Talking to David Lynch, you’d never guess he was the brains behind some of the eeriest movies of our time: mesmerizing bad dreams such as “Eraserhead” (1977), “Blue Velvet” (1986), “Twin Peaks” (1990) and his latest, “Mulholland Drive.”
Instead, he looks and talks like the apple-cheeked heartland boy and Missoula, Mont., native he is: He’s frank, open and disarmingly enthusiastic. If there’s one Lynch movie that gives you the biggest clues to his own personality, it’s the picture many thought was a career aberration; the gentle and humanistic Midwestern odyssey “The Straight Story.”
I talked to Lynch at Cannes, right after seeing “Mulholland Drive,” the Hollywood nightmare about two women lost in a maze of murder and corruption, which later won him a share of the fest’s Best Director prize (with Joel Coen, who won for “The Man Who Wasn’t There”). The bizarre tale, is prototypical Lynch. But, though some bewildered critics believe “Drive” may have no logical explanation, Lynch himself strongly disagrees. He supplied a very clear unraveling of the mysteries during our talk. But I’ll never tell.
Q. What was the genesis of “Mulholland Drive”?
A. The “Mulholland Drive” sign — the name — was the first thing. Ideas for me come in fragments.
Q. As scenes?
A. Even smaller. They’re almost like a still photo that starts to move as you study it. The ideas sometimes start stringing themselves together and a theme evolves, or a story evolves. And the more it evolves, the more other ideas swim in to attach themselves to it.
Q. What was the first visual idea you had?
A. Betty arriving in Hollywood.
Q. How difficult is it to keep making films with a strong personal vision in today’s Hollywood?
A. It’s not difficult at all. You have to have somebody behind you. It’s important to have freedom . . . and enthusiastic support. Those two things allow you to be true to your ideas. But my films don’t cost so much — and they don’t make so much. If I went crazy and started spending more . . . they’d fix me but good.
Q. Do you get inspiration from your dreams?
A. No. I think there’s an ocean of ideas. . . . And when an idea comes, it comes fully. Like a seed. But it still changes. It evolves, starts growing. Paying attention and following those ideas, for me, is what it’s all about. You don’t know exactly where they’re going to lead. There’s an emotional thing that happens: You sort of fall in love with certain ideas and you see the way cinema could do them, and you stay true to those — and other ideas will swim in and join them.
Q. “Mulholland Drive” is set in the present, but it feels like the ’50s.
A. For sure. That’s because the dream is always there. The dream originated from that Golden Age of Hollywood: someone steps off the bus and a whole new world opens up. So it has a feeling — sometimes in the music, costumes or settings — of the past. But it’s present day. During the early ’90s, in the Hollywood Boulevard poster shops, the most popular subjects were still James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. They symbolize something and it doesn’t go way.
Q. Who’s singing that great Spanish version of “Crying”?
A. Rebekah Del Rio [the singer who lip-synchs it on screen]. My old music teacher called me one morning and said “I’d like you to meet this girl. She wants to come by and maybe sing for you.” Around 10 in the morning, she shows up and we get her a cup of coffee. Maybe four minutes go by. I had the engineer in the studio light up a microphone and I said, “Instead of just singing in front of us, Rebekah, maybe you’d go in and sing in the microphone? We’ll record it.” She said “Fine.”
Q. How come we haven’t heard of her?
A. This is the Hollywood thing. The talent that exists that we don’t know about, that’s ignored. Fate either smiles or it doesn’t. But people are there, saying; “I’ve got the stuff.” And still, it never happens for some people.
Q. That’s what the film is about.
A. Exactly.
