INLAND EMPIRE

Started by MacGuffin, May 11, 2005, 04:50:02 PM

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MacGuffin

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.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

I Don't Believe in Beatles

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
"A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later." --Stanley Kubrick

MacGuffin

'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."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Ghostboy

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.

MacGuffin

Five minute interview with Lynch on IE and ideas:

"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

matt35mm

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!

MacGuffin

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. For more details, check out Chrysta Bell's Official Website.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin



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.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

matt35mm

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!

MacGuffin

"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Pubrick

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.
under the paving stones.

Fernando

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:

modage

yeah i think they've been spoiling progressively more imagery as they've gone along, the latest being the most spoilery.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

MacGuffin



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.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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MacGuffin



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.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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