INLAND EMPIRE

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

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matt35mm

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!




MacGuffin

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."
"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

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.


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



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.
"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

john

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."
Maybe every day is Saturday morning.

Pubrick

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.


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



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.
under the paving stones.

MacGuffin



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.
"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 Love a Magician

i haven't seen the movie but david lynch just seems like a straight up nice dude

MacGuffin

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."
"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

Reinhold

isn't that article a few months old?
Quote from: Pas Rap on April 23, 2010, 07:29:06 AM
Obviously what you are doing right now is called (in my upcoming book of psychology at least) validation. I think it's a normal thing to do. People will reply, say anything, and then you're gonna do what you were subconsciently thinking of doing all along.

Pubrick

you should beat the shit out of him.
under the paving stones.

MacGuffin

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.
"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

German Trailer



Poster Gallery here.
"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

bonanzataz

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

hmm... kinda makes me wanna watch the movie dubbed into german.
The corpses all hang headless and limp bodies with no surprises and the blood drains down like devil's rain we'll bathe tonight I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls Demon I am and face I peel to see your skin turned inside out, 'cause gotta have you on my wall gotta have you on my wall, 'cause I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls collect the heads of little girls and put 'em on my wall hack the heads off little girls and put 'em on my wall I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls

MacGuffin

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.
"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

bonanzataz

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.
The corpses all hang headless and limp bodies with no surprises and the blood drains down like devil's rain we'll bathe tonight I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls Demon I am and face I peel to see your skin turned inside out, 'cause gotta have you on my wall gotta have you on my wall, 'cause I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls collect the heads of little girls and put 'em on my wall hack the heads off little girls and put 'em on my wall I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls