inland Empire the closest he's come to replicating the greatest creative experience of his career — the five years he spent making Eraserhead while he was a student at the American Film Institute. ''I came from painting, where it's just you and the paint,'' says Lynch. ''Digital facilitates a similar experience. You can get deeper into it.''

Now he's selling it the way he made it: by himself. Becoming his own movie mogul has been a revealing and revolting experience. Wanting to mount an Oscar campaign on behalf of Dern, Lynch discovered it would cost him $3 million. He was appalled. Instead, Lynch is using guerrilla PR tactics that are part Dern advocacy and part protest, such as sitting on L.A. street corners with a poster of Dern. And a cow. ''It's like a David Lynch movie,'' laughs Dern. ''It's out-there and irreverent, and yet he's saying something of pretty phenomenal value. It's fabulous, insane, and very sweet.''

Lynch hopes Inland Empire can further inspire the desktop filmmaking movement, although he doesn't embrace the desktop viewing experience. Watching films on computer monitors instead of a movie screen? ''A total nightmare,'' he says. And while Lynch's marketing honcho Bassett is jazzed by the idea of expanding Absurda into an operation that could assist other filmmakers, Sweeney wonders just how ambitious Lynch really is. ''Until he goes through the experience, the jury's still out,'' she says. ''I think he doesn't know what he's getting into a little bit.''

CEO Lynch acknowledges a few tactical errors. If the coffee and the ringtones had been ready sooner, he says, he would have had more money to launch his new film. But he's hoping that publicity around some of his other upcoming endeavors can help the cause. And then there's Lynch's self-replenishing fan base. Early reviews of Inland Empire have been mixed, but preview screenings overflow with college kids for whom Lynch films have become an intellectual rite of passage. ''I think that's just neat,'' Lynch says. Ask him who he thinks his audience is and he laughs. ''I don't know!'' But then he takes a long drag off his cigarette. ''If I had to,'' he says, ''I would say anyone with an open mind, and anyone open to experiencing other possible worlds. That's what I want from movies. That's what I love.''
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on December 05, 2006, 06:52:17 PM
i finally indulged and watched the trailer.  i don't think i've ever been so excited for a movie in my entire life.  i haven't had a PTA movie or Kubrick movie to anticipate like some of you guys have.  I wasn't even a Malick fan when The New World was released.  The closest was Eternal Sunshine, and I stopped getting excited for Scorsese movies after Gangs of New York. 

So...I can't wait.   

Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on December 06, 2006, 09:53:56 AM
Quote from: MacGuffin on December 05, 2006, 01:28:45 AM
Sweeney wonders just how ambitious Lynch really is. ''Until he goes through the experience, the jury's still out,'' she says. ''I think he doesn't know what he's getting into a little bit.''

Quote from: James Ellroy on September 18, 2006, 07:05:40 PM
Spoken like an ex-wife.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on December 07, 2006, 11:23:50 AM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fsuicidegirls.com%2Fmedia%2Fauthors%2F2162%2Farticle.jpg&hash=8005a36e8d2138cfe20d415c5308821ddf0073e7)

If I didn't know better I would think David Lynch was Italian. He uses his hands to describe ideas more than anyone I have ever met. It's fascinating to watch this man communicate. He pulls out the cigarette pack, the lighter, moves the ashtray, lights the cigarette, puts the pack away the and then, once his hands are free, resumes emphasizing his words with enigmatic gestures. Lynch, a four-time Oscar nominee, remains one of the most enigmatic American filmmakers. He first entered the feature world with Eraserhead, which was a five-year journey. Since then he's directed the film adaptation of Dune, Blue Velvet, co-created the cult television series Twin Peaks and directed many other features. His latest picture, Inland Empire, is the first feature he has shot on video. He's even taking a stab at self-distribution. Inland Empire was another five year journey from start to finish, and once again Lynch is working with old friends and collaborators such as Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton and perhaps his most talented muse, Laura Dern. Dern plays an actor who, after a long dry spell, lands a coveted role in a big film. While filming, Dern's character and the other actors are told that the film is actually a remake of another picture that was never completed for mysterious reasons. Along the way Dern plays two other characters and seems to segue from reality to fantasy without any warning. In other words, Inland Empire is classic Lynch.

Daniel Robert Epstein: Hello David, it's a pleasure to meet you. I've been a fan of yours since I saw The Elephant Man as a kid.

David Lynch: Did it freak you out?

DRE:Yes, it did.

DL:Doggone.

DRE:Isn't that what you wanted to do?

DL:No [laughs] but it's tough for a little kid. I remember someone telling me they saw The Elephant Man when they were eight. I think it was a little too much.

DRE:I might have seen it when I was nine or ten.

DL:Uh-huh.

DRE:I had nightmares about your elephant scene.

DL:Right, sure.

DRE:It was very scary. Elephants were friendly when I was a kid.

DL:Uh-huh [laughs].

DRE:I look at Inland Empire as more of an art piece than a feature film. Do you see it that way?

DL:No I don't but I've heard people say something like that.

DRE:Do you see a narrative in it?

DL:Yes.

DRE:How many times do I have to see it until I discover the narrative?

DL:You'd only have to see it once. Well, you might have to see it a couple times, but it's there.

DRE:It reminded me of that old quote of yours from when you first got into film, where you said that you wanted to see the pictures move. Inland Empire feels like you are using the paintbrush to go in many directions. Is that more of an editing process or are you already thinking about this stuff when you're shooting?

DL:It is weird. It is all from ideas and then the ideas tell you everything. But you get to a point where the ideas are gathered and now you're getting close to a whole thing, a sequence is indicated pretty clearly. Then there's a point where for the sake of the whole, another thing happens. When you finally see the whole thing and react to that you see that there's much more work to be done and then there's sometimes rearrangements and deletions, maybe even something new that you never thought you were going to use. So it's a process but driven by the ideas.

DRE:Watching Inland Empire is a harrowing experience for the viewer. Is creating it as harrowing?

DL:When you get an idea it's like seeing it in a movie so it's not so much as harrowing, it's like thrilling. It fires you up because then you know what you're going to do. You get an idea, you love the idea and you love the way cinema is able to translate that idea. Those things are what drive the boat for me. It's not so harrowing, but if you get a fragment of a whole, that's usually the way it happens. Starts with fragments, then an unknown thing opens up and that's sometimes harrowing, but beautifully harrowing because you don't know what's there and you want to know.

DRE:Is it true that you were writing scenes right before you shot them?

DL:No, not right before I shot them, I'd write them before I shot them but not necessarily right before [laughs]. Now a couple of times I wrote them the day before, because I was in a place where I had to take advantage of an idea that was there. It was like a blurred, veiled inkling and then this thing happens and you focus on it and it comes into focus and you see it and you write it down. I was in places where I needed to do something there because I'd be leaving.

DRE:The scene where the prostitutes do the song and dance number to The Loco-Motion reminded me of Lost Highway where in the middle of the movie Robert Loggia freaks on the guy on the highway and also the Naomi Watts audition scene in Mulholland Drive. These are very impressive, in-your-face scenes. Do those things liven it up for you or is that all just part of the process?

DL:It's part of the process. Different scenes do different things and when you've got nine girls dancing to The Loco-Motion or something like that, it's got to be in the liveliness department.

DRE:Does a scene like that energize the movie?

DL:No, it's not like you say, "Oh, I need something here." The idea came along for it. It is not that I feel I need something and then would make something to fill that need. The idea is what's doing it.

DRE:A few years ago I interviewed David Cronenberg. Now, I'm not comparing the two of you.

DL:Good.

DRE:Too many people do that. I asked him if he puts certain things in his movies to tweak the audience and he told me that if he were to do that it would be more like he was tweaking himself. That seems to jibe with what you were saying with just putting something in a film.

DL:Yes, that would be a real false note and I feel like if you're true to the ideas and you work on it until you realize those ideas and they feel correct based on the idea, then they have a chance of feeling correct for others. Even if you're going on a intuitive feel, if you're true to those ideals, sometimes they've got these harmonics, if you dick with them, you might ruin the harmonics. They would be bad things and people would start smelling a rat. You may not even understand those harmonics, but somebody out there might and it's true on that level and it's true on the harmonic levels. So you've got to be real careful.

DRE:Are the harmonics ever not correct?

DL:No, they have to be. If the notes, the chords are correct, the harmonics are going to be correct. But you may not understand the beauty of the harmonics but somebody else might. If you've been true to these notes, they've got a chance to appreciate some other thing. On Eraserhead, I don't remember what it was but I had the feeling that I appreciated some other level of it later, but I wasn't even aware of it when I did it. It's that thing.

DRE:Your past films are so recognizable and famous for having great, lush cinematography and beautiful colors. Even though Inland Empire does have those things, it is in a much different way.

DL:It was because I was shooting DV so the quality isn't film quality. But it is it's own quality. For projection in theaters it needs to go to film, so you've got a certain quality resolution DV up-res-ed to Hi Def and then put on film. All these processes are opportunities to me. They keep adding something that's really magical and beautiful.

DRE:Besides it being shot on video did you try to shoot it the way you did your other films?

DL:I sometimes put it on the tripod and light it but sometimes it's floating. Something happened because I'm holding the camera more on this and when you hold the camera you find yourself moving based on the feeling you're getting from the scene and I think that's a secretive act. You're looking and listening and you are just doing things that you wouldn't do if you had an operator. You wouldn't be able to tell him in time. It's more like you're in there and you're doing things that you couldn't have done before.

DRE:Did the idea of the movie come before the idea of self-distributing it?

DL:Oh yeah. People would tell me that I've got a three hour picture that no one understands. [laughs] But I long for the 14 year old girls in the Midwest to fall in love with Inland Empire and embrace it. That would be so cool. I don't see why it couldn't happen but there's a whole bunch of things happening and I don't know all of it at all. It's a feeling that the studios are just following the music industry. The music industry used to be a big advantage to artists and then those advantages started going down and down and down. To the point where they say, Jack give me your final album and maybe we'll distribute it. They're going down low enough so that you say, "Well wait a minute. I'm going to do the same amount of work, take this advance and that's the last nickel I'm ever going to see." You don't see another nickel even if your film is doing good. How depressing is that? So I'd rather go a different route and take my chances. It's a little bit thrilling to do it. It is a large amount of work but I'm getting to meet the people. I'm getting to meet the theater owners and I'm taking a hair more responsibility than in the past. I think it's the way of the future.

DRE:I saw the video of you with the cow in Los Angeles on Youtube, are ventures like that something you want to be a part of?

DL:It is what's just going to happen, but for me, I'm still hanging on to the theatrical experience as the best. But it won't be too long before there won't be any DVDs. We will be downloading our films and what you do with it is up to you but I would recommend squirting it on a big wall with speakers in a dark room and seeing it all the way through. Kill the phones so you have that experience and you can go into another world. But a lot of people are going to see it on their phones and their computers but in my book they won't have seen the film.

DRE:Was it very important to have actors you've worked with before like Laura [Dern] and Justin [Theroux] in the main roles?

DL:What's important is to get the right actors for the roles. If you've already worked with them, you've already developed a shorthand and you're friends but that is not the reason to cast them. But when they marry to the part and you've got that added bonus, it's beautiful. Laura is in a film that's considered somewhat strange, but she has given a performance that will rival anything done this year so I hope she fares very well. The danger is that it will take a while to filter into the culture and miss an award but I think she'll be remembered for her role.

DRE:It is interesting how self-referential the film is. Much of it takes place on a film set, part of the movie is about a director working with actors, part of the movie was shot in Poland and there's a Polish character in the movie. Do you like putting what's happening to you right into your movies?

DL:I also went to New York City but no ideas came in New York. You see what I mean? It's the ideas coming and how one relates to another. You never know what's going to trigger them or when they're going to come. When they come along, then you focus on those and that focus and desire for more brings more in time. So the thing starts growing, you don't know where it's going, it just starts growing. A whole thing comes from Poland and from Hollywood. Now if I hadn't gone to Poland, I don't think I'd have gotten the Polish idea, but something was happening there. But I've gone to other places where something's happening but the ideas didn't come.

DRE:What is it you like so much about Los Angeles?

DL:I love the light. I love the feeling. It comes, I think, from the light, maybe more than that. But in LA I get the feeling of all possibilities. A freeing feeling of all possibilities can be gotten.

DRE:You started the short film Rabbits before you finished Inland Empire, did you always intend to put it into Inland?

DL:It started something happening. One thing leads to another, that's the beautiful thing about the world. So some things you do and that's it. Some things lead to more and more and more.

DRE:I believe you had some non-professional actors in Inland Empire.

DL:Well there were Polish actors, American actors, professionals and some surprises.

DRE:And regular people?

DL:Regular people, yeah.

DRE:What does putting regular people into your movie do for you?

DL:Everybody's an actor and they might be bad, but there's an actor in everybody. So sometimes you meet someone and see that their face would work. If they're right for that thing, then that's what you got to do.

DRE:Would you ever work for a studio again?

DL:Well, I haven't ever worked with a studio, really. But it is like asking, would you ever poke a knife through your chest? Maybe, but I don't think so.

DRE:Are you already doing things for your next project?

DL:No, I've got to do this distribution. But I'm longing for the day to start focusing on catching ideas. Maybe I'll catch them during the distribution thing. I've got some ideas for the next one but a lot more has to come.

DRE:I heard a rumor about more Twin Peaks.

DL:No, somebody asked me about that the other night. I don't know where that rumor is coming from.

DRE:Is there material there for a special edition DVD of The Elephant Man?

DL:I don't think so.

DRE:What do you think about the rise of Eli Roth?

DL:Oh, Eli's my buddy. I haven't talked to him in a long time. Eli is a go-getter and he's smart and a good guy. So everybody's got their own voice but Eli, I guess, is making it happen.

DRE:Do you watch many movies?

DL:No. I don't have time. I've got to work.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pozer on December 07, 2006, 03:42:25 PM
Quote from: modage on December 02, 2006, 11:55:11 PM
so i saw INLAND EMPIRE for the 2nd time tonite, again with Lynch, Dern and Theroux in attendance for a Q&A.  i was lucky enough to be able to ask him a question as well as meet mr. Lynch after the film where he signed my Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive DVD's.  i'll be seeing him introduce Vertigo on monday. 

as far as the film goes...  after the first viewing i felt somewhere between taz and samsong.  or maybe i felt both equally as strong.  it was one of the most incredible theatre experiences of my life on a purely viceral level but as a narrative film it was completely incomprehensible.  i thought anyone who would claim to 'get' the film was completely full of shit.  however on 2nd viewing i realized the first viewing as like taking a puzzle out of the box and spilling it onto the floor.  but the 2nd viewing i started to put the pieces together.  i'm still nowhere near completing it but i have started to make connections. 

more later.
nice.  along with p's review, this has fueled my anticipation.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on December 07, 2006, 04:12:53 PM
Quote from: MacGuffin on December 07, 2006, 11:23:50 AM

DRE:Too many people do that. I asked him if he puts certain things in his movies to tweak the audience and he told me that if he were to do that it would be more like he was tweaking himself. That seems to jibe with what you were saying with just putting something in a film.

DL:Yes, that would be a real false note and I feel like if you're true to the ideas and you work on it until you realize those ideas and they feel correct based on the idea, then they have a chance of feeling correct for others. Even if you're going on a intuitive feel, if you're true to those ideals, sometimes they've got these harmonics, if you dick with them, you might ruin the harmonics. They would be bad things and people would start smelling a rat. You may not even understand those harmonics, but somebody out there might and it's true on that level and it's true on the harmonic levels. So you've got to be real careful.

DRE:Are the harmonics ever not correct?

DL:No, they have to be. If the notes, the chords are correct, the harmonics are going to be correct. But you may not understand the beauty of the harmonics but somebody else might. If you've been true to these notes, they've got a chance to appreciate some other thing. On Eraserhead, I don't remember what it was but I had the feeling that I appreciated some other level of it later, but I wasn't even aware of it when I did it. It's that thing.


my favorite part, and the difference between lynch and a lot of visual wankers. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on December 08, 2006, 08:02:11 PM
the seed has been planted.  there are no words. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: A Matter Of Chance on December 08, 2006, 10:52:48 PM
I saw this tonight at the Brattle. A guy gave out samples of David Lynch coffee before and I didn't get any.  :(


In Louis Buñuel's autobiography he said, "Sometimes, watching a film is like being raped." This was that sometimes, and I loved it. Warrants a second viewing like-whoa.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Reinhold on December 08, 2006, 10:59:59 PM
i left this film completely satisfied. this is easily the best film i've scene since eyes wide shut.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on December 08, 2006, 11:01:02 PM
Quote from: A Matter Of Chance on December 08, 2006, 10:52:48 PM
I saw this tonight at the Brattle. A guy gave out samples of David Lynch coffee before and I didn't get any.  :(


In Louis Buñuel's autobiography he said, "Sometimes, watching a film is like being raped." This was that sometimes, and I loved it. Warrents a second viewing like-whoa.

which showing did you go to?  the 430 one was pretty empty, and we didn't get offered any coffee.  but when i left i checked out the line for the 8 oclock show and it looked pretty packed. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: A Matter Of Chance on December 08, 2006, 11:39:47 PM
Quote from: JG on December 08, 2006, 11:01:02 PM
Quote from: A Matter Of Chance on December 08, 2006, 10:52:48 PM
I saw this tonight at the Brattle. A guy gave out samples of David Lynch coffee before and I didn't get any.  :(


In Louis Buñuel's autobiography he said, "Sometimes, watching a film is like being raped." This was that sometimes, and I loved it. Warrents a second viewing like-whoa.

which showing did you go to?  the 430 one was pretty empty, and we didn't get offered any coffee.  but when i left i checked out the line for the 8 oclock show and it looked pretty packed. 

I went to the 8 o'clock, and I was glad I had tickets in advance. Nice to see another greater-boston-area folk 'round these parts.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Ghostboy on December 09, 2006, 05:39:20 PM
Screw all this waiting. I'm going to see it in New York next week.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on December 10, 2006, 03:23:21 AM
i don't know about film-rape but spelling is definitely getting a good raping up in those first two posts..

Quote from: pozer on December 07, 2006, 03:42:25 PM
nice.  along with p's review, this has fueled my anticipation.
my review fueled my anticipation too! can't wait to actually see it.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on December 12, 2006, 01:13:20 AM
INTERVIEW: DAVID LYNCH & LAURA DERN (INLAND EMPIRE)
Source: CHUD

There are certain things that I would love to have listed on my tombstone. A collection of the eccentric moments in my life that I'm - for better or worse - proud of having experienced. And I'm sure by the time Andre Dellamorte III sits on my lap, my story of having coffee and pie with David Lynch will likely involve me saving his life, or telling him a joke that made coffee and/or pie shoot out his nose.

Alas, such is not the case. I did have pie and coffee with David Lynch, and I'm sure I'll be bragging about that for years to come, but it was because I was invited to attend a junket with David Lynch and Laura Dern at a nearby Marie Callenders, where we were served pie and coffee and got a chance to have a roundtable discussion with one of the few artists who managed to make transcendent work in the 80's, and one of the stars of Jurassic Park. Though that's not exactly fair to Dern, who has been one of the best female actresses going for nearly 25 years, with great performances in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Citizen Ruth. INLAND EMPIRE is their latest collaboration. Lynch is a mad gesticulator, his hands were often in motion when answering questions, and not being able to transcribe those movements is something of a loss.

As David sat down with us someone commented that pie and David Lynch go together

David Lynch: It's the Twin Peaks thing, I guess.

Someone chimed in "I'll take Marie Callendar's over Four Seasons any day."

Lynch: You and me both. (This place) is way more of a restaurant than I thought.

Someone asked if he'd tried the pie yet, as a chocolate cream pie was put at the center of our table.

Lynch: Not yet, not yet. I was thinking about Banana Cream Pie. What are you guys gonna have, you've got Apple pie? Nice. But now you want the chocolate cream.

So what's your favorite pie?

Lynch: Well, I like cherry pie, I like blueberry pie, I like banana cream pie, and I like Dutch Apple pie, I guess those would be the top four.

How is Dutch Apple pie different than regular apple pie?

Lynch: Dutch apple pie has something on top. What is it, cheese? It has that crumbly top. Yeah, yeah yeah, that's it, a real crumbly top. Killer pie, beautiful.

Do you have a least favorite?

Lynch: I don't think I'd be wild about rhubarb

And at this point Laura Dern joins us.

Laura Dern: I love Rhubarb!

Lynch: Really?

Dern: Yeah.

Lynch: Wow.

David said he wanted banana cream.

Dern: Oooh, banana cream! Does that mean we get a piece of pie at every table we go to? Oh, this is fantastic. I should get a coffee.

Lynch: I'm getting a coffee, I think. I think so. (To us) Fire away!

How long were you guys in production on INLAND EMPIRE?

Lynch: Well, production is a weird thing, how long over from the beginning to the end was about three years, but we weren't always shooting every day, you know what I mean? A lot of days we weren't shooting.

(To Dern) So he'd just call you up every once in a while and say "I've got a camera, I've got an idea?"

Dern: Pretty much, right?

Lynch: Yeah. (pause, followed by laughter)

It seemed like there were a lot of different styles in this picture in comparison to some of your other work, handheld type of stuff, did you take a different approach to this project?

Lynch: Yes, because I was shooting DV with a small, lightweight camera. It was so beautiful to me, to be able to hold the camera and float around, and you know, let it move according to what I was feeling or seeing. Whereas before you're behind a massive camera, in front of you is an operator and a focus puller, and you've got a kind of barrier, and if you wanted to move, if you felt a thing, it wasn't possible. Like I say, on the next take you might say "can you drift in on this line a little bit like this," but it may not happen the same way on the next take, so it gives you this ability to really be in there and stay in there, because it 40 minute takes, it's very beautiful.

(To Laura) How different was it for you, having worked with David on previous projects?

Dern: You know, again, I'll almost repeat the same idea. The liberty that comes with working with DV, you're liberated as an actor, in the same way David describes you never miss anything because you're right there. You never miss an opportunity of being in the moment, because suddenly now - not just the performance - but the camera is offering that in the moment opportunity, you can catch anything, and he can hear what the actor - seemingly off camera - is doing and want to capture that and just flip around, and because of the luxury of a 40 minute take if you need it - I mean 40 minutes in the camera - that you can shoot an entire scene without ever stopping and he can get all the coverage he wants and we are staying within the moment of acting out this scene, and not cutting and resetting but in fact even while filming talking to me, because of the luxury of the lack of expense as well, to say let's do it again, okay, go back to this line, let's keep going. And you're just, as an actor, it's an incredible feeling to stay true the mood, the feeling that's going at that given time.

David, could you talk about how this film relates to your other work? Because there seem to be similarities with Mulholland Dr, and we actually saw clips from Rabbits in this film. Is this film an extension or how do you view it?

Lynch: It's different but... similarities, because it deals with - as Mulholland Dr. did - the movie industry. But... And it has, you know, a female lead, um (laughs)

Dern: Thank you (more laughs)

Lynch: You know, and then it kind of takes off and becomes different.

It felt a bit like a collage of some of your previous works, was that intentional?

Lynch: No. Ideas come along, and you pick an idea, and sometimes you catch an idea that you fall in love with, and you see the way cinema could do that. It's a beautiful day when that happens, and the idea tells you everything. Now you - because we had our kind of mechanism, we kind of fall in love with certain kinds of things, but every film is different, and it's based on the ideas that come. And they are the things you try and stay completely true to, and all the elements you try to get to be feeling correct before you walk away, and you go.

So, Laura, with this role, there's so many different levels, so many different performances, various different versions of the same person, how was that working for you?

Dern: You know, more than ever, the day's work was at hand, and what I had. Given that we shot in such a way that we would, David would a write and we would film that, and then he'd write another scene and we'd film that and so on, it forced me - very luxuriously - into the moment. I didn't necessarily know what was coming before or what was coming after, and whether one perceives it that I am different people, or that I am aspects of one person, either way you can really only act one way, which is being the person you are in that moment. So in a way, not knowing everything, and trying to somehow get to what would be logically minded as an actor and try and help the audience understand how this relates to that, etc. I was freed from any of that, by David keeping me in the moment with whatever character I was playing, or whichever aspect of the story I was involved in. And that was extremely freeing, and in a way I think allows for more imagination as an actor, because as much as an actor wants to believe this is just for my own experience, that they are not informing the audience. There can be a pitfall of feeling like "because my character is going to do this five scenes from now, maybe I should give them a little taste of that, so they know that it's coming," but as we see, human nature doesn't work that way. Where people cry in the news when we hear "so and so, who seemed like such a nice guy, did this atrocious thing." And so being forced by the director, if you will, to just be this aspect of what I suppose this is for, I think made me get to be braver by default, not intentionally.

Would you only want to approach a movie with this scene-by-scene approach with David? Is he the only one you'd feel comfortable with?

Dern: Well, I'd rather only work with David, period. (laughs)

Lynch: You're working with me now, but watch what happens next time "Oh, I don't even want to work with Robert." (more laughing)

Dern: They know, we've met many times before when you weren't here. (again, this entire exchange is peppered with laughter)

Lynch: Exactly. It's all baloney! (more laughing, as per last sentence)

Dern: Going back from their lunch. "Can you believe it? Poor David Lynch, he doesn't
realize that Laura has said that so many times today." But I think, for myself, I've watched David do this with many other actors on this movie, but I don't know if I could have done this with many other directors, because, and we've been asked if we have a shorthand, in fact we have a remarkable one. And I'm sure he has it with the other actors he works with, but for me, I have the ability from knowing him since I was seventeen, separate from who he is as a director to me, to intuit what he means, and he can intuit what I'm going to express before it happens. So it's not just what the movie's about, or the character I'm playing, but even as an operator, a cinematographer, I felt like David moved his body and camera just into place just as I was thinking of moving that way. You know there's that thing that happens...

Lynch: Laura actually directed this picture.

Dern: Wonderful.

With that scene by scene approach to filming, did you ever consider releasing it as a series of short films?

Lynch: No. (laughs)

Dern: A set of long films.

Lynch: No. After a while, the scene by scene revealed more. And then I wrote a lot of stuff, and then we went and shot more traditionally. We could shoot for several weeks, and have stuff to shoot, and organized like a regular shooting schedule. But it was just in the beginning that it was scene by scene. And those, were, could have ended up just being that, a scene, separate, by itself, for the internet or whatever. But I didn't know what it was going to be, so I'd shoot a scene, and then I'd get an idea for another scene and shoot that scene, and lo and behold, after a bunch of them, a thing came out.

Your working process on this was different

Lynch: A little different.

So, with the freedom of digital video, do you see yourself making movies more in line with this, or this kind of process?

Lynch: Not this process, but with digital video. And I think, maybe, I would, it would be nice to have a script written up front, but it just didn't happen this time.

Dern: But, as he said, there were chunks of the film that surfaced, that you wrote. Towards the end, I mean, we shot for a month.

Lynch: It all starts coming more and more and more.

Dern: But we shot for like, four or five weeks solid at one point, almost like a traditional movie.

So it was all linear?

Lynch: Totally linear. It's a straight ahead linear thing. (laughter) No, it wasn't all linear, but there were a lot of scenes that were there, some could have been back in time, some could have been here, and then a chunk right now, like that.

Laura, when you were shooting the opening sequence with the creepy old woman (played by Grace Zabrinski), was it as creepy to shoot as it was to do it?

Dern: Well she is the nicest, loveliest lady, but having met her on Wild at Heart, I'm just damned terrified of her every time I see her. I can't get over who she has been made out to be by David when I see her. It's the beauty of working with David, is that you are - speaking of being in the moment - you are there in the moment, you may have a sense that something is disturbing, or a sense that something is funny, but when you're in it you're just trying to make it as authentic as it is, and then when you reflect back, or when you see it as an audience something that even seemed straight while you're shooting it to me is just hysterical. I pretty much think he's the best comedy director going, you know other people don't see it that way.

Lynch: Laura is seeing a psychiatrist.

Dern: Hilarious. Her speech is hilarious, but I was doing it she was terrifying, so I don't know why it worked out that way because I wasn't sitting across from her.

The last question call is given

Lynch: Whoa that was quick, how can we possibly get into this?

I have to ask, is Twin Peaks ever going to be released on DVD?

Lynch: For sure it is.

We're still waiting for Season Two.

Lynch: Yeah, it's coming out, I think next spring. I think so.

What about Lost Highway?

Lynch: It's all color corrected, timed, high def masters ready, it's, I think Universal owns it now, and Lost Highway did not make a lot of money at the box office, so they probably have it way low on some list for DVD, I don't know when they'll get to it, I haven't heard a thing. You're going to have to write to Universal.

INLAND EMPIRE is already open in New York and Boston, and opens in LA on Friday the 15th.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Ghostboy on December 14, 2006, 10:48:18 PM
I'm seeing it at 1:55 on Saturday. I can't wait.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Just Withnail on December 15, 2006, 06:03:59 AM
Quote from: Ghostboy on December 14, 2006, 10:48:18 PM
I can't wait.

Norwegians will have to :(
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Ghostboy on December 16, 2006, 08:59:49 PM
Quote from: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 01:07:25 PM
Modage will hate this.
I will dismiss it, even as I admire parts of it.


So it turns out that I was wrong not just on the first count, but also the second.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on December 16, 2006, 11:33:33 PM
hah, i love the anti-reviews so far for this movie.  are you in NYC? 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Ghostboy on December 16, 2006, 11:41:53 PM
Yeah, and I think I might be free tomorrow evening. I was gonna send you a PM here in a bit...
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: samsong on December 17, 2006, 07:45:09 PM
thanks guys.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on December 17, 2006, 07:46:53 PM
arent you back in Cali yet?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on December 17, 2006, 07:47:45 PM
if i haven't made this clear yet this movie is so amazing. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on December 17, 2006, 09:10:46 PM
 :shock:

Unlike any other Lynch film.


Quote from: modage on December 02, 2006, 11:55:11 PMit was one of the most incredible theatre experiences of my life on a purely viceral level but as a narrative film it was completely incomprehensible.  i thought anyone who would claim to 'get' the film was completely full of shit.  however on 2nd viewing i realized the first viewing as like taking a puzzle out of the box and spilling it onto the floor.  but the 2nd viewing i started to put the pieces together.  i'm still nowhere near completing it but i have started to make connections.

Kinda with mod. It was like a puzzle with all the pieces laid out, and just because you're paying attention and recognize the pieces and the call-backs to those pieces, you do need another viewing, which I will do, to put 'em together for the whole, and maybe even then...  :yabbse-undecided:  But this was in an entirely different way than, say, Mulholland Drive was a mystery puzzle.


Who knew dancing prostitutes could look so poetic?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on December 18, 2006, 11:29:42 AM
Yes, That's David Lynch
The highly regarded director has always been considered eccentric. Now he's getting mad
By REBECCA WINTERS KEEGAN; Time Magazine

A cult movie director and a cow wait placidly on a busy Los Angeles street corner on a sunny autumn day. A giant image of Laura Dern's face printed with the words FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION looms beside them. The director delivers an encomium on cheese. The scene is surreal enough to be from a David Lynch movie, and it is, a two-minute film that has been downloaded more than 50,000 times on YouTube since it was posted Nov. 9. The director of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks didn't direct this one; a couple of guys named Nate and Matt recorded Lynch's street-corner Oscar campaign for Dern's performance in his new film, Inland Empire. But Empire is only marginally less homespun, and although it's not on YouTube, the director is distributing it himself.

Empire, Lynch says, is "about a woman in trouble." But even by the standards applied to Lynch's films, which exist in their own genre of weird, Empire is a doozy. It's three hours long, with no real plot, but rather a Greek chorus of Valley Girls cum crack whores, scenes of rabbits watching TV and Dern playing three different characters. At least three; Dern's not sure. "Once David said there were four, and I was like, Wait a minute--what?" she says.

The Empire endeavor began more than three years ago when Lynch started noodling with a Sony PD150 camera, which costs less than $3,000. "It's little, and they tell me it's bad quality," says Lynch. "I started shooting experiments with it and kind of loved the quality. It reminded me of early 35 mm. When there isn't a lot of information in a frame, it leaves a person room to dream."

Dreams and consciousness streams are the stuff of which Lynch films are made. A script? Not so much. Because he's considered an auteur, Lynch was able to convene a cast, including Jeremy Irons and Harry Dean Stanton, before he wrote Empire. "I'd get an idea for a scene, write the scene, gather people together and shoot that scene," says Lynch. "I didn't know if the second scene would relate to the first or the third." This is where Lynch's decades-long commitment to transcendental meditation--which he documents in a new book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity--came in handy. "Since I believe in the unified field, which unites everything, I figured some day I would understand that they do relate," he says.

Lynch may understand it. Audiences may not. That hasn't stopped his earlier films from gaining a following of people who spend an awful lot of time trying. Many critics considered his last movie, 2001's Mulholland Dr., released by Universal Pictures, a huge creative achievement, but it made a forgettable $20 million in theaters. By forgoing a distributor this time, Lynch gets to skip the awkward step where he turns over control of his vision to those linear folks, studio marketers. "People seeing the film together on a big screen in a dark room with really good sound is really important to me," says Lynch, who released his first film, Eraserhead, himself in 1977. "But any film like mine that's not seen as a summer blockbuster is getting harder to get into the theaters. It's so depressing."

It's not that Lynch couldn't get a distributor. "He has a great, twisted psyche that always gets some sort of primal response from people," says Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures, an indie company that "had some interest" in distributing Empire but never made the deal. It's that the do-it-yourself ethic that attracted Lynch to the Sony PD150 seemed suited to an experiment in distribution as well. Self-distribution is "very brave," says Dern. "But it doesn't make it easier. Nothing about this is traditional."

Lynch is embarking on an eight-city promotional road tour of the U.S. later this month. When he first started thinking about the costs of self-distribution, he was told of a $2.8 million Oscar publicity campaign for an actress in another current movie, recalls Dern. "He went insane," she says, beginning to imitate Lynch's clipped Midwestern accent. "'People are starving! That's disgusting. I could go stand on a street corner and talk about my actors!' As soon as I heard 'I could stand on a street corner,' I thought, Oh, no." Perhaps because there aren't actually any cows in Inland Empire, Dern didn't anticipate the bovine prop, however. "The Academy members love show business," explains Lynch. "And this is show business, being out with the cow."

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Lunch With Lynch
The director unravels the meaning of his new movie, 'Inland Empire.' Ha ha. Not really.
Source: LA City Beat

"That is such a nice-looking bird ... but I think it only has one eye."

What? I am sitting across an outdoor table from David Lynch, pretending to eat lunch, but really studying my notes furiously, trying to think of my next question. He was just explaining the advantages of serial television as a form, when suddenly ... .

"Right there, Andy," he says, nodding.

I look: A blackish bird has perched on my jacket, which is slung over a nearby chair. I'm facing the side that has an eye: All I perceive is a bird. I crane around to try to see its other side, but I spook it and it flies to another table. Once again, the observer has affected the observed.

"Yeah, only one eye," he continues. "Now it's going over to eat that food. That's Jay's food ... ."

Who's Jay? He must be within view and gesturing, because Lynch continues, "Oh, that's not your food, Jay? Is that bird gonna eat that food? Is that Laura's food? Keep an eye on that bird." He turns back to me. "OK, sorry."

What the hell were we talking about? Oh, yeah, the advantages of working on something continuous, with no planned end.

Welcome to Lunch with Lynch.

This is the third time I've interviewed Lynch, but the first time in person. It's hard to believe that the man once billed as "The Boy Next Door (from Mars)" is 60 and gray, particularly since he still seems, well, boyish. We're sitting outside – the director likes to be able to have a smoke – at a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard. So we have to pause as fire sirens head west and police sirens head east. It's ... interesting.

It may or may not say something telling about the filmmaker that he focused completely in on something – a one-eyed bird – that my gaze had passed over and automatically filtered out. It may be that he does less mental filtering or simply a different kind of filtering than me ... or most of us. Or maybe it's just that, from my seat, the bird's most striking feature, its missing eye, wasn't visible.

It is, in a crude way, analogous to the issues in viewing his new film, Inland Empire, and to the reason we're there. Early critical reaction to Inland Empire has been strongly divided – Rottentomatoes.com lists 53 percent positive, for what it's worth – between those who can't make heads or tails of it and hate it ... and those who can't make heads or tails of it but are swept away enough not to care. Somewhere, on the side, may be a very few who do have a better sense of what's going on and love it. I, by nature, would like to be one of those few.

Some of us see a beautiful one-eyed bird; others, just another bird not worth pausing over. I worry for Inland Empire: It's three hours long, with no clear story, and both times I've seen it, sitting there absorbed, other people walked out partway through. I'm trying to get Lynch to invite us over to his side of the table, if only for a tiny bit, to get a perspective that will make us go, "Wow! A one-eyed bird. How beautiful."

Outlandish 'Inland'

Even those who don't respond to Inland Empire will admit that, for better or worse, it's not like anything else, including Lynch's other movies. Of his nine previous features and his most famous work, the TV series Twin Peaks, three – The Elephant Man, Dune, and The Straight Story – can be considered outliers: They all have recognizably Lynchean moments, but they're from other people's screenplays. When most fans think of Lynch, they think of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Dr. – as beautiful and baffling and idiosyncratic a film- ography as any in cinema history.

Yet Inland Empire – though unmistakably Lynch in nearly every shot – is unlike all but the first of those, and even Eraserhead was more viewer-friendly in both narrative and length (almost exactly half of Inland Empire's three hours).

The only other movie it even begins to remind me of is Jacques Rivette's wonderful 1974 Celine and Julie Go Boating, which plays similar tricks with reality. Rivette's film is even longer, but it's also more playful and humorous. Lynch movies are always on an edge between horror and comedy, but Inland Empire – like Fire Walk With Me – runs out of humor a third of the way through.

It would be futile to try to describe the "plot" of Inland Empire. The best one can do is to relate the first few images and ? scenes and then a very general notion of the whole.

Big rumbling sound. Projector light cuts through darkness to the main title card. A distorted closeup of what appears to be an old record-cutting device. Scratchy audio: "The longest running radio play in history ... A gray winter day in a Baltic hotel." We hear people speaking Polish; there are English subtitles. Some abstract noise. Two Poles, their faces electronically smudged, as if to protect their identities, have sex.

We see a woman sitting in a dark room, crying while watching TV. Maybe she's been watching the previous scene; maybe it's from a Polish movie. As though it's a tape being fast-forwarded or rewound, the TV she's looking at whips through an image of Lynch regular Grace Zabriskie walking through a park (or something) and then of a show cast entirely with giant rabbits. Then we see the show, which is called Rabbits and appears to be a lapine sitcom written by Samuel Beckett, where the canned laughter responds randomly to things that aren't even vaguely funny.

Papa Rabbit goes out the door into a huge, ornately appointed room, before fading away. Two Polish thugs appear in the room and have a conversation.

OK: We're nine minutes into the film, and we've had Baltic radio, Polish sex, Crying Woman, Everyone Loves Rabbits, and Polish thugs. Now we're ready for the central thread of the "story."

Laura Dern appears to be playing Nikki Grace, an actress hoping for a comeback in a new film with the unlikely title On High in Blue Tomorrows. (Lynch tells me it just "popped into his head." Only later do I wonder if his unconscious was referencing the title Hot Tomorrows, the feature Martin Brest was shooting at AFI at the same time Lynch was there making Eraserhead.)

The film, directed by one Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons), is an adultery melodrama, with Nikki and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) as the secret lovers, Sue Blue and Billy Side. But, on the first day of rehearsal, Stewart reveals that his assistant/sidekick, Freddie (a wonderful Harry Dean Stanton, providing most of the movie's humor), has learned that the production may be jinxed: It's a remake of a Polish movie that was never completed ... because the two leads were murdered.

Was the sex scene at the very beginning an excerpt from the Polish film? Was it actually a private assignation between the two stars of that film, leading to their deaths? What is or isn't part of a film here? And who the hell is the crying woman?

Pretty soon, Nikki walks into the set for her character's house, then turns around to see the real world outside the house. (Twilight Zone fanatics might dub this maneuver a Reverse Duff, cf. "A World of Difference," March 11, 1960.)

Is Nikki turning into Sue? Are Nikki and Devon reliving the affair of Sue and Billy? Or of the late actors who played them in the first version? Is Nikki real at all? Maybe Sue is simply fantasizing that she's a famous actress playing the part of a working-class housewife. Is Nikki's psyche fracturing? Not unlike, by that point, my own?

Your guess is as good as mine ... even as good as Lynch's, in his estimation. He is famous for refusing to discuss either his intent or his own reading of his films. I remind him that the last time I interviewed him, I managed to get him to at least sign on to the notion that, yes, the first two-thirds of Mulholland Dr. are a dream or fantasy or nightmare.

"I don't know that I ever said that to you, Andy, but – "

"Well, I stated it that way, and you seemed to be OK with that."

"When people come up with something, I always say it's valid, you know, and so, I could have said, 'That's completely valid.'"

"But do you have a specific reading of a film in your mind, even if you don't think it's the only reading?"

"It's like this. At a certain point, you know exactly what it means for you ... . If you don't know what it means, then you have to think about it more to ... put the final pieces together. It's happened to me on lots of films, starting with Eraserhead, I didn't know what this thing meant. I was building it, but I didn't know what it all meant, and I was just going nuts. And I start reading the Bible. And I come upon this line, and I said, 'That is it.' And it described the whole thing to me."

I chuckle to signal that I understand the futility of my next question but that it's my job to ask it anyway: "What line was that?"

"I bet you were gonna ask that," he says.

"Is this a question you decline to answer, or ... ?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it doesn't matter. It would putrify the experience for other people. You work on a film so hard, to get it to feel correct as a whole ... and then it's done. You don't want to talk about it. It's cinema! Why break it down and try to put it into words? It's the language of cinema. It exists that way, for a reason: there it is. It's on its own. It shouldn't be taken away from or added to."

"OK, but the 'you' there is you, as a filmmaker. Those of us on the outside will inevitably try to figure it out."

"See, that's good! Because ... it's figurable. It's figurable. Everything is figurable, but everyone's interpretation is valid and good. And some people with a gift with words can see something and turn it into words and give that to people."

I try a different tack. I tell him that, when Blue Velvet came out, I thought it was so amazingly layered and woven that he had to have constructed it all with mathematical precision, in a totally intellectual process. He always denies that, and for a long time I didn't believe him – directors are, in general, prone to spinning their own personal mythology – and it took me a while to realize that maybe he isn't joshing us.

"I'm not."

Just about then, the waitress comes with a menu for me – Lynch had a head start on his meal – and, worried about the limited time scheduled for the interview, I try to quickly find something to order.

"Take yer time," Lynch says. "Gotta pick a winner."

Hot Digital!

The interruption turns out to be briefly helpful, because it enables me to remember just what I was trying to get at – that people really needed some kind of hook, an entry point, to approach Inland Empire, in the manner of the 10 clues Lynch prepared for the publicity on Mulholland Dr.; they didn't give anything away, and they didn't lock down a particular reading, but they did ease people's access. And Mulholland Dr. is straight-ahead linear compared to Inland Empire.

When I lay that out, Lynch responds by pulling out a sheet of paper. "I've got to show you something. It's in Italian, but this lady Alessandra gave me this; it was sent to her this morning. This is a flow chart of the film, but it's in Italian. So I don't know what it is. This guy saw it in Venice."

It's beautiful in its clarity and the precision of its layout. It shows four rectangular areas, with neatly drawn lines in the margins, connecting or buffering them. Everything is labeled ... unfortunately in Italian. The four rectangles must represent the four major worlds in the movie – Hollywood, the world within On High in Blue Tomorrows, the world within the Polish version, and the reality of the ill-fated Polish actors. And the lines, they would signify the time scheme ... unless the four rectangles are the four fragments of Nikki's psyche and the lines are ... .

"They did the same thing on Twin Peaks, mapping the flow of it all. Not this same person, I don't think, but some people did. Isn't it beautifully done?"

While I'm admiring it, I try to remember, once again, just what I had been getting at.

Lynch can have that effect. It's like classic stage magic – misdirection.

I bring up a specific interpretive example: In Lost Highway, the protagonist, Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), mysteriously transforms into Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). I've always wondered whether the fact that both characters are named after cities was jokingly deliberate or just happened.

Lynch laughs. "That just happened. But there's something to it. One time a group of psychoanalysts each wrote a quite long paper on Blue Velvet. And [protagonist] Jeffrey's last name, Beaumont, was translated and figured into their analysis. But these things just come along. Who knows how? But it's one of those things that ... . Wow, look at that nice grater. Beautiful salad."

Yes: My lunch had arrived.

Lynch shot Inland Empire entirely with a digital video camera, and not a particularly high-end model. He felt so liberated by this shift that he has publicly vowed never to work with celluloid again. I suggest that the means inevitably will affect the aesthetics, which he denies. "Technology played a part for sure, but it doesn't have anything to do with ideas. It has to do with the way the ideas are executed, but only in terms of ease and speed and the ability to stay in a scene longer and get deeper. You can have a smaller crew and not have to go to the lab and wait for a day to see dailies, things like that. It would be the same film, basically, on film."

Even more than usual, this one seems to have developed accidentally. "About three and a half years ago," Laura Dern tells me earlier in the day, "David called me up and said, 'Let's experiment.' He wrote a 15-page monologue, which we shot. That was the first thing we shot. He was playing around with this Sony PD150 camera, and I knew he was very interested in experimenting with digital.

"The process continued organically from that," she adds. "It wasn't really a decision he made. He'd write a scene, and then we'd shoot that, and then write another scene and then we'd shoot that, and we kind of kept going like that through the course of these years together. After maybe the first six times, the movie clicked for him. And then he knew he was making this film. But instead of stopping and writing a screenplay and giving it to me, we just kept shooting as we went along."

That first monologue – 15 single-spaced pages, Lynch later tells me – remains central to the film, broken up into five segments. But some of the material even predates that. The scenes with the rabbits were originally shot for Lynch's pay-website, Davidlynch.com, without any thought of becoming part of a longer work. "Early in the shooting with Laura," he says, "I knew that it was gonna go in, and so I took the series off the site and just saved it for the film."

It was obviously not a full-time preoccupation for three years. Dern went off to make We Don't Live Here Anymore and some other projects. "I always thought this might turn into a feature, but not for sure," she says. "At the beginning, I didn't know if it would be something for his website or if he was really just experimenting with the camera or if he would find his way to a movie. But, within a couple months I could see the fire lit in David, and I knew he was on the course of a film."

Dern had previously worked with Lynch on Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, but this was a significantly different process, much looser in some, but not all, ways. "For someone who paints a very abstract picture," Dern says, "he's a very specific director. Improvisation was not really part of it, although he lets you go to the furthest place you can go – just not with the dialogue, which is quite specific. He would give us the scenes the day before, but there was no full script. He keeps creating as he goes. Ideas keep brewing every second. You know, you're doing a seemingly simple scene of you and I sitting here talking, and the next thing you know there's a lumberjack standing behind you, and there's a monkey at the next table, and that's all from a new idea he had 15 minutes ago."

Empirical Analysis

In a sense, Lynch has faith in coincidence or cosmic direction or subconscious wisdom to make things come together. "Before I saw the final product, David asked me to write down what I thought the film was about," Dern says. "Afterwards, he had me read what I had written, and it was very true to the film. What was interesting was that I knew more along the way than I ever realized, just through the feelings. Not from any explicit description."

Still, working without a script and without any overview of where the story is going must be hell for the actors. Lynch had them jump off a roof, performance-wise, with him the only net. Surely they asked, "Come on, can't you give us a little more of a clue where we're going?"

"If I knew, I would probably tell them," Lynch says. "But sometimes I didn't know. We just had this scene, and we had to make it feel correct, make it honest, make it real. And that's what we had to focus on. Sometimes it helped to talk about some things that had gone before. But making this one real is what you're focused on – which is the way it is, even if you have the whole script. The example is: You're Andy today, you're being Andy all day long, and you don't know what tomorrow is. But, whatever it is, you'll be Andy going through it, and if you're true to Andy today, it'll work. There'll be continuity."

I wish I were that sure.

In terms of acting, this is Dern's movie all the way, even more than Mulholland Dr. belonged to Naomi Watts (whose performance, however, remains one of the most amazing in recent years). It occurs to me that this is Lynch's second major project in a row that's really centered on women – not the case in any of his earlier films. I couldn't help but wonder if this reflected some change, some event, in his life.

"No. Not one little bit," he says. "It's like ... OK ... like you're a chef. And you've been serving trout, and suddenly you start serving salmon. It just means that's what you caught, and so you try to cook it and serve it as well as you can, and bring out that flavor. But the only difference is that you caught a salmon this time."

Like several of its predecessors, Inland Empire is its own world. But it's a world either vastly more complex or simply chaotic – two states that are not always easy to distinguish in our real world. If there is a degree of complexity that lies beyond the limits of our mental equipment, it will appear to be chaos.

I still don't know which state better describes Inland Empire. I still don't get it in the way I'd like to: i.e., I can't, let's say, put it together or find a master pattern beneath its many scary and/or baffling scenes. And my lunch with Lynch shined light on everything except the sort of specific guidance I was looking for. Still, maybe little bits of that light will come together and illuminate just a few answers.

I do know that I enjoyed the movie more the second time through – always a good sign. And that I've regretted early dismissals of some Lynch films, most particularly Fire Walk with Me, much as I have with Stanley Kubrick's and Alain Resnais's. Inland Empire is a pretty vast place, and it's hard to fully survey in one, or even two, viewings.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: samsong on December 18, 2006, 12:21:15 PM
Quote from: modage on December 17, 2006, 07:46:53 PM
arent you back in Cali yet?
nope.  i have to fail a psych exam tomorrow night first.  i leave wednesday.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on December 19, 2006, 10:27:23 AM
Director Lynch produces film that puzzles critics

David Lynch is not like other directors. Critics say his films make no sense and even he admits they are difficult.

But he also adds to his air of mystery by doing things like taking a cow for a walk on a busy Los Angeles intersection or deciding to become a coffee merchant so moviegoers can drink his coffee while watching his films.

Lynch says he walked the cow on a leash because everyone likes a cow. When a young woman the other day asked the cow's handler if she could pet it, he said, "No, the cow's working."

So the woman wound up talking to Lynch and suppressing an urge to pat his hair which seems to shoot straight up from his temple, another item that separates him from others.

The director, whose works include "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Drive, is walking cows, carrying posters for actress Laura Dern and holding court in a pie shop these days -- in aid of promoting his latest work, a three-hour film called "Inland Empire," which he is slowly distributing across the country himself.

Critics have hailed Dern's performance although they are not quite sure who she is playing or what character she is at any given moment. There are about three to choose from.

But that's OK. Critics are also not sure what "Inland Empire" is about although they say it is a perfect fit for Lynch, one of Hollywood's favorite cult directors thanks to surrealistic works like "Twin Peaks" and "Mulholland Drive" that are replete with menacing images and confusions.

New York Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote recently: "There are, in the movies, few places creepier to spend time than in David Lynch's head. It is a head where the wild things grow, twisting and spreading like vines, like fingers, and taking us in their captive embrace."

TALKING RABBITS

And certainly that holds for "Inland Empire," which starts off telling a story about an elegant blond actress in a big mansion who is starting a new movie that is cursed. Soon she and the role merge and the story ostensibly set in a desert area east of Los Angeles winds up on the snow-filled streets of Lodz, Poland, and then among the homeless on Hollywood Boulevard where the actress seeks refuge.

Every building, street and room in the film turns menacing and to make things more complicated there is a family of rabbits dressed as people. Every time the rabbits speak, there is canned laughter. What the rabbits are doing in the movie is a mystery that Lynch can answer but doesn't want to.

In a recent interview, the 60-year-old director said he understood the film but added it was not an easy task for viewers.

"I did not start from a script. I wrote and shot one scene and then another. I would not see how one scene fits into another but after a while I did.

"This is not an improvisation in which you get together with actors and the crew and bat about ideas. I don't do that. I write out the dialogue, the mood and feel of things and I shoot the scene."

OK, but what about the rabbits?

"In the rabbit scene there is an idea and that tells you that the room is kind of green-blue and that it has a couch and a radiator and a transom," Lynch said, trying to explain an image in the movie that has many critics baffled.

But when pressed as to what the rabbits mean symbolically, Lynch avoids a direct answer. He is a man who will explain his work, but only so far.

"I don't talk about those kind of things. There is something about it that feels correct to me, so correct that it makes me feel happy, even though they are abstract things, they figure into the story very much to me and that's it."

As far as Lynch is concerned, he wants his viewers to feel his films, not understand them in a concrete way.

"It is not an intellectual thing. I am an intuitive filmmaker. You go by intuition. You let the idea talk."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on December 19, 2006, 10:44:44 AM
Quote from: MacGuffin on December 19, 2006, 10:27:23 AM
But when pressed as to what the rabbits mean symbolically, Lynch avoids a direct answer.
i would give all these jerks a direct punch in the throat.

they must think that if they keep badgering him he'll give them what they want. are they 5 years old? will they feel superior if lynch tells them what everything means in plain english? the answer he gives them is empowering! and they don't care, they even have to be told that it's alright to think for themselves. how insecure are these ppl, how bereft of ideas.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on December 19, 2006, 11:22:00 AM
yeah i really just love him.  and i love that its not supposed to be unintelligible.  when we met him, we told him that the first time we had no idea what was going on but the 2nd time more of the pieces definitely started to come together and he seemed to really like that.  he said a few more viewings and we'd have it all figured out, i said "maybe 10!" and he was like "oh, i don't think that many".  he's not purposefully sticking to the fringes, he just wants to give people a little credit. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: TheVoiceOfNick on December 19, 2006, 12:02:06 PM
On Sunday night I saw David Lynch's new film, Inland Empire, which he is self distributing around the country. David Lynch is one of my favorite directors, not because he's the most accessible filmmaker, but because he has such a unique style and his ideas are so bizarre. Although I love mainstream movies, I need films like Lynch's to balance that love. I can't satisfy that balance with most indie movies, as these days even indie Laemmle-type movies are full of formulaic stories and structure that would make Hollywood proud, if only they had more mass appeal. So Lynch works outside the system, in both his style and his production (he's financed by Studio Canal, not Paramount).

Anyways, Inland Empire. This was one wierd movie. I enjoyed it a lot, but I don't quite understand it. This is what Lynch was going for. Let's just say, if you were confused after watching Mulholland Drive, expect to be at least 10 times as confused after watching this movie. It deals with multiple stories, characters with multiple identities within the various stories, and yes, people dressed in bunny suits who get canned laughter responses from an unseen audience after they speak a line.

Lynch breaks the fourth wall several times by poking fun at the fact that the audience doesn't know what the hell is going on. At one point, Laura Dern mentions that this whole thing is a "mind fuck"... was she refering to her situation, or our viewing experience?

If you're looking to see a truly original but bizarre movie, go see this. If you prefer Michael Bay and chick flicks, pass on this. It's also worth noting that there are some very frightning situations, so if you're easily startled or hate scary movies, pass on this as well.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pozer on December 19, 2006, 12:08:27 PM
1st of all it's INLAND EMPIRE and 2nd http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=7606.new#new
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: TheVoiceOfNick on December 19, 2006, 12:14:14 PM
OK, thanks for the not so gentle nudge.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: TheVoiceOfNick on December 19, 2006, 01:01:05 PM
I tried searching but nothing came up.  Maybe I searched in the wrong search area?

What kind of things have changed?  I don't remember someone being so meanly confronted when posting something that was already posted.  They were kindly redirected to the thread, and the thread was locked.  No attitude.  I came back to talk about Inland Empire (or INLAND EMPIRE, sorry), and I'm rudely confronted. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on December 19, 2006, 02:14:58 PM
Quote from: TheVoiceOfNick on December 19, 2006, 01:01:05 PMMaybe I searched in the wrong search area?

You mean the area that's not the David Lynch forum?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on December 20, 2006, 11:32:08 AM
Beyond the Multiplex
David Lynch discusses his film "Inland Empire," his new signature coffee blend, and why movies should make you dream.
By Andrew O'Hehir; Salon.com

David Lynch should come with a personal Surgeon General's warning: If you're the right kind of ex-smoker with a vaguely bohemian past, hanging out with him can make you furiously want to light up.

I avoided smoking when I met Lynch the other day in a freezing artists' loft overlooking the West Side Highway in New York, but the Lynchian mood of total enthusiasm and commitment, saturated in caffeine and nicotine, was contagious in other ways. At age 60, Lynch is a long way from being the enfant terrible of American film. His hair has gone completely white and his face is seamed. He looks and sounds like the eccentric, charismatic art or drama teacher at a Middle American high school (Lynch grew up in Missoula, Mont.), the one the oddball kids flock to. He was dressed like an undertaker, in a starched white shirt buttoned to the neck and a black coat that reached his knees.

The man who made "Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet" and "The Straight Story" and a notorious, doomed version of "Dune" has been through Hollywood and come out the other side, more of an outsider now than he's ever been. After making the international cult hit "Mulholland Drive" in 2001, he could easily have gone back to a major or "mini-major" studio and commanded an eight-digit production budget. Instead, he spent almost four years with Laura Dern, a large supporting cast and an off-the-shelf digital video camera (the Sony PD-150, for you equipment mavens), making up a movie as he went along.

By Lynch's own account, he began writing and shooting scenes without knowing how or even whether they were connected, and only late in the process began to stick them together into something resembling a narrative. And the resemblance, one has to say, is pretty vague. The resulting movie is called "Inland Empire," although I don't think any of it takes place in the suburban desert valleys of southeastern California that bear that name. It might be about a Hollywood actress named Nikki (Dern), married to a rich but sinister Polish aristocrat, whose comeback project turns out to be a film haunted by a Gypsy curse, and who suffers a psychotic breakdown (or, if you prefer, travels through a portal into an alternate reality or two).

Trying to force Lynch's films into some unitary interpretive structure has rarely been helpful, and it's even less so here. No plot summary can capture all the salient elements of "Inland Empire" -- the hopscotching from Los Angeles to the snowbound city of Lodz in Poland; the cryptic fragments of thriller; the interpolations from "Rabbits," Lynch's Dada-style Internet serial; the eerie dance number featuring a bunch of Hollywood Boulevard hookers performing the Locomotion. More than anything else, "Inland Empire" is about its own haunting auditory and visual experience; in her marvelously written review, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis argues that it's best understood as a series of crumbling, glorious interior spaces, the kinds of locations Lynch has always employed to powerful and mysterious effect.

I'm on record as expressing exhaustion and frustration -- as well as fascination -- with "Inland Empire" after seeing it at the New York Film Festival, and there's no need to repeat all that. Talking to Lynch (and also to Dern and costar Justin Theroux) reminded me that no single viewer's response is sufficient or explanatory when it comes to a movie like this. Lynch is trying to push beyond the boundaries of 99 percent of contemporary cinema, trying to reinvent, or at least re-access, the revolutionary cinema of his idols Bergman and Fellini. While I remain skeptical that there's much of an audience in 2006 for a film this deliberately abstruse, there can be no doubt about the nobility of the effort.

Lynch's company will be distributing "Inland Empire" entirely on its own, without help from any major studio or indie distributor. When I met him, Lynch had just flown in from a promotional screening in Boston, and had only a few minutes to talk to me before heading for another at Manhattan's IFC Center. One of his assistants told me that setting up a traditional media junket at a midtown Manhattan hotel would have cost $50,000, so instead reporters met Lynch, Dern and Theroux in a donated, and apparently unheated, arts space on 11th Avenue.

The experience was not unlike a scene in "Inland Empire" itself. You entered through an unmarked red door on the wind-blasted avenue, and ascended a long, dim and steep staircase with portable closet lights strung along the floor. I sat down with Lynch in a stark but cheerful studio space, hung with abstract paintings in bright primary colors. It was a perfect setting, not ironic in the slightest.

Himself a former painter, David Lynch is an artist to his bones, and his core audience will always be the art-school types, the film geeks, the true believers. But Lynch has an artist's purity and optimism, and perhaps naiveté as well. James Joyce apparently believed that ordinary, bourgeois 20th-century readers would intuitively understand the stream-of-unconsciousness narrative of "Finnegans Wake," a book long since abandoned to the academic priesthood. Lynch talks in similar terms about the ponytailed 14-year-olds he hopes will flock to see "Inland Empire."

If there still are ponytailed teenagers in Middle America, outside the patented small towns of Lynch's imagination, no less likely audience for this film can be imagined. On the other hand, if he can get them sufficiently stoked on his David Lynch Signature Cup coffee blend -- as I told him, this is by far the most marketable idea he's ever had -- then anything is possible.

So, David, you've got this new film, "Inland Empire," and you're basically putting out the darn thing yourself. Most of the time when somebody makes a movie and we get to see it, either a big company in Los Angeles puts it out or a small company in New York puts it out. You don't have either of those.

No. I've done that before. Any one of those companies has a team -- one person does this thing, one person does that thing. So I have a team; it's just not at a studio.

And it's a lot smaller. Can your team really do all the things you need to do, to get people to come see your movie?

You know, money is great. But there are things that can be done these days without spending a bunch of money. A lot of it's tied to the Internet. Distribution is changing. The people at distribution companies are human beings. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they don't. There's no real experts. There's no studio head that always picks a winner. So the bottom line is, in the past I've gotten advances and never seen anything beyond the advance. [Long pause.] There's, um, no guarantee I see anything this way either. [Laughter.] But at least it'll be my fault. I think it's the way things are going. Advances are going down for films. There's no big payoff anymore. This has already all happened in the music business, and now it's starting in films. It's better to go this way.

And you're all set to put out the film on DVD when the time comes?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I'm just guessing you have a lot of great extra stuff for the DVD.

People love extra stuff. And this is a heartache to me. Because the film is the thing! But the film isn't the thing [on DVD]. I mean, it is the thing, but people want Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Do you know what I mean?

That's interesting. I do sometimes feel like the film itself recedes into the background on DVD. People get so interested in the back story, the peripheral stuff. You know, if you want to watch "Citizen Kane," watch "Citizen Kane"!

Yeah. Beginning, middle and end. At least once. And then get going on the extras.

OK, let's try to talk about your movie. I know you have your reasons for not discussing things like intention or meaning. But you're asking people to go see a three-hour film by David Lynch. So what can you tell them? What's it about?

A woman in trouble.

Right. Well, that's short and pithy. What else can we say about it? That woman is played by Laura Dern, who's playing, I don't know, either three different characters or one character split up three ways. It takes place in a lot of different settings, in California, in Poland, maybe other places. It's partly set in the film industry, and it feels partly like a commentary on the film industry.

[Lynch smiles but doesn't respond.]

Well, look. With or without your help, you know people are going to devote tremendous energy to figuring it out and piecing it all together. On Salon, there was a ferocious discussion about "Mulholland Drive" between our readers and a couple of writers, trading theories and trying to figure out what was going on in that movie. Are you OK with that kind of thing?

Absolutely! You know, people -- we're all detectives. We all have intuition. We're all sensing more than what meets the eye, deciphering things, figuring things out. So beautiful for the human being. It's part of it, it's part of us. Some films can be great, they're entertaining, you love 'em, but that's it. You're on to the next thing. And others, you can roll 'em around, you can think about them, live with them. And if you like that world that you get to go into, that's a beautiful thing. You can visit that world again, and go in and, in a way, get lost, like Chet Baker -- "Let's Get Lost." You get lost in a dream, and there's indications of things, that you can put it all together. It's all there.

OK, that's a good, cryptic David Lynch answer. I'll run with that.

OK. [Laughter.] That was completely straight-ahead, man.

I've heard you say before that you personally like to experience movies that are like dreams.

Well, that have room to dream. That get you going on what you could say was a dream.

So what movies have done that for you, in your life?

Well, like, Bergman and Fellini. Hitchcock, in a way. Kubrick. A lot of film directors -- Billy Wilder -- they make such a place, such a world, that you want to go there again and have that experience. It's an experience and a mood, and some abstractions that you can't necessarily put into words for your friends, but you say, "You have to feel, to experience that. You have to go in there and experience that. It'll make you dream."

This is a tricky one, maybe. You don't want to mess with my understanding of your film, and I can respect that. But don't you believe that your subjective understanding of what "Inland Empire" is about -- given that you directed it -- is necessarily more accurate than mine or anybody else's?

Maybe. [Laughter.] But yours is accurate for you, and as valid as anyone else's interpretation. It's like the world around us. We all maybe think we see the same world, but they say that we don't. They say that the thing is, the world is as you are. A lot of people are really, like, say, political. And they'll see films in terms of politics. Other people are into something else, and they'll see any film in terms of that, but it really means in terms of themselves. Their interpretation comes from that. As I say, the analogy is [gesturing at the paintings on the walls] standing in front of an abstract painting. The more abstract it is, the more varied the interpretations. And each viewer standing in front of that painting is getting a different thing. It's hittin' a different system each time. Same painting!

Well, it's my judgment that "Inland Empire" is the most abstract or experimental film you've done, at least since "Eraserhead" and maybe ever. Do you agree with that, and was it part of your intention?

No, my intention -- there's no intention. Ideas come along and you fall in love with them. In some ways that could be right, but it's a different thing. Each film is different, because the ideas are different. My hope is that the 14-year-old girls, maybe with a ponytail, going down the tree-lined streets in the Midwest, embrace "Inland Empire." Get their boyfriends into the theater with them. Have this experience. It would be so beautiful. [Laughter.]

Wow. I can only hope you succeed. Talk about the process of making this film, because I think it's quite different from anything you've done before. When you started shooting, you still didn't know where you were going, is that right?

Exactly. Always, I don't know where I'm going, but by the time I finish writing a script, I know where I'm going. This time, there were just scenes written. A scene written and shot, another scene written and shot. Scene 1 doesn't relate to Scene 2 whatsoever. Then I get an idea for a third scene, and I don't know how these are relating, or if they will ever relate. At this point, I'm just doing this on my own. Somewhere around five, six or seven scenes in, it happens that I see the unification, and a larger thing growing out of it. That would happen in writing a script before, and now it's happening as I'm shooting. Always, when you get one idea that you love, it is like a bait and it draws other things. It's like getting pieces of the puzzle one at a time. If the puzzle is green grass and a blue sky and a house, you get a piece of blue, you get a little thing of green -- you can't even see the grass, it's in the shadow, say, dark green -- and a little bit of roof tile. And you kind of wonder about these things, but then some other ones come, and lo and behold, one day there's the whole thing.

Did this approach change the actors' performances? The fact that they didn't know where they were going?

They talk about that. Not knowing, like, the arc. They've got a term now, it's called an "arc." I know there is one, an arc. [Laughter.] Scene by scene is what you shoot a film with, anyway. You're shootin' this scene and you're working it to make it feel correct. Everybody involved is talking -- action and reaction, rehearsal and talk, rehearsal and talk -- to get 'em to zero in on the original idea that's driving the boat, and working it till it feels correct based on that idea. So scene by scene, it goes that way anyway.

But sometimes they [the actors] know something that's going to happen later. Now, if they know that they are lying in this scene, I don't know if there's some subtle little -- what do you call it in the card game?

A tell.

Right. This way there's no possibility of a tell. It's honestly this scene. I say, "You're you today. You don't know what's going to happen tomorrow." It's kind of interesting to go that way. There was a certain point when I had the future scenes, and so they knew some things that were going to happen, and it became more like the regular way of working.

Do you think that somebody who's trying to impose a single coherent narrative on one of your films is wasting their time, or closing themselves off to the whole experience?

Yes. If I said something beforehand, you mean? If they knew upfront what I thought it meant?

Well, that. But even if they're trying to impose something ...

As they watch? Well, yeah. Many people have said, "You know what? A couple of scenes in, or halfway through, I just said, screw it, I'm just gonna let it wash over me and not worry about it." Honestly, that's the best way. All you've done is you've turned off the intellect a little bit. Other things are still really working, but the thing that tries to make sense of it in a traditional way has surrendered itself. [Laughter.] I think that's kind of beautiful. I think about, you know, like, um, seeing ... [long pause] It's just -- get in that world and let it be.

I think if any of your movies really accomplishes that ...

It's this one. Uh-huh. [Laughter.]

I know you have to go. But this is really important: Tell me about your new line of coffee.

David Lynch Signature Cup. It's the coffee I drink. And I really love drinking coffee.

I've heard that. I wish we had some right now.

Yeah! So it's gonna be sold on the site at first, and then it's going into stores. Yesterday I was at the Brattle Theatre in Boston [actually Cambridge, Mass.], and they want, you know, to put it in the lobby. It would be very cool if it was in art houses. It's a filmmaker's coffee. But a coffee that all people, I hope, will enjoy. It's really good.

Maybe your coffee can help save the art houses of America.

Well, the art houses have got to come back. It's tough going right now. But things go in waves. That's why I'm holding out hope for those 14-year-old girls. I'm not kiddin' you! Hollywood, the blockbuster mentality, has gone around the world killing the art houses, alternative cinema. But it is alive, that cinema! It's everywhere now, but it's hard to see it in the theaters in America. It's hard to see it in the theaters in Europe! So I'm hopeful that this change can occur again, like we saw in the '60s. It would be cool.

You know, there was a time when they said painting was dead. Painting ain't never gonna be dead. No medium is gonna be dead! Infinite possibilities, always surprises coming along. There are not that many surprises in a formula, an arc. Some solid entertainment, nothing wrong with it. But there's room for much, much more. And let's not miss out on the much more.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on December 22, 2006, 01:15:45 AM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fmedia%2Fphoto%2F2006-12%2F26873278.jpg&hash=7f313062b7f11e8e1d0fd8d58b5b65161ee368ea)

Inside each other's heads
Laura Dern and director David Lynch intuit their way through their latest collaboration, "Inland Empire."
By Susan King, Los Angeles Times

After working together three times in the last 21 years, actress Laura Dern and director David Lynch have developed a kind of shorthand.

"Very quickly we are in sync," Lynch said. "I don't know what it is. We have developed a way of working that is so smooth and fun. Laura is just like family."

Dern, the daughter of Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern, was a 17-year-old ingenue when Lynch cast her in his 1986 classic "Blue Velvet" as the innocent daughter of a police detective in a small, perverted town. Four years later, she played a sexpot named Lula Pace Fortune in his "Wild at Heart." In their current project, the puzzling three-hour "Inland Empire," Dern plays a woman in trouble.

Film Independent's Spirit Awards recently announced it would be giving them a special distinction award for their unique collaboration.

The gamin 39-year-old actress admits she didn't quite get Lynch's unique, surreal universe when she appeared in "Blue Velvet."

"I got there was light and there was darkness, and I got that he was a wonderful genius," Dern said recently over tea at Marie Callender's on Wilshire Boulevard. "Kyle MacLachlan and I were sort of the straight men of the story. I felt segregated from aspects of David's world."

But that changed with "Wild at Heart."

"I was immersed into all of it. So [our relationship] has shifted in terms of the roles he's given me. It has shifted in terms of how close we are now.

"To have a filmmaker in your life who gives you that kind of trust to have played these extremes ...."

"Inland Empire" defies description. Shot on a low-resolution Sony camcorder, the drama finds Dern playing an actress named Nikki Grace who is married to a powerful man in Los Angeles. She lands a role in a high-profile love story playing a woman named Susan Blue. Nikki begins an affair with her womanizing leading man (Justin Theroux), then seems to have trouble delineating between her real life and her reel life.

Her problems may be due to the fact that the film in which Nikki is starring has a curse. Another version of the film had been started in Poland but was never completed because the stars were murdered.

Frequently "Inland Empire" switches from Hollywood to Poland and to what could be footage from the unfinished version of the story. However, Nikki also finds herself roaming through Poland streets during winter.

Adding to the puzzle are several scenes involving three large rabbits in clothes that reside in a '50s-style living room; every time they say a line there is canned laughter.

"Inland EMPIRE" began as an experiment between Lynch and Dern three years ago.

"The process started with him writing a scene and saying he wanted to experiment, meaning, I think, with digital," she said. "The scene was a monologue. At that moment, I was thrilled to have fun with him. We shot that and then he wrote another scene and we shot that. And the light was lit. I could tell he was seeing a movie."

Once he felt it would be a movie, Lynch began writing more scenes. "Finally, at some point, he wrote a big chunk, and we did more of a traditional four-week shoot," Dern said.

In between working on "Inland Empire," Dern went off to do other movies, got pregnant and had a daughter two years ago.

"All of it was an opportunity and a challenge," the actress said. "Everything was liberating and terrifying simultaneously. David's requirement is to be in the moment because you don't necessarily know what's coming after or what's coming before or who specifically you might be playing that day."

But within a day's shooting, she said, Lynch is very specific. "Sometimes the blocking isn't structured, but the dialogue is very structured and he knows the feeling that he wants," she said. "He gives you great trust and a real open door to where emotionally you are going to take it."

Lynch liked the idea of shooting a movie in which he didn't know what would happen next. "If you know what is coming, there is always a possibility that an actor would tip their hand," he said. "You don't necessarily want to give anything away in this."

"I think David's world is more true to human nature than you would like," Dern said. "He lives in abstracts, but the story has a lot of authentic truth about it.

"To David, film is a visual medium that is about taking people into an experience where they intuit their way through it. He's a painter and he paints an experience, and he wants you and I standing next to each other looking at the painting and having completely different interpretations or feelings about it."

Just like a beaming father, Lynch is proud of Dern's performance.

And he wants to call attention to the fact with awards' voters. But Lynch is displeased with the amount of money spent on Oscar campaigns. "Always this time of year there is so much hype and generated buzz," he said. "You think something is gold and six months later it's fool's gold. If people can just appreciate her performance for what it is ... "

So in what must have looked like a scene from one of his own films, Lynch recently made a "For Your Consideration" sign touting Dern, hired a piano player and a cow named Georgia and sat for about four hours at Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue and another four in front of the Tower Records store on the Sunset Strip.

"It was the greatest cow," Lynch said.

"People would come up wanting to pet the cow and talk. So many people came up and said they wanted to help. So there is a part of us that can see through [the hype]. All I want is to try get the word out.... "
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: JG on December 30, 2006, 08:34:00 PM
I saw it again, this time with friends.  The girl I was with started crying at one point toward the end, which i thought was cool and awesome.   

the movie was just as amazing and its defintiley not impossible to get.  after the movie we had a conversation and i feel like we worked out a lot of stuff, at least a main story line. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: hedwig on December 31, 2006, 12:19:29 AM
Quote from: JG on December 30, 2006, 08:34:00 PM
The girl I was with started crying at one point toward the end
is she 14 years old, maybe with a ponytail?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 03, 2007, 02:23:22 PM
Quote from: modage on December 19, 2006, 11:22:00 AMwhen we met him, we told him that the first time we had no idea what was going on but the 2nd time more of the pieces definitely started to come together and he seemed to really like that. 

Do you agree with this theory?
http://messageboard.inlandempirecinema.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17

I'm with the whole prostitute watching TV/Nikki connection, that's what I got too. I still need to see it again.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 04, 2007, 12:17:26 PM
David Lynch and INLAND EMPIRE are about to be a Paramount Event Here In Austin! You've Got To Be There!!!
Source: AICN

Hey folks, Harry here -- The first truly awesome film event of 2007 is upon us. Near the end of the month, January 24th - there will be a screening of INLAND EMPIRE at the gorgeous and amazing Paramount theater - with David Lynch to appear with his film and hold a Q&A afterwards. I can't friggin wait to see the film with Lynch here. Rebecca Campbell and the Austin Film Society contacted me to offer the AFS discount to 200 AICN readers to attend this amazing event. Here's how to do it:

Dear Friend of AICN:
Guess what -- David Lynch is coming to Austin with INLAND EMPIRE, and AICN has arranged for you to get the Austin FIlm Society member price and early purchase privilege. See below for all the details, and if you want to participate, email Harry at HK@aintitcool.com with: Lynch Me - in the subject line by noon on Friday, January 5. Indicate how many tickets you wish to buy. And give me your FULL NAME - as I'll need to give it to the Film Society. I'll let you know if you've made it onto the list via a separate post on the site (I have 200 seats available).

The Austin Film Society presents
INLAND EMPIRE

Wednesday, Jan. 24 @ 7 pm
Paramount Theatre, 719 Congress Ave.
Followed by a Q&A with director David Lynch

"INLAND EMPIRE is a plunge down the rabbit hole of the director's imagination... His latest cinematic head trip is certainly the biggest mindblower." - New York Times

"...Laura Dern in a monumental performance." - Rolling Stone

ADVANCE TICKET PURCHASE
Tickets on sale to AFS members and Harry's list _only_ beginning Saturday, Jan. 6; tickets on sale to the general public Thursday, Jan. 11.

NOTE: AFS/AICN discount and advance ticket purchase available only through the Paramount Box Office, 719 Congress Avenue, opens noon Saturday!

TICKET PRICES
AFS/AICN
Orchestra: $20
Mezzanine: $15
Balcony: $10

General Public
Orchestra: $25
Mezzanine: $20
Balcony: $15

Tickets available to the general public (if you don't make it onto my list) through the Paramount box office and GetTix (1-866-443-8849) beginning Thursday, Jan. 11
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 05, 2007, 01:30:48 AM
French Trailer here. (http://www.allocine.fr/webtv/acvision.asp?nopub=1&cvid=18718797&player=ASF&debit=HD&emission=)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 06, 2007, 01:01:40 PM
Chasing a Piece of the Oscar Pie
Despite the P.T. Barnum-like efforts employed by David Lynch to elicit consideration for his Inland Empire leading lady, she has about as much of shot in 2006 as Marie Callender.
Source: FilmStew
 
The tape recorders are all turned off when Laura Dern whispers just outside the earshot of David Lynch. She smirks. And says, to paraphrase her, that because the filmmaking process, the filmmaking philosophy, and the actual final product operate with such nonconformist aspirations, and because the world we live in today, probably to paraphrase Thom Yorke too, is so replete with conformists, yes men, and ignorant cogs, that Inland Empire is a political film.

Lynch's latest, teeming with abstractions, is tag line described as, "A Woman in Trouble." This is all Lynch, Dern, or anyone involved will concede. So for Dern to call it a political film, I say why not, even though nowhere in the content are there any sort of political circumstances. It exists outside of this world.

But it doesn't matter what I think. You want to know what the man just out of Dern's earshot thinks. Moments before the interview ended - and moments before Dern had this chance to proffer her feelings on the film's existence in the political realm - Lynch, with a stretched and surprised look on his face, shot down any intimation of political motivations. "PO-LIT-ICAL INTENTIONS?" he exclaims in a calculatedly high-pitched voice. "There are no political intentions in this! Zero!" 
 
Dern, sitting next to him, nods her head in contrast, slipping a piece of banana cream pie into her mouth. "There are some people who are political and they'll see politics in everything," Lynch insists. "No, this is a world on its own and you just go into this world. When there are abstractions, people have varying interpretations and thoughts about it, but I think it's the same with all films. When the lights go down and the curtains open and you go into another world. It's so beautiful."

Lynch takes a glob of his banana cream pie and places it into his mouth. The two chew in unison. I'm not sure why I'm at Marie Callender's sharing banana cream pie with David Lynch and Laura Dern. I'm not sure why all I want to do is ask Lynch about his pie-eating proclivities and what kind of mangled but sweet-tasting pie he bakes for himself.

Then again, I'm not sure why Lynch was recently sitting on Los Angelesstreet corners with a cow (you heard right) and a billboard-sized Variety-like ad saying, "For your consideration, Laura Dern for best actress," with Dern glossed in the bleak spotlight, sharing her space with a gelid damsel-in-distress blue penumbra.

I'm just not sure when it comes to Lynch. But Lynch, in a seemingly charitable moment, explains his intentions behind the cow-on-La-Brea-and-Sunset incidents. "Laura, and this is in my opinion and a lot of other people, should be at least nominated for an Academy Award. But we don't have any money and we're not connected with a giant studio."
 
"So, I had this idea that because the Academy members love show business, that I would go out onto the street with a cow and signs for Laura," adds Lynch. "And one time, a cow and a piano player. It was beautiful."

To Lynch, this and the world of his latest film both share the glistening appellation of "beautiful." And I agree.

"Soon, Channel Four came and Channel Five came," Lynch recalls. "And that story went around the world because we live in that kind of world now where things travel fast. So it was to make people aware that a film was coming that had a great performance by Laura. It was magical."

"But what is it between you and Laura?" I ask. "Between me and Laura?" Lynch replies. "Pure love. It's love, trust; Laura's great talent. If someone that you love is right for the part, it makes you very happy. So you're going to get to go down the road with this person."

"There's so much happiness seeing her nail these things and get them to feel correct," he continues. "Not so easily all the time, but with so much enthusiasm to get it. And bingo, it's great."

Adds Dern: "It's a family having a good time together. It's a party all the time. He knows it's about having fun. Unfortunately, it's such a rare experience."
 
"There are things that obviously stay unique to the experience of working with David," the actress continues. "And interestingly, they weren't in the area of working scene by scene and not having a script, but more in the area of working with digital instead of film."

"We had the luxury of shooting an entire scene without cutting. It gives you a great deal of freedom as an actor to be truly in the moment as opposed to being in the moment, holding it, and having to go back and replicating it. That was the thing I found most liberating and most unusual."

Dern also credits Lynch with giving her the opportunity to play a multi-faced character. After working with the filmmaker on Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, this is by far their most substantial collaboration, sort of a companion piece to Naomi Watts' work in the dreamy Mulholland Drive.

"It's like a game of Candyland; pure bliss," Dern raves. "To have someone as extraordinary that I have admired my whole life trust me enough to say let's work this way and you're going to explore these different people or aspects of a person... He so believes in actors. He has such reverence for their process, but he's still very specific and very detailed about what he wants."

At this point, Lynch scrapes the surface of his pie plate, satisfied yet staring at the chocolate pie on the table next to us. Dern finishes and someone else asks Lynch about his conception of Inland Empire, and all his films for that matter. How does he do it?

"It's the idea," he explains. "You get an idea. And the idea tells you everything. There's a thing, in painting and music and all the things. There's a moment when the whole thing feels correct and it's done."

"You know when you shoot a film, there's all these stages," adds Lynch. "It's not until the very end that you start dealing with the whole. Up to then, it's parts. Maybe you have a screening, and you say wait a minute, you have huge problems."

"You go back to work. You have another one. You get closer. You do the same. You get closer. And then it happens. It's done. It feels correct as a whole."

There you have it: David Lynch - perfectionist, lover of pies, and defender of all that's artistically genuine in the cinema. Whether or not mainstream audiences will ever catch up to Inland Empire has yet to be determined. So far, in a handful of theaters around the country, it has grossed a little over $100,000.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: I Don't Believe in Beatles on January 06, 2007, 08:40:12 PM
Bay Area folks:

According to www.myspace.com/davidlynchfoundation, INLAND EMPIRE will be shown on the 19th in Emeryville at 7:30, with a Q&A session presumably following the film.

However, there's also this screening on the same day in San Rafael, and half an hour earlier, which he is supposed to be attending, or at least "present"ing:

http://cafilm.org/films/717.html
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 07, 2007, 02:55:28 PM
'I never play the same part again'
Source: Khaleej Times

DAVID LYNCH never makes a movie by the book, and few people know that better than Laura Dern. After all, she's starred in two of the maverick filmmaker's projects, "Blue Velvet" (1986) and "Wild at Heart" (1990). But even she wasn't prepared for Lynch's latest movie, "Inland Empire". To start with, Dern never saw a full script — not before she was cast, not after she was cast and not at any point during a long shoot that was conducted in bits and pieces over the course of some two-and-a-half years. But then, who needs a script for a movie that, in keeping with its chaotic origins, displays little concern for linear storytelling or traditional narrative?

"When I jumped into his movie I didn't know quite where it was going," Dern admits, speaking by telephone from her Los Angeles home. "David first said, 'Let's experiment.' He wanted to shoot a monologue and experiment with digital film for his Web site. He said he was going on a journey of exploration. So he would write a scene and we would shoot it. We did that about five or six times, not really sure where we were going. But I could see that his fire was lit."

Instead of obsessing over questions of plot and character, therefore, the 39-year-old actress stayed the course and discovered that she was totally enmeshed in the movie and its story, even if she didn't quite comprehend it.

"David said that this movie is about a woman in trouble," Dern says. "He doesn't mean for it to be vague or tongue-in-cheek, but it's a huge piece. For me it's about this journey of this woman and the dismantling of a woman and her psyche, and her resurrection."

To the extent that it's possible to summarise the plot of "Inland Empire," it's about a struggling actress (Dern) working in a film for a European director (Jeremy Irons) in which she plays opposite a womanising actor (Justin Theroux). Somewhere along the way their onscreen love affair spills over into real life, despite dire threats from the leading lady's angry husband (Peter J. Lucas).

That sounds straightforward enough, but the story meanders and is interrupted for several scenes, apparently played on a stage before an audience, involving three characters wearing rabbit ears, one of whom is ironing. What is all that about? Don't ask.

At the very least, however, "Inland Empire" gives Dern a chance to exercise her considerable acting chops, honed in almost 50 films and television shows in which she's appeared since making her screen debut at age 7.

"I had a career agenda from early childhood," she recalls. "I decided that I never wanted to play the same part twice and that I wanted to work with great filmmakers.

"I grew up around a dazzling bunch of directors," she says, "and was inspired by them all — people like Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby and Martin Scorsese. And at that time I was inspired by films of that era. They were about flawed protagonists and characters going through deeply damaging experiences. The pictures they were making were 'Midnight Cowboy' (1969) and 'Klute' (1971), but not 'Pretty Woman."'

After playing bit parts as a child, the blossoming Dern first caught the movie industry's eye in "Foxes" (1980), along with another young actress, Jodie Foster, who had already made her mark in Hollywood.

Her breakthrough came in "Rambling Rose" (1991), in which she played a sexually precocious young maid in the 1930s South. It earned her an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress — and also a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her mother, who played the wife of her conflicted employer (Robert Duvall).

Since then, while she has never been a top star, Dern has worked steadily, combining occasional leading roles with meaty supporting parts in such films as "October Sky" (l999), "I Am Sam" (2001) and "We Don't Live Here Anymore" (2004). Defying her reputation as an indie stalwart, she also topped the box office in "Jurassic Park" (l993) and "Jurassic Park III" (2001).

On the personal front she has dated numerous fellow actors, including Jeff Goldblum, Kyle MacLachlan and Treat Williams, and was engaged to Billy Bob Thornton until he left her for Angelina Jolie. In 2005 she married musician Ben Harper, with whom she has two children, 5-year-old Ellery Walker and 2-year-old Jaya.

Like many other working mothers, Dern says, she wanted to take time out to stay home with her children when they were young — which made her latest Lynch film even more attractive.

"Because we worked sporadically, over a two-and-a-half-year period, with David on 'Inland Empire,"' she says, "it gave me the luxury of spending time at home with my daughter."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Ghostboy on January 07, 2007, 03:00:20 PM
Quote from: MacGuffin on January 04, 2007, 12:17:26 PM
David Lynch and INLAND EMPIRE are about to be a Paramount Event Here In Austin! You've Got To Be There!!!

I wasn't die hard enough to be first in line to get tickets for this, but I was number five or six.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 08, 2007, 10:35:17 PM
Five minute interview with Lynch on IE and ideas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tICW-Vf6s70
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: matt35mm on January 08, 2007, 10:53:35 PM
Quote from: Ginger on January 06, 2007, 08:40:12 PM
Bay Area folks:

According to www.myspace.com/davidlynchfoundation, INLAND EMPIRE will be shown on the 19th in Emeryville at 7:30, with a Q&A session presumably following the film.

However, there's also this screening on the same day in San Rafael, and half an hour earlier, which he is supposed to be attending, or at least "present"ing:

http://cafilm.org/films/717.html

If anyone is also planning to go the Emeryville screening, please let me know!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 12, 2007, 12:27:08 PM
Quote from: Ghostboy on January 07, 2007, 03:00:20 PM
Quote from: MacGuffin on January 04, 2007, 12:17:26 PM
David Lynch and INLAND EMPIRE are about to be a Paramount Event Here In Austin! You've Got To Be There!!!

I wasn't die hard enough to be first in line to get tickets for this, but I was number five or six.

Chrysta Bell Gets Signed to David Lynch's New Record Label, Strange World Music and Austin TX Appearance

On WEDNESDAY, January 24th, David Lynch's new movie, INLAND EMPIRE will premiere at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas. Chrysta Bell will be the entertainment for the official afterparty at the LUCKY LOUNGE starting at 11pm. The song "Polish Poem" from INLAND EMPIRE written by Lynch and Bell wil be performed. You can get tickets at Frontgatetickets.com (http://tickets.frontgatetickets.com/choose.php?pl=76&lid=9525&eid=12956). For more details, check out Chrysta Bell's Official Website (http://chrystabell.com/).
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 15, 2007, 11:43:59 AM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fsuicidegirls.com%2Fmedia%2Fauthors%2F2190%2Farticle.jpg&hash=831cdd2409db1fa11824f8a2beeb7d7c148c01a7)

Laura Dern is the talented and beautiful muse of many of David Lynch's best films. Dern has starred in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and most recently, Inland Empire. In Lynch's three hour, shot on video opus Dern plays multiple characters all orbiting her main character of an actor who lands her first really great part in a long time. Dern has not only supported many independent filmmakers throughout her career, she produced Alexander Payne's first film Citizen Ruth, scored an Oscar nomination for Rambling Rose and even changed herself into a femme fatale for Novocaine. I got a chance to talk with Dern about Inland Empire from an undisclosed place in Manhattan.

Daniel Robert Epstein: So have you and David have kept in contact over the years?

Laura Dern: Yeah. We both got busy in different directions for a while which is part of why we didn't work together for a period of time. But we always remain friends and keep finding each other in the course of life.

DRE:I asked David if there is a narrative in Inland Empire and he said "Yes there is." What did you ask him about when you were shooting this?

LD:I only remember a couple of times where I really had to pinpoint him down and say "I need more." That's over a three year period so that's pretty amazing considering there wasn't a script. If I could say anything to someone who's going to his film; I would want them to know about David before they entered the theatre. There's nothing about David that is elitist. He hasn't figured out the plot and is sitting back waiting for you to fail his test. He believes in the visual arts and he is a painter who's start was about creating something on canvas and having interpretations be intuitive and completely different than anyone else's. That's how he created art and then cinema took off from there. David believes in the intelligence of an audience. He believes in an audience going into the experience and discovering it for themselves. He knows what it is for him but he doesn't need it to be the same for you and I love him for that. I want people to know that because I had the same experience making it that they had watching it. I didn't know what the plot was but I had to feel my way through it and consider behaviorally what the character is walking through in each scene as we did it because I didn't know what was coming after or what had come before. I had no script to guide me. But David is so specific about the feeling he wants you to have. Even when he speaks in code, he gives you a word or a feeling or the mood that he wants then you can run with that for a long time. He told me at the beginning of shooting that it is about a woman in trouble. That really helped me. For me it became about many aspects of a woman going through a dismantling and maybe even a resurrection at some point. So I never saw it as these different characters and these different pieces. That's a very exciting way to work.

DRE:Obviously you understand your interpretation of the film but do you feel that you and David were in sync?

LD:Emotionally yes. I think most of people who see it, probably could get all the same feelings from it. But even though I figured it out for me, I don't necessarily know what the rabbits mean or what does 47 mean or am I killing myself, is the guy my husband and what is the Polish connection? Is that woman me from a past life? Is it me in an altered state and I'm finding myself? There's so many ways people are talking to me about it and they're all pretty fantastic ideas. So I can't wait to see it again to figure it out more and see what it makes me feel. The first time you see it you're watching yourself and seeing what you all did and how it came together. So it takes a couple times before you just sit and witness the movie.

DRE:Would you have done this film if it had been any other filmmaker but David?

LD:There are only a few filmmakers that I would take a three year journey with. But I would trust them because I either know them personally or because I love their work. But to have no script and to play several people takes the length of familial relationship. Also it wasn't just me trusting him but also knowing how much he trusts me. That was an incredible gift. The greatest thing a director can learn from David is that he believes so much in his actors. That confidence and faith forces you to take risks in a much greater way.

DRE:Do you remember your first audition for David?

LD:Yeah, it was for Blue Velvet. I was 17 and I went in figuring I'd do what is always done at auditions which is sit down and be asked to read a scene. I'm sitting on a floor in the hallway when David came out of the office and said "I got to take a leak." He ran to the bathroom and afterwards he invited me into his office with the casting director and we spoke about life for 30 minutes. I remember us discussing trees and meditation. He mentioned something about being a mediator. We talked about him growing up in the Northwest and me growing up in LA and that we lived near each other in LA when he was making Eraserhead. We never mentioned acting or movies. I don't think he'd ever seen me in a movie but he'd been told something about me. Then he asked me to come to Bob's Big Boy with him to meet Kyle MacLachlan for French fries.

DRE:So he really does like Bob's Big Boy.

LD:That's real. We went to Bob's and he was drawing on a napkin and then he asked me to go do Blue Velvet. That was my audition process. So I should have known then that I'd end up doing Inland Empire because already it was going to be an unusual journey.

DRE:Is part of the fun of doing a David Lynch movie seeing what he does with all these disparate parts?

LD:What's incredible is that it's only as fun or maybe even less fun than the journey itself. David is so much fun. He wants it to be such a good time. He's a nice man. He wants everybody to have fun which is unbelievably rare to have on a movie set. He cares deeply about this spontaneous, fun, experimental feeling. Being pushed towards bravery is a blast. He had a camera operator working with us and he needed something like a dolly shot but we had no equipment. So he put the camera operator on rollerblades. That can only be paralleled by seeing it. It's exhilarating, it's scary, it's exciting and you don't know what to expect. That's what everyday at work was like.

DRE:David also loves Los Angeles. You grew up there and your parents are actors. Do you love Los Angeles?

LD:In some ways. I think he has more of a love of it than I but the parts of LA that I love, he loves equally. He loves old school Hollywood like Grauman's Chinese, the old Hamburger Hamlet restaurant on Beverly and places like the Beverly Hills Amusement Park. Those are things that I love too because they were my childhood and he has an appreciation for it on a whole other level and I love that about him.

DRE:Since you and David have worked together so much, do you have a shorthand on set?

LD:Yeah, we talk a lot about everything but the movie. I think he's a believer in not over talking, just like he's a believer in not over plotting. Everything becomes an intuitive, feeling experience and that's the way he describes it.

DRE:Have you ever shot a movie on video before?

LD:No.

DRE:Was it a different experience?

LD:Wildly different. Nothing like shooting a 35mm movie. With a 12 hour day on a regular movie, you hope for an hour's worth of great footage. On a 12 hour day on this movie, we'd come away with probably ten hours of great footage. We shot all the time. We'd get to work and start shooting. The Sony PD-150 is so lightweight that we were close together the entire time. It wasn't like he was in his tented little place watching a monitor. There are certain kinds of movies that require that, but there are other kinds of movies that are about human behavior and to have your director right there with you watching what you're doing and pushing you to try different things or go to a different place is the way it should be.

DRE:One of the last scenes has Laura [Harring] blowing a kiss and then there's all the other actors. Do you have a shorthand with the other actors since most of you have worked with David before?

LD:Not really oddly enough. David has a different language with each person. He gets his own feeling with each person. Each experience is so unique with David. I'm friends with Naomi Watts and she and I did a movie together [We Don't Live Here Anymore] and we talked about how much we loved David and loved working with David, but it is still it's own experience. But there are a couple of catchphrases we all know. He's the most unique person and such a brilliant and extraordinary gift to film. I just feel really lucky to work with him.

DRE:Your two previous films with David are so beautiful and lush, do you feel like we are losing that now that David is only going to be working with video?

LD:I don't know the answer to that because I haven't seen that much digital video being transferred. I thought I would hate it because I love film. But what David did with the transfer process and how he transferred it and how he works with color and light and sound and mixing and matching them all together is so beautiful. The crudeness of the film that he was working with becomes its own art. I don't know if in somebody else's hand I would feel the same way but somehow the nastiness of it was the beauty. But David certainly feels like it's his future and I'm sure it is the way of the future.

DRE:I love the scenes with you, Jeremy Irons and Justin Theroux. How was doing those?

LD:Great. That was the most like making a regular movie. The scenes with Jeremy and Harry Dean Stanton were done all together in five days. There was more crew as well. But we still were moving so fast which I think all the actors loved.

DRE:I know you've done like a dozen pictures with your mom including this one.

LD:Something crazy like that at this point. But there are only two where I felt like we were really working together, Rambling Rose and Wild at Heart.

DRE:Is it coincidence when the both of you are on a picture?

LD:Oh, total coincidence. Rambling Rose is the only time we actually sought out doing it together. I was involved in the movie and the director [Martha Coolidge] and my mom were very good friends because they had done another film. She really wanted my mom but mom and I also wanted to do it together. But David asked my mom to do Inland Empire without me even knowing.

DRE:I heard you might be in Jurassic Park 4.

LD:I heard that too. I don't even know. People have asked me if I'm going to be in it so I don't know if that means they're writing it and my character is in it.

DRE:Would you be interested?

LD:Well if Steven [Spielberg] were there I'd always be interested because I love him.

DRE:What if he were just producing because I don't think he's going to direct it?

LD:You never know. I guess it depends on where they take the dinosaurs and me.

DRE:It has been almost ten years since your appearance on Ellen DeGeneres' sitcom. It had a big impact at the time but it seems like it has faded.

LD:It had an impact on people who were ready to listen. That's the good news. But it did not have an impact on the Bush administration. So Ellen's show didn't make it any different. But what did excite me is that I've never received more fan mail for anything in my life. A lot of it was parents thanking me for being part of something that helped them to honor their children's choices. That moved me so much. At the time, it was huge because these huge sponsors were pulling out and we were in the middle of shooting and it was becoming a huge controversy. It wasn't just that she mentioned being gay but I was also playing a gay woman that she was coming out to and potentially coming on to. The whole thing was amazing and it seemed to be radical in this day and age, but it was at the moment. Unfortunately not quite huge enough to shift the tide of unconscious idiocy.

DRE:Did you have a big part in Year of the Dog?

LD:I don't have a big part. It's very much an ensemble. I had a hilarious time doing it and it was a hilarious character that I loved playing. I really wanted to do it because I think Mike White is totally brilliant. Mike is a born director. We tried to do a movie together a long time ago that he had written and that he wanted to direct. It never came to be so I wanted to support him when he finally got to direct.

DRE:Do you know what you're doing next?

LD:I don't. I had a small part in a movie with Russell Crowe [called Tenderness] and there's a movie with John Travolta and James Gandolfini that's supposed to come out called Lonely Hearts. But I don't know when that movie's coming even though we did about a year ago.

Now I'm trying to figure out what to do after this. I feel so liberated from doing Inland Empire that I'm like "Gosh, what do you do when you get to be three totally different people." But I've been lucky enough to run the gamut so hopefully something fun will come up.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: matt35mm on January 16, 2007, 10:16:52 PM
Quote from: Lucid on January 16, 2007, 11:21:23 AM
Quote from: Ginger on January 06, 2007, 08:40:12 PM
Bay Area folks:

According to www.myspace.com/davidlynchfoundation, INLAND EMPIRE will be shown on the 19th in Emeryville at 7:30, with a Q&A session presumably following the film.

However, there's also this screening on the same day in San Rafael, and half an hour earlier, which he is supposed to be attending, or at least "present"ing:

http://cafilm.org/films/717.html

Still no details on the Emeryville screening?  The location is listed as TBA on the Lynch Foundation page.  Anyone?

I've looked.  All over.  No.  Fuck.

And San Rafael is sold out, so that's not really an option.  Fuck.

I shouldn't have cheated those Gypsies!  Damn their oily curses!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 17, 2007, 06:44:03 PM
Italian Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtzSSG8X9e0
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on January 17, 2007, 09:41:28 PM
is no one else watching these? ok i'm not watching anymore.

here's what you missed: the french don't seem to have changed the title or the language, but the italians are calling it "the empire of the mind" and dubbing it. and if you would like to know what the old broad is saying at the end of the italian trailer, it translates to: "is there a murder in this film" which was not included in the french trailer.

i don't know if that's even a spoiler. no one knows.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Fernando on January 18, 2007, 09:38:10 AM
Quote from: Pubrick on January 17, 2007, 09:41:28 PM
is no one else watching these? ok i'm not watching anymore.

I haven't seen any since someone labeled the first one as spoiling "a very scary moment in the film", so I'll keep my eyes virgin for at least another year at the earliest.  :yabbse-sad:
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on January 18, 2007, 09:41:22 AM
yeah i think they've been spoiling progressively more imagery as they've gone along, the latest being the most spoilery.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 23, 2007, 12:19:09 PM
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Bingo! Bango! Bliss?? An interview with David Lynch
By Mark Rahner; THE SEATTLE TIMES

It's natural to think of David Lynch accompanied by a low, menacing hum in real life. Not an aura of bliss.

But I'm drinking coffee with the eccentric creator of such singularly bizarre cinema as "Blue Velvet," "Mulholland Drive" and the "Twin Peaks" series — who also uses rotting animal flesh in his art. And he's ebullient. He's shooting abracadabra hands at me while he talks, as if he's bursting with too many words, and needs to release the surplus out his fingers.

Lynch, a Northwest native who turned 61 on Saturday, spent time in Seattle last week to promote his new film, "Inland Empire," and his new book, "Catching the Big Fish" (Tarcher/Penguin, $19.95). The former is a dark three-hour fugue starring Laura Dern as "a woman in trouble," and the latter is about the source of his bliss: transcendental meditation.

Do you know what "Inland Empire" is about?

Sure.

Help me out, then.

No, I'm not going to tell you.

You gotta know what you're doing. At first you don't know. At first I didn't have a clue, but this is always the way it is. The thing is, you know, we get ideas. Or as in the case of "Catching the Big Fish," we catch ideas. And we don't know quite how it happens, but suddenly, bango! There's an idea! And I picture it as, the idea was there. It comes up and it enters the conscious mind, and then bingo! We see it. And not only do we see it, but we know it, all in an instant. And we know we know it, because we can write it down. And even though it comes in an instant, we can write a lot of things — paragraph after paragraph sometimes, dialogue, the way people look, the way they sound, the pace of a thing, the mood of a thing — all there in an idea! Unbelievable!

I'd slept poorly the night before and dozed off briefly. I couldn't differentiate between my dream and the movie.

One lady told me about the same thing. She went away partway through the film sleeping and dreaming, and she said she really wanted to tell me about the dream she had, because it was probably being fed by the film in some ways, and I didn't have time to get it from her, but she said it was quite something.

They call Spokane "The Inland Empire," but it doesn't seem to have much to do with Spokane.

No, but it has to do with Inland Empire. Those words said something about this (the movie), and so I loved it as a title.

Want to know what's missing?

What's missing?

Dancing dwarf.

No.

No?

No.

Let's go to TM. It seems incongruous that a man who makes such profoundly unsettling movies radiates bliss.

Bliss. It's such a beautiful thing, and we all have some of it. There's a phrase, "True happiness is not out there. True happiness lies within." And that phrase I used to think about. And it had a ring of truth to it, but they don't tell you where the within is, nor how to get there. Do you sit and just think about it? I don't know. I'd heard about meditation, but I thought it was a waste of time. What I'd pictured in my mind was people just sitting kind of pretending to do something and thinking it was cool —

So how did you get into it?

I'm gonna tell you. I was working on "Eraserhead" in the stables of an 18-acre estate. I had haylofts, maid's quarters, garages, stalls, and I had tons of equipment, all from the American Film Institute, almost a little studio. And I thought, I should be the most happy camper in the world, and I was thinking one day that I wasn't. It was just hollow inside. And it was just kind of confounding, and I thought maybe this meditation is a way to go within.

And then my sister called out of the blue, said she'd started transcendental meditation, told me about it, and in the light of what I'd heard before, it made sense. And the biggest thing, though: I heard a change in her voice that was more happiness and more self-assuredness. And that together with what she told me about it, I said, "That's it," and I started.

And did it take me within? Let me answer that.

Yeah, go ahead.

It was incredible. Because you sit comfortably, close your eyes. Noise is no barrier, thoughts are no barriers. It's not a trying, it's not a form of concentration. It's not even a form of contemplation. You just innocently say this mantra, and my experience was as if I was in an elevator and they cut the cable and I just went. And it was so powerful and so unique, I thought, "Man! I'm a human being, and I'm having this experience?" Unbelievably beautiful. So it was not a problem for me to stay regular in my meditation. And I understood what within is. I understood. Because I was one place and I felt the dive and I felt transcending and I felt that bliss, and just waves of bliss.

I think the Beatles got more interesting after they discovered the Maharishi.

Everything gets better. It does. And it's not a surface cure that doesn't really work. It's not partial knowledge. It's a field of total knowledge. It sounds so strange, but it is the knowledge and creativity and power and bliss that creates the entire universe.

Proceeds from your book go to The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. Consciousness-based education: sort of like No Inner Child Left Behind?

That's a very beautiful phrase you just said. The engine that drives learning is intelligence, consciousness, ability to understand, appreciate something. And if they (students) have a small amount of consciousness — even if they have a big amount of consciousness — if there's stress and strains and horror in the school, learning becomes such a bummer.

In consciousness-based education, you allow that student to dive within twice a day, and what happens is the light of the unified field — pure consciousness — starts being enlivened by the experience of transcending, and it starts growing. Now the student gets a little bit happier, and the student is shedding a little bit of that stress, a little bit of that fear, anxiety and depression or whatever, anger. And they start getting along better with their teachers, and the knowledge gets easier to understand, easy to appreciate, and it's happening, it's in schools, and those schools that it's in, the success rate is phenomenal.

Season two of "Twin Peaks" is finally getting to DVD (April 10) six years after season one. Will you ever revisit it?

I don't think so. But you know I always say I love that world. Obviously I love that world. But you know it just, it came to an end in my mind really when we were pretty much told to solve the case with Laura Palmer.

Cups of coffee per day?

Well, I always said 20. I don't know if it's quite 20. But it's between 10 and 20.

The people who see your films enhanced somehow might be surprised that you don't do any drugs.

No, I don't do any drugs. But here's the thing: There's a guy I met who wrote a great book called "2012," he's into all kinds of drugs. His path is, he doesn't really call them drugs but "medicines." And you can get many, many experiences. All I'm sayin' is, there's an easier way to go, and some of those experiences cost the nervous system a pretty penny. It's a strain on the nervous system — it's a jolt to ratchet that thing up and give you that experience.

What is it about rotting flesh?

Textures. There's three words — satva, rajas and tamas. Satva is building the next step. Rajas is maintaining the step before. And tamas is destroying the one that went before that. So that's the way creation goes. Everything doesn't just get built and stay that way. There is a stream of evolution. So when any one of these processes is going, pretty fascinating textures come out — colors, shapes, forms. A lot of people on the decaying side turn away, but there's an incredible thing to flesh in its bloom and in its decay.

Peace, brother.

Peace to you pal, brother.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 24, 2007, 01:17:52 PM
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David Lynch: It's just common sense
By SEAN AXMAKER; Seattle Post Intelligencer

David Lynch was born in Missoula, Mont., and has lived in Los Angeles for the last half of his life, but Washington can lay claim to a piece of cinema's most stubbornly individualistic feature filmmaker.

After all, he spent a few formative years growing up in Spokane and returned to the state decades later to shoot his short-lived, TV soap opera noir, "Twin Peaks."

"There's always things about our childhood where ideas come from," he confesses. "It was an influence for sure." More recently, he's turned to Subversive Cinema, a sister company of Seattle's Scarecrow Video, to help distribute his own line of DVDs.

The once boyish maverick of such dark, demanding and confounding films as "Blue Velvet," "Lost Highway" and the gentle, G-rated slice of slightly askew Americana, "The Straight Story," is 60 now.

He came to Seattle for a special preview screening of his new film, "Inland Empire," which opened at the Neptune Theatre on Friday, and for a talk at Town Hall Seattle on Transcendental Meditation.

You can see his age in his face and his graying hair (still wildly brushed as if trying to escape his head). Dressed in his trademark neat white shirt and simple black suit, he sat back for an interview with a cup of coffee within reach and an occasional cigarette between his fingers.

His manner was soft-spoken and pleasant, his answers were simple and succinct, and he was calm and confident. Imagine a gentle but eccentric elementary-school teacher patiently trying to explain filmmaking and the creative process as if it were nothing more than basic addition and subtraction.

"It's mostly common sense making films," he insists. "You don't need a studio. You need some money and you need ideas and then you go make your film."

Simple, no? It is for Lynch, who continues to spin his puzzling visions and twisted stories without conforming his ideas to a committee. "Compromise is not something that you do."

There are no compromises on "Inland Empire" (is it a coincidence that Lynch used Spokane's nickname as the title?). The heady and dreamy three-hour drama grew from the seeds of scenes that he first explored with actress Laura Dern in short films shot on digital video. "I started using it early on, not knowing if I was making a feature. Once I realized I was making a feature, I didn't want to change."

It's his first feature shot on DV and he's embraced the format, and not simply for the freedom and flexibility it offers the independent artist. "It's its own look and feel; it's not film. I think I like it with less detail; it kind of gives more room to dream."

And he has bypassed the studio system to distribute the film independently. "There are many, many, many great theaters available to people and that's the place where people see films," he explains. "So if you can get your film into a theater, that's all you need. And now you can make your own DVDs. If you have a conduit to stores, you put them down that conduit. Again, it's a lot of common sense."

It makes sense to me.

P-I: Where did the idea for "Inland Empire" begin?

Lynch: Laura Dern. I see Laura Dern walking down the sidewalk. I hadn't seen her in a while. She says, "Oh, David, I'm your new neighbor. We have to do something again sometime," and I said, "I know we do. Maybe I'll write something for you." Now you could meet a lot of people and say something like that, but ideas started coming from that.

And you started by shooting these ideas as short scenes for your Web site before you ever had a script?

Yes. In the beginning I get an idea, and it happens to be something like a scene. Instead of writing it down and waiting for the next idea and building a screenplay, I started shooting those scenes, not ever thinking of a feature at that time. There were just scenes and they didn't relate in my mind. Then, all of a sudden, more of a story started coming out that actually related those scenes. It was kind of beautiful.

So this wasn't written as a story so much as grown as a piece of organic art?

Oh yes, it has a complete story, it's just that there's the story and the way the story's told. Something that's not so concrete, it has something to do with feeling or intuiting a thing. So it's a story but a story that holds abstractions. And that's what I love about cinema.

Why don't you discuss the meaning of your films?

It's not a game, that I like to confound people and see what they come up with. The filmmaker should have a definite, solid idea of what it means. But when something is more abstract, all kinds of interpretations come out. If I said, "Oh, that's a wrong thing," and I wasn't willing to say mine, that would be a very bad thing. So I think every interpretation is valid.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: RegularKarate on January 25, 2007, 04:31:47 PM
I missed the first about five minutes of this because of a mix-up, but this is an amazing movie.

I can see why people wouldn't like it, it's like having your brain slapped around for three hours (I avoided spoilers so much that I didn't even realize it was going to be that long), not knowing when it's going to end.

It's still swimming around in my head... it opens here in another couple of months and I'll definitely see it at least twice more.

And that song Lynch sings is awesome.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 26, 2007, 01:33:49 PM
Film is dead, long live digital movies says David Lynch

He's created some of the most memorable and enigmatic works ever committed to celluloid, but as far as David Lynch is concerned, film is dead.

The maverick Hollywood director famed for disturbing movies which explore the dark side of human nature such as "Blue Velvet," "Eraserhead" and "The Elephant Man" says he has become part of the digital revolution.

"Film is a beautiful medium," the 61-year-old outsider told AFP in an interview. "Beautiful machines, beautiful cameras, the look -- everything is exquisite. But making films like that is dead."

Lynch shot his latest film "Inland Empire," an intriguing and infuriating three-hour puzzle that has left critics scratching their heads and reaching for the vitriol, entirely using lightweight digital cameras.

And he insists that for the rest of his career there is no going back to traditional film-making.

"Traditional movie cameras are like lead. The dollies are giant and heavy. Everything is big and so slow. Every time you move the camera, you have to re-light the set. It's like molasses in January."

Working in digital allowed Lynch to shoot and edit in real time, whereas previously he would have to wait 24 hours for film to be developed.

"Seeing what you're really and truly going to get and being able to tweak it right there, is priceless," he says.

"To be able to maintain spontaneity on set without killing the magic of the moment by having to reload the camera is a whole new way of working. I could never go back to working in film. It's like a dinosaur."

Yet though Lynch has enthusiastically embraced new technology in his art, he is dismayed by the thought that as more movies are made available to download over the Internet, people will drift away from watching films on a big screen.

"It's a horrible thought," he says. "I truly hope that if people are going to start watching films on their iPods, that they have some sort of device that will allow them to squirt a huge picture onto the wall," he says.

"But I hope the tradition of going to the movies never dies. A giant screen, a dark theatre with hundreds of people, the curtains opening and everyone traveling into a different world ... it's a magical thing."

Lynch was speaking as part of a promotional tour for his new book "Catching the Big Fish," in which he describes his methods of capturing ideas and the immense creative benefits of daily meditation.

He has also carried out a mini-tour of the United States, appearing in New York, Washington and Hollywood with Scottish folk singer Donovan.

Although he acknowledges the irony of promoting inner bliss after a lifetime's work spent exploring the violent recesses of humans, Lynch says his sense of peace achieved through meditation will not necessarily alter the traditional themes of his films.

"If you got all blissful and laid back when you meditated and your work didn't have any power, it would be absurd to keep meditating," he says.

"Meditation for me has been the key to an ocean of creativity. The ideas just keep flowing," Lynch adds, scoffing at the traditional notion that great art was often the fruit of great suffering.

"Somewhere this idea, maybe it came from the French, started that there was something noble about the starving artist in his garret, shivering in the cold. I admit I always thought that was cool.

"But if you're really suffering and depressed you can't get out of bed. I think the starving artist thing is just a great way to get chicks -- they take pity on you and bring you food. And if you're lucky, they hold you tight."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: I Don't Believe in Beatles on February 01, 2007, 09:23:24 PM
Bay Area folks:

INLAND EMPIRE is finally getting released here next week.  It'll be playing at the Embarcadero Center Cinema in SF and the California Theatre in Berkeley starting Feb. 9th. 

There's also a screening on the 8th at the Castro. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: matt35mm on February 09, 2007, 11:41:05 PM
This opened in Santa Cruz today as well as in Berkeley.

So, my feelings while watching it was that I liked the beginning, wasn't really into the middle, and was really into the last 40 minutes or so.  Much of it looked terrible, unfortunately.  I don't mind video resolution, but I don't think I could ever get into having the camera be 5 inches from the actor's face and having their features bulge towards the lens.  And some of the scenes suffered from the same problems that that free Transcendental Meditation DVD scene had (which was shot on the set of INLAND EMPIRE, with a few of the actors there).

But other than those things, I did like it.  But then again, I like almost anything that isn't dismissable, and INLAND EMPIRE certainly isn't dismissable!  I suppose that's just another way of saying that it leaves you with plenty to think about and dwell upon as it haunts your mind.

I would be willing to give it another go in a few weeks, as I can see I'll be able to follow along better during the second viewing.

As such, I don't feel like I'm prepared to talk about it in depth yet.  I will say that there were a handful of scenes that scared the shit out of me the way only David Lynch knows how to.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on February 12, 2007, 08:44:48 PM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimage.guardian.co.uk%2Fsys-images%2FFilm%2FPix%2Fpictures%2F2007%2F02%2F12%2Flee_lynch3.jpg&hash=7c93263c9b093128ceab5a8796cbd07bcc860071)

David Lynch
The American auteur was on stage at the NFT to discuss his oeuvre, his debt to transcendental meditation, the genesis of his latest film, Inland Empire, and why he went on the road with a cow
Source: Guardian Unlimited

Mark Kermode: Just to start things rolling, and this is not specifically connected to Inland Empire which we've just seen, but transcendental meditation is a really big thing in your life. The last time we talked, it was entirely about how TM had changed and affected your life. In as much as it is possible to explain this complex subject in a pitifully small amount of time, please explain to us what TM has done for your consciousness and what you believe it's capable of doing for the greater good?

David Lynch: How many people have heard of TM? Quite a few. Good. TM is a mental technique. It's an ancient form of meditation that allows any human being to dive within and transcend and experience the unbounded, infinite ocean of pure consciousness. Pure vibrant consciousness, bliss, intelligence, creativity, love, power, energy - all there within. At the base of mind, the base of matter, is this field. And it's there. Modern science has just discovered the unified field by going deeper and deeper and deeper into matter. And there it was: a field of oneness, unity. They can't go in there with their instruments and everything, but any human being can go dive within through subtle levels of mind and intellect, transcend and experience this field. When you experience this deepest field, it's a beautiful experience, and experiencing it enlivens it and you grow in consciousness.

You grow in creativity and intelligence. And the side effect is that negativity starts to recede. Things like hate, anger and depression, sorrow, anxieties - these things start to recede and you live life in more freedom, more flow of ideas, more appreciation and understanding of everything.

It's so beautiful for working on projects. It's a field of knowingness - you enliven that and you get this kind of intuitive thing going. It's so beautiful for the arts, for any walk of life. In Vedic science, this field is called Atma, the self and there's a line, "Know thyself." In the Bible they say, "First seek the kingdom of heaven which lies within and all else will be added unto you." You dive within, you experience this, you unfold it and you're unfolding totality. The human has this potential and they have names for this potential: enlightenment, liberation, salvation, fulfilment - huge potential for the human being. And we don't need to suffer. You enliven this thing and you realise that bliss is our nature. We're like happy campers, flowing with ideas. We're like little dogs with tails wagging. It's not a goofball thing, it's a beautiful full thing, really, really great.

MK: I'm right in thinking that your relationship with that has mirrored your film-making career - you started TM around the same time that you were making Eraserhead, is that right?

DL: That's correct.

MK: And it's something that you've done throughout your career?

DL: Yes.

MK: So the question that's always asked is, if TM creates positiveness and all the things you've talked about - and I can see that it genuinely does - some people might ask what about all the darkness that's in your films?

DL: Exactly. We are all different at the surface and one at the core, unity. We are one world family. On the surface, different - I like this, you don't like this. And we catch ideas. Sometimes, we catch an idea that we fall in love with. And if it's a cinema idea, we see what cinema could do to that idea and we're rolling. Stories hold conflict and contrast, highs and lows, life and death, and the human struggle and all kinds of things. But the artist doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You gotta understand it. You don't have to die to do a death scene. You just have to understand it in your own way, but understanding is the thing, understand this suffering, this anger, this character. And you go like that.

I thought when I started meditation that I was going to get real calm and peaceful and it's going to be over. It's not that way, it's so energetic. That's where all the energy and creativity is. Everything that is a thing has emerged out of this field. So it's tremendous creativity. And you don't lose your edge, you get more, stronger feeling for something and it can be magnified. And you don't get sleepy and laidback in this kind of flat-line peace. It's a dynamic peace. It's very powerful, it's where all the power is. So the thing is you can make all these stories but you're separate from it. And that's the key.

MK: I'd like to show a clip from Eraserhead, but before I do, one specific question. One of the recurrent images in your films is of electricity arcing, light-bulbs crackling, two points and something arcing between them. And it seems to me that this somehow relates to what you think about the synaptic arcs in our brains, about making connections. I know you hate saying what things mean in your films, but am I right in thinking that that's at least in the right area?

DL: [pause] No. [audience laughs] Mark is a beautiful guy. It's like that, but I didn't think of it that way. I just love electricity. I like smoke and fire and electricity, these things are mesmerising. You could watch a thing sparking and arcing for hours, and it makes such a beautiful sound. And it's also a disturbance. There's something about electricity that does kind of what you say, but it's not necessarily the reason that it's there.

MK: This is a clip from Eraserhead. Usually in these circumstances I set up for you in narrative terms what's happened up to this point, but there's really no point in explaining. So here's a clip that I quite like.

[runs clip]

MK: One reason why I wanted to show that sequence is that it's a musical sequence. So much of what you do is related to music or harmony, the suspended chords and the way the narratives work. The other reason is that in the case of Inland Empire, it's the first time since Eraserhead that you've made something without any outside interference at all. It's taken years to put together, it grew and seemed to form organically, and the end film is entirely your own project. And that was sort of similar to Eraserhead. You've said that you don't have to actually suffer when you're making art, but people did always talk about Eraserhead as an extremely personal project, as is Inland Empire. Do you see those two things as connected? Please don't say no again.

DL: I won't say yes. There's only been Dune where I didn't have final cut. You know, I came to film-making through painting. Nobody fiddles with a painter and his painter. It should be that way in film, and we should have total control. That way the thing has a chance of holding together as a whole. So all the films were that way. Although I understand what you're talking about. Eraserhead took about six years from start to finish - I kept running out of money, so that's why it took so long. Inland Empire, it started as scene by scene, and there were long times before the next scene came. Finally it started unfolding more rapidly. So when it goes like that it's very frustrating, but it also gives you a chance to go slow and sink into a world and live in that world. The world of Eraserhead, I lived in that world for years, and it was a beautiful experience.

MK: In the case of Inland Empire, just at nuts and bolts level, I've read various versions of where the story came from. One of them is that Laura Dern told you about a neighbour coming to see her and that she suggested the title. Another is that it came out of work that you were doing for the website [davidlynch.com]. As far as you can tell, where did the genesis of the story come from?

DL: It is true that Laura Dern came along and started this. She was walking down the sidewalk in front of my house and smiling as she approached. I hadn't seen her in a long time. She came and announced that she was my new neighbour. And this made us both very happy. And then she said, "David, we gotta do something again some time." And it struck me and I said, "Yes, we do. Maybe I'll write something." And that meeting there triggered a thing, a desire to write something. And desire is like a bait, it can bring things in. And lo and behold, it started bringing things in.

Where the title came from is another story. Later, in the middle of shooting, about a third through, she was telling me that her husband was from the Inland Empire, which is an area east of LA that encompasses many towns. She went on talking but my mind stuck on those words. I'd heard them before but now they had a new meaning and I stopped her and I said, "That's the title of this film." Then, at the same time almost, my brother who was up in Montana, cleaning the basement of my parents' log cabin, discovered this old scrapbook that had fallen behind a chest of drawers. He dusted it off and found that it was my scrapbook from when I lived in Spokane, Washington, aged five. He sent it to me. I get this, I open it up and the first picture is an aerial view of Spokane and underneath it says, "Inland Empire." So I had the most beautiful feeling of a correct title.

MK: And is it correct that there are certain elements, like for instance the rabbit sitcom, that have their genesis on your website?

DL: Yes, it ran on the site and was called Rabbits. Sometimes we start something and we think it is that. And later, it finds a new home. It was like going towards that, or later, it sprouts and becomes a bigger thing. You don't ever know. It's important that when you get an idea, write it down so you won't forget it. And then, when you're doing it, so many things can flow from that doing.

MK: Next clip that I want to show is from Blue Velvet. You've been talking about Laura Dern and this is a key Laura Dern scene. This has been written about often as ironic, and this has always made me quite cross because there never seemed to be anything ironic about it at all. This is when Laura Dern describes her dream of love. I always thought it was meant to be completely sincere and not ironic at all. You have said in the past that it's not meant to be ironic, so I hope that's still the case. Here's that lovely scene from Blue Velvet.

[runs clip]

MK: The thing I absolutely love about that clip is I think that when Laura Dern describes that dream, it's like you were saying earlier, it's not in a goofy way but in a real way. And you do really mean that, don't you?

DL: Yes. The phenomenon of a shared experience in a theatre is very different than seeing a film on your own. And in a theatre, we all have this thing where we want to be very cool and when you see something like this, really kind of embarrassing, the tendency is to laugh so that you are saying out loud that this is embarrassing and not cool and you're hip to the scene. So this kind of thing happens. But we also always know that when we're alone with this person that we're falling in love with, we do say goofy things, but we don't have a problem with it, it's so beautiful. And the other person's so forgiving of these beautiful, loving, goofy things. So there's a lot of this swimming in this scene. At the same time, there's something to that scene, a truth to it, in my book.

MK: There's also, in the background of it, Angelo Badalamenti, the master of the suspended chord, the person whose music kind of embodies that sense that you get in your films of two worlds vibrating against each other. And it's the thing in between that's important. He is the great suspended chord writer of his generation.

DL: He is. He can tear your heart out.

MK: The last thing I want to show is a scene from Fire Walk With Me. The reason I want to show this is, when it opened, it got very poor reviews in some places. And I remember watching it, and I think it's still my favourite of your films; I really, really loved it. It seemed that when the press turned on Fire Walk With Me, they didn't just dislike it, they were actively hostile towards it. Years later, I spoke to Angelo Badalamenti about it, and I said it must have been heartbreaking when that happened. And he said, "For David, it was like somebody had taken away his kid and was murdering the child." How bad did it feel when Fire Walk With Me was that badly received? And do you now feel vindicated, now that people feel it's actually a masterpiece?

DL: No, I didn't feel bad.

MK: No? He lied!

DL: Angelo lied. When you do something and you have final cut, you have control over it, and you've done the best that you can do and not walked away until all the elements feel correct and you really feel that, then you can take that heavy negative reaction. It was on Dune, where I knew I was selling out, and then still you get a bad review, that's dying two times. And so, I just died a little bit on Fire Walk With Me. But it's true, and the reaction was understandable at the time. It wasn't in the same spirit as the series, that's what people got upset about. And the series was tapering anyway. And there was a dark cloud over things for me right around that time. It was just destined to happen that way. But over time, since then, its reputation has come up.

MK: The key line is, "We live inside a dream." Do we?

DL: Very much, we do.

MK: So we're going to show this clip. Again you'll recognise the setting and the characters. I think this is a great redemptive moment, but then you said maybe it's dark.

DL: We'll talk about it.

[runs clip]

MK: It isn't redemptive?

DL: You know, he wants his garmonbozia.

MK: Which is corn?

DL: Which is pain and sorrow.

MK: In what language?

DL: It's in the subtitle in there.

MK: But where does the word come from?

DL: I don't know. It just came.

MK: So, in your language.

DL: It's their language. So in a way, they sort of liked feeding off that. The creamed corn.

MK: When you were making Fire Walk With Me, you said that one of the reasons you wanted to do it was that you wanted to get back to Twin Peaks. You had fallen in love with the place, and I think there's an entire generation of people who did fall in love with the place of Twin Peaks, with the atmosphere of that series. I know that things, as you say, petered, but there was a moment when it was like, that was the place that we all wanted to be.

DL: It's strange. Twin Peaks exists in a part of the north-west, a fictitious part, but it's there. It's a small town, and yet the story travelled around the world. Go figure, what it was that caught all different cultures and places. It was a strange, beautiful surprise.

MK: And was it as a result of Twin Peaks that, you have a line of coffee, don't you?

DL: Yes, but not as a result of Twin Peaks.

MK: I know you like coffee.

DL: I love coffee, but many human beings love coffee. And I think this David Lynch signature cup coffee will please those coffee-lovers.

MK: For those who don't know, it has the most fantastic advert, which is a picture of you and it says, "It's all in the beans, and I'm just full of beans."

DL: Yes. [laughs]

MK: Are you happy to take questions? Okay, let's start there.

Q1: I've grown up watching your films and I think there aren't many film-makers out there who depict the human condition, and human affliction, as you do. What's your take on that and how does it relate to your transcendental meditation?


DL: The affliction that you're talking about is suffering, and there's a thing when our desires are blocked, there's this huge frustration, and that frustration can turn into anger, and it can turn into what they call unproductive thinking and actions. So the character of say, Frank Booth - I didn't think about this, Frank Booth just literally came walking along as an idea, but at the same time you can see there's some very tender thing to Frank, but there's so much torment and tension and suffering in the guy that he's just bound by that. Bill Pullman in The Lost Highway, the same thing. It just builds up and builds up and builds up. Now, if that same person could transcend and experience this deepest level, the lid would come off this pressure - beautiful, beautiful. It's like in darkness, the light would come on and the darkness would just start going. And then Frank would be, maybe not as interesting as in the film, but Frank himself would be a much, much happier cowboy.

Q2: Thank you for such an astonishing new piece of work. Inland Empire has an unconventional distribution method. Is that because the major studios and distributors don't want to take it up? And if that's the case, do you believe that the mainstream cinema audience has lost the capacity to think or that the studios are afraid that they have?

DL: There's a whole bunch of things. One, Inland Empire is three hours long and two, people have trouble understanding it. It's the kiss of death; for a distributor looking at this, it's a horror to them. On my website, I started distribution of Eraserhead and the short films and other things, and we made contacts and friends, and a conduit got developed to stores. And we thought, wait a minute, maybe we could do this with Inland Empire. That was before there was even any wondering about distributors and what they would think. Then, the advances that distributors give - just like in the music business, these advances used to be huge. And they just went down and down and down. So people get asked to do an album for nothing now. And the same thing has happened in the film business. So, then you find, at least in the States, I never got a nickel, no matter how much a film made, more than that advance. Not a nickel. All kinds of creative accounting.

So we thought, why not go out and try, and the trying is so beautiful because we go to different cities and meet people like tonight and get a feel for how things are going. And the feel I got from the United States was... I always thought the real film-lovers were in Europe. But there's a huge, huge bunch in the States, who are just longing for an alternative to what comes out of Hollywood, more and more and more. So that's a very uplifting feeling. Meeting the theatre owners and having a relationship with them, which is the last stop for a film, in that theatre, in that dark room and the big picture and the right sound, it's all a good thing. It might not be the future for all film-makers, but it's a future for more.

MK: What's the truth or otherwise of this story that you went on the road campaigning for Laura Dern with a cow that said, "If it wasn't for cheese, there wouldn't be an Inland Empire"?

DL: This is true. I didn't have a lot of money to support Laura in the traditional way, which is to buy a lot of these ads in the trades. Theoretically, people in the Academy read these trades and they see a picture that cost so much money, and they change their minds on who they vote for based on this picture. It's absurd. So lots and lots of money spent, I don't think it does any good, but they call them vanity pictures and lots of actors, they like to see the picture and they like to know they're supported by the studio like this. It makes sense, but I didn't have that money. So I got this idea to go out with a cow and a big placard for Laura, and sat on the corner of Hollywood and La Brea and, within an hour, these television news people came, and a crowd gathered. And it was mainly, I think, for the cow. But Laura appreciated that so much, and people appreciated it, but she still didn't get a nomination.

Q3: In a lot of your films, you're very much concerned with stage performances, like we saw in that clip from Eraserhead. And in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, you have actresses playing actresses who are in turn playing another part and they play another part in that film. I was wondering why you're so focused on this idea of performance in your films?

DL: I don't know. I always say it comes with the idea. But then you get lots of ideas, but you fall in love with certain ideas. And I have a thing for curtains and the stage. But then, I think everybody does because a curtain hides something and we want to know what's behind this curtain. And in the cinema, when the curtain opens and the lights go down, it's so beautiful and magical, there's something to it. So it thrills me. If an idea comes and it holds that kind of thing, I fall in love.

Q4: I wanted to ask about the idea of the stock company. In Hollywood, you've had John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, even Clint had stock-company actors. You've surrounded yourself with people like the great Jack Nance, Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, the cast from Twin Peaks and the great, underrated On the Air. What is it about those people particularly that you feel drawn to?

DL: I think what happens is, the rule is, get the right person for the role. If there're two people who are basically both right, and you've worked with one of them before, and you have a shorthand to working and have a good relationship with them, you're going to pick that person. It goes like that.

Q5: Do you watch current movies? If so, are there any current directors that you like?

DL: I haven't watched any for some time. I like to work but I'm not really a film buff. But I was asked this question just today - I liked Aki Kaurismäki's film, The Man Without a Past.

Q6: Which painters or creators influenced your work or your vision of art?

DL: I always say Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is my biggest influence. But for painters, I like many, many painters but I love Francis Bacon the most, and Edward Hopper. Both really different, but Edward Hopper makes us all dream, take off from a painting. Magical stuff. And Bacon for a whole bunch of reasons, but those two are big, big, big inspirations.

MK: Am I right in thinking that there's a major exhibition of your paintings happening, is it in Paris?

DL: It's in Paris, opens in March. It's paintings and drawings and photos and things.

MK: Should we go?

DL: Well, that's up to you. But I think you'd enjoy the show.

Q7: wanted to know how you got to using DV, and in doing that, do you think you would go back to some of those projects that haven't come around, for instance, Ronnie Rocket or One Saliva Bubble?

DL: I started getting into DV through the website, doing short things with a Sony PD150. Started kind of falling in love with this camera, the way there's so much freedom connected to it. Then I started, in the early days of Inland Empire, getting an idea for a scene, writing it and shooting it, with just the Sony PD150. When more came, and I see it's a feature, I stuck with that camera. I did tests up-resing it and the up-res to film, I loved the look of it. It's not the same quality as film, but it has its own feel that I fell in love with. And more than that, this small camera, with 40-minute takes, automatic focus, seeing exactly what you're going to get, it is... I'm deeply in love with this now, it's so good for the scenes and the actors. Magic things can be caught which maybe couldn't be caught with film because you're always stopping - the longest you can go after a slate is about nine minutes. It's always broken and it always moves so slow, everything's so heavy. It's a horror compared with DV.

MK: Are you working as your own operator with that camera?

DL: Yes, you can be there very close, in way more tender action and reaction. You can talk and start again and talk. And it can catch a thing that, like I said, maybe they couldn't have caught before.

MK: Could you now see yourself going back to film?

DL: I don't know that I will, but the digital world would be very, very friendly to Ronnie Rocket.

Q8: I'm studying film at the moment and my biggest influence is you. Can you give me any advice as a struggling future film director?

DL: Stay true to your voice, stay true to the ideas, never turn down a good idea but never take a bad idea. And don't take no for an answer.

Q9: I was just wondering whether you would consider cinema as a kind of consciousness, in that it's making decisions, it's allowing us to see characters and events in certain ways?

DL: Ideas come from consciousness because ideas are things. Consciousness turns itself into things. So the whole cosmos is vibrating consciousness. There are things that cinema can do that can catch an abstraction and it can say something that can't be said any other way, or it could be said with words but it would take a poet. Cinema can do abstractions, but I don't think cinema can make you transcend. I think cinema could get you into deeper and deeper levels, theoretically I guess it could. It can say deeper and abstract things and give indications of hidden things. It's a magical medium, but this thing of consciousness... The best way to know what it is is to pretend that you didn't have it. And if you didn't have consciousness, you wouldn't exist. Or if you did exist, you wouldn't know it. It's the "I am" ness. It's the ageless thing we talk to. It's awareness and it's the thing. Some people think, "I think, therefore I am", that the brain produces consciousness. But it's the other way round; consciousness produces the brain - it produces a fish, it produces a tree, from the subtlest it just keeps coming out. It just makes things.

MK: Do you not think there are moments in cinema, especially in your cinema, in which moments of transcendence happen? Like when I watch that Laura Dern speech, something happens which is not of the moment.

DL: It could give you a blissful, beautiful feeling; whether you really get into that real transcendence, I don't know. But transcending is a natural thing. Many, many, many people have transcended, but they don't know how they did it, and they don't know how to do it again. So they say, when you're falling asleep, and going from waking to sleep, you pass through a gap, that synapse thing. People say, "Woah, I see a white light" or 'I feel bliss" - it doesn't always happen but the transcendent is behind all waking, sleeping and dreaming. It permeates creation, it's there, it's our self. And you just need to experience it to enliven it. And then it gets more and more and more.

Q10: What is it about Poland that made you decide to film Inland Empire there, and with Polish actors as well?

DL: A car arrived and five or six guys get out and come into my house. And they're from Lodz, Poland, and they say they're from the Camerimage film festival. They're the greatest bunch, these guys who run the festival, the hardest workers. They've been putting on this festival for 14 or 15 years now, on their own against all odds and it gets bigger and bigger every year. Really beautiful. They invited me over there and I asked them if I went there, because I heard there were factories, so I asked if they could get me into factories so that I could photograph, and if they could get me nude women at night to photograph.

MK: In the factories?

DL: Not in the factories. It would be very cold. And they said yes to both things. And they were as good as their word. But the city of Lodz is so beautiful to me and there's so much mood there. The architecture and the clouds and the way it all is, it's its own place. And I start falling in love. I think a place, like music or anything, it can conjure ideas. And ideas started coming out of Lodz, Poland. And one thing led to another and there it was, Hollywood feeding some of it and Lodz feeding some of it.

Q11: You were saying at the start about going deeply into the world of a film when you're filming it. But when you finish the film and you're watching it back, does it seem strange to you? Does it feel like you're a waking person looking back at a strange dream? Do you have that distance from a film?

DL: After a while. You just know a little bit too much, so it takes a while for that to go. But I can have a good experience sometimes, if I haven't seen Eraserhead for a while, to go into that world again. I got a DVD made that's so beautiful. It's clean, the sound is good even with all the compression. I was tweaking the digital projector. I feel that the DVD is better than the film prints. I just saw a film print because the Museum of Modern Art has Eraserhead and has restored it, and there are many, many, many problems with it on film, but on DVD it was just rock solid.

MK: If I can bring this to a conclusion on that note - the consistent thing through all your movies is the extraordinary soundscape, dating back to the work of Alan Splet. These sounds that we think of as Lynchian, the ambient noise. It does seem to me that sometimes you can watch a David Lynch film with your eyes closed because of what's happening on the soundtrack.

DL: Well, that's very nice but it's sound and picture moving together. And it's a magic thing. And you try to get those sounds to marry with that picture and enhance it, based on the idea. When they flow together and they marry, then you've got a chance at the thing where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And that's beautiful.

MK: I think you're an incredible advert for TM, frankly, because if it does what it does to you to everybody else, then I would advocate it immediately, because you are full of beans. Ladies and gentlemen, the fabulous David Lynch.





Video: watch clips from the interview here. (http://film.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,2009819,00.html)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Gamblour. on February 12, 2007, 11:14:33 PM
I fell asleep so hard during this. First of all, it's playing in a very small, very old, skeezy theater, which ended up being perfect. They only take cash, the seats are like foam car wrecks. Anyway, I was really amused by what I would wake up to, and I left feeling like the world was projected in video. I am going to go see it again, but I want to be really drunk, like go to a super trashy bar either before or after. Probably after.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on February 19, 2007, 01:07:20 PM
[This review is pretty much spoiler-free.]

The first viewing of a Lynch film is really unlike anything else. It's a beautiful, frustrating, challenging, frightening, and sometimes a punishing experience, but you always feel that you've been made stronger. It's sort of how I felt after Manderlay, but on a different level.

This movie is drawn out torturously in a way very different from Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway... I think it feels something like Eraserhead. These are the parts, I guarantee, during which people fell asleep. They were pretty amazing, really, because we've learned to expect a certain aesthetic, a certain visual logic, and a certain rhythm, even (or especially) in Lynch films, and that is all shattered in those moments. INLAND EMPIRE is more difficult to interpret, I think, than any other Lynch film, because of this. Some people call this a "mess," but I think it's something very different. You know there's something there, and you know it's important, and you also know that you're a long way from getting it.

Interpretation is so daunting that you just have to surrender to the film and allow yourself to be intellectually and emotionally raped. You get some ideas, and people will say superficial things... like it's all about FAME... Well, it's definitely about being part of a film, being sucked into a film, being a victim of a film or some other alternate universe, which is so beautifully described by that walk of fame scene (that's not a spoiler). My initial interpretation was that INLAND EMPIRE is about moving through worlds toward enlightenment, and I think, for now, I'm sticking with that.

EDITS:

I swear I did not read page 12 before using the "rape" analogy. I've never been raped, and I hope I never am, but If I ever was, I think it would feel something like INLAND EMPIRE.

Quote from: Pubrick on January 17, 2007, 09:41:28 PMi don't know if that's even a spoiler. no one knows.
No, that is not a spoiler. Only the images in the trailers are spoilers.

Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on February 20, 2007, 07:25:30 PM
New Spoiler here. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DlYCvxvPZY)


(trailer)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on February 20, 2007, 10:23:13 PM
If someone can find a decent quality version of "Ghost of Love" (the Lynch-sung piece that plays over the trailer, i.e. "straaaange... what love does") I will give you a gajillion dollars.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Ghostboy on February 20, 2007, 10:39:14 PM
That new trailer kinda sucks. The Italian one is still the best.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: picolas on February 20, 2007, 10:54:55 PM
Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on February 20, 2007, 10:23:13 PM(the Lynch-sung piece that plays over the trailer, i.e. "straaaange... what love does")
holy crap. i thought that was him but decided it couldn't be. if anyone finds it i'll use an emoticon of their choosing in my next post and try to justify its use to the best of my ability.

i was prepared for the suckage from the last trailer so this one seemed good. especially after JB's review/expecting rape.. my favourite part is barely seeing the title but at the same time it engulfs the screen.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: matt35mm on February 20, 2007, 10:59:06 PM
Quote from: picolas on February 20, 2007, 10:54:55 PM
if anyone finds it i'll use an emoticon of their choosing in my next post and try to justify its use to the best of my ability.

Where would be the fun in explaining it?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: picolas on February 20, 2007, 11:02:11 PM
the emoticon? i'd work it in no matter how unrelated to what i was going to post about.

for example:

that movie was awesome! :yabbse-thumbdown: down is the new up! it made me rethink everything! 

but better
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: matt35mm on February 23, 2007, 02:38:07 AM
Quote from: matt35mm on February 09, 2007, 11:41:05 PM
So, my feelings while watching it was that I liked the beginning, wasn't really into the middle, and was really into the last 40 minutes or so.  Much of it looked terrible, unfortunately.  I don't mind video resolution, but I don't think I could ever get into having the camera be 5 inches from the actor's face and having their features bulge towards the lens.  And some of the scenes suffered from the same problems that that free Transcendental Meditation DVD scene had (which was shot on the set of INLAND EMPIRE, with a few of the actors there).

But other than those things, I did like it.  But then again, I like almost anything that isn't dismissable, and INLAND EMPIRE certainly isn't dismissable!  I suppose that's just another way of saying that it leaves you with plenty to think about and dwell upon as it haunts your mind.

I would be willing to give it another go in a few weeks, as I can see I'll be able to follow along better during the second viewing.

As such, I don't feel like I'm prepared to talk about it in depth yet.  I will say that there were a handful of scenes that scared the shit out of me the way only David Lynch knows how to.

Yeah, much better the second time.  I was much more into the middle this time, and was quite into it for the whole running time (the rest of the audience, however...).  Even the video and those hooker girls didn't bother me as much.  And the scary parts were STILL scary!

I just had more of fun time being able to notice what I missed the first time, and be able to actually have some idea of what was going on, which also made the experience moving (the first time wasn't moving at all).

So, basically, I'll add to the pile of reviews that say that a second viewing reveals a greater experience, especially if the whole middle felt like a limbo to you.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on February 23, 2007, 12:14:57 PM
Lynch Interview on a Blog
Tomcast Video Interview here. (http://clement.blogs.com/thomas_clment/2007/02/david_lynch.html)



Cahiers du Cinema Online Version In English - Lynch Article
Check out the Online version (http://www.virtuel-book.com/cdc/cdc00/) of Cahiers du Cinema featuring an article on Lynch.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: matt35mm on February 24, 2007, 12:28:30 AM
OH, and it just wouldn't be right not to have a mention, somewhere in this thread, of how gorgeous Karolina Gruszka is!  By far the prettiest prostitute in the movie!

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.l-gwiazdy.pl%2Fimages%2F18__gruszka7.jpg&hash=18dc5db16f0332b98b0fa8fc89ba3d4b06a5c8e2)

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.wp.pl%2Fa%2Ff%2Fpjpeg%2F9851%2Fkarolina_gruszka.jpg&hash=1d22f51d4afb5a81664d81675b448d332912c3f2)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on March 09, 2007, 12:48:37 AM
Dern Defends Director/mentor Lynch

Actress Laura Dern has defended David Lynch against accusations the director makes his surreal movies deliberately difficult to understand - and then refuses to explain them. Dern, who has starred in four Lynch movies including his latest Inland Empire, became incensed at the Venice Film Festival last September when one reporter criticized him for not explaining the movie's plot. She says, "I get so protective of David, like an older sister or something, which is so absurd. He's not waiting for us to get the movie because he doesn't think the cinema is about 'getting it'. I think he believes - which I've found very rare in filmmakers - in the intelligence of the audience, that they're intelligent enough to discover the film and what it means within themselves."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on March 09, 2007, 03:03:31 PM
David Lynch on Inland Empire
Lynch discusses his latest masterpiece with Total Film

David Lynch might have been crowned the king of weird, but as he sits across from Total Film, he looks more like a friendly uncle, relaxed, smiling, and with a twinkle in his eye. Still, we know it's him: his attire is classic Lynch, a white-shirt buttoned-up to the Adam's apple, a smart, pressed, black suit, and his iconic ice-cream scoop hair reaching for the ceiling. And then he opens his mouth to speak, and he starts to earn his title...

You're certainly going to get quite a reaction from audiences for this one...
I try to stay true to the ideas that I fall in love with, and try and get those things to feel correct in the translation to cinema and hope that if they feel correct to me, and if I've been true to those ideas, they'll feel correct to others, but you never know. You can't control that – audiences are so different, varying. Like they say, we're all a little bit different. And when cinema gets somewhat abstract, many different interpretations and feelings come.

There are some dark feelings...
There are some dark feelings and some lighter feelings. Stories hold many things, and it is a story of a woman in trouble, so it goes.

But obviously it goes a lot deeper...
Sure, but you already know what those things are, for yourself.

You didn't have a name for the project when you started...
No, I didn't have a name. I didn't even know it was going to be a feature film when we started and somewhere along the line, I was talking to Laura Dern after we'd been shooting for a while, and she was telling me that her husband grew up in the Inland Empire, which is an area to the east of LA, and she went on talking about something and my mind stopped on those words, even though I'd heard them before, even though I'd heard them in a different way, and I stopped her talking and I said 'That's the name of this film.'

Strangely, at that same time, my brother was up in Montana, going through my parents' log cabin, and in the basement behind a bureau he finds this old dusty scrapbook fallen back behind there. And he dusts it off, looks at it, determines it's my scrap book from when I was five, and sends it to me, when I was living in Spokane. I get this, I open it up, and the first picture in the scrapbook is an aerial view of Spokane Washington and underneath it says, 'Inland Empire' so I felt very good then about the title.

We've got our own interpretation of the film and how we feel when we watch it, but how did you feel when you watched it as the final product? What does it do to you, does it hypnotise you as well?
Yeah, it hypnotises me. And you see the idea go from when it goes into your conscious mind, now you see it on the screen, and it's a beautiful thing. You can go in there, and experience it all together. It's a good thing.

Inland Empire's full of references, it feels like you've built to a climax of the imagery that runs through your films...
Give me an example, 'cause I don't feel that. I know there's red curtains in it...

There's a lot, the painting of the birds nods to Blue Velvet, the guy cutting the log à la Twin Peaks...
(Laughs) Yeah, I guess!

You didn't see that?
Well, I can see it through your eyes, but they're there for different reasons, than to gather things from the past.

You used a cow to push for an Oscar nomination for Laura Dern...
Well, I got this idea. I didn't have the money to support Laura Dern in the traditional way, so I thought 'Oh, I'll go see what happens at the corner of Hollywood and La Brea.' We found a place that we could go to there, it was very nicely situated. I thought, 'I'll take a cow and this placard and promote Laura in this way.'

Within one hour Channel Four News and Channel Five News were there, and a good size crowd was there, really nice people. I didn't realise the love people have for cows. Tremendous love, and curiosity. So it worked to the point of getting the word out on her behalf, but it didn't get her a nomination.

It's a stunning performance. How would it have felt if she had been given an Academy Award nomination?
I would have felt very good. Laura is a great actress and she's a daring bold, brave actress, and at the same time she's grown up in LA, from showbiz parents, and that statue has a certain glimmer. I think she might have been very happy to get it.

To what extent did your use of transcendental meditation inform the film?
Transcendental meditation is a mental technique that allows any human being to dive within. And diving within, one experiences subtler levels of mind and intellect; the border transcends and experiences this ocean unbounded, infinite, eternal, pure consciousness, modern science's unified field, the kingdom of heaven, the absolute, totality, absolute intelligence, creativity, bliss, energy, dynamic peace, all these qualities exist in this unmanifest field in the base of mind and the base of matter. The experiencing of this deepest level enlivens it and one grows in those qualities and they say it's a holistic experience.

Transcending this deepest level is the only experience that lights the full brain on the EEG machine. And we've been told we only use 5 or 10 per cent of our entire brain and here's the whole brain engaged with this experience.

So what happens is consciousness starts expanding, bliss starts expanding, intelligence and understanding, wakefulness, awareness, appreciation, all avenues of life get better, creativity flows, and the side effect of all this is that negativity starts to recede, things like anger, anxiety, stress, fear, depression, sorrow, they start to go, clearing the way for enjoyment of the doing.

It's appreciation magnified, energy to do things without that heavy weight that kills creative flow, and things get very, very good. Intuition grows, it's an ocean of knowingness, pure knowingness, unbelievable. It's a beautiful thing, it feeds the creative process, feeds the enjoyment of the doing and people like coming to sit next to you and give you money.

You've said that you liked digital so much, you're not going back to film. What is it you like so much about shooting digitally?
You've got a smaller camera, and you've got 40 minute takes, so you can really get down in there without breaking it and you're seeing exactly what you're going to get. In film you learn close to what you're going to get but you don't really know until the dailies. Now you know, and if you don't like it you can fix it and see the fix right in front of you. It's very, very good. Automatic focus – on 35 mm, you've got a guy focusing, if I want to move in, they've got to rehearse, the dolly's got to move, he's got to pull the focus, that's a horror.

Are there any contemporary filmmakers that you're interested in at the moment?
I haven't seen a lot of contemporary films. I'm not really a film buff. I liked Aki Kaurismäki's film Man Without A Past.

If you could spend time with any filmmaker from the past, to be their pupil, who would it be?
I got the opportunity to spend time with Fellini, on a Friday night, for a half an hour - him holding my hand, speaking to me and Sunday he went into a coma. That was worth it right there. And that's who I'd choose anyway.

You're friends with Eli Roth, is that right?
I'm buddies with Eli.

How did that friendship come about?
Eli was working for a Broadway producer when I became somewhat interested in doing something on Tesla, Nikola Tesla, and so Eli did a lot of research and we became friends, like that.

How's your music coming along?
It's coming along really good, thanks for asking. I don't know what's going to happen but you need time. I want to do some music when I go back home. I'm working with this girl, Christa Bell. She sings in Inland Empire and I'm doing an album with her. Then I was involved with producing a group called Fox Bat Strategy but  the lead guitar player and singer died suddenly, so it'll be a tribute album to him, so it'll be six or seven tracks, but that's all we had. Angelo Badalamenti and I did this thing called Thought Gang and that's almost finished. A lot of things are almost finished, but not quite.


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David Lynch Interview
The wizard of odd talks to Empire about his new film, Inland Empire. 

He may have passed 60, but his hair is still wavy as a field of corn (it's become his trademark), his shirt buttoned-up to the gills (he dislikes the wind on his neck), and his unwillingness to give pat and convenient answers as infuriating and brilliant as ever (he just doesn't think in straight lines). Indeed, the ultra-obtuse, three-hour long "a woman-in-peril" drama Inland Empire finds him returning to the Eraserhead-style, wilfully bizarre art-mainstream hinterland where he made his reputation as the wizard of odd. Love him/ hate him/ want-to-shake-him-until-he-'fesses-up, there's no doubting that David Lynch remains a wonderful thing. As he answers questions, usually with stringent denials, he spins his fingers in potty arabesques, a sign language that could be highly significant or just an itch for another of his frequent cigarettes...

You describe the movie as an enigma and mystery...
No! I never described it that way. I said it's a story of a woman in trouble.

It is a mystery to some degree. do you want people to be able to solve the mystery or will the enigma of it lose some power?
No! My ideas come in fragments, so I have to make sense of those things for myself and viewers — we're all human beings. We see things and hear things, we're like detectives, we figure it out for ourselves. When things get abstract there's many different interpretations, and it's so much fun to come up with your own interpretations, your own feelings, and figure it for yourself.

Given you made this film bit by bit over four years, when did you know it was time to stop?
When it feels correct as a whole. When you're shooting in a location and you're working away, how do you know to say, "Okay. we got this and you can go"? You know as you go along that you got that, and you know when you've got all the things you need to take to the editing room later. It's a feel or it's an intuitive thing and it's checking back with the original idea. Always checking back with the original idea tells you how to go.

What was the original idea then?
The original idea is the final film. You see what I mean?

Not really. Could there be another form for the film, say, on DVD?
No! This is the film but the DVD could have extra things. Those scenes that hit the cutting room floor for the sake of the whole. But on their own they could be interesting. Like in Blue Velvet there were a couple of scenes I wanted to get just to have on their own, but they're lost.

We wouldn't dare ask for solutions or meanings but why do you have humans dressed as rabbits in what appears to be a sitcom within the film?
You can ask, but I would ask you why? There are things that are very hard to put into words. It's a thing that feels correct.

What about the duck?
It could be the eye of a duck. The eye of a duck is just the placement of a certain jewel scene. But it could be the eye of the duck. It's where a certain kind of logic we're used to doesn't mean anything but it has a feel that is a correct feeling to me.

Righto... Does that mean that they might continue, like the bunny family you say might be become part of something else?
They were on my site first and were one of those things that go somewhere. I don't know what the rabbits will do. But any number of things could happen.

A spin off series?
Yeah.

Do these things have a symbolic meaning or do they have a more aesthetic meaning?
They have a meaning, yeah. They have a meaning. Sometimes you can get an idea and you don't know what it means. Just like a viewer could look at a thing, and it's a big something to wonder about... I love them they're wordless ideas intuitive kind of ideas.

Working fast and lose over four years, shooting on a microbudget using digital video cameras, did this feel similar to your experience of making Eraserhead all those years ago?
Sure. With Eraserhead, again, ideas come and you fall in love with those ideas and you start translating them, so it means you start finding locations, so you build sets, and get a certain light going and you find certain people that marry to the characters that came with the idea. I was thinking that the idea is real important to stay to true as the fundamental notes of a chord. You get those notes correct and then the harmonics will be correct (he starts playing an imaginary keyboard in the air). So someone could be out in the audience maybe getting way more understanding. It goes kind of like that.

Is it easy to be true to that way of working independently when you don't have whoever looking over your shoulder?
No! If you have final cut, if you have control, you can do it in any kind of environment. I do enjoy it more with a smaller crew.

Is the creative thrill you get from making a film like Straight Story different form something like this?
No! It's the same. People say some of my films are experimental, but I say Straight Story was my most experimental. When I read the script which I didn't write, I felt these things, these beautiful feelings, and I thought how do you get that feeling in cinemas? When you have something that brings a real emotion, that's the power of cinema.

Why though do you keep returning to the abstract side of cinema?
I don't know why that happens, but we have choices and there could be a lot of reasons why... Who knows, but when you get an idea and you fall in love with it there's not a whole lot of choice. You're going down a street and you meet this girl and you know it doesn't have to make any sense. Bingo! You're in love.

Did you ever worry DV wouldn't be as 'pretty' as celluloid?
No! To me it is! I know, obviously, it's not the quality of film but in some ways the lesser quality I like. Sometimes film kills the room to dream. I'm so happy with this look, there is room to dream. Do you mind if I smoke?

Not at all. Can you us about the retro '50s feel to your movies...
I grew up in the 50s, and those experiences are powerful. Some people grew up in the '70s, powerful, beautiful memories of the '70s which to me is one of the worst decades. It has something to do with that. Has something to with the birth of rock 'n' roll, and something to do with those American cars. an incredible design. There was so much optimism at that time and it must leak into the process.

Is putting dark, disturbing images onto the screen therapeutic or cathartic for you?
No! It's the ideas and you fall in love with them. So it's not like cathartic or cleansing thing.

When you just fancy watching a movie at home what do you pot for?
I watched The Apartment, Billy Wilder's The Apartment, on New Years Eve on the big screen. I love this movie, it's a New Years movie and I love Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard they are a place that is so great to return to. He had such a great sense of place and mood. It's a magical thing.

What are we to make of your views on Hollywood in this film?
You could say this is where Laura Dern's character just happened to be. It's not a statement but it sure could be read s a statement, but it's where she ended up.

Do you ever say, "No that's not the right answer one of my films"?
No! It would be wrong to say that.

Is there's a mischievous part of you that loves the fact people can argue about your films.
No! That would be a false reason to do something.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: john on March 09, 2007, 03:37:49 PM
Lord, I hate interviewers.

To expand...

They're still so petulant and insistant that he explains every fucking thing in his films.

It's always the same formula, "I wouldn't DARE to be like all the other critics and ask what _________ is all about but.... hey, what is ________ all about?"

And then, if he doesn't give they answer they want...they get downright pushy about it. Why even interview him? Why not just write an essay, "Here is my theory for INLAND EMPIRE, and my imaginary response from David Lynch telling me I'm absolutely right."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on March 10, 2007, 12:50:24 AM
this is just ridiculous. one good interview followed by one of the worst i have ever read..

Quote from: MacGuffin on March 09, 2007, 03:03:31 PM
David Lynch on Inland Empire
Lynch discusses his latest masterpiece with Total Film

David Lynch might have been crowned the king of weird, but as he sits across from Total Film, he looks more like a friendly uncle, relaxed, smiling, and with a twinkle in his eye. Still, we know it's him: his attire is classic Lynch, a white-shirt buttoned-up to the Adam's apple, a smart, pressed, black suit, and his iconic ice-cream scoop hair reaching for the ceiling. And then he opens his mouth to speak, and he starts to earn his title...

You're certainly going to get quite a reaction from audiences for this one...
I try to stay true to the ideas that I fall in love with, and try and get those things to feel correct in the translation to cinema and hope that if they feel correct to me, and if I've been true to those ideas, they'll feel correct to others, but you never know. You can't control that – audiences are so different, varying. Like they say, we're all a little bit different. And when cinema gets somewhat abstract, many different interpretations and feelings come.

There are some dark feelings...
There are some dark feelings and some lighter feelings. Stories hold many things, and it is a story of a woman in trouble, so it goes.

But obviously it goes a lot deeper...
Sure, but you already know what those things are, for yourself.

You didn't have a name for the project when you started...
No, I didn't have a name. I didn't even know it was going to be a feature film when we started and somewhere along the line, I was talking to Laura Dern after we'd been shooting for a while, and she was telling me that her husband grew up in the Inland Empire, which is an area to the east of LA, and she went on talking about something and my mind stopped on those words, even though I'd heard them before, even though I'd heard them in a different way, and I stopped her talking and I said 'That's the name of this film.'

Strangely, at that same time, my brother was up in Montana, going through my parents' log cabin, and in the basement behind a bureau he finds this old dusty scrapbook fallen back behind there. And he dusts it off, looks at it, determines it's my scrap book from when I was five, and sends it to me, when I was living in Spokane. I get this, I open it up, and the first picture in the scrapbook is an aerial view of Spokane Washington and underneath it says, 'Inland Empire' so I felt very good then about the title.

We've got our own interpretation of the film and how we feel when we watch it, but how did you feel when you watched it as the final product? What does it do to you, does it hypnotise you as well?
Yeah, it hypnotises me. And you see the idea go from when it goes into your conscious mind, now you see it on the screen, and it's a beautiful thing. You can go in there, and experience it all together. It's a good thing.

Inland Empire's full of references, it feels like you've built to a climax of the imagery that runs through your films...
Give me an example, 'cause I don't feel that. I know there's red curtains in it...

There's a lot, the painting of the birds nods to Blue Velvet, the guy cutting the log à la Twin Peaks...
(Laughs) Yeah, I guess!

You didn't see that?
Well, I can see it through your eyes, but they're there for different reasons, than to gather things from the past.

You used a cow to push for an Oscar nomination for Laura Dern...
Well, I got this idea. I didn't have the money to support Laura Dern in the traditional way, so I thought 'Oh, I'll go see what happens at the corner of Hollywood and La Brea.' We found a place that we could go to there, it was very nicely situated. I thought, 'I'll take a cow and this placard and promote Laura in this way.'

Within one hour Channel Four News and Channel Five News were there, and a good size crowd was there, really nice people. I didn't realise the love people have for cows. Tremendous love, and curiosity. So it worked to the point of getting the word out on her behalf, but it didn't get her a nomination.

It's a stunning performance. How would it have felt if she had been given an Academy Award nomination?
I would have felt very good. Laura is a great actress and she's a daring bold, brave actress, and at the same time she's grown up in LA, from showbiz parents, and that statue has a certain glimmer. I think she might have been very happy to get it.

To what extent did your use of transcendental meditation inform the film?
Transcendental meditation is a mental technique that allows any human being to dive within. And diving within, one experiences subtler levels of mind and intellect; the border transcends and experiences this ocean unbounded, infinite, eternal, pure consciousness, modern science's unified field, the kingdom of heaven, the absolute, totality, absolute intelligence, creativity, bliss, energy, dynamic peace, all these qualities exist in this unmanifest field in the base of mind and the base of matter. The experiencing of this deepest level enlivens it and one grows in those qualities and they say it's a holistic experience.

Transcending this deepest level is the only experience that lights the full brain on the EEG machine. And we've been told we only use 5 or 10 per cent of our entire brain and here's the whole brain engaged with this experience.

So what happens is consciousness starts expanding, bliss starts expanding, intelligence and understanding, wakefulness, awareness, appreciation, all avenues of life get better, creativity flows, and the side effect of all this is that negativity starts to recede, things like anger, anxiety, stress, fear, depression, sorrow, they start to go, clearing the way for enjoyment of the doing.

It's appreciation magnified, energy to do things without that heavy weight that kills creative flow, and things get very, very good. Intuition grows, it's an ocean of knowingness, pure knowingness, unbelievable. It's a beautiful thing, it feeds the creative process, feeds the enjoyment of the doing and people like coming to sit next to you and give you money.

You've said that you liked digital so much, you're not going back to film. What is it you like so much about shooting digitally?
You've got a smaller camera, and you've got 40 minute takes, so you can really get down in there without breaking it and you're seeing exactly what you're going to get. In film you learn close to what you're going to get but you don't really know until the dailies. Now you know, and if you don't like it you can fix it and see the fix right in front of you. It's very, very good. Automatic focus – on 35 mm, you've got a guy focusing, if I want to move in, they've got to rehearse, the dolly's got to move, he's got to pull the focus, that's a horror.

Are there any contemporary filmmakers that you're interested in at the moment?
I haven't seen a lot of contemporary films. I'm not really a film buff. I liked Aki Kaurismäki's film Man Without A Past.

If you could spend time with any filmmaker from the past, to be their pupil, who would it be?
I got the opportunity to spend time with Fellini, on a Friday night, for a half an hour - him holding my hand, speaking to me and Sunday he went into a coma. That was worth it right there. And that's who I'd choose anyway.

You're friends with Eli Roth, is that right?
I'm buddies with Eli.

How did that friendship come about?
Eli was working for a Broadway producer when I became somewhat interested in doing something on Tesla, Nikola Tesla, and so Eli did a lot of research and we became friends, like that.

How's your music coming along?
It's coming along really good, thanks for asking. I don't know what's going to happen but you need time. I want to do some music when I go back home. I'm working with this girl, Christa Bell. She sings in Inland Empire and I'm doing an album with her. Then I was involved with producing a group called Fox Bat Strategy but  the lead guitar player and singer died suddenly, so it'll be a tribute album to him, so it'll be six or seven tracks, but that's all we had. Angelo Badalamenti and I did this thing called Thought Gang and that's almost finished. A lot of things are almost finished, but not quite.


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David Lynch Interview
The wizard of odd talks to Empire about his new film, Inland Empire. 

He may have passed 60, but his hair is still wavy as a field of corn (it's become his trademark), his shirt buttoned-up to the gills (he dislikes the wind on his neck), and his unwillingness to give pat and convenient answers as infuriating and brilliant as ever (he just doesn't think in straight lines). Indeed, the ultra-obtuse, three-hour long "a woman-in-peril" drama Inland Empire finds him returning to the Eraserhead-style, wilfully bizarre art-mainstream hinterland where he made his reputation as the wizard of odd. Love him/ hate him/ want-to-shake-him-until-he-'fesses-up, there's no doubting that David Lynch remains a wonderful thing. As he answers questions, usually with stringent denials, he spins his fingers in potty arabesques, a sign language that could be highly significant or just an itch for another of his frequent cigarettes...

You describe the movie as an enigma and mystery...
No! I never described it that way. I said it's a story of a woman in trouble.

It is a mystery to some degree. do you want people to be able to solve the mystery or will the enigma of it lose some power?
No!  My ideas come in fragments, so I have to make sense of those things for myself and viewers — we're all human beings. We see things and hear things, we're like detectives, we figure it out for ourselves. When things get abstract there's many different interpretations, and it's so much fun to come up with your own interpretations, your own feelings, and figure it for yourself.

Given you made this film bit by bit over four years, when did you know it was time to stop?
When it feels correct as a whole. When you're shooting in a location and you're working away, how do you know to say, "Okay. we got this and you can go"? You know as you go along that you got that, and you know when you've got all the things you need to take to the editing room later. It's a feel or it's an intuitive thing and it's checking back with the original idea. Always checking back with the original idea tells you how to go.

What was the original idea then?
The original idea is the final film. You see what I mean?

Not really. Could there be another form for the film, say, on DVD?
No!  This is the film but the DVD could have extra things. Those scenes that hit the cutting room floor for the sake of the whole. But on their own they could be interesting. Like in Blue Velvet there were a couple of scenes I wanted to get just to have on their own, but they're lost.

We wouldn't dare ask for solutions or meanings but why do you have humans dressed as rabbits in what appears to be a sitcom within the film?
You can ask, but I would ask you why? There are things that are very hard to put into words. It's a thing that feels correct.

What about the duck?
It could be the eye of a duck. The eye of a duck is just the placement of a certain jewel scene. But it could be the eye of the duck. It's where a certain kind of logic we're used to doesn't mean anything but it has a feel that is a correct feeling to me.

Righto... Does that mean that they might continue, like the bunny family you say might be become part of something else?
They were on my site first and were one of those things that go somewhere. I don't know what the rabbits will do. But any number of things could happen.

A spin off series?
Yeah.

Do these things have a symbolic meaning or do they have a more aesthetic meaning?
They have a meaning, yeah. They have a meaning. Sometimes you can get an idea and you don't know what it means. Just like a viewer could look at a thing, and it's a big something to wonder about... I love them they're wordless ideas intuitive kind of ideas.

Working fast and lose over four years, shooting on a microbudget using digital video cameras, did this feel similar to your experience of making Eraserhead all those years ago?
Sure. With Eraserhead, again, ideas come and you fall in love with those ideas and you start translating them, so it means you start finding locations, so you build sets, and get a certain light going and you find certain people that marry to the characters that came with the idea. I was thinking that the idea is real important to stay to true as the fundamental notes of a chord. You get those notes correct and then the harmonics will be correct (he starts playing an imaginary keyboard in the air). So someone could be out in the audience maybe getting way more understanding. It goes kind of like that.

Is it easy to be true to that way of working independently when you don't have whoever looking over your shoulder?
No!  If you have final cut, if you have control, you can do it in any kind of environment. I do enjoy it more with a smaller crew.

Is the creative thrill you get from making a film like Straight Story different form something like this?
No!  It's the same. People say some of my films are experimental, but I say Straight Story was my most experimental. When I read the script which I didn't write, I felt these things, these beautiful feelings, and I thought how do you get that feeling in cinemas? When you have something that brings a real emotion, that's the power of cinema.

Why though do you keep returning to the abstract side of cinema?
I don't know why that happens, but we have choices and there could be a lot of reasons why... Who knows, but when you get an idea and you fall in love with it there's not a whole lot of choice. You're going down a street and you meet this girl and you know it doesn't have to make any sense. Bingo! You're in love.

Did you ever worry DV wouldn't be as 'pretty' as celluloid?
No!  To me it is! I know, obviously, it's not the quality of film but in some ways the lesser quality I like. Sometimes film kills the room to dream. I'm so happy with this look, there is room to dream. Do you mind if I smoke?

Not at all. Can you us about the retro '50s feel to your movies...
I grew up in the 50s, and those experiences are powerful. Some people grew up in the '70s, powerful, beautiful memories of the '70s which to me is one of the worst decades. It has something to do with that. Has something to with the birth of rock 'n' roll, and something to do with those American cars. an incredible design. There was so much optimism at that time and it must leak into the process.

Is putting dark, disturbing images onto the screen therapeutic or cathartic for you?
No! It's the ideas and you fall in love with them. So it's not like cathartic or cleansing thing.

When you just fancy watching a movie at home what do you pot for?
I watched The Apartment, Billy Wilder's The Apartment, on New Years Eve on the big screen. I love this movie, it's a New Years movie and I love Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard they are a place that is so great to return to. He had such a great sense of place and mood. It's a magical thing.

What are we to make of your views on Hollywood in this film?
You could say this is where Laura Dern's character just happened to be. It's not a statement but it sure could be read s a statement, but it's where she ended up.

Do you ever say, "No that's not the right answer one of my films"?
No!  It would be wrong to say that.

Is there's a mischievous part of you that loves the fact people can argue about your films.
No!  That would be a false reason to do something.


just look at how many times the interviewer in the second interview asks idiotic questions that presume the complete OPPOSITE of what lynch is about. poor guy has to keep giving interviews though to get the word out, but it's not doing any good. if the ppl who are supposed to have done research not only still ask the same questions but are getting even WORSE there is no real hope for the film. it'll be a flop, to be sure. and prolly hated more than mulholland drive (by the mainstream wild hogs).

i think the TM crap he talks makes him sound even crazier, but if he wasn't so high on life his spirits would surely be crushed by now. it's like what we see in these pictures and several have seen in real life, the man, is only a spectral representation of his true form.. somewhere in another place beyond this. he is unaffected by this most depressing reality.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on March 13, 2007, 11:14:19 PM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fentertainment.timesonline.co.uk%2Fmultimedia%2Farchive%2F00146%2Flynch385_146861a.jpg&hash=9f18f554f32a95541346579f1797812fee3cd185)

A tour de force of personality
David Lynch, one of America's most original film-makers, has taken on the task of producing and distributing his latest work. Stephen Dalton finds out why
Source: TimesOnlineUK

THERE HAS always been method in David Lynch's madness.

As American cinema's best-known avant-garde auteur, the tension between his peachy-keen boy-scout image and the psycho-sexual carnage on screen feels artfully knowing. His childlike public persona, half sage and half simpleton, smacks a little of Peter Sellers in Being There. Yet his films have always been impressively controlled, brilliantly vivid high-wire walks between irony and sincerity, horror and humour, beauty and brutality.

When we meet in snowy Berlin, the 60-year-old creator of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks seems a little more unhinged than usual. Wide-eyed and babbling beneath his unruly precipice of greying hair, Lynch is on the campaign trail for his most extreme and impenetrable film yet, Inland Empire. Staring into the middle distance, internal motor revving, his hands windmill through the air like the conductor of some invisible orchestra.

Three hours long and shot on digital video, Inland Empire is a dense, sense-crushing marathon of narrative loops and crazy-paving digressions. It stars Laura Dern as a traumatised actress, among other overlapping identities, while Jeremy Irons plays a haughty British film director. Some scenes were shot in Poland, in Polish. Others feature human beings dressed in rabbit suits. Beyond these shaky basics lie the murky subconscious badlands of Lynchworld. Here be monsters.

There is a lot riding on Inland Empire, including the director's own money. For the first time since Eraserhead 30 years ago he acted as writer, editor, sound designer, producer and US distributor. Those latter credits are crucial. Freed from the commercial demands of financiers and cinema chains, for better or worse, this is David Lynch Unplugged. The film was shot without a fixed script, its maverick director composing each scene on the hoof.

"The Surrealists used to throw things in the air and let a random act lead to a new direction," Lynch says. "And many times in life, these kind of things happen. I think it always wanted to be this way but it had to trick me to get there, and that's why it's thrilling to me."

So Lynch believes each film has a mind of its own? "It has a mind of its own," he repeats. "It's like a radio. A radio should not take credit for playing good or bad music. They're not really my ideas. I always say the analogy is like fishing. The fish is not yours. You catch the fish, and some fish you fall in love with. Then you prepare that fish."

This disingenuous seafood analogy is a Lynch favourite, but Inland Empire is certainly his most exotic fish supper since Eraserhead announced the arrival of a major new cinematic voice in 1977. Much admired by Stanley Kubrick and Francis Ford Coppola, Lynch's debut feature was shot over five years during a hellish stay in Philadelphia, where he became a father for the first time. The nightmarish plot seems to reflect his hatred of the city and the anguish of a young parent, but he resists any attempt at autobiographical interpretation of his work.

Likewise the tormented love triangle in Inland Empire co-incided with the collapse of his third marriage, to producer Mary Sweeney. But Lynch insists his films offer few clues about his own mental state.

"That's like asking does the chef look like the fish?" he deadpans. "Sometimes, maybe. Eraserhead, for me, is my most spiritual movie, and never has anyone discovered that. People have different understandings. What's important is you get the chance to have your own interpretation, just like in life. Why would you want something so restricted that everyone has the same result, going out of the theatre?"

Inevitably, Lynch deflects all enquiries about the ideas that inspired Inland Empire. "I don't want to, you know . . . putrify the filmgoing experience," he frowns.

The title, which arrived midway through filming, is one of Lynch's best. Commonly used to describe the suburban township sprawl east of Los Angeles, "inland empire" perfectly evokes the sinister subconscious hinterland where Lynch's work seems to originate.

"Well, they say everything emerges from this unified field at the base of all matter, base of all mind," he says, sketching a kind of cosmic shelf system in the air with his restless hands. "If you have a conscious mind here, it's not conscious here, and there's the field. So the ideas are bubbling up, millions and trillions and zillions of ideas, in everyone's subconscious."

This theory meshes nicely with Lynch's well-documented interest in Transcendental Meditation, a key influence on his film-making. Although he has meditated for three decades, the director has become more vocal and evangelical about it in recent years. At times he sounds alarmingly like the victim of some happy-clappy Californian cult.

"If you want more creativity, more inner happiness, more intelligence, more love, energy, power, knowingness, understanding, appreciation," he gushes breathlessly, "there is a place where you can visit within, through the mind, intellect, transcend and experience unbounded, infinite, eternal pure bliss consciousness. The unified field. A beautiful, beautiful thing."

Lynch believes TM can he harnessed as a powerful force for collective good. One of his long-term goals is to raise money to open meditation "factories" that will bring about world peace. Pardon?

"We can change the world, end suffering, in this one stroke!" he insists, hands scything wildly through the air. "Always people talk about peace, they do these things, but it's all on the surface. The world is like a tree. All the leaves up here are sick. They're yellow, they're brown, they're dying away. Now we try to make the leaves green, one leaf at a time. We pour billions of dollars into this or that leaf. We're working away, but it's on the surface. Water the root, bring it up from here, automatically all those leaves are green and healthy. That's the deal! It's a peace-creating factory, the greatest machines on earth are the human beings!"

Although he remains revered by arthouse audiences, Lynch's commercial fortunes have been in decline since the 1990s, especially in America. His last release, Mulholland Drive, became a critical success in 2001, but only after emerging from the expensive wreckage of a cancelled TV pilot. Longer and darker, Inland Empire proved much less appetising to US distributors, so Lynch took the bold step of distributing it himself.

Going on the road to hustle his wares like some modern-day version of B-movie showman William Castle was, the director insists, a "fun experiment" which led to useful first-hand feedback from theatre owners and audiences. So was it commercial necessity or personal choice?

"Both," he nods. "It's a three-hour film, somewhat difficult to understand maybe, so distributors weren't racing to my door. At the same time, we'd built a network on the website for distributing Eraserhead and short films, building relationships to get those things into stores. So we thought, why not do this on Inland Empire as well? When you see advances from distributors going down you think: wait a minute, there might be another way to go."

Lynch's promotional campaign for Inland Empire also took on a whiff of an old-school hucksterism last November when he positioned himself around Hollywood with a live cow and a poster of Dern.

"I went out three times," he explains. "The first time was on Hollywood and La Brea, and within an hour, Channel Four news came with TV cameras and a crowd gathered. It was very nice. I sat in a chair, the cow was to my right, and to my left was a large picture of Laura Dern for people's consideration for an Academy Award. The word went out, but she did not get a nomination."

This kind of goofy humour has long been Lynch's saving grace. Even the gruelling, challenging marathon of Inland Empire is leavened by well-placed jokes, including some welcome comic relief during the end credits. Given the financial constraints on avant-garde auteurs, the future is unclear for this veteran surrealist showman. But David Lynch Unplugged is lively and amusing company, albeit slightly unhinged. Whether or not the rest of us can hear the music, the invisible orchestra inside his head plays on.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: I Love a Magician on March 15, 2007, 03:41:56 AM
i haven't seen the movie but david lynch just seems like a straight up nice dude
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on March 15, 2007, 10:55:07 AM
Laura Dern: My life as a muse
Hollywood's quirkiest actress has teamed up once again with its strangest director. But even Laura Dern can't tell Stephen Applebaum what 'Inland Empire' is all about
Source: The Independent

At the US premiere of David Lynch's Inland Empire, Laura Dern, his leading lady who'd spent three years collaborating with the director on the movie, admitted that she was still in the dark. "The truth is I didn't know what I was playing, and I still don't," she said candidly. "I look forward to seeing the film to learn more. I know there are several different characters that become one in their own way. And because it was done as a discovery along the way, I too was on the journey that David took me on, not knowing where we would turn next."

When we meet some time later, I confess that I am also baffled by Lynch's three-hour opus. "And I was going to start by asking you what the film was about," says Dern, smiling. So what on earth has Lynch made? Hailed as a masterpiece by some, damned as an incoherent mess by others, Inland Empire is by turns familiar and alienating, accessible and impenetrable, stimulating and boring. Apparently drifting back and forth in time, and perhaps even between different levels of consciousness, the film is held together by Dern's emotionally raw portrayal of a subtly delineated collection of women who may emanate from her own battered wife character, or from the mind of a woman seen tearfully watching a snowy television screen in some unnamed Baltic state. There is a film-within-a-film, an allegedly cursed Polish folk tale, a murder, a surreal sitcom featuring actors dressed as rabbits, and an overlap between "real life" and role-playing. Inland Empire may make sense on some level - but on which level is anyone's guess.

"David's not really interested, I think, in clarity," says Dern, with considerable understatement. "He's not waiting for us to get the movie because he doesn't think the cinema is about 'getting it'." Like one of his film-making inspirations, Federico Fellini, Lynch wants us to engage with his films in a way that allows our "subconscious to work and let something else take over," Dern suggests. "I think he believes - which I've found very rare in film-makers - in the intelligence of an audience, that they're intelligent enough to discover the film and what it means within themselves." In other words, Inland Empire is not just a movie, it is art.

A friend of Lynch as well as a collaborator, Dern recalls becoming angry when a journalist criticised the 60-year-old director for not explaining Inland Empire after it was unveiled at the Venice Film Festival last September. "I get so protective of David, like an older sister or something, which is so absurd," she says sweetly. "I thought, 'Oh my God, aren't we so fed up of the television telling us what we're supposed to feel?'"

The idea that film should do more than just entertain is ingrained in Dern. Born in Los Angeles in 1967, her parents are the actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd. At six, Dern appeared with Burt Reynolds in White Lightning. When she was seven, she appeared alongside her mother in Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More. "Of course I was going to become an actor, and of course I would work with David Lynch," says Dern. "Who else could I work with? I mean, these were the guys I watched directing actors so I defined film as that." Her parents balked at the idea of her acting but Ladd eventually relented and enrolled her, aged 10, at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute.

Though she starred in Jurassic Park, Dern has generally steered clear of blockbusters, preferring the flawed characters more often found beyond the mainstream. She garnered plaudits for her performance as a glue-sniffing mum-to-be in Sideways director Alexander Payne's controversial first feature, Citizen Ruth, and an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a sweet-natured nymphomaniac in Rambling Rose.

From early on, she says, "I defined acting as risk-taking and playing protagonists who are complicated and dark and who force us as an audience to find empathy for someone intolerable. I don't think I saw a movie until probably in the last decade where nice people got together and had a romance. Those movies didn't even exist [when I was growing up]. Modern-day romances were love stories in Midnight Cowboy and Klute. Romantic scenes were those two men on the floor of the bank in Dog Day Afternoon who loved each other."

When she was 12, she watched A Clockwork Orange on cable while her father was out. "Never a good idea for a child," she laughs. "I was paralysed. But at the same time I fell in love with movies and where they could take you. So those are the people I saw growing up, those are the kinds of characters my parents played, and that's what I wanted to do for a living."

She was a senior in high school when she first worked with Lynch on his cult classic Blue Velvet, reuniting with the director four years later on Wild at Heart. He is the "closest person to me outside my mother that I collaborate with," says Dern. Inland Empire was born out of mutual trust and respect. Lynch felt she could pull off multiple roles without knowing what the film was about; Dern had confidence in his ability to make it work. "I don't think anybody else would have done this," says Dern. "I have friends who are actresses who stopped at, 'What do you mean, there's no make-up and hair?'"

Image, fame and celebrity seem of little concern to Dern. However, this did not stop the actress from becoming the focus of tabloid interest when Billy Bob Thornton publicly ditched her for Angelina Jolie. "I left our home to go and make a movie, and while I was away my boyfriend got married, and I never heard from him again," Dern said at the time. "It isn't easy to be tabloid fodder," she reflects. "But it's not the invasion that's difficult, it's that you have to read things that hurt you or be told things about someone you care about hurting you. That stuff sucks."

She has finally found romantic stability with the outspoken singer-songwriter Ben Harper. They married in 2005 and have two children together, Ellery Walker, five, and Jaya, two. Dern knows from personal experience that being the offspring of artists can sometimes be difficult. The requirements of the job when she was growing up meant that she was often separated from her parents. It was not their fault, she says. "Taking your family on a movie wasn't easy then. And now it's what's done. Family in the workplace, women having children in their workplace, all of these things are much more a common reality and that makes it really easy for me in ways that [it wasn't for] my parents."

The couple are determined to do things differently. "I would be a fool not learn from previous mistakes by actors who were doing it for the first time," says Dern. "Having a touring musician father and actress mother, we work diligently at keeping them together as much as possible. But they are gypsies therefore."

There is excitement in her voice when she talks about Harper. "Being with a songwriter has been amazingly inspirational," she says. "Every single day he sits down and writes. It doesn't matter if he's with our son at a play date, in nature, watching the news, discussing politics, he's examining the state of things. And that's incredible as an actor to be reminded of the wealth of opportunity to learn about human nature every single moment of the day."

Dern has been busy herself. As well as Inland Empire she will soon be seen in Lonely Hearts, with John Travolta and James Gandolfini, Mike White's Year of the Dog, and Tenderness, opposite Russell Crowe. Given that she and Harper have been outspoken opponents of the war in Iraq, would she like to do something overtly political? Absolutely, she enthuses.

"My favourite movies as a teenager were political thrillers, politically based everything, films like Network, Three Days of the Condor, All The President's Men, The Candidate, and those were the kinds of films I dreamed of making. I would love to make a very specific political film right now about what's going on. And I am outspoken about my opinions. Whether we wanted to be before or not, now we have to be, which is why nonconformists like David are so essential."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Reinhold on March 16, 2007, 12:23:47 AM
isn't that article a few months old?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on March 16, 2007, 05:58:20 AM
you should beat the shit out of him.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on April 09, 2007, 01:38:04 PM
Lynch Goes Digital with Inland Empire 
Source: American Cinematographer
 
Inland Empire represents writer/director David Lynch's first foray into digital video (DV) for theatrical release. The movie's nonlinear plot comprises a series of bizarre and loosely connected vignettes that take place in a number of settings, including Los Angeles, where an actress (Laura Dern) struggles to play a film role that may be cursed; Lödz, Poland, where nefarious characters abound; and a theatrical living-room set populated by a family of people with human bodies and rabbit heads.

Lynch shot Inland Empire himself, using a Sony PD-150 in 29.97/60i NTSC, and edited it with Apple's Final Cut Pro. The project was originally intended to be a 4x3 presentation on his subscription-based Web site, but as shooting continued over a period of three years, he changed his mind and began to format the movie for a 1.85:1 theatrical presentation.

Dern, who also starred in two of Lynch's 35mm productions, Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart, says the chief difference between working with the director on a film shoot and working with him on a digital shoot had to do with pacing: "We were shooting constantly [on Inland Empire]. There were no large lights to put up, and we had no need to wait between setups for coverage, because David was holding the camcorder — he could cover an entire scene in 20 minutes or an hour. The luxury was an incredible shorthand on the set. There was never any downtime."

To convert his original NTSC standard-definition footage into a suitable theatrical format, Lynch collaborated with Michael Broderson, a post-workflow specialist at FotoKem. "David came to us about a year before he did his final post," recalls Broderson. "He made a reticule for his PD-150, so he was framing at 1.85 as he shot, but putting it on the Internet at 4x3. I asked him if he wanted side mattes, but he preferred [the footage] be cropped to 1.85. So I figured out the dimensions and created a Photoshop overlay he could use in Final Cut Pro. David went through and reframed each shot for 1.85 and then output the movie in sections onto DV tapes."

These tapes were up-converted to 16x9 24p HD through a Snell & Wilcox Alchemist Platinum and laid off to D-5. "With 60i footage, you've got 60 real fields," notes Broderson. "Every field is adjacent to the next and they all have motion. So if you just remove the extra frames, you get an obvious stutter, and if you just blend them all together, you get a very soft look. The Alchemist uses a sophisticated motion algorithm to make everything look smooth in 24p."

An online HD conform was completed from the D-5 tapes on an Avid DS Nitris, using Lynch's DV tapes as a guide track, along with EDLs from his edit. "Everything was captured nonlinear with the Nitris," says Broderson. "Within that environment, we did a lot of fixes, like motion stabilizing and paintboxing, along with the editing. The ability to do that is a big advantage over a linear online system." The final Nitris conform was output to Sony HDCam SR tapes.

The color correction was completed tape-to-tape in a da Vinci 2K  suite by FotoKem colorist George Koran. "David made the decision to do a tape-to-tape correction rather than a digital intermediate [DI]," says Koran. "He comes from the film telecine world, so he's used to the terminology; he knows what to ask for and what we can do. We tried a lot of different looks and densities. David let me play with colors, and I would come up with suggestions. For example, on the Poland sequences, we went for a heavy Tobacco-filter look, almost a rust color. We also applied some grads to darken the top portion of the frame."

Koran worked with Lynch to achieve a striking style for the sequences involving the rabbit-head family. "We created a cyan-greenish look on the walls of that set," he says. "We did some Power Windows and darkened the background walls so the rabbit actors would stand out more in the foreground. For a scene involving a living-room couch and a female rabbit who is ironing, David wanted to play some shots with more contrast, so we worked on the densities. For a sequence where Laura's character goes down into a basement, we created an almost skip-bleach/desaturated look. David really gave us lots of great-looking scenes to work with."

Koran used a Teranex box to enhance the image quality from the HD up-conversion. "In my suite, I can program the Teranex from shot to shot, adjusting the sensitivity of the noise reduction and changing the aperture to increase the sharpness. We're also able to smooth out the inherent grain of DV, but you have to be careful to avoid artifacts. You can easily go too far with sharpening, and then it starts to look artificial. We created a pretty good group of presets for the movie during our initial tests."

Inland Empire was recorded to 35mm on Arrilaser recorders from two HDCam SR tapes at 1920x1080. "First, we took the final tapes into our DI suite and applied a custom look-up table [LUT] that was designed to make HD material look right on film," explains Broderson. "In the DI suite, we could screen digitally — with the LUT applied — using a Digital Projection 2K DLP projector. We'd then record it with the Arri and look at the film version. David watched the digital and film projections, and he thought the match was spot-on." The final output was made on Kodak Vision Premier 2393.

Koran was also impressed with the final match from tape to film. "We did a lot of initial tests to make sure everything would transfer correctly from the HD world to film. I attended the cast-and-crew screening and saw the film version projected on a full-size screen for the first time. I was really impressed with how well it translated."

Following its theatrical run, Lynch will release Inland Empire on DVD, using the HDCam SR tapes as his master.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on April 23, 2007, 12:48:19 AM
German Trailer here. (http://www.moviemaze.de/media/trailer/view/20937/d1197d8f331619c34a7596f2f89b213b/3140_trailer01-de_720.mov)



Poster Gallery here. (http://www.moviemaze.de/media/poster/1741/inland-empire.html)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on April 23, 2007, 04:23:12 PM
you know, i may have heard wrong, but didn't lynch say that this film would have an odd release strategy due in part to his releasing it on dvd on his website with a short gap between the time it was in theaters? i'd really like to see this one again and as it stands, i saw this movie over 6 months ago. grindhouse'll probably come out on dvd before this one does.

fucking lynch...


motherfucker's been sowing some pretty serious shit with this movie, i'll tell ya what...


Quote from: MacGuffin on April 23, 2007, 12:48:19 AM
German Trailer here. (http://www.moviemaze.de/media/trailer/view/20937/d1197d8f331619c34a7596f2f89b213b/3140_trailer01-de_720.mov)

hmm... kinda makes me wanna watch the movie dubbed into german.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on April 24, 2007, 01:07:51 AM
INLAND EMPIRE US DVD Release in August
Source: Dugpa

I've been told that the INLAND EMPIRE DVD will be out in the US in August. Expect an official announcement in the next few weeks.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on April 24, 2007, 01:14:00 AM
Quote from: MacGuffin on April 24, 2007, 01:07:51 AM
INLAND EMPIRE US DVD Release in August
Source: Dugpa

I've been told that the INLAND EMPIRE DVD will be out in the US in August. Expect an official announcement in the next few weeks.

:wink:
ur so sex-e, mac.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: mogwai on April 24, 2007, 10:13:05 AM
so david, how about a audio commentary this time?

dl: bullshit. that's how i feel about it. total fucking bullshit.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: last days of gerry the elephant on May 02, 2007, 06:42:28 PM
Quote from: MacGuffin on April 24, 2007, 01:07:51 AM
INLAND EMPIRE US DVD Release in August
Source: Dugpa

I've been told that the INLAND EMPIRE DVD will be out in the US in August. Expect an official announcement in the next few weeks.

Wow, Toronto is not late at all.
I will be attending the opening show & watching Inland Empire for the first time this Friday, and owning it three months later?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: SiliasRuby on May 05, 2007, 12:35:39 PM

From Dugpa.com, The David Lynch Resource....
Inland Empire DVD Announced

Okay, back to the real news after last month's April Fool's joke. This is no joke, Inland Empire has an official dvd release date in region 1: August 14, 2007. The suggested retail price is $29.95. Extras include:
LYNCH 2 (BEHIND THE SCENES OF INLAND EMPIRE WITH DAVID LYNCH)
TALKS WITH LAURA DERN AND DAVID LYNCH MORE THINGS THAT HAPPENED (ADDITIONAL CHARACTER EXPERIENCES)
THEATRICAL TRAILERS (3)
STILLS GALLERY (73 PHOTOS)
DAVID LYNCH COOKS QUINOA


So happy.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on May 05, 2007, 12:44:01 PM
Quote from: SiliasRuby on May 05, 2007, 12:35:39 PM
DAVID LYNCH COOKS QUINOA

this could be the key to understanding the film.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on May 05, 2007, 03:32:43 PM
Cover art:

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rykodistribution.com%2Fimages%2Fartists%2F10825.jpg&hash=f2c8311e8c4d8a9d0b4005dedbabb986506b0fe9)


http://www.rykodistribution.com/artist_title.php?artist_id=10825&media_id=20361
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on May 30, 2007, 03:37:23 PM
INLAND EMPIRE DVD to Include 90 Minutes of Deleted Scenes

According to an article up at Davisdvd.com, David Lynch's upcoming two-disc DVD of INLAND EMPIRE will include a feature called "More Things That Happened (Additional Character Experiences)" which includes 90 minutes of deleted footage that will be edited together into a mini-feature.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: The Red Vine on May 30, 2007, 04:50:21 PM
This is going to be a wonderful DVD package. However, I saw the film at IFC Center a few months ago and was not the least bit astounded by it. Perhaps like most of Lynch's films, it deserves a second viewing.

Lynch has served his surreal sensibilities well with a film like "Mulholland Drive", but here he's gone a step too far. It's his most ambiguous feature since "Eraserhead" and his most tedious yet. Perhaps this would not have been the case if he had at least one element of his story that was concrete for his poor audience. Or maybe a shorter running time. Lynch is usually never interested in telling a straight forward story, but he is successful with intriguing atmosphere. Not so much here. Instead we have a film where odd, surreal occurrences happen again and again until it's 3 hour running time is complete. What do these ideas add up to? I would've been comfortable not knowing, but instead I just didn't care.

As I've mentioned, another viewing is probably in order. But I can't imagine the film being any more entertaining.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on July 05, 2007, 11:00:41 AM
DVD Press Release:

DAVID LYNCH EXPANDS HIS INLAND EMPIRE
The Celebrated Director Adds a Host of Extras for the DVD Debut of His Acclaimed Film Including an Amazing 75 Minutes of Additional Scenes, Plus Interviews, Behind-The-Scenes Footage and Much More

Available August 14th from Rhino Entertainment

LOS ANGELES -- David Lynch's acclaimed film INLAND EMPIRE will make its DVD debut this summer with Rhino Entertainment. Overseen personally by Lynch, the DVD will feature the director's mind-bending cinematic journey generously embellished with a number of extras including a massive collection of additional scenes entitled "More Things That Happened." Other bonus materials include a making-of featurette, interviews with Lynch and the film's star Laura Dern, a photo gallery and theatrical trailers, plus footage of Lynch at home cooking quinoa -- an edible seed similar in texture to couscous.

Filming entirely in digital video allowed Lynch to explore many different pieces of the puzzle that make up the rich tapestry of INLAND EMPIRE. Lynch had a wealth of additional scenes that were integral to his original vision of the film. For the INLAND EMPIRE DVD Lynch dove further into the story to include scenes that enrich the original mystery. "I'm very happy with the DVD because it continues the story of INLAND EMPIRE and people can discover 'More Things That Happen'" says the director about the special bonus features on the DVD.

Starring Dern, Jeremy Irons and Justin Theroux along with Harry Dean Stanton, Diane Ladd and special appearances by Grace Zabriskie, William H. Macy and Julia Ormond, Lynch describes INLAND EMPIRE with characteristic understatement as "A woman in trouble."

A surreal visual voyage, INLAND EMPIRE was shot in both Los Angeles and Poland. It features some of Poland's biggest film stars and took more than two years to complete. Lynch worked from a script that he developed during shooting which makes the behind-the-scene moments especially illuminating.

Since its premiere last September at the Venice Film Festival in Italy, the film has provoked intense reactions. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times describes INLAND EMPIRE as "fitfully brilliant, a plunge down the rabbit hole of the director's imagination and a spellbinding companion to his masterpiece, Mulholland Drive." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone lauds the film as "a puzzle whose pieces you'll keep trying to put together in your head long after you leave the theater." and Nathan Lee of The Village Voice praises Dern in the "Performance of the Year."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on July 24, 2007, 06:37:02 PM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theage.com.au%2Fffximage%2F2007%2F07%2F20%2Flynch_wideweb__470x311%2C0.jpg&hash=7c32f8eca1c8c978ed3d00fd6447ffa2862bd496)

Tender is the psycho
David Lynch made his name with dark characters and twisted plots. But underneath it all lies the search for light, writes Simon Hattenstone.
Source: The Age

A SYNOPSIS: DAVID Lynch's new film, Inland Empire, is about an actress playing an actress playing an actress. I think. Another synopsis: David Lynch's new film, Inland Empire, is about non sequitur-spouting human rabbits starring in a sitcom that could have been scripted by Samuel Beckett. And another: David Lynch's new film, Inland Empire, is set in Poland, features a Polish cast and tells the story of a love triangle that goes tragically wrong. And a final one: David Lynch's new film, Inland Empire, is about a weeping woman watching a terrifying movie.

These are just a few of the plot strands in the film. If you make it through the three hours, you'll leave the cinema with your senses beaten to mush. Lynch has always been a byword for weird; this is double weird with cream on top. In an age of multiplexes and movies by numbers, thank the lord of art-house loopiness for Lynch.

From the birth of the mutant baby in 1977's Eraserhead, through the grotesqueries of The Elephant Man and the oxygen-sipping psycho in Blue Velvet, to the twisted noir of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, Lynch has defined his own landscape. These are worlds of surface sunshine, innocence, sweet '50s songs, naive lovers and American dreams, while underneath bubbles a cauldron of depravity, deformity, ghoulish sounds and severed ears.

Lynch is the opposite of another exceptional American filmmaker, Robert Altman. Whereas Altman starts with multiple, incoherent strands and pulls them together, Lynch starts with a conventional story and allows it to implode. Inland Empire is his most experimental film yet - we are never sure what is real, fictional or dreamed, nor in what order events happen. He has become the William Burroughs of cinema, taking apart plots and characters, and randomly glueing them back together.

I've always wanted to meet Lynch. I suppose I wanted to know what kind of sicko could dream up such a circus of psychopaths, sadists, dwarves, rape victims and not-long-for-this-world naifs. He is sitting in a suite at Claridge's hotel in London, looking immaculate. His white shirt is creaseless and buttoned to the top, his grey quiff rising proud as the prow of a ship. He has never enjoyed talking about his movies. He doesn't like to be pinned down to specific meanings and is a master of the polite, evasive answer. His line has always been that a film means different things to different viewers.

He would rather we look at his movies as we would a painting or jazz - there is no right or wrong answer. He's happier talking about his myriad hobbies - painting (he started out as an artist), photography, coffee (he is a heavy user and has his own line), kitchen phobias, uteruses, nudes, the weather, smoking and, most of all, transcendental meditation.

Outside, the ground is thick with snow. Lynch loves it. He is very interested in weather. Recently, he started to make a daily weather broadcast for the Los Angeles radio station, Indie 103.1. He has already sent over his report for the day. What did he say? "I just tell them where I am. I did it from the train station this morning. I give them the date - and then I tell them what it is like for me right now. Like today I would say that it has been snowing and it is now overcast and grey. And I'd say there's a slight breeze."

He points out of the window. "See the way the steam is moving, so there's a good steady breeze. Then I would say the temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius. I have to do some research. Today I got the temperature from the driver who had the temperature in Celsius, but I also got it from the hotel, and that jived with what the driver said." He tells me how much he loves the light - how everything good in life is connected to light, and within seconds he has segued into transcendental meditation.

Lynch has meditated for 30 years. He says it transformed his life, saved him from himself. "You naturally, effortlessly, beautifully dive within, and each deeper level has more happiness - the mind wants to transcend meaning, to go beyond into the unbounded ocean of pure consciousness ..." As he talks, his hands flutter up and down like a fledgling trying to fly. "You grooow in consciousness, you grooow in bliss, you groooow in intelligence, you groooow in dynamic peace, and the side-effect of this is: negativity starts to recede."

Lynch says he was a happy boy, moving from state to state as his father's job dictated. Donald Lynch was a research scientist with the US forestry commission, and his work took the family from Montana to Idaho, Washington, Durham, North Carolina, back to Idaho and finally to Virginia. Lynch jnr has described his childhood as idyllic - full of elegant, old houses, tree-lined streets, the milkman, droning aeroplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees.

"Middle America the way it was supposed to be." He had been a good, popular boy, a peacemaker, an Eagle scout. But it was a dull life. There was an absence he couldn't quite place.

By the time Lynch was a young man, he felt a gnawing discontent. On the surface, everything was just dandy. He studied at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he married young, had a child, was making short films, but inside he was in pieces.

"I had anxieties, fears, so much inner turmoil, anger - about my situation in life, and not being able to control it." In his rage, did he do the whole Wild At Heart Nick Cage thing? "Yes, for sure. You know how we act when we get that way, you take it out on those people who are closest to you, and make their life hell."

He began to meditate out of desperation rather than conviction. "In two weeks the anger started lifting." But it wasn't enough to save his marriage.

In his early 30s, he got married again, to Mary Fisk, and had a son, Austin. He then lived with Blue Velvet star Isabella Rossellini for five years. After a 16-year relationship with his producer-editor, Mary Sweeney, with whom he has a 15-year-old son, Riley, they married in 2006. In typical Lynch style, they separated almost immediately.

When Lynch began meditating, he was terrified he would lose his fire. "I thought that maybe it will make me so calm, so peaceful, that I won't want to do work. It's the opposite. You've got this energy. It's so much more exciting. Intuition flows."

As a young man, he was convinced one had to suffer to portray suffering. That's what all the art students believed then, he says, his lips creasing into a Jimmy Stewart smile.

"But you don't have to die to do a death scene. You just have to understand it in your own way. It's like the law of diminishing returns - the more you suffer, the less you can do. Real suffering is something we don't want. You could say it's very romantic, and it came to me that poor, melancholy artists, slightly depressed - it's just to get chicks, and it works so well."

Was he once that melancholy artist? "For sure. The girls love that. They bring food over and drinks, and hold you tight." David Lynch's Guide To Pulling, huh? He likes that idea. "It works like a charm. But it is a joke for creativity. If you were really that way, you couldn't work."

Lynch is not at all like his gallery of freaks and monsters. But he's not so different from the true innocents - think of Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet or Laura Dern in Wild At Heart - who witness the horror. Perhaps it's easiest to understand what goes on in Lynch's head when he talks about the two artists he finds most inspirational, Edward Hopper and Francis Bacon. Hopper's hazy, suburban dreamscapes and Bacon's screaming, eviscerated popes couldn't be more polarised.

An even greater inspiration is the city of Philadelphia, where he lived as a young man. "It was like seeing a five-year-long film." What was in the film? "A certain type of architecture, interiors, insanity in that city, fear in that city, hate in that city, turmoil in that city."

Lynch recites it like a mantra. And this had been absent from his childhood? "Yeah. The intensity of Philadelphia was something. I think it's different now, but I still think it's pretty bad. On top of that, it's called the City of Brotherly Love."

LYNCH IS OFTEN embraced as an ironist. He can appear to be laughing at the all-American innocents and celebrating the tawdry and amoral. But I'm beginning to realise that isn't the case. Lynch despises irony and cruelty, and loves those wide-eyed idealists who believe in love and purity.

At a screening of the new movie at the National Film Theatre, a beautiful scene is played from Blue Velvet in which Laura Dern's Sandy describes her vision of love. "I had a dream. In the dream there was our world and the world was dark because there weren't any robins, and the robins represented love. And for the longest time there was just this darkness and all of a sudden thousands of robins were set free and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed that love was the only thing that would make any difference."

The critic Mark Kermode, interviewing Lynch on stage, says what he loves about this scene is that it is so sincerely felt, despite the fact that so many in the audience laugh and regard it as ironic goofball.

Lynch nods, and brilliantly deconstructs the kind of audience who admire him for what he considers to be the wrong reasons. "A shared experience in the theatre is very different from seeing a film on your own, and in a theatre we all have this thing where we want to be very cool, and when you see something like this, kind of really embarrassing, the tendency is to laugh, because you are saying out loud that you realise this is embarrassing and not cool and you're hip to the scene, so this kind of thing happens. And then we also know, when we are alone with this person we're falling in love with, we do say goofy things, but we don't have a problem with it; it's so beautiful. And the other person is forgiving for these beautiful, loving, goofy things. There's a truth to the scene."

Of all his characters, Lynch is perhaps closest to the straight-talking Alvin Straight (The Straight Story), yet so many strange stories circulate about him. Is it true that he has a bottled uterus on his desk? He shakes his head vigorously. "I don't have a uterus on my desk."

What about not on his desk? He nods. "Yes, I have a bottle with a uterus in it. It was never on my desk, it's somewhere in the house. That belonged to Raffaella de Laurentiis, Dino's daughter. She had it removed. I didn't ask her for it. She thought I might appreciate it, and she had the doctor package it and send it for me." And did he appreciate it?

"Very much. It's an organic object - we see so many things in the world, but sometimes we see something that was sort of hidden and it strikes us, and ideas can come from that."

OK, then, story No. 2 - did he dissect a cat for artistic purposes? "For sure. Now here is the deal. Is this a sickness? Nooooah! In school, many classes will dissect a frog or salamander, maybe a fish. How many chefs are working with fish? It was important for me for many reasons to check out some real organic material. I called the vet. He asked me some questions to ascertain whether I was a nutcake. He determined that I was serious, but said at the present time he had no cat for me. Five minutes later, a cat had just come in, and he called me." Did he turn it into art? "No, it was just a learning experience."

My favourite story is that he won't allow food to be cooked in the house. True or false? "OK, now look at this," he says. "You have a lot of works on paper, say, in a house. Why in the world would you go into that house and spray grease on to those works of paper, unless it was an idea that came to you to deteriorate that work in some way? And this is what cooking can do. Also, wherever you can smell that cooking, it must be landing on the walls and y'know what I mean. So it is unfortunate that kitchens are in a house. To my mind, they should be a side building, easily hosed out, cleaned, and the odours and all the stuff that go with it away from the workspace."

So there is no kitchen in his house in LA? He shakes his head, with phlegmatic resignation. "I've let it go ... I've moved most of the work away from the kitchen. There is a kitchen in the house and it has been used for any number of meals."

Is it true that it caused a problem with Isabella Rossellini? He bursts out laughing. "Hohohohohahahaha! I don't think so. I think that's a myth." The full myth is that Rossellini left him because of his kitchen intolerance, though in her autobiography she says he left her and that she was heartbroken.

In the '90s Lynch had plenty of people happy to invest in his movies, but not any more. It has taken him five years to make Inland Empire on digital video cameras, his greatest struggle since Eraserhead. He could not push for an Oscar nomination for Laura Dern in the traditional manner, by placing an advert in the trade magazine Variety, so he went on the road with a cow and a placard saying, "If it wasn't for cheese, there would be no Inland Empire." He says it worked a treat, and within minutes there were news crews on the scene. Dern still did not get a nomination.

Does he find it depressing that it's so hard to get backing for his films now? No, he says, of course not - what else could he expect with such a film? "Inland Empire is three hours long, and people have trouble understanding it, so it's the kiss of death for a distributor."

He's enjoyed the struggle, though, loves working with video, loves taking the finished product on the road. "The thing was so beautiful because we go out to different cities and get a feel for how things are going, and the feel I got from the US was that there's a huge, huge bunch who are just longing for an alternative to what's coming out of Hollywood. That's a very uplifting feeling."

Lynch says it's all about finding the light, the positives. It's always there, and any of us can embrace it if we make a concerted effort - even his most infamous psychopath, Frank Booth, in Blue Velvet.

"There is some very tender thing to Frank," Lynch says, "but there's so much torment and suffering and tension in the guy. Now if this same person could transcend and experience this deeper level, a lid would come off, the darkness would start going. And then Frank would be maybe not as interesting as in the film - but Frank himself would be a much, much happier cowboy."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on July 25, 2007, 11:56:32 PM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dugpa.com%2Fimages%2F2007%2FDLflyer.jpg&hash=5c7b840df8ba441eb6e0a7028d33929ca1ae399c)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: ponceludon on July 26, 2007, 09:02:36 PM
There MUST be a catch. This is too easy. (For people living in LA, that is.)

Ah hah. First come first serve. All of LA is signed up for this, I'm sure.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: SiliasRuby on July 28, 2007, 12:07:52 PM
Quote from: Lucid on July 26, 2007, 06:27:52 PM
If Silias is the only one who goes to this, meets Lynch and shares a cup of coffee with him, then the rest of L.A.-Xixax will end up kicking themselves.
I've already talked to lynch and chatted with him a couple of times. Haven't had the coffee yet, but looking forward to it.

I'm going too MacGuffin. See you there. Let me know which person you are. Or not.....
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: w/o horse on July 28, 2007, 05:19:59 PM
Tentative plans to go.  I have reservations but I don't know if I'll get back from work in time for a decent place in line.  If I don't, however, I do live on Veteran, like a five minute walk from the Billy Wilder theater, so if you want to have coffee with Lynch and then me let me know.  Because I talk about movies with a friendly smile.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: SiliasRuby on July 29, 2007, 02:49:40 AM
Quote from: Losing the Horse: on July 28, 2007, 05:19:59 PM
Tentative plans to go.  I have reservations but I don't know if I'll get back from work in time for a decent place in line.  If I don't, however, I do live on Veteran, like a five minute walk from the Billy Wilder theater, so if you want to have coffee with Lynch and then me let me know.  Because I talk about movies with a friendly smile.
Great, so many people talk about them with a frown
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: w/o horse on July 29, 2007, 10:23:46 PM
In LA, and everywhere else I'm sure, there's a certain type of person you just wouldn't want to talk to about film unless you wanted snobbery and deliberate disagreement.  You know.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: SiliasRuby on July 30, 2007, 12:08:45 AM
Okay fine.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 01, 2007, 10:14:49 PM
If I'm writing this, it must mean I'm not there.


I got out of work, and in plenty of time, so since I was half way there, I decided to go. Looked for parking, but couldn't find anything, so I bite the big one and pay the $5 lot. That thing was sold out loooooooooooong before I ever got there. And it was completely unorganized. I checked in downstairs, but was told the email RSVP people were to go upstairs. I climb the steps... and all of the city of Westwood is in a line that snakes upon itself. I see something about tickets and I'm looking where to get them. I go back down and ask. They say they're not needed for the Filter/email people. He says the line is so long, I probably won't get in, but it shouldn't be long before I find out for sure. The guys in front of me don't have tickets either. So I stand in the line, which I think is the end... and wait... and wait... and wait... Then this guy and girl cut in front of me saying that this is the line for the ticket holders. I tell him it's all one line, but he says different...blah, blah, blah. The two guys ended up leaving. Then the line moves, and when I get to the front, what do you know, it's the line for ticket holders. I knew getting in the other line, where ever that was, was gonna be all for naught, so I leave. I walked around hoping my friend Silias would spot me and let me in with him, but no. The Limited Edition Lynch memorabilia was all stuff you could buy from the website, without the S&H charge.

The good part was that it only took me 45 minutes to get home instead of the usual hour and a half it would normally from that area.


This is why I don't go to these things.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: SiliasRuby on August 02, 2007, 01:04:32 AM
Quote from: MacGuffin on August 01, 2007, 10:14:49 PM
If I'm writing this, it must mean I'm not there.


I got out of work, and in plenty of time, so since I was half way there, I decided to go. Looked for parking, but couldn't find anything, so I bite the big one and pay the $5 lot. That thing was sold out loooooooooooong before I ever got there. And it was completely unorganized. I checked in downstairs, but was told the email RSVP people were to go upstairs. I climb the steps... and all of the city of Westwood is in a line that snakes upon itself. I see something about tickets and I'm looking where to get them. I go back down and ask. They say they're not needed for the Filter/email people. He says the line is so long, I probably won't get in, but it shouldn't be long before I find out for sure. The guys in front of me don't have tickets either. So I stand in the line, which I think is the end... and wait... and wait... and wait... Then this guy and girl cut in front of me saying that this is the line for the ticket holders. I tell him it's all one line, but he says different...blah, blah, blah. The two guys ended up leaving. Then the line moves, and when I get to the front, what do you know, it's the line for ticket holders. I knew getting in the other line, where ever that was, was gonna be all for naught, so I leave. I walked around hoping my friend Silias would spot me and let me in with him, but no. The Limited Edition Lynch memorabilia was all stuff you could buy from the website, without the S&H charge.

The good part was that it only took me 45 minutes to get home instead of the usual hour and a half it would normally from that area.


This is why I don't go to these things.
I had a similar experience. I got out of work at a reasonable time and got there what I thought was an ok time: 6:22. It obviously wasn't a good time at all. I thought it was such a shame I was a bit disapointed. I was looking for you everywhere Mac, and I don't know if you saw me but I was in the red amoeba T-shirt meandering by the memorbilia table. It wasn't a complete bust. I picked up 2 free postcards. I already have met and talked with him a couple of times and have seen IE twice so I left after about 20 minutes of just walking around and seeing the complete disorganization that was that event.
Another high point the check girl at the LA fitness parking building let me go out for free after explaing my pridictament.

I kept thinking that I should have skipped work....but no. Anyway, I've been trying to live with any regrets.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 02, 2007, 01:10:33 AM
Quote from: SiliasRuby on August 02, 2007, 01:04:32 AMI was looking for you everywhere Mac, and I don't know if you saw me but I was in the red amoeba T-shirt meandering by the memorbilia table.

I was by the bar in what I thought was the end of the line.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: w/o horse on August 02, 2007, 02:11:37 AM
You two probably walked by me.  My roommate went down at 4:30 and stood in line.  At 5 when the b.o. opened there were about forty people, so he was able to get himself a ticket and then go back through and get me a ticket.  The reservations didn't mean anything, one ticket per person.  There was a second line for the old theater.  Both lines could hold 250 people.  I was in a black Portishead Records t-shirt with brown pants.  We were on the stairs, and I was at the bar twice.

At any rate the Q&A was impersonal and nothing came from it.  After that the Valley Girls from the film did on stage the dance they do in the film. It was kind of awkward.  But before the show Lynch played a song with another guy to 'set the mood for Inland Empire' and it was a very mood setting song.

So you didn't miss too much.  But Saturday is Battleship Potemkin!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 03, 2007, 12:22:41 AM
Quote from: MacGuffin on July 25, 2007, 11:56:32 PM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dugpa.com%2Fimages%2F2007%2FDLflyer.jpg&hash=5c7b840df8ba441eb6e0a7028d33929ca1ae399c)


http://laist.com/2007/08/02/inland_empire.php
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: john on August 03, 2007, 01:33:57 AM
Yeah, author of that article, I'm a big fan of Lost Highways, too.

As well as The Twin Peaks and Wild of Heart.

Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Just Withnail on August 07, 2007, 07:16:43 PM
this is an epic rightmare, and Lynch's big fish are pirahnas chewing at your face while your heart races - and in the in-love way, not the shit-I'm-dying way.

That doesn't say anything, really, but I hope I'm forgiven for having a muddled impression of this film. I might have nothing insightful to say about it, at least not until second viewing.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 09, 2007, 04:35:49 PM
Best Buy breaks INLAND EMPIRE DVD Street Date
Source: Dugpa

I've been told that a number of Best Buy stores have already put the new INLAND EMPIRE DVD on their shelves which is supposed to street next Tuesday. If you are looking for a treat this weekend, try looking at your local Best Buy. I have received a copy of the DVD and all I can say is that it is one of the most extensive presentations of a David Lynch film on DVD EVER.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: GSinNYC on August 09, 2007, 07:36:55 PM
There's a DVD store here in NYC that released INLAND EMPIRE this past Monday (they don't want me to mention their name)...I grabbed the last copy.  The DVD, my friends, is astounding.  The film, we all know about...but the extras are fantastic.  Since watching the film (which looks GREAT, a lot more beautiful than I remember on the large screen), I've watched LYNCH 2 (I think it's additional material from "LYNCH 1" -- the documentary that's coming out later this year) and DAVID LYNCH COOKS QUINOA, also a couple of the STORIES and a few of the STILLS.  No spoilers from me...all I'll say is that after watching LYNCH 2 and QUINOA we get to know David Lynch better than we've ever known him before.  A true delight...insight into the man, the artist and his process.  You're in for a real treat.  Watching more later tonight.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: modage on August 09, 2007, 11:14:03 PM
Quote from: GSinNYC on August 09, 2007, 07:36:55 PM
There's a DVD store here in NYC that released INLAND EMPIRE this past Monday (they don't want me to mention their name)...I grabbed the last copy.  The DVD, my friends, is astounding.  The film, we all know about...but the extras are fantastic.  Since watching the film (which looks GREAT, a lot more beautiful than I remember on the large screen), I've watched LYNCH 2 (I think it's additional material from "LYNCH 1" -- the documentary that's coming out later this year) and DAVID LYNCH COOKS QUINOA, also a couple of the STORIES and a few of the STILLS.  No spoilers from me...all I'll say is that after watching LYNCH 2 and QUINOA we get to know David Lynch better than we've ever known him before.  A true delight...insight into the man, the artist and his process.  You're in for a real treat.  Watching more later tonight.

Mondo Kim's
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 10, 2007, 10:33:23 AM
More Lynch Clips from the Hammer Museum
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.showvids&friendID=60871191&n=60871191&MyToken=05846143-083e-4e2c-86ca-1f6555128fed

--------------------------------------

Lynch at Borders in Westwood on August 14th to Sign Copies of INLAND EMPIRE

Visionary and icon of modern cinema David Lynch signs his latest epic INLAND EMPIRE for fans. For more than twenty years, Lynch has been amassing fans with his unforgettable sense of style on screen. Now you can meet with the master and have your copy of his newest film INLAND EMPIRE signed. Due to limited time with our featured guest, INLAND EMPIRE must be purchased to meet Lynch and only Borders-purchased copies of prior titles will be allowed to be signed. See store for updated details.

August 14, 2007 7:00 PM
Location: In Store

Westwood - LA
1360 Westwood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
Phone:310.475.3444
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: edison on August 10, 2007, 10:39:08 AM
Just ordered it from familyvideo.com for $11.95 using coupon NEWMEM5F

Can't wait to see this.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pozer on August 10, 2007, 11:12:40 AM
Lynch at Borders in Westwood on August 14th to Sign Copies of INLAND EMPIRE

Visionary and icon of modern cinema David Lynch signs his latest epic INLAND EMPIRE for fans. For more than twenty years, Lynch has been amassing fans with his unforgettable sense of style on screen. Now you can meet with the master and have your copy of his newest film INLAND EMPIRE signed. Due to limited time with our featured guest, INLAND EMPIRE must be purchased to meet Lynch and only Borders-purchased copies of prior titles will be allowed to be signed. See store for updated details.

August 14, 2007 7:00 PM
Location: In Store

Westwood - LA
1360 Westwood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
Phone:310.475.3444
[/quote]
me thinks me in. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Reinhold on August 11, 2007, 12:35:25 AM
Quote from: edison on August 10, 2007, 10:39:08 AM
Just ordered it from familyvideo.com for $11.95 using coupon NEWMEM5F

Can't wait to see this.

thanks! i did too.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: greenowl on August 15, 2007, 05:48:06 AM
Bought the last copy @ the Best Buy on Santa Monica and La Brea ( what a nightmare... the power went out from 3:30pm until 6pm. @ 8 the main computers were still FUBAR.) before 9pm I managed to get out of there with my copy of IE.

I watched it.

Why don't i care about it?

I love Lynch. Why don't I care about this film?

It was beautiful, yes. Did i think it came from a pd150, sometimes, yes, but that didn't bother me... The post work was amazing.

I know, I know, I know... I need to watch it again, but shit...

I came out of his other films seeing life differently. And this time i came out trying to justify Lynch's film... very different.

I need a walk.


Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: mogwai on August 15, 2007, 07:00:17 AM
who are you?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Reinhold on August 16, 2007, 01:50:33 PM
Quote from: greenowl on August 15, 2007, 05:48:06 AM
Bought the last copy @ the Best Buy on Santa Monica and La Brea ( what a nightmare... the power went out from 3:30pm until 6pm. @ 8 the main computers were still FUBAR.) before 9pm I managed to get out of there with my copy of IE.

I watched it.

Why don't i care about it?

I love Lynch. Why don't I care about this film?

It was beautiful, yes. Did i think it came from a pd150, sometimes, yes, but that didn't bother me... The post work was amazing.

I know, I know, I know... I need to watch it again, but shit...

I came out of his other films seeing life differently. And this time i came out trying to justify Lynch's film... very different.

I need a walk.


Lynch says in catching the big fish that it's good for you to mull over his films, try out different ideas about aspects of the plot, and work out the meaning over time. I think it's every bit as great as any of his other work. when i saw it, i immediately followed the film with a discussion of it and i felt like that made the overall first experience even better. do give it another shot, preferably with other people there.

as for the pd-150, it was exactly the look lynch wanted.

ps: introduce yourself in the thread in idle chatter.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on August 18, 2007, 11:22:18 AM
Quote from: greenowl on August 15, 2007, 05:48:06 AM


I watched it.

Why don't i care about it?

I love Lynch. Why don't I care about this film?

It was beautiful, yes. Did i think it came from a pd150, sometimes, yes, but that didn't bother me... The post work was amazing.

I know, I know, I know... I need to watch it again, but shit...

I came out of his other films seeing life differently. And this time i came out trying to justify Lynch's film... very different.

I need a walk.


i dont like your review   :whip:

i just wanted to let you guy sknow that i bought it/saw it/loved it....it is the greatest film that has ever been made (so far)

i promise to write a more lenghty/fan-boyish review soon....



Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: SiliasRuby on August 18, 2007, 12:24:26 PM
I'll look forward to your emotional blowjob you are going to give INLAND EMPIRE pyramid machine
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on August 18, 2007, 12:41:53 PM
beats the blowjob you give EVERYTHING ELSE, siliasruby.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: hedwig on August 18, 2007, 07:36:36 PM
has anybody here ever eaten quinoa?

the first thing i watched was DAVID LYNCH COOKS QUIONA because of the title. it is fascinating. lynch is an amazing storyteller even just sitting there with a cigarette and a glass of wine. he creates this mysterious mood.. the way he describes this incident (paper and coins), it's bizarre and beautiful, like one of his movies. i wanted to hear the story again right as it ended. and then he does some weird shit with his hands. BALLERINA was fun to watch for a minute or two. only because it looks like he's filming a soul dancing, then it's a bit boring. i will watch LYNCH 2 later tonight. lynch's voice is fun to impersonate. keeenwaaah, boy i tell ya.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 18, 2007, 08:03:04 PM
Quote from: Hedwig on August 18, 2007, 07:36:36 PMthe first thing i watched was DAVID LYNCH COOKS QUIONA because of the title. it is fascinating. lynch is an amazing storyteller even just sitting there with a cigarette and a glass of wine. he creates this mysterious mood.. the way he describes this incident (paper and coins), it's bizarre and beautiful, like one of his movies.

It's funny how detailed he gets about every step in the process; "Then we're gonna put the lid RIGHT THERE."


It's as mesmerizing as watching him make the lamp on the Dynamic DVD.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: tpfkabi on August 19, 2007, 11:42:37 AM
pendereSki

lynch does not like the idea of people watching films on phones or computers. i thought that bit was funny.

as for the film - i don't know.

it seems like lynch, even in his own words, makes films like he makes his ambient music - just shoots scenes and tries to make meaning of it later.

i like ambient music in spurts, but i'm more interested in experimentation within structure instead of structural experimentation.

Beck/Black Tambourine in the middle of the film felt really out of place to me.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 20, 2007, 01:15:52 AM
David Lynch Takes Calls on NPR and Talks INLAND EMPIRE Soundtrack

Check out the interview with David Lynch on NPR by clicking here. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12840729) David makes a brief mention that the INLAND EMPIRE Soundtrack will be available in a couple of weeks.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on August 20, 2007, 02:47:34 AM
what is "5.1 dolby digital far-field monitor playback?"

EDIT: nevermind, found out on my own...

"A buffet of aural options is included, with Lynch providing a pair of Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks, one tailored for near-field monitor playback and one better suited for far-field monitor playback. What that means is, basically, near-field monitors are considered to be more compact speakers and are closer to the listener, allowing them to hear less "reflected" sound while far-field monitors are larger, farther away and rely more on "reflected" sound. For this review, I sampled the far-field Dolby Digital 5.1 mix and found it to be quite bass-heavy, often very quiet during passages of dialogue and skimpy on surround effects. A Dolby 2.0 stereo track is also included, as are optional French subtitles (but, of course, no optional English subtitles)."


plus... chapter stops?! wtf?!?! so happy!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 22, 2007, 09:41:08 AM
David Lynch On His 'Empire,' Turning Down 'Jedi' — And Cooking Quinoa
Idiosyncratic director also says he's seen 'Bourne Ultimatum': 'There's nothing wrong with a great Hollywood blockbuster.'
Source: MTV

You haven't lived until David Lynch has called you "buddy." Unfailingly polite, enthusiastic and honest, it's immediately clear in conversing with the filmmaking icon that he remains as independent as he's ever been. Just take a look at the newly released DVD of his last film, "Inland Empire." Of course, the DVD includes all 172 minutes of the perplexing story of "a woman in trouble" (the film's tag line), but it also features more than an hour of additional scenes (yes, that means more of his actors in rabbit costumes), an extended interview with Lynch and even a cooking segment with him.

Lynch took time out from his painting and daily weather reports (featured on DavidLynch.com) to discuss the new DVD, his love affair with digital filmmaking and why he turned down directing a "Star Wars" film.

MTV: Traditionally there aren't a ton of extras on DVDs of your films. Why load this one up and pull the curtain a bit on your process?

David Lynch: Pulling the curtain on some things isn't good. I always want to protect the film and experience for people. But this time there were a lot of scenes ... that formed a kind of thing that I call "other things that happened." It's like, you meet the family in the film — except for the sister who lives in Ohio. And now with this it fills that out. And then — I don't cook, but I had this recipe for quinoa. And cooking shows are very popular. So I thought I'd do a cooking thing.

MTV: Perhaps the cooking show could be a new part of your career?

Lynch: Let's talk at MTV because it could be big. It could be huge, man. [He laughs.] A black and white cooking show with stories, because there's a lot of waiting in cooking.

MTV: When you released "Inland Empire," you went on a sort of barnstorming tour, taking the film from city to city. Was that effective?

Lynch: We live in a field of relativity, so it worked out relatively well. In the Midwest, theatrically, on the seismic meter, we hardly made a blip. It's kind of sad when you go and do all these things to reach certain people that may have a great experience if they go but they just don't go. I wonder about the 17-year-old girls in the Midwest. If they could embrace "Inland Empire," I think they would have a great experience in that theater. With the DVD, now maybe there's a chance for them.

MTV: Do you think audiences are more or less apt today to go to films that revel in abstractions like yours do?

Lynch: I think there's a slight trend toward embracing new cinema, non-Hollywood blockbuster cinema. It's not erupting, but because of the Internet, I think people have more of a chance to get buzz going on alternative cinema, so I think it's hopeful out there. It just hasn't penetrated the smaller places.

MTV: In the extras it's clear that you love your actors. But I'm wondering how you convince someone like Naomi Watts to put on a rabbit costume? Did she have any trepidation?

Lynch: No. Actors are very special human beings. They yearn to take on a new character and they yearn to go deep into that and make it real. They yearn for it! It's such a thrill.

MTV: Are you planning to go back to any of your earlier work and add bells and whistles to the DVDs?

Lynch: The only one that's been talked about is "Fire Walk With Me." There are many short scenes that weren't in the final film that on their own are interesting. They just never fit in the film. There's talk of me editing and mixing those. There's a scene with Jack Nance. It's a short scene with Ed [Wright], who played Mr. Mibbler. I loved this guy. He was in "Wild at Heart" as well. Both of them are gone, so to fix those scenes, for the memory of them, it's real important.

MTV: You shot "Inland Empire" using digital technology. Will you ever go back to film?

Lynch: Never. Digital is so friendly for me and so important for the scenes, a way of working without so much downtime. It's impossible to go back. Film is a beautiful medium, but the world has moved on. The amount of manipulation we can do, anybody can do, is so much the future. Film is so big and heavy and slow, you just die. It's just ridiculous.

MTV: Do you ever find yourself drawn to Hollywood blockbusters?

Lynch: I saw "The Bourne Ultimatum." I liked the first one the best but the third one is second-best. I like entertainment. Cinema can say many things. There's nothing wrong with a great Hollywood blockbuster. But sometimes you're [into] it like crazy while it's going and when you leave it sort of pops and evaporates.

MTV: I know that controlling your films has been a big issue for you since "Dune," because that film didn't turn out as you intended. Are you ever tempted to relinquish a little control in order to have access to a bigger budget?

Lynch: Never! Never! Never! Money could never make up for dying the death of seeing what could have been and not making it that way. Maybe it's because I came from painting, but it's just theater of the absurd. The filmmaker doesn't have the final say. It's absurd! A nightmare, a horror! Why would anyone do that?

MTV: Is it true you almost directed "Return of the Jedi"? How close did you come?

Lynch: Not close at all. I had a meeting with George [Lucas]. I like George. It was his thing. I said, "You should direct this. It's your thing! It's not my thing."

MTV: Did he flat-out offer it to you at the time?

Lynch: Yeah!

MTV: But you immediately declined.

Lynch: I called him the next day.

MTV: Looking forward, do you think you'll continue to move further into experimental filmmaking, as in "Inland Empire"?

Lynch: I don't know which way anything will go because it's all about the ideas that come that you fall in love with. In between things, there are no ideas — and then suddenly there's the idea. If you fall in love with it, you know exactly what to do. Sometimes it can be surprising.

MTV: Do you ever worry the idea won't come?

Lynch: Sure, but that's how come I meditate every day, because when you meditate, you transcend and you experience the unbounded infinite ocean of creativity. And the ideas start flowing easier.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: squints on August 26, 2007, 05:03:17 AM
Quote from: bigideas on August 19, 2007, 11:42:37 AM
lynch does not like the idea of people watching films on phones or computers. i thought that bit was funny.

he says something like "you can't watch a movie on a FUCKING CELL PHONE!" and he gets visibly angry about it. That's so awesome
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: tpfkabi on August 26, 2007, 02:08:00 PM
anyone have any comments on "More Things that Happened?"

i was thinking every cut back to the glasses guy was the same shot repeated over and over until he said, "i love (or maybe 'like') pancakes."

that would have been the funniest moment in the whole film had it made it.

i'm guessing Dern talking to that guy is the 18 minute monologue broken up?

Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on August 27, 2007, 02:33:12 AM
i still dislike this movie. i have more appreciation for it now that i've watched it again, but i still don't like it.

i really hate the acting (other than laura dern, of course). everybody seems to know they're in a lynch movie. the whole affair seems to be completely aware that it's a lynch movie. it was my main complaint the first time around (page 8 for anyone who cares), it's even more apparent on second viewing. it feels like a kid who worships lynch got his hands onto a dv camera and all of lynch's resources and shot whatever came to his head til it started to make sense. some might see this as a compliment to the film, "an unfettered lynch shooting his crazy thoughts like he was a kid making eraserhead again, hooray!" to me it's the work of a talented filmmaker who is unfocused and has run completely amok. it's like what ebert said of lost highway:

"[it] plays like a director's idea book, in which isolated scenes and notions are jotted down for possible future use. Instead of massaging them into a finished screenplay, Lynch and collaborator Barry Gifford seem to have filmed the notes."

i always half-heartedly believed that about lost highway while my other half was able to follow that film's logic. the difference between empire and lost highway is that lost highway's set-pieces were inspired, mysterious, and astoundingly choreographed and filmed, whereas the big scenes in empire seem hurried and not very well planned. not only that, the "resolution" in empire is clunky and unsatisfying, while the last ten minutes of highway (for me) totally tied up everything that had preceded it with a terrifying and emotional punch, more akin to twilight zone rather than chien andalou.

and therein lies my real problem with inland empire. the emotion isn't there, both for its characters and for its audience, as it has been in every other lynch film. rather than feel for these characters, i feel that lynch uses the characters (if they can even be called that) haphazardly as pawns in his convoluted plot rather than letting the characters experience, react to, and change their environment as he has in the past. take a look at jeffrey in blue velvet. after actively working his way into a mystery, jeffrey cries and feels remorse after witnessing and inflicting violence on victimized dorothy. diane selwyn masturbates violently over the loss of a loved one. laura palmer, after having been systematically raped by her father and descending into a world of drugs and prostitution, clings to the one man she loves and who genuinely loves her back as she drunkenly stumbles off his motorcycle screaming "i love you james!!!" the scenes are over the top, the films delve into worlds outside of our own, but they always cling onto that thread of humanity so that we believe in, root for, and feel for the characters we have invested the past two hours of our life into. and in inland empire, we give the filmmaker an extra hour to make us care and it just never happens. where other lynch characters take life into their own hands, changing their environments and moving the films along, nikki sits like a duck in water waiting for something to happen to her. sure you can say that nikki grace is an oppressed aging woman in hollywood, defenseless to the world around her, but i'm not convinced. i think she's boring. i am given no reason to like nikki or feel that nikki (or any other character in the film for that matter) is anything other than a soulless vessel for lynch to carry out this concept, so why should i care? it wouldn't be so bad had the concept alone been strong enough to sustain a three hour film, but it wasn't, and i'd seen it before (with better photography) in a lynch film that had the aforementioned humanity. mulholland dr works b/c the last hour of the film explains and humanizes the motivations behind the vessels (betty and rita) who dominated the atmosphere of the beginning of that film.

lynch's films have always been heavy on atmosphere. here, the atmosphere has consumed the humanity that made his films so visceral and real and scary to me. inland empire is long, mostly unengaging, poorly filmed, and i do not understand the almost unanimous praise this board has given to it.

i realize it is late so many of my points might not be so well written or clear (also, keep in mind that the "m" "u" and "j" keys on my keyboard are broken and i had to add them in later using cut and paste), but i really would love to have somebody pick apart my argument and try to convince me why this movie is good so that i can further solidify my points or admit defeat and realize just how much of an accomplishment inland empire is.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 27, 2007, 11:42:51 AM
The Super Fun of It
David Lynch's Inland Empire comes out on DVD this week. Nathan Lee chats with the director about digital video, putrefied experiences, and tapioca.
Source: Village Voice
 
In the fall of 2006, David Lynch published a book called Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. "Ideas are like fish," he begins, and the book is his guide to their natural habitat (the unconscious); the best way to hook them (transcendental meditation); and the most effective kinds of bait (desire, intuition).

Along the way, Lynch shares the ingredients of his best-known recipes (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet), as well as some of the more exotic ideas he's managed to catch ("I don't necessarily love rotting bodies, but . . . the textures are wonderful"). Midway between chapters devoted to "Kubrick" and "Common Sense," a whale emerges from the depths. "I'm through with film as a medium," Lynch declares. "For me, film is dead."

Lynch made good on this promise—or bad, depending on your point of view—with last year's release of Inland Empire, a movie shot with the Sony PD-150, a low-grade digital-video camera considered obsolete for serious feature filmmaking. Like his previous film, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire tells the story of a woman lost in the labyrinth of self. Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace, a Hollywood actress in the grip of a violent identity crisis, the nature of which is reflected in the elusive, dreamlike shape of the movie. But where the glamorous look of Mulholland Drive referenced the Hollywood past (westerns, musicals, film noir), the rough textures, weak colors, fuzzy depth of field, and structural volatility of Inland Empire resembled nothing so much as YouTube having an epic nightmare.

Audiences expect the unexpected from Lynch, but many critics were appalled by this new direction. In thrall to the vanishing art of 35mm cinema, they failed to appreciate the extraordinary variety and visual richness of Inland Empire, with its encyclopedic investigation into the spatial and textural possibilities of video as video, not a low-rent replacement for film: the distortion of objects looming in the foreground and evocative ambiguity of background shadows; the unique beauty of a video dissolve and the dissolution of forms in "overexposed" light. To dismiss the medium of Inland Empire is to miss the message. Just as Mulholland Drive can be read as a cautionary tale about the effect of movies on consciousness, Inland Empire speaks to the isolation and fragmentation of the post-cinema psyche, the splintering of self in the matrix of the Internet. As such, it may be the first movie masterpiece that doesn't properly belong in movie theaters.

"Digital makes it what it is," says Lynch on the phone from his house in the Hollywood Hills. Back in L.A. from the Polish premiere of Inland Empire, the director spoke to me about digital filmmaking, cooking quinoa, and the beauty of the "thing."

"With traditional shooting on film, the equipment is so big and so heavy you need a large crew," he says. "And the setup between shots takes a long time—sometimes a very long time. With digital, you have much less downtime—sometimes just moments. So what happens is, you stay in the scene, and there are less things around to break that scene. You're in it-—you're in it!" But what precisely are we getting into with Inland Empire? The only explanation Lynch has offered to date is that it's about "a woman in trouble." What kind of trouble? "Well, you know," replies Lynch, "I just say it's about a woman in trouble." That's it? "That's it. I can't really say, because it putrefies the experience. You see a thing, and that thing has been worked on for a long time until it feels correct as a whole. And then it needs to go out without any additional words. It doesn't do any good for the director to say this or that—it doesn't really change people's opinion. They might come up with something far more interesting out of it."

Lynch's reticence to comment on the meaning of Inland Empire extends to the double-disc DVD package. The first simply contains the film as shown in the theaters, without a commentary track. The other disc is made up of nearly three hours of extras and features, including a 70-minute collection called "More Things That Happened." Incorporated into the body of Inland Empire, this additional material would push the total running time to over four and half hours, but Lynch insists that they be considered apart from the main attraction.

"There are things that don't go in a film that you can still love," he says, "but the film's got to stand on its own. It's got its own feel, and you don't want to fiddle with that. Anything else should be separate. So the film is the film, the other things have a bearing on film, but they're just . . . "— ha!—"more things that happened."

And what about "Ballerina," a study of a woman dancing to a piece of music composed by Lynch? "It's another thing—it's just a thing—but to me, it's a very beautiful thing." Indeed—whatever else "Ballerina" might be, it makes for a definitive rebuke to anyone who claims video incapable of rivaling the beauty of film. Composited from two different shots, sheathed in a smoke-like emanation, the movements of the dancer are as hypnotic as the infernal close-ups of Wild at Heart or the interstellar oddities of Eraserhead. "Ballerina" might be viewed as a preparatory sketch for the vast canvas of Inland Empire, the trace of an artist refining his technique. A painter before he was a filmmaker, Lynch devotes as much attention to the production design and set decoration of his movies as he does to the performances or cinematography, as can be seen in the montage of behind-the-scenes footage on disc two called "Lynch 2." "That seems to me the joy of it," he says of this artisanal care for details. "I mean, the super fun of it!"

As for "Quinoa," which begins with the filmmaker preparing a recipe based on the hearty grain, then morphs into a beguiling lesson on how to cook up a story, Lynch merely notes: "Well, you know, there's all these cooking shows. But I don't cook. I know how to make tapioca from when I was little, and rigatoni because I learned how to make rigatoni. But now I know how to make quinoa. So I did kind of a cooking thing.

"The chef does not make the fish," Lynch continues. "The chef can prepare that fish and really make it a great meal—a beautiful, you know, thing—but the chef doesn't make the fish. It's like you are going along down the street and you get an idea, and it's a thrilling thing, it's the whole thing, and it might be a fragment, but that fragment is complete. So you go into this process where more ideas hook onto it, and the more ideas you have, the quicker the rest come to join it. They become like bait, and you just stay true to those ideas. And where intuition comes in is, you're translating this idea to film and it's not quite right. Like on a violin note—if you lean a little bit harder on that note, it feels correct, and if you back off a little bit, it doesn't feel correct. And if you follow this thing, staying true to idea, intuition is your friend. You walk away when it feels correct."


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

David Lynch Goes Digital
Why Inland Empire is better on your TV than it was on the big screen.
Source: Slate.com

In recent years, David Lynch has emerged as a tireless proselytizer—of organic coffee, transcendental meditation, and, perhaps most surprising for a onetime celluloid fetishist, digital video. While other veteran filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh) have dipped their toes in the chilly electronic murk of DV, Lynch has jumped right in. "Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit," he told me when I interviewed him last fall.

Lynch's latest feature, Inland Empire, is his 10th, and his first to be shot in digital video. The movie was an overwhelming experience on the big screen, a three-hour waking nightmare that derives both its form and its content from the splintering psyche of a troubled Hollywood actress, played by Laura Dern. But the natural home for this shape-shifting epic may in fact be the small screen. Watch Inland Empire on the DVD that came out last week and you sense that this lurid, grubby fantasy springs from deep within the bowels of YouTube as much as from inside its heroine's muddy unconscious. The DV that Lynch has come to cherish is the medium of home movies, viral video, and pornography—the everyday media detritus we associate more with television and computer monitors than movie theaters, more with intimate or private viewing experiences than communal ones.

And not only does Inland Empire often look like it belongs on the Internet, it also progresses with the darting, associative logic of hyperlinks. Indeed, parts of the movie originated on Lynch's Web site, davidlynch.com, itself a labyrinth of wormholes and worlds within worlds. The rare major filmmaker who caught on early to the potential of streaming video, Lynch has been creating short films specifically for an online audience since 2001. One of his more popular Web series, Rabbits, in which a rabbit-headed family recites Beckettian non sequiturs (to the sound of canned sitcom laughter), actually made its way into Inland Empire.

The practice of shooting feature films on video only goes back a decade or so, to the introduction of the cheap, compact MiniDV format. The Dogme '95 movement, led by Danish troublemaker Lars von Trier, kicked off the digital revolution, and before long, DV was the default mode for indie filmmaking the world over. Broadly speaking, the first wave of MiniDV films can be grouped into two categories: those that treat video as a language in itself, with its own expressive potential (the first Dogme film, The Celebration, for instance, or even The Blair Witch Project), and those that attempt to disguise or neglect to accommodate the video-ness of video and use it simply as an affordable substitute for film.

High-definition video, which now often closely approximates film, has become an increasingly common format for studio productions (David Fincher's Zodiac being a recent example). But Lynch is not interested in simulating celluloid with a state-of-the-art video camera. He shot Inland Empire with the relatively primitive Sony PD-150, a consumer-grade model that was introduced in 2001 (eons ago in techie years) at a retail price of less than $4,000. Lynch's love of video has much to do with the freedom it grants. Shooting with a camcorder removes the strictures of a traditional film production, allowing for a smaller crew, less setup time, and no accountability to money men. The lightweight camera, along with the low cost and high capacity of videotape, generally means more and longer takes. Video permits Lynch to indulge fully his taste for improvisation—to make things up as he goes along. Inland Empire was written a scene at a time and shot piecemeal over a period of three years.

But Lynch being Lynch, aesthetic concerns presumably outweighed practical ones. Compared with film, video typically looks harsh and almost hyperreal, with a narrower range of colors and weaker contrast, but it's precisely those qualities that Lynch revels in. While a lower-resolution film stock, like Super 8, has a grainy, romantic allure, lower-resolution video, characterized by fewer pixels per inch, merely looks fuzzy. For Lynch, who has likened low-res video to film stock before the emulsion process was perfected, the murkier the image, the more "room to dream," as he puts it. It's no wonder this master of the enigmatic would prize video for its literal lack of information.

The deeper you get into Inland Empire, the more logical the video aesthetic seems. The bleeding colors and the unstable image are a perfect fit for the fugue state that the movie gradually sinks into. Simply put, Inland Empire is the story of a grave identity crisis. The trouble begins when actress Nikki Grace (Dern) lands a part in a hokey melodrama called On High in Blue Tomorrows. As actor merges with character, and film and reality violently intersect, space and time also begin to fissure. One minute we're in sunny Southern California, the next in snowy, old-world Poland.

Inland Empire shares with Lynch's previous feature, Mulholland Drive (2001), a morbid fascination with the destructive machinery of Hollywood. Both regard acting as a threat to the stability of the self. The earlier film, ingeniously reconstructed from an aborted TV pilot, was a poisoned valentine, ruefully enthralled by the promise and magic of old Hollywood. Inland Empire strips off the patina of glamour. In every respect—from its experimental ethos to its unconventional economics (it was partly self-financed and eventually self-distributed)—the film is Lynch's defiant rebuke to the industry that has never fully embraced him. At one point, one of Dern's characters (she seems to be playing three or four) is stabbed in the gut and staggers along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, leaving a trail of blood.

Video, as Lynch uses it here, is the language of the subconscious, somehow more and less real than plain old filmic reality. DV looks more lifelike than film (its frame rate, the frequency at which successive images are captured, is higher than film's and closer to how the human eye operates), but it also seems unnaturally heightened, since it's not what celluloid-trained eyes are used to.

Lynch started his career as a painter—earlier this year the Fondation Cartier in Paris mounted a show of his photographs, digitally tweaked erotica, and massive, crude, roughly textured oil canvases—and he uses video with the curiosity and resourcefulness of an innate visual artist. He pays attention to its flickers, its shadows, its susceptibility to distortion from under- or overexposure. In this remarkable scene, for instance, he achieves a multitude of textures with an amusingly low-tech flashlight-in-the-dark method.

Bodies and faces, meanwhile, are repeatedly abstracted with an unforgiving lens or light source. Dern fearlessly offers herself up to one disfiguring wide-angle shot after another. The extreme close-up is a Lynch trademark, and here, using his DV camera like a new toy, he peers even more intently than usual, as if he's stumbled on an entirely different way of looking.

Whether or not Lynch intended it to, Inland Empire in the end conveys a techno-existential insight worthy of William Gibson. Film is a physical process, dependent on the interaction of light and chemistry. Video is by definition more remote, more spectral, a cluster of data in the electronic ether. And while mortality is a defining trait of film, a medium that degrades and disintegrates over time, video—quickly and endlessly reproducible—conjures a spooky sense of the infinite. In Inland Empire, truly a horror movie for the digital age, it's not that the ghost is in the machine. The ghost is the machine.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: socketlevel on August 28, 2007, 01:47:04 AM
Quote from: greenowl on August 15, 2007, 05:48:06 AM
Bought the last copy @ the Best Buy on Santa Monica and La Brea ( what a nightmare... the power went out from 3:30pm until 6pm. @ 8 the main computers were still FUBAR.) before 9pm I managed to get out of there with my copy of IE.

I watched it.

Why don't i care about it?

I love Lynch. Why don't I care about this film?

It was beautiful, yes. Did i think it came from a pd150, sometimes, yes, but that didn't bother me... The post work was amazing.

I know, I know, I know... I need to watch it again, but shit...

I came out of his other films seeing life differently. And this time i came out trying to justify Lynch's film... very different.

I need a walk.




ya i feel the same way, the techniques he used in this film are played out.  sure, some jaw dropping scenes.  i like the bit with the two people sitting on the street talking the most, and there are some classic approaches to scenarios.   however, i can't help but think i'd seen it all before in his other films.  It's also too long, cuz it's not like lynch has to worry about plot, so why make it as long as it is? i understand it's the artists vision, but as the viewer it seemed indulgent.

lynch very much redefined horror techniques and his use of sound and wind in all his films are amazing, but i wanted to see something new.  i think people got so caught up that it was lynch, and that he's mr. independant now, and bully for him, he's doing the shit he wants to, but they've overlooked the movie going experience.

i hope his next one is better
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Reinhold on August 28, 2007, 10:49:40 AM
saying that something you recognize as good is bad because it isn't new is totally illegitimate criticism in my opinion.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Gold Trumpet on August 28, 2007, 12:17:00 PM
Yea, but they did say something to criticize it. You and some others (not everyone) have said absolutely nothing but yet claimed Inland Empire to be the best thing out there. Or in your case, the best film since Eyes Wide Shut. So you can't really talk because you've said a lot less than them.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 28, 2007, 12:40:35 PM
Easter Egg on the R1 disk.


From the dugpa board:

QuoteWeird, I think I might be the first to have found this (I did search first but sorry in advance if I'm repeating something known).

There is an Easter Egg on the R1 IE DVD. It's on disc 1. If you're playing the disc on a computer, navigate to the Languages and Sound menu and hover the mouse over the bright blast emanating from the gun and you'll see a rabbit symbol. Click on that.

If you're using a DVD player, there doesn't seem to be a way to get to the rabbit symbol (I tried every direction with every option selected). But you can still get to the scene. It's Title 2 on the disc so just start the feature and then navigate to title 2 with your remote (this will work a bit differently with different DVD players -- on mine you hit search and then you can pick the title number -- YMMV).

If you want to be surprised, don't read further...










SPOILER






It's another scene from the Monologue, lasting about 2 and half minutes. Here she tells a story of a one-legged young girl who violently escapes a juvenile detention facility. As usual, an impressive and nuanced performance from Dern.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on August 28, 2007, 03:53:03 PM
Quote from: • on August 28, 2007, 10:49:40 AM
saying that something you recognize as good is bad because it isn't new is totally illegitimate criticism in my opinion.

stop challenging his two sentences of "illegitimate criticism" then and start challenging the points that i've made! it's like nobody wants to acknowledge the fact that this is not a very good film!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on August 28, 2007, 04:03:06 PM
Quote from: bonanzataz on August 28, 2007, 03:53:03 PM
Quote from: • on August 28, 2007, 10:49:40 AM
saying that something you recognize as good is bad because it isn't new is totally illegitimate criticism in my opinion.

stop challenging his two sentences of "illegitimate criticism" then and start challenging the points that i've made! it's like nobody wants to acknowledge the fact that this is not a very good film!

i promise you i'll challenge you!!!  :yabbse-grin:

i've seen it twice....i still think it is the best film ever made...and kubricks 2001 beign right behind it...

i still need to see it two more times to get my head around it...its very complex, very beautiful, and interesting....you could write essays about each scene almost..its just so damn much to process ....its lynch on overdrive and i am trying to keep up w/him....but damn, it is so fuckign beautiful.......if anyone hasn't  seen it yet, just watch it for fucks sake!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: tpfkabi on August 29, 2007, 02:01:32 AM
i agree with the statement that it feels like actors acting like they know they're in a Lynch film. the dv is very off putting at times. one example - when the Lynch regular who plays the neighbor visits Dern - look at how nice the picture looks when it shows Dern - it pretty much looks like film - then you switch to the absurd overacting shot of the neighbor and it looks hideous. is it the outside light that makes it look bad? i'm really wondering if the two actors parts were shot at totally different times. other times it looks really great - i can think of instances where Dern is in darkened hallways or the repeated red lamp shot.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: davidchili on August 29, 2007, 11:34:04 AM
i still can not say it's the best lynch film ever, but it's definately the scariest film ever to me...
one thing prevent me from watching this film over and over is that it's too scarey, it SCARED THE SHIT OUT OF ME!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on August 29, 2007, 04:43:14 PM
R1 & R2 DVD comparisons:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews32/inland_empire.htm
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: brockly on August 29, 2007, 08:55:40 PM
this was fucking incredible! lynch's vision of the world is amazing. i love the experiance of watching his films. love the visuals, the sounds, the performances and the atmosphere thats created from them. ive seen this 3 times since the dvd arrived last week and i think its my new favourite lynch film. edit: spoiler it was nice to see lynch's first optimistic ending since fwwm (not counting straight story which he didnt write). end spoiler and like all his other movies, its extremely moving even when ur struggling to comprehend what the hells going on. and laura dern was just as powerful as watts in mulholland. mulholland drive is the most incredible viewing experiance of my life simply because it was my first lynch, but this is definately the second.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: davidchili on August 29, 2007, 09:00:09 PM
spoiler ahead unconsciously

Quote from: brockly on August 29, 2007, 08:55:40 PM
it was nice to see lynch's first optimistic ending since fwwm (not counting straight story which he didnt write).

yea, i didn't notice that untill you mentioned it.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: brockly on August 29, 2007, 09:31:29 PM
yeh i think u should add a spoiler warning tho in case some people still havent seen it. my bad it slipped my mind :doh:
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on September 04, 2007, 12:32:16 AM
INLAND EMPIRE Soundtrack Available September 11th
Amazon.com has the new INLAND EMPIRE Soundtrack now available for Pre-Order (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000VLPV5W?tag=sycamorerecords&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B000VLPV5W&adid=0Y89XTRWESDKYC6KKYW2&). Below is a track listing:

01 David Lynch "Ghost of Love" 5:30
02 David Lynch "Rabbits Theme" 0:59
03 Mantovani "Colours of My Life" 3:50
04 David Lynch "Woods Variation" 12:19
05 Dave Brubeck "Three To Get Ready" 5:22
06 Boguslaw Schaeffer "Klavier Konzert" 5:26
07 Kroke "The Secrets of Life Tree" 3:27
08 Little Eva "The Locomotion" 2:24
09 David Lynch "BBQ Theme" 2:58
10 Krzysztof Penderecki "Als Jakob Erwachte" 7:27
11 Witold Lutoslawski "Novelette Conclusion" (excerpt) /Joey Altruda "Lisa" (edit) 3:42
12 Beck "Black Tambourine" (film version) 2:47
13 David Lynch "Mansion Theme" 2:18
14 David Lynch "Walkin' on the Sky" 4:04
15 David Lynch / Marek Zebrowski "Polish Night Music No. 1" 4:18
16 David Lynch / Chrysta Bell "Polish Poem" 5:55
17 Nina Simone "Sinnerman" (edit) 6:40
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: grand theft sparrow on September 04, 2007, 09:00:52 AM
OK, I saw this the week it came out on DVD and I haven't been able to articulate how I feel about it, largely because I've only seen it once.  As it stands, Blue Velvet was the only Lynch that I loved after only one viewing (not counting Dune, which I first saw when I was 8 and I thought the giant worms and Sting were cool).  But after INLAND EMPIRE, I was left completely numb.  It wasn't that I couldn't give a shit one way or the other; it was that I didn't (and still don't) know how to express how I felt about it.

In a lot of scenes, I agree with taz that it felt like everyone knew they were in a David Lynch movie and once or twice, I felt like it was a Lynch imitator instead of the man himself.  But I think most of that has to do with the DV thing.  I know a lot of people have expressed distaste in Lynch leaving film for DV when his film work looks so much better but I think that's precisely the point of him switching.  Lynch enjoys making his audience feel uncomfortable.  He knows he has legions of fans that are with him no matter what; so how can he unsettle even a few of them?  By stripping the beauty from the image itself.  He's filmed ugly things in pretty ways and made pretty things look ugly before filming them in a pretty way but with IE, he's filming ugly things and pretty things made to look ugly in an ugly way. 

So DV is ideal for what it seems like he wants to accomplish and after this one viewing of IE, I'm of the opinion that the best way to judge the film is not on how we felt about it so much as how Lynch accomplished what he set out to do.  Obviously, we can't know for sure if he did or not but he's one of the few directors alive (the only?) that I imagine manages to get closest to putting images on screen exactly as he sees them.  If that's the case, then his having total freedom on this film leads me to believe that everything in the film is exactly what he wanted and therefore would make this his masterpiece.  For the first time, I've seen a film wherein it seems right that the personal feelings of the viewer are completely irrelevant.

Maybe deep down, I don't like the film and I'm giving Lynch a pass.  I don't know.  I doubt it, though.  All I know is, more than any of his other films, I'm eager to get to a second viewing as soon as possible despite (or maybe because of) having such unresolved feelings about it. 
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on September 04, 2007, 12:18:18 PM
Quote from: just sparrow on September 04, 2007, 09:00:52 AMFor the first time, I've seen a film wherein it seems right that the personal feelings of the viewer are completely irrelevant.

i've seen plenty. and it's never a good thing.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: davidchili on September 04, 2007, 10:01:15 PM
Quote from: just sparrow on September 04, 2007, 09:00:52 AM
For the first time, I've seen a film wherein it seems right that the personal feelings of the viewer are completely irrelevant.
It's true at some points, not in the whole film.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on September 12, 2007, 04:30:57 PM
guys, i am so sorry for delaying my review...i've watch the film 4 times already and i still need one more viewing...and i'll even take notes..(a first for me)...but rest assured, i will have my biased, annoying, school girl review up tomorrow....but i wanna attack my boy taz (et al?) right now...

you hear me???  i'm calling you out now! :yabbse-grin:


why is there a criticism of the film dealing with the characters "acting" like thery are in a lynch film???  dat makes no sense....thats like saying you didn't like fargo b/c they characters acted like they were in a coen brothers movie... 

Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on September 13, 2007, 09:01:43 AM
okay, i am ready now...i'm gonna try my best to put my thoughts into a somewhat cohesive post but keep in mind that i am not near as intelligent about reviewing film as most of you guys...and i know i'm on the hot seat for delivering a good critique b/c you gotta deliver if your avatar is the film theatrical poster.  right?

i'll start this right now by saying i am still confused about the film in terms of a narative point...hell, it could
l be that its nothing more than a series of surrealistic events/ideas shot on dv (b/c it's cheap and gives you the freedom to film and not worry about the bottom line as much in $$$-which means: total creative freedom for lynch) with no rhyme or reason...but comon, i'm like to believe that this, along with other lynch films, is a puzzle to put together...and i feel better that lynch will never explain the meaning of his films...that way he won't make me look like an idiot (if i'm wrong).

i'm not gonna discuss in detail what i think the film is about...that's for later...now, on to the film...


SPOILERS-SPOILERS-SPOILERS-SPOILERS-SPOILERS-SPOILERS-SPOILERS




INLAND EMPIRE


i love the opening...i have a 40" hdtv w/5.1 and the opening thundering is awesome...then we slowly build to the titles which are creepy and cool...then comes the all to familiar image of the needle and record...such great use of sound w/the image...and that's always a point all through the film...i love the radioesque type of announcer over that image too...the way he talks and what he says ("axxon n, the longest running"....)acts as though we are in for a ride...sit back, a enjoy...from there we go to, in what i preceive to be, a scene from the old polish film 47...the blurring of the faces is such a cool thing...from there we cue to the beautiful etheral music playing while we see a young woman crying while watching a tv staion that's all static tv  here's a perfect example of why lynch is a master...if you read again what i put in bold and then see how lynch put that exact scenario onscreen-it's fucking icredible...he can take any situation and make it beautiful...that's fucking talent that is unrivaled...and i like the touch of adding grace z. intermixed w/the static...the scene with the rabbits...i have never seen the shorts by lynch so this was a total surprise...i like these scenes and i like the way they progress later in composition...i like the scene when the male rabbit walks out of the door...and into that beautifully decorative room...i think it's a cool thing how we go from the rabbits dingy abode to that grand room...and that scene with the rabbit standing there by the doorway and light just only behind him until the entire room is filled w/light is such an incredible image...following that comes another lynch thing witht he base rumbling and fuzy image to reveal another actor...i do know why i mentioned that than only to point out a cool camera thingy...and then again, the rabbit fades w/the light...the next scene with the shot of the tree-then slowing gaining light and showing the bright green leaves is another cool example of subtle imagery that makes random things so beautiful...and there are all kinds of shit like that throughout the film...i gotta go off track and point out that after seeing this film several times, the dv looks incredible!  i knew lynch could pull it off...and makes me feel good that lynch is never going to back to film...this should make all you shoestring budget filmmakers happy...b/c it gives hope that hey if he can do it, maybe i can do it!  i like the scene w/grace z. and i wish the film had subtitles b/c she is saying some important shit...if anyone knows where i can find a transcript, holla at me...this is also the scene when we meet laura d. for the first time...and i must say she was incredible in this film...when i knew she was cast is was alittle worried b/c i find her not that great of an actress but what the fuck do i know-she nailed it!  the scene with grace z. has a little bit of piggy backing on the rabbit scene and along with many others in which the perspectives change so dramatically and so beautifully...when grace z. points her finger to couch where laura d. will sit, is again, just a cool way that perspectives change in a neat way...the next scene where she gets the audition shows soem of lynch's humor...once she gets the part via telephone call you see ian a. doing a funny celebration thing...sorry, got to point out that the way i'm reviewing this film may be kind of annoying doing it like a baseball play by play bu ti am watchign it again as i type this b/c i wanna get my imagery and emotional state to the same tune as it was last night so i can accurately do this for you guys...again, if it's annoying, i apologize...i love the scene w/diane l., will m., and justin t.  i thinks it's hilarious and a treat for all lynch fans to have them all together for our viewing pleasure...it's pure bliss...i love theroux's character! he's so fucking awesome...but my favorite surprise was dearn's husband...whoever that guy was-he's cool as hell...he's got the best vernacular and and tone of voice...plus, the casting of irons was alot of fun...he's so underrated and like the guy so much...he fits perfectly as one of lynch's repertopire of actors...and i hope he is used again...and harry s. was fucking hilarious as most evryone has pointed out...again, it's a treat to have him in this...


sorry guys...this is going to be much larger than i thought (i've got alot to say)...very big review, i promise...i will have to do this in parts...i know this may come to as a cop out...i'll return

     

   
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on September 13, 2007, 09:31:35 AM
i can't believe how easily i followed what you were saying. unlike your Keys to the World review, you found a good font size.

i don't wanna jinx you, cos you still hav to write the damn thing, but i think you might end up offering the most comprehensive opposition to bonzie's review. currently i agree with a lot of what bonze has said. he's made great points in both his epic posts, which i don't know if anyone else read.

jb had a great review on page 15 but i don't expect him to elaborate specifically to counter bonze. other great moments have been Ghostboy's predictions on page 8, in which he predicted i wouldn't like it at first but eventually come to realise i do (brilliant!).. at this point i'm in the first stage, so he's right so far. page 6 and page 8 has my two bogus reviews, i didn't see the movie until much later.

a couple of things i want to mention, this being a kind of bookmark review:
-why is everyone getting the "sowing heavy shit" line all wrong? imdb included. isn't it "some kind of heavy shit"?
-neon, the funny thing is that your attitude and approach to films might seem inelegant but it's perfect for lynch films because they too are loopy.
-due to the nature of the film, i think it's possible that both bonze AND neon may be right. bonzie is right because no serious person who likes to stay awake while watching a movie will deny that there is some points where YOU JUST CAN'T! and maybe that's a beautiful thing. there are also some undeniably brilliant Lynch moments amidst this 3 hour cure for insomnia.

and so the question becomes about one's threshold for lynch. if this is the man with his guts on your front lawn, how long can you stare at them before you just hav to close the door in disgust or boredom? certainly his future films will provide this answer. the question itself is a beautiful thing.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: brockly on September 22, 2007, 07:03:19 AM
the soundtrack is great. its not as accessible as other lynch soundtrakcs because the original music doesnt really have any melody or composition. its really just long, drawn out sequences of dark, emotional ambience. but its very beautiful and mystifying and captures the mood of the film perfectly. this is only half the album though. everything else, especially the two songs lynch wrote/composed, is great as well.

i watched the movie again and im liking it more and more every time i see it (as expected). still dont have a solid interpretation, but right now that doesnt really matter. i love this movie because of the way it connects with me on a completely emotional level. it definitely resembles eraserhead more than any other lynch movie because of how perplexing and abstract it is. and its fucking terrifying like nothing ive ever seen.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: SiliasRuby on September 22, 2007, 10:03:23 AM
I also have the complete soundtrack, if anyone wants a copy I can send it to them. I'm feeling generous today.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on September 30, 2007, 08:34:20 PM
Quote from: Pubrick on September 13, 2007, 09:31:35 AM
i can't believe how easily i followed what you were saying. unlike your Keys to the World review, you found a good font size.

i don't wanna jinx you, cos you still hav to write the damn thing, but i think you might end up offering the most comprehensive opposition to bonzie's review. currently i agree with a lot of what bonze has said. he's made great points in both his epic posts, which i don't know if anyone else read.

jb had a great review on page 15 but i don't expect him to elaborate specifically to counter bonze. other great moments have been Ghostboy's predictions on page 8, in which he predicted i wouldn't like it at first but eventually come to realise i do (brilliant!).. at this point i'm in the first stage, so he's right so far. page 6 and page 8 has my two bogus reviews, i didn't see the movie until much later.

a couple of things i want to mention, this being a kind of bookmark review:
-why is everyone getting the "sowing heavy shit" line all wrong? imdb included. isn't it "some kind of heavy shit"?
-neon, the funny thing is that your attitude and approach to films might seem inelegant but it's perfect for lynch films because they too are loopy.
-due to the nature of the film, i think it's possible that both bonze AND neon may be right. bonzie is right because no serious person who likes to stay awake while watching a movie will deny that there is some points where YOU JUST CAN'T! and maybe that's a beautiful thing. there are also some undeniably brilliant Lynch moments amidst this 3 hour cure for insomnia.

and so the question becomes about one's threshold for lynch. if this is the man with his guts on your front lawn, how long can you stare at them before you just hav to close the door in disgust or boredom? certainly his future films will provide this answer. the question itself is a beautiful thing.

hey p, thanks for the love.  i went back and read yours, jb, and taz's reviews.  i agree w/you and jb more so than taz.  sorry, taz  :(  it may be a while till i get it all out of my head and spilled out onto this thread, but i am working on it.     
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on September 30, 2007, 10:15:06 PM
Quote from: pyramid machine on September 30, 2007, 08:34:20 PM
hey p, thanks for the love.  i went back and read yours, jb, and taz's reviews.  i agree w/you and jb more so than taz. 

to clarify once more: that review you read was not real. i hadn't seen the movie yet, hence at the end "i havn't seen this movie". it was around the time i was making top ten lists full of other movies that hadn't been released yet, or in some cases been made. i apologise for the chaos and confusion brought on by my gag, many ppl have been injured as a result, some i fear will never be the same again (pozer).. that was never my intention. it was a powerful gag.

i've since seen it and that's when i said i agree moreso with Taz. look forward to clarifying this again..
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on October 22, 2007, 01:16:27 PM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dugpa.com%2Fimages%2F2007%2F1020ghost.jpg&hash=ba302bfb01e84b43732141b00ae0774fc8aee5c0)


David Lynch Ghost of Love Single Available 11/23/2007
Ryko Distribution announced the release of a new single from David Lynch. Ghost of Love which appeared on the INLAND EMPIRE soundtrack will be released as a CD single. Included on this CD will be an unreleased track called Imaginary Girl.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: socketlevel on December 02, 2007, 03:09:50 AM
Quote from: reinhold on August 28, 2007, 10:49:40 AM
saying that something you recognize as good is bad because it isn't new is totally illegitimate criticism in my opinion.

really?  so you are immune to the reaction of getting bored?  what do you think a cliche is?  i strongly think that lynch can in fact become a cliche of lynch.  what about all those directors that made something good and then they continue to milk that same idea over and over and over, you still give them the same credibility as someone that tries to reinvent the wheel, no you should give them shit for it imo.  well the independent world is no different than the mainstream one.  i don't doubt for a fact that 99.99% of david lynch fanboys have at one point gave criticism to something mainstream because it is "something you recognize as good is bad because it isn't new"

when i was in film school, all the kids got into stuff that was arty and experimental because it was new too them, which is cool.  however the moment they would go and see an excellent mainstream movie; like any pixar movie for example (which is just as good as any french new wave film, brackage, bunuel or w/e name you can think of, just different) and really liked it but then feel they had to qualify why they liked it, because they lose indie cred if they just show they're a kid inside of all the bullshit Barret wearing pretense.

not to mention the fact that lynch is basing his movies off of a style that lacks little-to-no plot, which isn't bad, but if you're in that realm of cinema then one of the only things you got going for you is staying original and fresh.  at least with a plot you can reaffirm certain dramatic ideals and maybe even moral/ethical codes.  when your whole thing is about absurdity or being strange, then you're not really achieving that anymore when it's cliche arn't you?  strange is no longer strange when it's convention.

i love strange, i love no plots, i just wanna see it in a new way.  same way that i love plots and stories, i just wanna see them in a new way too.  if someone else made a film and it looked like inland empire we'd say "what a wanna be lynch".  why can't we say that about lynch himself?

i'll rephrase my comment to help understand how your comment is wrong, it's not something that is good that's bad, it's something that was good and is now bad.  lynch shoulda tried something new as soon as emo fuckers like trent reznor latched onto it.  guys like marilyn manson and all the "neo-goth" music video directors used all his conventions in their wrist slitting 3 minute chopping blocks.  if i were lynch at that point i'd say to myself, ah fuck this is my Frankenstein, and gone on to something new, something that wasn't about shock value, and not necessarily mainstream, but something new because it got too big in fact.

10% of inland empire is phenomenal, 90% of it is pretentious, someone living in yesteryear and milking the same old cow, just like the holywood blockbuster.

-sl-
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on January 15, 2008, 01:35:14 PM
Japanese Limited Edition of LYNCH ONE and INLAND EMPIRE on DVD
A Japanese Limited Edition of LYNCH ONE and INLAND EMPIRE will be released on February 22nd.


(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dugpa.com%2Fimages%2F2008%2F0112_DVD.jpg&hash=66bca214c0aa8071432bb4430a713dfec270f191)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on April 21, 2008, 02:22:32 PM
Soundtrack anyone?

http://rapidshare.com/files/63204935/David_Lynch__2007__Inland_Empire.rar
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: cinemanarchist on April 22, 2008, 12:25:11 PM
Yes, please. Thanks Mac!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: ShanghaiOrange on August 21, 2008, 10:59:57 PM
after a fateful second viewing, i have decided that this is a bad movie.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Reinhold on August 21, 2008, 11:17:56 PM
Quote from: ShanghaiOrange on August 21, 2008, 10:59:57 PM
after a fateful second viewing, i have decided that this is a bad movie.

you're just plain wrong. this movie is a masterful exploration of an artist's relationship with work as it develops. it's solidly executed from a technical standpoint and it's an unhindered expression of lynch's vision. if you didn't like it, i'm sorry that you had that experience, but this film is great.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on September 22, 2008, 01:55:48 PM
Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on February 19, 2007, 01:07:20 PMYou know there's something there, and you know it's important, and you also know that you're a long way from getting it.

QFT, as they say. QFT.

I'm currently revisiting INLAND EMPIRE pretty hardcore, reading up and figuring things out. It's definitely harder than I expected. There's so much meaning in this film, it's ridiculous. I think I have it mostly figured out, and I'll post my interpretation once I iron out some details. I'd really like to discuss a few things with the people at the official message board (http://messageboard.inlandempirecinema.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=5), but the administrator seems slow to approve new accounts.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pozer on September 22, 2008, 09:00:42 PM
way to take one for the team.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: cron on September 27, 2008, 08:11:07 PM
I thought QFT stood for 'quite fucking true'
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on September 29, 2008, 11:41:52 AM
I think the most common meaning (and the one I intended) is "quoted for truth."
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: cron on September 30, 2008, 01:15:14 PM
Quantum Field Theory is the first result that google throws, i thought you had discovered some deep stuff about that in the movie.

i'll never comment on anything again.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: MacGuffin on September 30, 2008, 04:01:13 PM
Quit Fucking-up Threads
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pas on May 17, 2009, 08:59:30 PM
Now that it's been a while and everybody have calmed down (not especially here but in the critics circles). When I look at this film in my David Lynch collection I am now convinced that it is his absolute lesser film. It will not be a ''stain'' but it almost feels like a student film at times.

There are moments in it, especially Laura Dern's performance I guess.. but the ''weirdness'' is not as involving and hypnotizing as Mul. Drive no ?

Will this be remembered in... 5 years ?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pozer on May 17, 2009, 09:13:49 PM
movie's shit. thread re-abandoned.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Astrostic on May 17, 2009, 11:44:47 PM
movie's not shit. It's Lynch's, and the century's, best.

The film avoids all of the glossy, calculated phoniness exhibited by most living filmmakers, as well as any of David's previous films, and contains not a single moment that isn't genuine and honest.  Nothing in this film rings in as 'weird for weird's sake', and, regardless of whether or not it 'makes sense' in any convention realm, the experience of watching it, letting it penetrate whatever corner of my mind and memory that it pleases, was all the sense that needed to be made for me. The last half-hour (post Hollywood @ Vine/ending #1) is pure bliss.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Gold Trumpet on May 18, 2009, 12:26:36 AM
Quote from: Pas Rap on May 17, 2009, 08:59:30 PM
There are moments in it, especially Laura Dern's performance I guess.. but the ''weirdness'' is not as involving and hypnotizing as Mul. Drive no ?

I have no comment on Inland Empire, but it's funny because Muholland Drive has really dropped off for me. I originally liked the film a great deal, even called it the Citizen Kane of its type, but I re-watched it last month and was sad that film played like a jigsaw puzzle for teenagers. Every scene was easy to dissect and fit into its larger picture that I just became bored while watching it. Few scenes existed for their own narrative sake. It was all dedicated to a puzzle but the problem is that after a few viewings, the puzzle is as obvious as a Salvador Dahli painting about dreams. Still well done, but doesn't hold up for the long term.

I'm still a non David Lynch fan because The Straight Story is still his best work to me
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: SiliasRuby on May 18, 2009, 11:58:23 AM
I recently saw it a week ago ad it still holds up to me. It's still as emotional draining every time I see i. This is the 4th time.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on May 22, 2009, 02:29:14 AM
Quote from: Pubrick on September 13, 2007, 09:31:35 AM
i can't believe how easily i followed what you were saying. unlike your Keys to the World review, you found a good font size.

i don't wanna jinx you, cos you still hav to write the damn thing, but i think you might end up offering the most comprehensive opposition to bonzie's review. currently i agree with a lot of what bonze has said. he's made great points in both his epic posts, which i don't know if anyone else read.

jb had a great review on page 15 but i don't expect him to elaborate specifically to counter bonze. other great moments have been Ghostboy's predictions on page 8, in which he predicted i wouldn't like it at first but eventually come to realise i do (brilliant!).. at this point i'm in the first stage, so he's right so far. page 6 and page 8 has my two bogus reviews, i didn't see the movie until much later.

a couple of things i want to mention, this being a kind of bookmark review:
-why is everyone getting the "sowing heavy shit" line all wrong? imdb included. isn't it "some kind of heavy shit"?
-neon, the funny thing is that your attitude and approach to films might seem inelegant but it's perfect for lynch films because they too are loopy.
-due to the nature of the film, i think it's possible that both bonze AND neon may be right. bonzie is right because no serious person who likes to stay awake while watching a movie will deny that there is some points where YOU JUST CAN'T! and maybe that's a beautiful thing. there are also some undeniably brilliant Lynch moments amidst this 3 hour cure for insomnia.

and so the question becomes about one's threshold for lynch. if this is the man with his guts on your front lawn, how long can you stare at them before you just hav to close the door in disgust or boredom? certainly his future films will provide this answer. the question itself is a beautiful thing.


.......i have to quopte you....seroiudly,P..gewt your ass back hear....!  anyways i briefly skimmed over HJB'sanalysis and quite honhestly he makes all thre hayters lookj like ben lyons (aka ignorant douche bags.......TAZ u know i love u  :love:)....I wish I had Jb's brain...anyoneds whos reading this neeesds to stop what they doong and thank him.  JB has just open the floodgATES .......thank u JB...ill finish it up the 24th........
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: socketlevel on May 25, 2009, 12:39:58 AM
i have wrote previously on this thread that details my major gripe with this film (and also on the thread for synedoche ny for the exact same reason).  yet i post again because i can't help but notice how almost no one is talking about the movie, but rather why it should exist and how lynch is bold for making it.  i do appreciate how some people have come back since it died down to re-evaluate their impression, which i find insightful.

i think:

- the movie is too long. there is no plot to adhere to, so why not cut it down?
- the acting is bad.
- we've seen lynch do everything in this film before - (which isn't inherently bad, but since it comes to mind i can't help but think originality is the major element in his expression)

I'm worried that lynch's freedom has gotten the worst of him.  he shoots it autonomously on video with next to no budget, with no external pressures to appease.  normally i would applaud that kind of work environment, however, in this case it bloated up the picture with a ton of stuff that simply wasn't needed.

i question why people like this film, and if some of you have convinced yourself to like this film because of it's stigma.  it just seems like a hipster thing to like because it's abstract... which is lame.

-sl-

PS. i do like the scene on the street where the characters are lying down talking to eachother, and the crazy shot of laura approaching the camera at night looking like a maniac but that's about it, film coulda been those two scenes and i woulda been way more impressed.  which i guess is kinda the point, why go back to the same theme over and over and over in tedium... get to the point/expression/message david and then move on... boring.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on May 25, 2009, 02:19:28 PM
Quote from: socketlevel on May 25, 2009, 12:39:58 AMit just seems like a hipster thing to like because it's abstract... which is lame.

Except it's not abstract.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Reinhold on May 25, 2009, 04:20:43 PM
let me post some of my writing about the film, cut from a much larger piece that frames my discussion of the film in a larger body of postmodern narrative techniques and concerns. it's not my best writing, but i hope at the very least that you'll see that lynch is up to some new things in this film.

Textual Analysis of Inland Empire
David Lynch - 2006

Many scenes in Inland Empire take place on diegetic TV/Film sets, leaving it unclear to the viewer whether the angles are from the movie/TV show within the film or not. They also blend "high" and "low" cultural forms. The "Marylin Levins Show" scene is a great example. The film switches between two digital recording formats, DV and HDCAM SR, to provide some difference between the TV show footage and the ordinary filming. The issue is that, while there is a difference, the status of the images remains completely unclear. Are the images presented to the viewer on-air or on-set?

The viewer will have to decide for himself/herself, though there is little concrete indication of how to negotiate this issue. This subverts the American cultural tendency to associate the cinematic image with higher quality than TV/ "video." Studio TV shows of the sort depicted are shot on HDCAM or Digital Beta in reality, which both look better than DV. Most professional filmmakers of David Lynch's stature refuse to work with DV, but significant sections of this film are shot on DV. The differences are that DV has a little less than half of the resolution of HDCAM SR, but has the same frame rate and depending on the HDCAM SR settings, can have an identical color sampling. If one image is sharper than the other, the film or the TV show within the film, which "should" it be? There is also a cultural tendency to associate sharper resolution (or higher-fidelity sound) with a higher degree of realism. For decades, lower-resolution film stocks and video formats have been used within films shot on sharper media to denote dream space, personal subjectivity, low production values that signify ineptitude, or other scenarios that distance viewers from the primary narrative. 

In the production of this film, the two formats were standardized rather than kept as disparate elements. Both the DV footage and HDCAM SR footage would have had to have been transcoded to a Digital Intermediate codec, a "container" for a video images with different resolutions that allows them to be reproduced infinitely without degradation or compression errors arising from the transfer process itself, and more importantly at the time of this film's production, allowed the two formats of footage to be inter-cut in the same nonlinear editor's timeline natively.  The intermediate codec standardizes the footage from different sources and creates a master file. A cut assembled from these DI codec files is the "print" distributed to the DVD publishers and optical printers for 35mm distribution. The final film image, then, is a composite nearly all major cinema imaging technologies in the last 20 years, with components ranging from hobbyist equipment to professional studio lenses and post-production rigs contributing to the look of the final product.

The film blends "high" and "low" forms thematically as well as technically. Characters repeatedly enter spaces that emphasize differences in social and socio-economic status. The gypsy woman's accent, cheap make-up and dress reveal her as impostor from the moment she arrives. Then her movement within the space is emphasized by distortion, the product of an extremely wide-angle lens used in close quarters, to contrast her with the prim stillness of Dern and her home. Prostitutes in the parlor and hotel scenes with rich men are either desaturated, emphasizing video noise from high-gain (a camera setting used to over-use available light. The noise results from the camera dynamically missing detail on the image.) In more traditionally treated scenes, the blending of high and low arises solely from the plot. The assistant director, apparently poor, shamelessly begs people for money with a rehearsed speech. "I know. I'm a bum," he states distantly, staring forward. He has just finished praising the reasoning skills of dogs, and the viewer is left to contemplate the value of a dog's wisdom as he collects several hundred dollars from the lead actors.

The assistant director's begging is also useful when examining the role of characterization in narration. The first time that viewers encounter this speech, it seems like a hackneyed scenario on the part of Lynch, however admirably lit and performed. Upon a second encounter, overheard later in the film, viewers now attribute the tired, trite quality of his begging routine to his character. Viewers treat the character's dialogue as an aesthetic decision ultimately lying with Lynch as writer and director. The second encounter elevates what would have been simply an inclusion of a tired scenario to set-up for amusing character development. Effective characterization, of course, is also heavily reliant upon performance and a number of technical factors.

The diegetic filmmaking narrative foregrounds performance among several influences other than the director's. First of all, the story is about actors literally bringing the work to life. Secondly, Jeremy Irons' character is a chump. In addition, several scenes depict other people's labor under the influence of the director. Even moving a 2,000-watt flood light is extended and complicated by the rigger's confusion. He either can't hear or is trying to impose his opinion of the placement of the light. This scene highlights the surprising degree of difficulty that directors can face, even when they are clearly communicating simple messages to the crew. As in Mulholland Drive, here Lynch foregrounds rehearsal as a transformative moment, in which the boundaries between a character and the actor's identity are most flexible.

The texture of the actors' clothing and the degree to which it matches the sets also highlight the materiality of the mise-en-scene. In the scenes with the mafia bosses, the elegance of the rooms make prostitute's dress look cheap and out of place. In the crack whore [sic] sequence in the dream-set, the women's clothing fits the atmosphere better, but Dern's character is alarmed by her image and the degree to which it matches the garish images of the prostitutes. The prostitute from the mafia scene watches the sequence unfold on a television, and Dern will eventually enter her bedroom.

The opening sequence of the film structurally foreshadows the concerns that will unfold. The title text "INLAND EMPIRE" is rendered as a 3D text object, digitally lit with 8-bit white light. The digital "camera" settings required to produce a text object that looks precisely like this are identical to the actual camera specifications of the Sony PD-150, the digital camera with which Lynch shot significant portions of the film. It is worth mentioning here that digital nonlinear editors and effects generation programs capable of 8-bit renders are also capable of 16-bit and 32-bit renders, each with more complex shading algorithms to reduce banding and produce a more "natural" grade of light and shade.

The profilmic object and lighting are also highly significant. The camera is extremely close on a phonograph scratching a record as it plays. It reshapes the surface of the disc further the longer it plays. Here Lynch again asserts his concern with the affective, abstract, "raw" qualities, the music, and their physical origins and manifestations, its groove and the peeling curls of the disk collecting on the needle. This image also lends itself to the effects of performance on identity construction that Lynch will explore for the entirety of the film.  The plot focuses on an actress's experience making a film that increasingly shapes her life as she continues to play the role.
Also, beginning with the following shot, digital versions of camera qualities and effects will accompany their physical counterparts to underscore the blending of media that constitutes this film's particular mode of communication. Throughout the rest of the film, digital blurs coincide with changes in depth of field, and contrast ramps as lighting changes. Similarly, the camera lingers on reflections, dirty panes of glass, and juxtaposes vignetting and physical lens flares with digital banding.

By choosing a consumer-grade camera and putting a higher quality, faster lens on it than it is designed to use, Lynch both maximizes performance and strains the capacities of "vision" of the camera. Where the set's light is too bright to be read by the PD-150, the CCD "blows out" and the bright area of the frame, or cuts off its reception of luminance at a certain level. The camera effectively "chooses" not to pick up detail because it is not equipped to reproduce signals at those high frequencies though the CCD can detect them. The reason for cameras being produced this way is that TV signals won't carry the high frequency whites, and many consumer televisions also will not accurately display brightness over a certain level even if it is received in a signal. The issue here is that in addition to shutter speed, aperture, and other traditional considerations, digital cameras also actively change the image in the moment of recording in order to ensure accurate distribution of the recording overall on consumer grade televisions. Like a person trying to present the most widely palatable version of a disturbing memory, the camera literally drops detail so that certain parts of the depiction will not disrupt others.
When printed to film, the subtleties of the blown out areas, which have some errant pockets of detail, are brought to life by the film grain when printed to 35mm and projected. A similar phenomenon also occurs with digital noise in low light throughout the film. Because Lynch literally foregrounds these relationships on the surface of the image, the technology he chose to tell this particular story of transformation is integral and formally relevant. This narration raises issues of favoring authentic detail (analog technology that needs a lot more light and work) and building limits into one's work based on what will be reproducible (the drawback of simple, fast, and easy digital technology).

Digital blurring effects and shifts in depth of field also play an extremely significant role in the spatial-temporal organization of the film. Consider the sequence in which a mysterious figure appears on the back of the set during a rehearsal and the later scene in which the figure is revealed to be Dern's character emerging from a fantasy-limbo space. The reverse shot between Dern and Irons shows Dern's chair empty, suggesting that she occupies both dream and physical space simultaneously and exclusively, that she has nonlinear access to information in the diegetic real world via the supernatural/non-physical activity. The placement of the second scene so late in the film destabilizes viewers' hypotheses about the spatial/temporal status of each scene. This effect is created partially by the apparently linear structure of time that the narration takes between the two scenes. Because the viewer has followed Dern's character, and witnessed her entry into the space in the second scene, he/she must rationalize the information that is presented.

Where and what kind of space is it? Is it illusion? Did the events really happen as they are depicted? Based on how the set and blocking are spatially and temporally set up in relation to a plane of focus, I hypothesize that there is a diegetically invisible boundary, on either side of which divergent temporal logic applies. The characters that cross this plane do not appear to be conscious of it. In this way it resembles the ambiguous, elastic boundaries of technologically mediated postmodern experience. That boundary, like the one in the film, is observable to those paying attention, remains hard to articulate, and cannot accurately be presented as actually occupying a particular point in space or time. As in life, crossing that boundary has consequences in the diegetically real, physical world.

Echoing the relationship of the two characters, Theroux crosses the plane, granting him access to Dern's thoughts and emotions. He does not like what he sees or gets impatient, and leaves. The camera pursues Dern's character into the limbo space beyond the focal plane, and after this point in the film, the narration will never again stably represent linear time in merely Newtonian space. The actress's emotions and concerns motivate expressionistic lighting, absurdist imagery, and dynamic sound scapes. She is afraid of her husband and of being considered a whore by both him and Theroux's character. The plot focuses on the performances she must execute for herself, the other characters, and her professional commitment to the film being made within the film. She attempts to negotiate these overwhelming and private fears in environments manifest them externally.

Recall that the pink interior house set is used throughout the film as a sort of dream-limbo space in which Dern's character's subjectivity is externalized, amplified by the disturbing nature of the scenario, and re-internalized by her character. Early in the film, during a rehearsal, mysterious figure appears near this set, far in the back of the studio space. Theroux goes to investigate, but returns, telling his coworkers that whoever was back there "disappeared where it's real hard to disappear."  When she enters the studio space from the limbo space, she first appears out of focus and walks through a plane that is in focus. In a reverse angle, Theroux approaches from the other side and comes into focus. The plane of focus remains at the same location in space.  It is observable to the astute spectator, but goes unnoticed by the characters. Interestingly, because it cannot be visibly spiked or noted in a way that shows up on camera, its "invisibility" requires special awareness of it on set. The crew and Lynch must approximate the plane of focus in space, plan the focal depth of the camera, block the camera and actors. All of this must be done to maintain this bit of continuity, however subtle. In my view, its subtlety itself beautifully suits the facility with which the two temporalities blend.

Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: polanski's illegitimate baby on January 16, 2010, 06:28:36 PM
Might as well make my first post a vengeful one...Greetings and fuck you David Lynch for hurting my eyes, ears and not pushing enough dopamine through my brain. The all-great qualities of Mulholland Drive and others somehow deteriorated into the most blatant form of sadomasochism in this new movie. How careless and sadistic do you have to be to create something so vulgar? I know it's like a cool thing to do nowadays--make it the most unbearable film viewing experience ever in order to illustrate some life-changing concept. But, for fucks sake, at least do what Kaufman did in the Synechdoche--shoot an agonizing film on a great medium. As a viewer, i do not give a shit for any postmodern attempt of reactionism, if you will. If you have some quibbles with filmmaking and its constant urge for honesty then you should perhaps participate in theatre as it's much better fit for pretense. You want to retrograde and make me feel like a voyer? Well you have already done that. This film might very well be a marvel, but i can't see past all the selfishly-imposed shit that obscures its supposed genius.


Oh btw, i didn't just stalk the forum for 5 years as you can see i registered in 05 and then promptly dropped out of film school and didn't use the forum. But came back, to get some spiritual guidance and talk some shit :)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: socketlevel on January 16, 2010, 07:55:13 PM
dude i like your style already. i'm with you on all your points.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: bonanzataz on April 17, 2010, 10:39:13 AM
I think I like this movie now.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Reinhold on April 19, 2010, 02:08:14 AM
Quote from: polanski's illegitimate baby on January 16, 2010, 06:28:36 PM
Might as well make my first post a vengeful one...

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi18.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fb133%2Freinholdmessner%2FScreenshot2010-04-19at30613AM.jpg&hash=058a6530d9ece0a735f3834c6f94f935d1c37fa4)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: NEON MERCURY on April 22, 2010, 10:23:00 AM
Quote from: bonanzataz on April 17, 2010, 10:39:13 AM
I think I like this movie now.

:love:

yes!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on April 22, 2010, 11:04:37 AM
i still don't.

i think lynch went off the deep end with it and that's why he hasn't been heard of since.

i like the IDEA of it but it's completely unwatchable. also he must be kicking himself now with the advancements in DSLRs and video in general. seriously if he had shot this movie with his butt it could not have looked much worse. his BUTT!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pozer on April 26, 2010, 09:34:45 PM
i hate this movie so much that i removed it from my DVD shelf, took a magic marker and wrote "nothing really matress" on its casing and placed it on the side of the street.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Alexandro on April 26, 2010, 11:04:51 PM
dios mio. you all sound like ron fucking howard. inland empire is no easy sit but it's obviously not meant to be an easy sit. if you find nothing else to hang to, laura dern's performance is enough to warrant multiple viewings. at least that. it looks as if it was shot on video for no money...so what? I understand if some people were let down by it, but what a backlash for such a free spirited unconventional film. it is actually a very rare example of an experimental film that goes all the way without ever feeling overly pretentious, it is a raw fucked up thing that good or bad, has no parallel in today's cinema because everyone is too worried that a film "works" or has  "tight" narrative or lookw pretty. lynch has proven for 40 years or something that he can present us beautiful looking movies. now he tries a something weird and everyone complains like little schoolgirls because he clearly doesn't give a shit...whatever, it's just depressing when a film with a true punk rock attitude and willingness to break something or just be truly free is hammered like this when there is so much crap out there getting a pass or being endlessly discussed as if it had some merit like fucking avatar or something.   
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on April 26, 2010, 11:20:51 PM
Quote from: Alexandro on April 26, 2010, 11:04:51 PM
without ever feeling overly pretentious

i have to disagree with you there.

but you know what i'll give it another go cos i'm scared of being called a little school girl. especially for having legitimate complaints about the unwatchability of a wankfest. it's like my biggest fear.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Alexandro on April 27, 2010, 12:14:41 AM
and i'm drunk too.

wait...you mean is more scary that sounding like ron fucking howard?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Fernando on April 27, 2010, 10:54:01 AM
lol

ron fucking howard sounds kind of badass, maybe if you said little ronnie howards, now THAT is scarier than a little school girl.


good thing here is that you guys made me want to see this again, it's proudly placed on my shelf.

and like alexandro said, all flaws aside, laura's performance is worth to see it a few times.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on April 20, 2012, 01:06:15 AM
Does anyone know if "Axxon" has a legitimate real-life meaning? My search skills fail me. There are apparently hundreds of companies with the name, plus a few bands and DJs. Surely the word must come from somewhere.

It is a name... rarely. But that's not a satisfactory answer.

Most importantly, Spanish speakers, please explain this:

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axxón (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axx%C3%B3n)

Google translates "Axxón" as "Scientist," but only as a proper noun referring to that publication. How on earth could a word like "scientist" only be a proper noun?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Fernando on April 20, 2012, 12:31:02 PM
Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on April 20, 2012, 01:06:15 AM
Does anyone know if "Axxon" has a legitimate real-life meaning? My search skills fail me. There are apparently hundreds of companies with the name, plus a few bands and DJs. Surely the word must come from somewhere.

It is a name... rarely. But that's not a satisfactory answer.

Most importantly, Spanish speakers, please explain this:

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axxón (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axx%C3%B3n)

Google translates "Axxón" as "Scientist," but only as a proper noun referring to that publication. How on earth could a word like "scientist" only be a proper noun?

in that wiki page they dont talk about the meaning or where they got the name Axxón.

the article explains that it's an online magazine dedicated to literature, science fiction, fantasy and horror.

visited the site and there's an email of the guy running the site, I can ask him where they got the name and its meaning if you want.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on April 20, 2012, 12:50:42 PM
Quote from: Fernando on April 20, 2012, 12:31:02 PMvisited the site and there's an email of the guy running the site, I can ask him where they got the name and its meaning if you want.

I would love you forever.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Fernando on April 20, 2012, 02:54:35 PM
email sent.

Quote from: Pubrick on November 01, 2005, 05:25:05 AM
now we play the waiting game.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xixax.com%2Ffiles%2FP%2Fwaitingame.gif&hash=c1ccf97a27f66ff1de3939dc54e28759db45255e)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Sleepless on April 20, 2012, 03:05:38 PM
In the meantime should we debate the correct pronunciation?
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on April 20, 2012, 03:09:10 PM
I think it's safe to say the emphasis is on the O, but I have no idea how to pronounce a double x in Spanish. If that even is a thing.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Pubrick on April 20, 2012, 10:37:50 PM
Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on April 20, 2012, 01:06:15 AM
Does anyone know if "Axxon" has a legitimate real-life meaning? My search skills fail me. There are apparently hundreds of companies with the name, plus a few bands and DJs. Surely the word must come from somewhere.

It is a name... rarely. But that's not a satisfactory answer.

Most importantly, Spanish speakers, please explain this:

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axxón (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axx%C3%B3n)

Google translates "Axxón" as "Scientist," but only as a proper noun referring to that publication. How on earth could a word like "scientist" only be a proper noun?

Why isn't this sufficient: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/axon
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Fernando on April 22, 2012, 11:10:20 AM
got an answer! p was half right.

this is his literally response:

''its a mutation of axón, the connection between nerve cells and action*. that was the idea. the word had to take part of the computer program name and had to be five letters to leave three spaces for the numbers. back then we were in the DOS on PC** days and the names had to be eight characters max.''

* action in spanish is acción, the double cc is pronounced like an x.

so axón + acción = axxón

** the online magazine was made in the 80's
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on April 25, 2012, 10:03:42 PM
Thank you!

Pretty interesting. It still doesn't explain why so many companies go by the double-x variation, though. And it's still confusing why Google translated it as Scientist. (Has that word come to mean "scientist" through context because of that publication?)

I'm sure Lynch just randomly saw the word somewhere and decided to use it. Or he could have made it up.
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: chalfont on April 01, 2013, 08:19:12 AM
Quote from: matt35mm on February 24, 2007, 12:28:30 AM
OH, and it just wouldn't be right not to have a mention, somewhere in this thread, of how gorgeous Karolina Gruszka is!  By far the prettiest prostitute in the movie!

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.l-gwiazdy.pl%2Fimages%2F18__gruszka7.jpg&hash=18dc5db16f0332b98b0fa8fc89ba3d4b06a5c8e2)

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.wp.pl%2Fa%2Ff%2Fpjpeg%2F9851%2Fkarolina_gruszka.jpg&hash=1d22f51d4afb5a81664d81675b448d332912c3f2)

Totally agree!!!!!!
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: chalfont on April 03, 2013, 02:43:55 PM
A great visual version of "the Polish Poem" (FWWM and MD also included)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQiPQgMTkEI
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: DBeyond on April 08, 2013, 08:59:18 PM
Quote from: chalfont on April 01, 2013, 08:19:12 AM
Quote from: matt35mm on February 24, 2007, 12:28:30 AM
OH, and it just wouldn't be right not to have a mention, somewhere in this thread, of how gorgeous Karolina Gruszka is!  By far the prettiest prostitute in the movie!

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.l-gwiazdy.pl%2Fimages%2F18__gruszka7.jpg&hash=18dc5db16f0332b98b0fa8fc89ba3d4b06a5c8e2)

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.wp.pl%2Fa%2Ff%2Fpjpeg%2F9851%2Fkarolina_gruszka.jpg&hash=1d22f51d4afb5a81664d81675b448d332912c3f2)

Totally agree!!!!!!

Actually I disagree. This woman, Kristen Kerr, is stunning, her smile...everything...she owns!!!

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fcontent1.catalog.photos.msn.com%2Fds%2Fpic-en-us%2Fpicenus_msnentertainment%2FWireImage.com%2F67D3214C-CB4B-4DBE-8AA9-72C768BF5AC7.jpg&hash=b6c4bb2b6744c8875f35caa1798bb5d9793e76d7)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on January 17, 2014, 02:03:49 PM
SamFZGames, I moved your post here, which is sort of where this discussion is happening now:

http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=10711.msg330952#msg330952
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: SamFZGames on January 17, 2014, 03:48:17 PM
Thank you :)
Title: Re: INLAND EMPIRE
Post by: Drenk on October 29, 2014, 11:23:26 AM
I found this old interview, I don't know if it was posted. Always nice to hear him talk with his hands. And I know this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days.