David Lynch Interview, Inland Empire

What could be more surreal (and Twin Peaks-ish) than having pie and coffee with David Lynch at Marie Callender’s, the archetypal all-American restaurant? Well that’s exactly what MoviesOnline did this past week at the Los Angeles Press Day to promote Lynch’s new film, "Inland Empire." Comedian Mel Brooks once referred to the avant garde Lynch as ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’ because of his peculiar style and focus on the American psyche. So sitting down with Lynch and his talented co-producer/star Laura Dern to discuss "Inland Empire" over a slice of Chocolate Cream pie seemed oddly apropos – especially since Lynch himself admits to having eaten lunch at Bob’s Big Boy in L.A. nearly every day for seven years "along with four, five, six, seven cups of coffee with lots of sugar" while jotting down creative ideas on a napkin with a pen borrowed from his waitress. He attributes the inspiration for many of his films to his daily sugar rush in this period. Lynch says, "I got a lot of ideas at Bob’s." Let’s hope his time with us at Marie Callender’s proves equally stimulating.

Born in Missoula, Montana and raised in rural, small town America before moving to an urban environment to pursue an artistic career and a fellowship at the AFI, Lynch is considered a highly original filmmaker with a unique and uncompromising vision. He has acquired a reputation for being one of the foremost contemporary film auteurs and someone who continually defies cinematic convention. Lynch wants his films to resonate emotionally, intuitively, and personally for each viewer. The screen is a canvas upon which he projects his unique ideas and enigmatic images and then extends an invitation for personal interpretation. Lynch does not try to impose "meaning" on his vision. Instead, he leaves that up to the viewer.

Lynch believes that films about life should be complicated and, in some cases, inexplicable – a confusing, irrational series of random events that truly have little discernable purpose, where things are abstract and felt or understood in an intuitive way. He explains, "Life is very, very confusing, and so films should be allowed to be, too. All my movies are about strange worlds that you can’t go into unless you build them and film them. That’s what’s so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds." He also believes that ideas exist outside of ourselves. "I think somewhere we’re all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist. And I think the mind isn’t conscious enough to go all the way to where we’re connected, but it’s conscious of a certain amount of that territory. So you just hope that you can make the conscious part of your mind bigger or that these ideas will fly into your airspace, so you can shoot them down and grab them and take them home."

The iconoclastic filmmaker explored the seedy underside of small-town America in 1986’s visually stunning and seminal classic, "Blue Velvet," and in the critically acclaimed but short-lived 1990 TV series, "Twin Peaks." He examined the dark underbelly of sprawling metropolises in 1997’s "Lost Highway" and 2001’s "Mulholland Drive," where identity is always ambiguous and fluid. And he took us on a dark, violent road trip in 1990’s "Wild at Heart" complete with obvious references to "The Wizard of Oz," a film Lynch is quite fond of. His films are non-linear; full of surreal, nightmarish, dreamlike sequences; stark and strange images; dark, decaying environments; and distorted characters existing in polarized worlds. They are also marked by painstakingly crafted audio that lends an unsettling, nerve-jarring tone to the proceedings and often use vintage songs in unconventional and disturbing ways. Lynch also employs vibrant colors, dreams, and compelling montage to connect plot twists, transformations of character, and multiple free-floating emotions into sensual and visceral sequences that evoke collective dread and malaise.

During a career that has spanned three decades, Lynch has developed a consistent narrative and visual style that is instantly recognizable to audiences worldwide. It has made him a favorite of film critics and the object of a strong cult following despite the fact that, with the notable exception of 1980’s "The Elephant Man," most of his films have not been big financial successes. The director shares a birthday with Federico Fellini and has often cited filmmakers Luis Bunuel, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, and Roman Polanski as some of his most significant influences. Others who have also inspired him include artist Francis Bacon, whose work he finds both visually stunning and emotionally touching, and German novelist Franz Kafka whose work, like Lynch’s, often combines the mundane with the absurd and surreal.

Lynch’s latest film, the 179-minute "Inland Empire," shot in the U.S., Poland and France, takes his originality to a new level as he approaches his artistic oeuvre armed with and liberated by a hand-held, consumer digital camera, the Sony PD-150. While the film’s title refers to the residential area that borders the desert near Los Angeles, we doubt that’s what Lynch had in mind. Although Lynch had a basic premise, he began filming without a script and wrote each scene just before shooting it. What transpires on screen is baffling, mysterious, hard to follow, and often incomprehensible in any traditional narrative sense – but, of course, the film is vintage Lynch so you don’t ask what it means and you abandon all hope of logic. Rather, you yield to it, experience it, let it take you where it will, and go along for the ride.

In sum, "Inland Empire" is a highly personal, ambitious, and experimental film that is both mesmerizing and incoherent – from the initial images of a shaft of projected light to a phonographic needle slowly lowering onto the grooves of a record, to a plotless TV sitcom featuring talking humanoid rabbits whose performance is accompanied by a distorted laugh track (snippets taken from Lynch’s 2002 "Rabbits"), to an intensely prophetic Polish Gypsy neighbor (Grace Zabriskie) who warns actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) about her upcoming role in director Kingsley Stewart’s (Jeremy Irons) film, to menacing Eastern Europeans who are looking for "a way in" (to what we don’t know) and are searching for someone who they are told has "left for the Inland Empire." Lynch describes it as "a mystery about a woman in love and in trouble," but it’s more complicated than that. "Inland Empire" is actually a film within a film based on a ‘haunted’ screenplay entitled ‘On High in Blue Tomorrows,’ which is itself a remake of a Polish film that was never finished because of the untimely demise of its lead actors.

Laura Dern, who appears in nearly every scene of "Inland Empire," delivers an astonishing performance of great depth and range. She plays both spectator and protagonist as time and space merge and reality and illusion blur in the dark, dreamlike alternate worlds her character inhabits. As the story unravels, she becomes unable to distinguish herself from her character and stands outside herself observing the life she’s imagining as a character in search of something that’s never clear as one facet of her fractured identity bleeds into another. She plays the faded actress Nikki Grace, the character Susan Blue in an adulterous Southern melodrama, and an abused prostitute who mysteriously wanders the streets of Poland, climbs dark, abandoned staircases to audition for a role, walks across deserted stages, and finally collapses among the homeless at the corner of Hollywood & Vine in what turns out to be her big scene finale in "On High in Blue Tomorrows." "Inland Empire" also features strong performances by Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, and brief cameos by Diane Ladd and William H. Macy.

Lynch is first to arrive for our interview sporting an impeccable black suit and white shirt that contrast handsomely with his platinum grey hair. While we wait for Laura Dern to join us, we enjoy a Lynch-esque moment as the director expounds on the absurdly mundane topic of pie. Once Dern arrives, our conversation evolves into a more serious discussion about the making of "Inland Empire" which recently won the Future Film Festival Digital Award at the Venice Film Festival. Here’s how it went:

DAVID LYNCH: Good, how are you doing?

DAVID LYNCH: Is Laura here too with us?

DAVID LYNCH: I’ll be darned.

A waiter delivers a Chocolate Cream pie to our table while we wait for Laura Dern to arrive.

WAITER: It’s already cut.

DAVID LYNCH: (admiring the pie) Beautiful!

DAVID LYNCH: Yeah, it's the Twin Peaks thing, I guess.

DAVID LYNCH: You and me both.

DAVID LYNCH: Uh huh.

DAVID LYNCH: Yeah, way more of a restaurant than I thought.

DAVID LYNCH: Yeah, full on.

DAVID LYNCH: Not yet. Not yet. Well I don't know. I was looking at… I was thinking about Banana Cream Pie but I don’t see any.

DAVID LYNCH: I intend to. What are you going to have? You’ve got Apple pie?

DAVID LYNCH: Nice.

DAVID LYNCH: Already, huh?

DAVID LYNCH: You want the Chocolate Cream?

DAVID LYNCH: Beautiful.

DAVID LYNCH: Well, I like Cherry pie, I like Blueberry pie, I like Banana Cream pie, and I like Dutch Apple pie. Those I guess are the top four.

DAVID LYNCH: Uh huh.

DAVID LYNCH: Dutch Apple pie has something on top. What does it have? Cheese?

DAVID LYNCH: Yeah, it’s a crumbly top. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. It's a real crumbly top. Killer pie! Beautiful!

DAVID LYNCH: Well, I don't think I'd be wild about Rhubarb.

Laura Dern joins the interview and overhears our conversation.

LAURA DERN: I love Rhubarb.

DAVID LYNCH: Really? Wow!

LAURA DERN: Banana Cream?

DAVID LYNCH: Uh huh.

LAURA DERN: (spotting a pie at another press table) Oh! Banana Cream’s over there! Does that mean we get a piece of different pie at every table we go to?

DAVID LYNCH: I think so.

LAURA DERN: Oh this is fantastic!

Laura Dern gets comfortable as another waiter approaches.

WAITER: Do you want anything to drink?

LAURA DERN: I’m fine.

DAVID LYNCH: I’m getting a coffee, I think. Thanks.

The waiter leaves and our interview begins.

DAVID LYNCH: Fire away!

DAVID LYNCH: Well, production is a weird thing. How long from the beginning to the end was about three years, but we weren't always shooting every day, you know what I mean? And a lot of days we weren’t shooting. (laughs)

LAURA DERN: Pretty much. (to David) Right?

DAVID LYNCH: Yeah. (Dern and Lynch both laugh)

A waitress arrives with Lynch’s coffee and sets it down in front of him.

DAVID LYNCH: (to waitress) Is this mine?

WAITRESS: Yes.

DAVID LYNCH: Thank you very much. (sips coffee) Good coffee.

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

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

DAVID LYNCH: It’s different but [with] similarities because it still deals with, as "Mulholland Drive" did, the movie industry and it has, you know, a female lead. (laughs) So there’s…

LAURA DERN: Thank you.

DAVID LYNCH: Then it kind of takes off and becomes different.

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

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

LAURA DERN: Well I would rather only work with David period. (laughs)

DAVID LYNCH: That’s because she’s working with him now. Watch what happens next time. ‘I only want to work with Robert or I only want to work with...’

LAURA DERN: Well they know me because we’ve met many times before when you weren’t here.

DAVID LYNCH: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s all baloney. (laughs)

LAURA DERN: Can you believe what she’s saying? Poor David Lynch. He doesn’t realize that Laura has said this so many times to us. But I think for myself – David may – I watched David do this with many other actors on this movie, but I don’t know that I could have done it with many other directors because, you know, we’ve been asked if we have a shorthand and in fact we have a remarkable one. I’m sure he has it with the other actors he works with, but for me I have the ability from knowing him since I was 17, separate from who he is as a director to me, to intuit what he needs and he can intuit what I’m going to express before it happens. So it’s not just what the movie’s about or the character I’m playing but even as an operator, a cinematographer, I felt like David moved his body and the camera into place just when I was thinking of moving that way. You know there was that thing that happens that is…

DAVID LYNCH: (interrupting) Laura actually directed this picture. (laughs)

LAURA DERN: I did (laughs) and he was wonderful. We cut his part out.

DAVID LYNCH: (laughs) No.

LAURA DERN: A set of long films, yeah.

DAVID LYNCH: You know, after a while the scene by scene revealed more and then I wrote a lot of stuff and we went and shot more traditionally. You know we could shoot for several weeks and have stuff to shoot and organized like a regular shooting schedule. But it was just in the beginning that it was scene by scene and those could have ended up just being that -- a scene, separate, by itself for the internet or whatever. But I didn’t know what it was going to be so I’d shoot a scene and then I’d get an idea for another scene and shoot that scene and lo and behold after a bunch of them, a thing came out.

DAVID LYNCH: A little different.

DAVID LYNCH: Not this process but with digital video and I think maybe I would, you know, it would be nice to have a script written up front but it just didn’t happen this time.

LAURA DERN: But as he said, I mean there were chunks of the film that surfaced that you wrote towards the end. I mean we shot like a month.

DAVID LYNCH: It all starts coming more and more and more.

LAURA DERN: And you shot like four or five weeks solid at one point like almost a traditional movie.

DAVID LYNCH: Sure, that’s right.

LAURA DERN: Because you had so much work to do.

DAVID LYNCH: Right.

DAVID LYNCH: (teasing) Totally linear. It’s a straight ahead linear thing.

LAURA DERN: (laughing) …in every way.

DAVID LYNCH: No, it wasn’t all linear but there were a lot of scenes that were there. Some could have been back in time. Some could have been here (gesturing to indicate the future) and then a chunk right now like that.

LAURA DERN: Well I have to say she’s the nicest, loveliest lady but having met her on "Wild At Heart," I’m just damn terrified of her every time I see her. I can’t get over who she has been made out to be by David when I see her but you know it’s the beauty of working with David is that you are again, speaking of being in the moment, you are there in the moment and you may have a sense that something is disturbing, or a sense that something is funny, but when you’re in it you’re just trying to make it as authentic as it is and then when you reflect back or when you see it as an audience, something that even seemed straight when we were shooting it, to me is just hysterical. Like I pretty much think he’s the best company director going but (laughing) other people may not see it that way. It just depends on how you take it.

DAVID LYNCH: Laura is seeing a psychiatrist.

LAURA DERN: But Grace is hilarious and when I was doing it, she was terrifying so I don’t know why it worked out that way because I wasn’t sitting across from her.

DAVID LYNCH: For sure it is.

DAVID LYNCH: Yeah, it’s coming out I think next spring.

DAVID LYNCH: I think so.

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

DAVID LYNCH: Uh huh.

DAVID LYNCH: Yeah. You have to write to Universal.

DAVID LYNCH: Thanks.

LAURA DERN: Thanks very much.

LAURA DERN: (admiring the pie at the adjacent press table) No, I’ve got my eye on the Banana Cream… with all due respect to the Chocolate Cream.

"Inland Empire" opened in New York on December 6th, in Boston on December 8th, and will open in Los Angeles and Pasadena on December 15th.