Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  While Lynch was doing post-production on Mulholland Drive, another layer was added to his life: That layer was the country of Poland. “David’s interest in Poland began when these guys from Camerimage Film Festival, which is a festival devoted to cinematography in Poland, came around in February of 2000,” said Sweeney. “They came en masse—there were six or seven of them—and they seemed like wild and crazy guys, which tickled David. They wanted him to attend their festival and kept begging and sending him stuff until he agreed to go.”

  Founded by Marek Żydowicz in Torun, in 1993, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography runs for one week every year and had just moved to Łódź when Lynch became involved. The Camerimage Gang—a term Lynch came up with—is a revolving crew of musicians, artists, and filmmakers that includes Kazik Suwała, Agnieszka Swoińska, Adam Zdunek, Michał Kwinto, Paweł Żydowicz, Kamil Horodecki, Dariusz Wyczółkowski, Mateusz Graj, and Ewa Brzoska. “I used to say, ‘David Lynch will come and visit us one day,’ and people thought I was crazy,” recalled Żydowicz, who continues to direct the festival. “When David and I first met, I was at a crossroads and the plans for Camerimage Festival weren’t going well, but the meeting with David changed it all.

  “He’s like one of those Renaissance giants capable of creating enormous frescoes,” Żydowicz added, “and he loved Łódź, which is a city of dark secrets, devastated factories, fog, shadows, broken streetlamps, and eerie noises. It has a mood of mystery evocative of a violent dream where things have an odd, alluring logic.”4

  When Lynch attended the festival that November, he met Marek Zebrowski, a Polish composer based in L.A. who’s worked with the festival in various capacities since 2000. “David fell in love with Łódź and started getting all kinds of ideas,” Zebrowski said. “The winter atmosphere, abandoned factories, opulent residences from the late nineteenth century—all these things came together to create the beautifully mysterious film INLAND EMPIRE, which he made in the early years of his relationship with the country. A few years after he began attending the festival, the project with Frank Gehry began germinating, too.”5

  The project with Gehry that began germinating was nothing less than a master plan for rebuilding the Łódź city center, which included facilities for the festival, a renovated railway station, stores, hotels, and a museum. Beginning in 2005, Lynch worked closely with Gehry and the Camerimage team, and funding was secured from the European Union, the city, and private sponsors. “Frank Gehry’s grandparents were all born in Łódź, so this was a personal project for him,” said Zebrowski. At the conclusion of the 2000 festival, several members of the gang accompanied Lynch to Prague and shot a documentary of him working with Angelo Badalamenti on the score for Mulholland Drive.

  On returning from Prague in January, Lynch met a new assistant, Jay Aaseng, who would work closely with him for the next eight years. “Erik Crary, a friend who’d started working for David four months earlier, called and said, ‘We might have a position here,’ ” Aaseng recalled. “I was a film student in Madison and had just turned twenty-one, and right before Christmas Mary Sweeney and Riley were in Madison and we met at a Starbucks. I followed up by phone and Mary said, ‘Let’s give it a shot and try it out for six months. How soon can you get here?’ I said, ‘I’ll get in my car tomorrow.’ I think I got the job because Riley liked me.

  “In those days David would come into the gray house in the morning and have some kind of shake for breakfast, and he’d sit down and go over things with us,” Aaseng continued. “The first day I was there he walked in, and in that very direct way he has, he walked up and said, ‘Hey, Jay! Good to meet you, buster! Let’s get to work!’ ”6

  That spring Lynch put the finishing touches on a two-hour-and-twenty-seven-minute cut of Mulholland Drive, which wound up being a co-production of Les Films Alain Sarde, StudioCanal, and Picture Factory. Krantz has a producing credit on the film but says, “I was minimally involved. David and I didn’t stop speaking and I went to the set, but it was fractious between us.”

  In the end, Lynch’s conflict with Krantz proved irrelevant and Mulholland Drive turned out to be worth the wait. “We assumed it would never see the light of day, then David called a year later and said ‘It’s gonna be a movie,’ and we did a few more days of shooting,” said Theroux. “A few months later he invited me and Naomi to a screening of the film and we were just blown away by how wonderful it was. It was like hearing Sgt. Pepper’s for the first time. There’s so much to digest, and it raised a lot of questions, and I immediately wanted to see it again.

  “I knew the script but I didn’t really know what the movie was when we were shooting it, and the finished product is so unlike our experience of shooting it—and that speaks to David’s genius as a filmmaker. His use of sound and music, the juxtaposing story lines—he did a masterful job of conjuring a mood we couldn’t have anticipated while we were shooting. I was surprised by how dark and moving and haunting it is. Sometimes you can’t even identify the emotion you’re feeling, whether it’s discomfort or joy or sadness, while you’re watching Mulholland Drive—David is very good at creating characters that carry multiple emotions at the same time. One of my favorite scenes in the film is Patrick Fischler’s monologue in Winkie’s Coffee Shop about a nightmare he’s had. He recounts his dream to someone, then the scene moves outside and goes behind the coffee shop, and even though it’s in the middle of a sunny day in Los Angeles, it’s absolutely terrifying.”

  Mulholland Drive premiered in May of 2001 at Cannes, where it won the Prix de la mise en scène (best director award), which Lynch shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There. “When we were in Cannes at the photo call the photographers started chanting my name, and as I walked onstage I passed David and he said, ‘Hotshot,’ ” recalled Harring. “The way he said it meant so much to me.”

  The trip to Cannes proved to be a huge turning point for Watts, too. “For years I hadn’t been able to get anyone to call me back or look me in the eye when I was auditioning, and there I was walking the red carpet at Cannes,” Watts remembered. “The film got a five-minute standing ovation, and Todd McCarthy wrote an incredible review in The Hollywood Reporter that singled me out and that was it—my life changed overnight. I suddenly had every agent calling and sending me flowers and I never had to audition again, and it was all because of David. He literally changed my life. I’ve met a lot of people and worked with some brilliant directors, but there’s no one else like him. David is just one of a kind. He loves actors, and you trust him and want to give anything and everything to him, and you want to please him. He radiates good energy and I always feel well taken care of when I’m with him.”

  In the fall of that year Lynch took Mulholland Drive to the Toronto Film Festival, and the Twin Towers fell in Manhattan while he was in Canada. Lynch and Sweeney were temporarily stranded there, and Aaseng speculates, “That event made him feel like it was important for him to share TM with the world. I think he thought that if everyone was meditating, things like that wouldn’t happen, and at that point he offered to pay for everyone in the office to have TM training.”

  The seeds had been planted for the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, which would launch in 2005. In the meantime, things were finally wrapping up for Mulholland Drive. Universal Pictures released it in the United States on October 12th, 2001, and it netted Lynch a best director Oscar nomination. The film’s stature has grown exponentially since then, too. In a poll conducted by BBC Culture in 2016, Mulholland Drive was declared the greatest film of the twenty-first century.

  LOTS OF PEOPLE can start companies and make money, but that’s never worked out for me. Picture Factory was an idea Mary and Neal Edelstein came to me with, and I liked the name Picture Factory so we set this thing up, but almost instantly I had zero interest in it. It would just take time, and it wasn’t fun at all, and I don’t think I ever
even read anything for it. I never knew American Beauty was offered to me, I’ve never heard of Motherless Brooklyn, and I definitely don’t remember seeing the script for The Ring. Neal ended up doing that with Naomi Watts, so that was good for him.

  Everybody’s got their own version of what happened with Mulholland Drive, but I don’t remember a dinner at Orso or that dance between movies and the TV business Tony talks about. I remember Tony wanted me to do something, and the idea of something called Mulholland Drive as some kind of offshoot of Twin Peaks is something I might’ve talked about for ten minutes with Mark Frost. But it was never solidified, and all I remember about it was that it would be called Mulholland Drive and would involve a young girl coming to Hollywood. Tony always wanted me to write with somebody else—I don’t know why—but I wrote Mulholland Drive on my own and I let the people at ABC read the first couple of pages when we pitched it. Doing a pitch is a kind of performance, and I don’t enjoy doing them.

  Mulholland Drive is a magical street, and many people feel that when they drive on it at night. It twists and turns and Hollywood is on one side and the Valley is on the other and you kind of get lost on it. It’s an old road, too, and there’s a mood to it, and you can feel that many people from the golden age of Hollywood drove on that road. It’s really got a history, and if you’re in Los Angeles long enough you start hearing stories about things that have happened on it that get your mind going.

  It’s not necessarily true that I don’t know what the film is until I get in there and shoot it. If that were true, then you wouldn’t be able to trust a person like me. You have a script and a definite idea of what you want, but sometimes when you get there you see things and possibilities and things can grow. Or because it’s not exactly what was in your head, you adapt and something even better appears. There’s the essence of the scene, you’ve got to get that, but different things can trigger ideas, and that’s why shooting on location is great. If you build a set based on your mind, then that’s what it will be, but when you go on location all kinds of stuff can happen.

  It’s pretty much true that I prefer working with relatively unknown actors, but the fact that they’re unknown isn’t the thing—it’s that they’re the right person for the part. That’s what you go for. I trust Johanna to tell me if someone can or can’t act, but sometimes it’s not a problem if they can’t, because you work with them and there’s something about them that’s right.

  When I cast something I like to start by looking at pictures, so I’m looking at pictures and I see this girl and I say, ‘Whoa, she is beautiful and I want to meet her,’ and that was Naomi Watts. They got word to her and she flew out from New York and she came in and she looked nothing like her picture. Nothing like her picture! She didn’t look bad, but she didn’t look like her picture, and I wanted the girl in the picture. I thought, This is crazy! I’m imagining a person who doesn’t exist! She’d come to meet me directly from the plane, so I asked her if she could come back again made up and she came back. Gaye Pope’s son is named Scott Coffey, and Scott worked with Naomi on something, and he’s in the kitchen when Naomi comes back. Scott and Naomi were talking and laughing about something, and I saw a side of Naomi because Scott was there, and I said, “Okay, she’s perfect; she can do it,” and that was it. She’s perfect and the rest is history.

  I remember Justin Theroux coming out and we had a good talk and he’s just a great actor. Chad Everett was perfect for the part he played, and Ann Miller was perfect, too. I loved Ann Miller! Oh my golly, she was so much fun to work with. She was Coco, and that character fit her like a glove. Billy Ray Cyrus came in to talk about another part, but he was Gene the pool guy—he couldn’t have been better. It happens a lot that people come in for one thing and I’ll see they’re perfect for something else. Cori Glazer doesn’t show off her beauty, but she’s got a beautiful face. You have to isolate it, though, and I remember staring at her for a long time, and then I knew she was the Blue Lady, and she got the last word in the film.

  The Cowboy kind of wandered into the film. I’m sitting in my chair and Gaye is over at the keyboard, and Gaye had this special quality. Gaye was fantastic. She wasn’t particularly good as a secretary and was a little bit of a ding-a-ling, but she had good energy and that’s way more important. When push came to shove, she was able to give orders and say no, so she had the stuff, but she always treated everybody well. Her sweetness made this beautiful cocoon where I could think of anything and not be afraid to say it out loud. She never judged anybody, and when I was with her I felt like I could say anything. A person like that is perfect for writing, and I could try things out and it was fine with her. The atmosphere of freedom she created was real conducive to catching ideas, so I’m sitting with Gaye and in walks the Cowboy and I start talking, and as I’m talking I’m picturing Monty.

  I knew Monty could act because of something that happened on The Cowboy and the Frenchman. Monty was with Propaganda and they produced that thing, and we were working on a scene with this character named Howdy, a bulldogger who’s trying to take down this bull. Harry Dean is yelling at him to get some beer nuts, and Howdy can hear him but Harry Dean doesn’t think he can hear him, so he keeps yelling. Howdy gets pissed off and his anger helps him bring the bull down; then he jumps the fence and takes off because he’s fed up with Harry Dean. There’s so much noise in the scene that you can’t understand what Howdy’s saying, so I said, “We’re gonna have to loop this thing; who can we get to loop Howdy?” I hear Monty say, “I’ll do it, David,” and I thought, Oh, this is gonna be embarrassing, but I said, “Okay, Monty, you can try,” and he nailed it perfect on the first take. I thought, I’m gonna remember that. Monty can’t remember lines, though, so it was a struggle to get that scene out of him. Monty’s super smart, but I don’t think he did well in school and he just couldn’t remember some things. We stayed until we got it, though, and it worked out. Monty’s delivery was always perfect, but Justin had to have Monty’s lines pasted to his chest.

  I get these happy accidents. Brian Loucks calls during Mulholland Drive and tells me, “David, I have someone I’d like you to meet, named Rebekah Del Rio,” so Rebekah was going to come up to the studio, maybe have a coffee and talk, and sing something to me. So she comes up to the studio, and before five minutes go by, before any coffee, she went into the vocal booth and sang the exact thing that’s in the film. It wasn’t changed at all. That’s it. That’s the recording. There was no character like Rebekah in the Mulholland Drive script before she came to the studio that day, and she was the one who picked that song to sing for me. So I’m thinking about this scene I’d written for Club Silencio, “No Hay Banda,” which in Spanish means there is no band, and it fed into Rebekah because she sang that song without a band. So she’s brought out onstage and she’s singing beautifully, then she falls over and the singing continues.

  We had a great crew on Mulholland Drive and I got to work with some of my favorite people. I love working with Pete Deming. He loves curveballs and taking advantage of what comes up and he’s not afraid to try any goofball thing, so we developed some strange techniques together. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t, but it’s a great collaboration, and everything goes in the toolbox and has a purpose. There’s definitely a lightning machine in the toolbox, and the best one we ever had was one Sabrina [Sutherland] found in Riverside for Lost Highway. These two machines she found were as big as railroad cars, and they arrived on two flatbed tractor-trailers. When you hit that lightning, that thing put out power like you cannot believe—it lit everything up for a mile around, like real lightning.

  It was incredible when we did the shot of the car accident at the start of Mulholland Drive. You’ve got this taut cable attached to a six-thousand-pound weight a hundred feet in the air on one end, and the car is attached on the other end, and the weight is going to get dropped. If that cable snapped before it was supposed to, it would’ve been like a whip, and
you don’t know where it’s going to go, but if it hits you it’s like a hot knife through butter. It was really dangerous. There were three cameras at least on that shot, and Pete and I were there, but everybody else had to go away. Gary’s up with the crane and there’s a pin in the ground holding the six thousand pounds and that cable is just dying to break, and there’s this special charge that works like a cable cutter. When they cut the cable and the weight is in free fall it launches the car with the joy-riding kids in it so that it hits that limo so hard—man! It was fantastic! Gary did a great job on that and it was so much fun.

  Jack Fisk is my best friend and we got to work together on Mulholland Drive. Jack can get stuff done. It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d given him ten bucks, he would’ve built that set, and that set is just beautiful. There’s a scene where Betty says to Rita, “Look in your purse; your name must be on something in there,” so Rita opens her purse and there’s all this money in there, and there’s a unique blue key to something unknown. There had to be something it was to, and I don’t know why it ended up being to a blue box instead of a door or a car.

  John Churchill was second AD on Mulholland Drive, and he was a great guy who came into his own as an AD. He was a PA on Lost Highway and The Straight Story, but he was born to be an AD and took to it like a duck to water. There are many skills needed to do that job. The person has to get along with the director and the crew and keep things moving forward. They also take care of background, like getting things quiet, getting the cameras and the sound rolling, and get the next fuckin’ shot. Keep it moving. They’re a combination of enforcer, diplomat, and scheduler. What do we shoot first, what do we shoot second, that sort of thing. That leaves directors free to think and not have a lot of stuff clouding their heads—the director has to think about what the next scene needs to deliver and nothing else. In some ways I hate this thing of pushing forward and making a fuckin’ day, but you have to do it, and the AD helps you get what you want. It’s a tough job and Churchy was good at it and he was my friend and he had a great sense of humor. He’d make me tell stories. We’d see someone on the street and he’d say, “Okay, what’s their story,” and I’d tell him about that person. And he remembered everything. He was a fantastic guy.