[originally published on Greencine, August 2007]
David Lynch, the once boyish maverick of such dark, demanding, and confounding films as Blue Velvet and Lost Highway (not to mention the gentle, G-rated slice of slightly askew Americana, The Straight Story), is 60 now. You can see his age in has face and his graying hair (still wildly brushed as if trying to escape his head), but his output is, if anything, even greater now. He’s producing short films for his website, painting, even marketing his own signature coffee.
And he’s still making films the only way he knows how: his way. He made heady and dreamy three hour drama Inland Empire, shot totally on digital video (his first feature made in that format), with such Hollywood pros as Laura Dern and Jeremy Irons, yet financed and produced completely outside of Hollywood.
“It’s mostly common sense making films,” he insists. “You don’t need a studio. You need some money and you need ideas and then you go make your film.” He even bypassed the studio system to distribute the film independently. “There are many, many, many great theaters available to people and that’s the place where people see films,” he explains. “So if you can get your film into a theater, that’s all you need. And now you can make your own DVDs. If you have a conduit to stores, you put them down that conduit. Again, it’s a lot of common sense.”
Lynch came to Seattle in January 2007 to appear at a special preview screening of Inland Empire and talk at Town Hall on Transcendental Meditation and granted a few select interviews. Dressed in his trademark neat white shirt and simple black suit, he sat back for the interview with a cup of coffee within reach and an occasional cigarette between his fingers. Soft-spoken and pleasant, calm and confident, answering most questions with simple and succinct answers, he comes off as a gentle but eccentric elementary school teacher patiently trying to explain filmmaking and the creative process as if it were nothing more than basic addition and subtraction.
You wrote in your book, “Catching the Big Fish,” that you spent a lot of time in the woods while you were growing up. Is that where the settings and atmosphere of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks came from?
Wood is an influence, but it wasn’t… I always pictured Blue Velvet as having lumber around it, but it was shot in North Carolina. But there’s a lot of lumber around in North Carolina, too, so it worked out. But I pictured it more as a Northwestern kind of town. Then when Twin Peaks came out, yeah, there’s things, but I wrote it with Mark Frost, he’s not from the Northwest. There’s always things about our childhood that ideas come from. So it was an influence for sure. The woods. Wood and woods.
Blue Velvet captured something I’d never seen any other movie do at that time. It presented what should be a simple and peaceful rural community and revealed this dark layer underneath the surface, not simply a criminal underworld but a moral underworld. And I had lived for a year in La Grande, Oregon, which Blue Velvet‘s Lumberton evoked perfectly for me.
There’s a dark layer underneath every community. Looking back, people made a big deal about Blue Velvet showing the surface and then something under the surface. Since then, if you see TV and newspapers, more and more has been revealed that was hiding there all along. I say the sickness is being revealed and people are dealing with it, which I guess is a good thing. So it’s not just La Grande, or it’s not just in Twin Peaks or Lumberton, it’s everywhere.
Read More “Interview: David Lynch on ‘Inland Empire’ I – The Idea”