David Lynch’s Empire

For his latest the legendary moviemaker embraces a DIY approach

by Daniel Nemet-Nejat | Published January 23, 2007

The only predictable thing about David Lynch is that he is always looking to surprise us. Since 2001’s Mulholland Drive, Lynch, 60, has been seeking new creative outlets for his work. His Website, davidlynch.com, offers weather reports (which Lynch delivers himself from outside his Hollywood Hills home), his music and a collection of experimental videos. Most notable among them is the 2002 Web-only series Rabbits, featuring humans dressed as rabbits, the voices of Mulholland Drive stars Naomi Watts and Laura Harring and a laugh track.

“He keeps expanding and growing as a person and as a filmmaker,” says Laura Dern, who appeared in Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990). “What is unheard of is that he gets braver and more willing to risk further. The more rules he knows about, the more rules he wants to break.” Lynch’s latest project, Inland Empire, is his boldest experiment yet, taking him into uncharted territory in moviemaking and distribution.

Working without a story, Lynch invited Dern and the other actors, including Justin Theroux, to experiment with him. Lynch used a skeleton crew—some of Dern’s scenes were shot with just her and Lynch—to film a series of separate scenes, highlighted by a 14-minute monologue by Dern. Ultimately, Lynch realized that these scenes were part of a unified piece, which he developed as he continued to shoot. The film also marks Lynch’s first feature foray with video, which seemed to inspire his unfettered approach and enhance the hallucinatory aesthetic. The result is a narrative that is confounding but absolutely compelling. In a raw performance that anchors the film, Dern plays an actress (or does she?) who stars opposite Theroux in a melodrama directed by Jeremy Irons. But, as actress and character bleed together, the story fractures in time and space, taking us to Poland, incorporating scenes from Rabbits and possibly introducing a third Dern character (she isn’t even sure how many people she played). The film, which makes Mulholland Drive look like a straightforward narrative, defies easy explanation—and Lynch refuses to offer any guidance.

But perhaps Lynch’s biggest leap with Inland Empire has been into the world of DIY moviemaking. When it proved difficult to secure a good distribution deal, as is his custom, Lynch decided to turn adversity into opportunity (Mulholland Drive famously grew out of a rejected TV pilot). Buoyed by business on his Website, which offers Lynch’s Signature Coffee, Eraserhead ringtones and copies of his short films, Lynch decided to distribute the film himself through his company, Absurda. Like an old-fashioned record promoter, Lynch has traveled with the film, promoting its release in each city. He hasn’t shied away from showmanship either, recently stopping traffic on Sunset Boulevard with a “For Your Consideration” banner and a live cow to promote his leading lady.

MM sat down with Lynch in New York to discuss his conversion to video, working without a story and his new role as a mini-mogul.

Inland Empire (2006)

Daniel Nemet-Nejat (MM): What made you decide to distribute Inland Empire yourself?

David Lynch (DL): On the Website, we started selling Eraserhead and some short films. My friend Eric then met these guys who said they could get it into some stores— like a distribution thing. It seemed kind of magical; you didn’t need a middleman. Then there was some question, ‘Well, jeez, maybe it could happen with the new film.’ But I didn’t have the money to pay for it, and I didn’t really think I could do it. When the film went to the Venice Film Festival, I heard that advances for films were going down—especially for a three-hour film that no one can understand. But they hadn’t even seen it yet, so it wasn’t that. It’s just that when you go with a distributor, you get an advance; advances are going down and it’s been my experience that the advance is all you will ever see. This way, there is no advance, but a possibility of seeing more and it’s more in one’s control. It’s kind of freeing, in a way.

MM: Has being a known commodity made it easier for you?

DL: For sure. But I think that anyone could do it. If you’ve got a feature film and people like it, you can do it.

MM: Have you been able to take advantage of digital projection?

DL: No, there are not enough theaters. We have to print on film, and that’s superexpensive, so the number of prints is always a question mark. With digital projection, you could go much cheaper.

MM: Are you trying to recreate a midnight movie atmosphere?

DL: Well, it would be beautiful. When Eraserhead came out in the 1970s, the midnight movies, that idea made that film. The art-house circuit made that film. And those two things have kind of disappeared. I think it could come back.

MM: Do you plan to use any promotional gimmicks, a la William Castle?

DL: Well, I went out on the street with a cow for Laura Dern, so I’m into show biz.

MM: How did you end up using video?

DL: I started doing these experiments for my Website and I shot them on the [Sony] DSR-PD150, which is not high-res DV. I would get an idea for a scene or something and I would shoot it and then I started getting more ideas and I saw how these scenes started relating one to another, realizing that all along I’d been working on something. So now I’m committed to the Sony PD150, which I loved by then. We did tests from DV to film and they looked beautiful to me, really amazingly good. I was just a happy camper. I will not go back to that dinosaur film way of going.

MM: Is it the quickness of it that you love?

DL: It’s not quick for quickness sake; it’s all the in-between. With film, you wait for two or three hours to move the camera and light the damn thing. This is what kills a scene; it kills it. So this thing gives life to the whole process. It’s beautiful.

MM: You have compared video’s look to an old Hollywood aesthetic. What do you mean by that?

DL: The quality of what I shot reminds me a little bit of the 1930s kind of emulsion and technology in 35mm, where everything wasn’t so crisp and it was a hair more impressionistic. It made it somehow less real and more magical.

MM: A lot of your films have a certain tension with the past—a nostalgia and a rejection at the same time. Is that something you’re conscious of?

DL: No. These things come from the ideas. Some people, I’ve heard—I don’t know— want to make a film to show this problem they’ve heard of in the world. That’s fine. It’s absolutely not the way it happens for me.

MM: How does it happen for you?

DL: I get an idea. It could just be a little fragment of an idea that I fall in love with. When you catch an idea like that it’s so beautiful, because you know what you’re going to do. It may just be a tiny piece of the puzzle, but it’s enough to bring in the rest, in time.

MM: It seems like you’re trying to get back to a more experimental approach, both with the subject matter of this film and the process of making it.

DL: Every film, in a way, is an experiment. You get an idea and the idea tells you everything. It’s like… a chef catches a fish. Now the chef didn’t make the fish, he caught the fish. But the chef can cook it and prepare it in a really good way. So it’s then up to the chef to do something with that fish. He might experiment with a little bit of brown sugar one time, mixed in with something else that’s he’s been liking. But the proof is in the tasting. He could taste it and say, “No! Not for this fish.” And he would remove the brown sugar and go with another thing until it tastes just right. That’s when the analogy stops. The idea is talking to you and you experiment with the thing until it feels correct based on that idea. Sometimes you veer off and you know that’s not right and you come back and say, ‘Oh, that’s what we need.’

MM: Was the first scene that you shot with Laura Dern the extended monologue that is cut through the final film?

DL: It doesn’t really matter what the first was, but it wasn’t the first.

MM: Can I ask what the first was?

DL: No. I’ll tell you why. Someone’s in the middle of the film and they’ve read your article and they (whispering) “Hey that’s the first scene…” It putrefies the moviegoing experience, which is a delicate thing.

MM: You’ve said that after shooting six scenes, you realized that you had a movie to link them all together. What made you realize that?

DL: I don’t know. I got a feeling that those scenes could relate and they were totally unrelated before. And then, what you call “a glorious idea” came.

MM: How was it directing actors without having a story arc?

DL: That’s a good question. It works surprisingly well, because if you’re honest in the scene… it’s like, you are yourself today—everything that you do, your kit, is working like it worked yesterday. You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. So, if we shot you today and then got an idea for tomorrow, you would be the same. But we would talk about yesterday, because yesterday might have some significance. ‘Remember yesterday, you were wearing that black shirt?’ Well, you might wear the same thing today. So there’s something that would carry over from the first. But the first was honest because it was that character in this particular scene. And the second you’re honest in that scene, you have that first scene to refer back to and it gets easier.

In other words, it strangely doesn’t matter. You could even get the third scene happening before the first scene and it still is working. It’s still that same character, but it’s been done in the beginning anyway—scene by unrelated scene by unrelated scene.

MM: The structure of the film almost seems to mirror the approach of making a film, where you often shoot out of sequence.

DL: Yeah, a lot of times the situation forces you to do that. It’s much safer to shoot in sequence and I would always much rather shoot in sequence, because you may discover a thing along the way. If you had been going backwards, you might have to do some reshooting.

MM: Of course, with this film, it’s more difficult to say what the sequence actually is.

DL: (laughs) There’s a sequence. But, it’s more hidden.

MM: How has your creative relationship with Laura evolved over time? It seems like she has become more of an active collaborator.

DL: All actors are collaborators. They’re like—how can I say it—a critical element. But all elements are important. Laura is an incredibly good actress; she’s also really fun to work with. Because I’ve worked with her more than once, you get a shorthand. So it’s easier, faster, more fun to go forward when you have a good relationship with someone. But every time, there’s a certain point where everything I say stops and she’s got to make it something real. I’ll tell you another thing: Before she saw the final film, it was suggested that Laura write down what she thought it was and she was amazingly accurate.

MM: I’ll have to ask her what that was.

DL: I hope she doesn’t tell you.

MM: What does the Web allow you to do that you can’t do with film?

DL: You can interact with the people and you can give them kind of random access. It’s different than film. In film, you kind of control the thing—beginning, middle and end—so that people can have a certain experience. The Internet is not that way.

MM: But you don’t like watching films on a computer.

DL: I think if you see the movie on a computer, with the computer speakers, you haven’t seen the movie, really—but you think you’ve seen the movie. If you could see the movie on a big screen, with really good sound, in a dark room, then you’ve seen the movie.

MM: You seem to be using the Website to create a “David Lynch brand.” Have you become more brand-conscious?

DL: That’s other people. I like it as a home for experiments, but it takes so much time. In the future, I’m sure I’ll do more experiments that’ll find their way onto the site. But when you go off and work on a project, you leave that behind. You can’t do everything, and that’s very frustrating. But it is an opening to the world, so you can put things there and know they have the possibility of going everywhere. It’s really magical—and that will be the way people see films. But I hope when they download stuff, they can squirt it on a big wall with really great speakers. MM

For more information on Inland Empire, visit www.inlandempirecinema.com or www.davidlynch.com.

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