by David Lynch
Lynch also used his website as a platform for various musical collaborations he was involved with. At the end of 2001 he released BlueBOB, an album of what Lynch has described as “industrial blues” made in collaboration with John Neff for Lynch’s label, Absurda. Recorded from 1998 to 2000 and completed in March of that year, it was originally released as a CD available only through Lynch’s website. Lynch and Neff did one live performance to promote the record, at the Olympia in Paris on November 11th, 2002, which Lynch remembers as “a torment.”
A French journalist visited Los Angeles to write an article about BlueBOB in 2002, and Crary recalled Lynch saying, “ ‘If we’re gonna do this, let’s make it fun.’ He had Alfredo build a cave in the backyard, and there was a little mini-sculpture hanging over the entrance to the cave, and we put a smoke machine and a strobe light in there, and a sexy girl was wandering around, and David came out of the cave with his shirt off, smeared with mud, and did the interview.” This is probably the only opportunity Lynch’s fans will ever have to see him without his shirt on.
In May of 2002 Lynch was president of the jury at Cannes, where Roman Polanski’s The Pianist took the Palme d’Or, then, back in Los Angeles, Chrysta Bell reappeared. “After my meeting with David in 1998, we didn’t stay in touch, but Brian Loucks maintained a relationship with me. In 2002 Brian was at a party and ran into David, who never goes to parties, and he said, ‘Hey, what’s going on with Chrysta Bell?’ David and I went back into the studio and finished that first song we’d done together, then whenever David had pockets of time I’d jump in there.
“I’d made demos of the songs I’d written for my first album,” she continued, “and when I played them for David he said, ‘I’m proud of you, Chrysta Bell, but I think you should wait for our record to come out as your debut.’ I said, ‘Okay, David, but we need to step on the gas,’ and he told me how long it took to make Eraserhead and that it was worth it to take time with things. But he started making more time for us to work together.”
Early in 2003 Lynch’s life changed course when he met Emily Stofle, whom he subsequently married. Born in 1978 in Hayward, California, Stofle was raised in Fremont and moved to Los Angeles in 2000 with her older sister to pursue a career in acting. They found an apartment in Beachwood Canyon, and Stofle studied with acting coach Diana Castle while working a string of odd jobs—assistant to the manager of a nightclub, waitressing gigs. She and her sister befriended a neighbor, Eli Roth, who’d researched a project on Nikola Tesla for Lynch, and was director of the 2002 horror film Cabin Fever, which Lynch executive-produced. “One night I visited Eli at his apartment,” Stofle recalled, “and I noticed a photograph of one of the props from Fire Walk with Me on his wall. I asked him where he got it and told him I was a huge fan of David’s. He said he’d worked with David and that David was producing content for his website and maybe there was something he’d like to do with me.
“Eli talked to David, then called me and said, ‘David has cameras on some birdfeeders at his house, and people can log in to his site and watch the birdfeeders. He has this idea that he wants a golden ball to drop and then you come out in a coat, which you take off. You’ll be nude and you’ll spin around, then you’ll stand there for five minutes, then go off the screen,’ ” she continued. “I thought, Oh, I don’t know. The Internet? Nude? I don’t know if those are the circumstances I want the first time I meet this filmmaker I admire. A few days later Eli called again and said David was looking for models to pose for photographs and that he’d pay the models and give them three signed prints, so my sister and I went up and met him on February 20th. We sat around a table in his conference room and talked, and he later told me that when I was leaving I turned around and waved goodbye to him and that’s when he fell in love with me.
“He photographed me and I was nervous and that was it,” Stofle added. “He was very professional and I had no idea he was interested in me. I didn’t have a crush on him, either—I was just fascinated by him and excited to work with him. He called a month or two later and wanted to photograph me for another project, then in June I moved in with my mom in Fremont and began attending San Francisco State.”2
Shortly after meeting Stofle, Lynch ran into Laura Dern on the street outside his house. She’d just moved into the neighborhood and both agreed it was time for them to work together again, so he wrote a scene for her. He didn’t have a feature in mind, and at that point the scene he came up with was just another of his film experiments. “We shot it in the painting studio,” said Aaseng, “and Laura memorized this incredibly long scene. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life—she was just knocking this monologue out of the park and going for long stretches. The only time we’d break would be to change film in the camera. She was just going.”
Sitting opposite Dern in that very long scene was Erik Crary. “I’m not an actor and I have no idea why David picked me to be in that scene,” Crary said. “He told me, ‘Get yourself a suit jacket,’ and I brought up all my old glasses and let him pick the pair he wanted me to wear. I think I have a paint scraper in my pocket. Laura is really intense in that scene and has to do a lot, so I asked her what I could do to help her and she said, ‘Just stay with it and look at me.’ ”
Dern remembers the night as being “very magical and a little trancelike. A warm wind blew through the painting studio and the night got super quiet and the coyotes calmed down and the night sky was above us and everything felt mysterious and unknown. I was a nursing mom at the time and I thought, Oh my God, how am I going to remember anything, but somehow I did. David set the tone with his reverence— his respect for the ritual of storytelling is always palpable. He wants it quiet and you know you’re just gonna keep going until it’s done.”3
It took only four hours to shoot the scene, and Aaseng said that “after we finished and Laura had gone home, David was having a smoke in the painting studio and he was really excited. His eyes were just lit up. He looked at us and said, ‘What if this is a movie?’ I think that was the moment when INLAND EMPIRE was born.”
Gaye Pope died that spring, on April 20th, which was a great loss for Lynch; the two of them had a deep and unique friendship. He spent the month of June doing intensive study in the Netherlands with Maharishi, and on returning to L.A. he began gearing up for INLAND EMPIRE and called Jeremy Alter. “David said, ‘I’m doing this thing, and I don’t know what it is but I want you to produce it,’ and we started doing these shoots,” Alter said. “David would write pages and Jay would type them and that was about the extent of the script. At the beginning the shooting was sporadic, but once Jeremy Irons came on board it became a more full-time thing.”
As Catherine Coulson was to Eraserhead, Aaseng and Crary were to INLAND EMPIRE: They did anything and everything. “I think he was thrilled to be working that way, because it was super bare bones,” said Aaseng of Lynch, who wrote, produced, edited, and shot the film with a Sony DSR-PD150. “Peter Deming helped on one or two scenes but David was basically the DP, and Erik and I were often running cameras. We were doing call sheets, finding props, paying people, I was an assistant editor for a while and a makeshift script supervisor—we all learned a lot and David was very patient with us.
“I was David’s writing assistant throughout INLAND EMPIRE, too, but in no way was I his collaborator,” Aaseng continued. “I just wrote down what he said. He’d say, ‘Let’s write,’ and he’d dictate and I sat at a computer and typed. Sometimes when we were on set, we’d finish shooting a scene and inspiration would strike and he’d say, ‘Jay, come over here,’ and I’d go over with a pad of paper and get it all down. David wanted to go renegade and didn’t want to be constrained by people telling him he couldn’t do this or that, and Jeremy Alter was an important part of that equation. Whatever David came up with, Jeremy would say, ‘Cool, we’ll do it,’ and he was able to get David into places because he knew lots of people.”
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��Part of my job was to make sure David could smoke at any location where we were shooting,” said Alter. “I had to find some unusual things, too, of course. One day he said, ‘Jeremy, get a piece of paper and a pen and write this down. I need six black dancers, including one that can sing, a blond Eurasian with a monkey on her shoulder, a lumberjack sawing wood, Nastassja Kinski, a tattooed person, [meditation instructor] Penny Bell, Dominic who’s an ex–French Foreign Legionnaire, Laura Harring in her Mulholland Drive outfit, and a beautiful one-legged girl.” Alter got it all.
“It was a crazy experience,” said Aaseng of the making of the film. “One night we were shooting a scene where Justin Theroux is lying dead in an alleyway, and we ordered a pizza. It arrived and David ate a slice, then he looked at the pizza and scraped all the topping off of it and smeared it on Justin’s chest so it looked like a wound.”
Laura Dern carries the film almost entirely and is onscreen for pretty much all of the second half. Like a little girl lost in a dangerous forest, Dern stumbles in and out of various realities, her identity periodically shifting along the way. Lynch began toying with the idea of doubles and doppelgängers in Twin Peaks, and with INLAND EMPIRE he just let it rip. Dern’s journey takes her far and wide, too, from a prostitute’s hotel room in Poland, to a barbecue in a trashy suburban L.A. backyard, to a movie set, a mansion, a therapist’s office, and a European circus. As the film unfolds she’s alternately terrified, mystified, and serene. There are extraordinary little set pieces within the film, too. When Dern dies of a stab wound on a dirty Hollywood Boulevard sidewalk, she’s in the company of three homeless people, played by the Asian actress Nae Yuuki, Terry Crews, and Helena Chase, who looks at Dern and tells her, “You dyin’ lady.” Chase lived in one of the houses used as a location in the film, and although she wasn’t an actress, something about her resonated with Lynch, so there she is onscreen.
Also on board for INLAND EMPIRE was Justin Theroux, who said, “I had no idea what we were doing on INLAND EMPIRE. That was really seat-of-the-pants, let’s-get-the-band-back-together filmmaking, and David was extremely visionary as far as embracing the technology that was newly available fifteen years ago.
“When I finally saw the film I was moved by it—INLAND EMPIRE is as close to a spiritual opus as you’re gonna get,” Theroux added. “It’s powerful and full of inexplicably unforgettable images—a character standing behind a tree holding a Christmas light, for instance. So strange, and yet you remember it.”
The budget for INLAND EMPIRE was nebulous. StudioCanal eventually kicked in four million dollars, but the film was well under way by the time the funds materialized. “I remember asking David what he wanted the film to cost,” Alter recalled, “and he said, ‘Jeremy, you’re gonna tell me something costs a hundred and forty dollars and I’m gonna give you a hundred and forty dollars.’ ”
On June 26th, 2004, Lynch’s parents were in a car accident and his mother was killed. “Death doesn’t disturb David the way it does most people, but I think he was changed by his mother’s death,” Sweeney reflected. “It was shocking the way she died, of course, but they also had a complex relationship. David’s a lot like his dad, who was dreamy and sweet, but his mom was the one who recognized his talent and cultivated it, and he told me they were very close when he was growing up. She was an incisive, analytical, smart woman, and they had the same dry sense of humor and joked with each other in a way nobody else in the family did.”
That fall Lynch embarked on a new musical partnership when he began working with his friend from Łódź, Marek Zebrowski. “David loves dissonant, far-out music and is a big fan of Polish avant-garde composers like Krzysztof Penderecki and Henryk Górecki,” said Zebrowski, “and when he discovered I was a pianist he invited me to work with him at his studio. Prior to my first visit in 2004 I asked, ‘What do you want me to do? Should I bring music paper? Are we going to compose something together?’ He said, ‘No, no, just come up.’ So I arrived at the studio and there were two keyboards set up and he said, ‘Okay, let’s do something.’ I said, ‘But what are we doing?’ He said, ‘Oh, anything, as long as it’s very contemporary and avant-garde sounding.’ I asked him to give me a thought or two before we started, and he said, ‘It’s dark. It’s a cobblestone street. A car goes very slowly down that street and another car follows it.’ And that’s David—absolutely of-the-moment creativity. So he started playing, then I joined in and we entered a completely different world. After we’d played for a while I felt like we were approaching an ending, so I looked at David, and he looked back with an expression on his face that said he was feeling exactly the same thing. We both nodded and it ended.”
The INLAND EMPIRE shoot was still under way in October when Stofle returned to L.A. and moved in with a friend in Monterey Park. “David started hiring me to work on things—I did the voice-over for a film he did called Boat—and when I went up to see it in December we were in his office and he kissed me,” recalled Stofle, whom Lynch subsequently cast as one of the seven Valley Girls who serve as a kind of Greek chorus in INLAND EMPIRE. “I knew it was complicated and that he lived with someone he had a child with, but I think I was in a bit of denial about what was happening. It just didn’t seem to be in the realm of possibility that I’d have a serious relationship with him. But over time I fell in love with him and then that was all I wanted.”
Lynch was spending a lot of time experimenting with music then, and in January of 2005 Dean Hurley took over the running of his recording studio. Born and raised in Waynesboro, Virginia, Hurley came to L.A. in February of 2003 to work in film as a sound supervisor. Trained as a visual artist, Hurley is entirely self-taught as far as his work as a sound engineer. “When I came up to interview for the job, David showed me the studio and said, ‘We do sound experiments up here, and I need somebody to help me with this equipment,’ ” Hurley said. “ ‘You’d know how to run all this stuff, right?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ ”
Hurley asked for two weeks to learn the room, then jumped into the fray. “When I first started working for David, I was confused when he’d say things like ‘Dean, you gotta put on “Mama, I Just Killed a Man,” by Queen, or “I Just Believe in Love” by John Lennon,’ and then I realized that the thing he remembers from a song—and considers its title—is the lyric that encapsulates the emotional pinnacle of the song,” said Hurley. “That’s kind of revealing in terms of how his brain works.
“One of the first things we worked on is a song called ‘Ghost of Love,’ which is on the INLAND EMPIRE soundtrack,” Hurley continued. “We started working on it the way we often start, which is with David talking about a particular song or artist and the feeling he wants to capture. For that song he talked about Janis Joplin’s ‘Ball and Chain,’ and when we listened to it he was just drilling me, saying, ‘What is it? What makes this song the thing that it is?’ I told him the chords are minor and it’s three-chord blues, and he said, ‘Yeah! Three-chord blues in a minor key! Give me those chords!’ I gave him a set of chords that he liked and he said, ‘Give me a drumbeat!’ Then he looped it over and over and sat there with a pad of paper and wrote lyrics.
“There are things David’s consistently drawn to in terms of sound and music,” Hurley continued. “He talks about the B-52 bombers he heard circling overhead when he was a child and wanting his guitar to sound like that. And he loves three songs from the Monterey Pop Festival: Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Wild Thing,’ Janis Joplin’s ‘Ball and Chain,’ and Otis Redding doing ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.’ When you listen to that Hendrix track, there’s an interlude that sounds a lot like the way David tries to play, all whammy bar, with this giant rumbling bomber distortion underneath.”4
INLAND EMPIRE was an all-hands-on-deck affair, and among those hammering nails were Aaseng, Alter, Crary, Hurley, Austin and Riley Lynch, Alfredo Ponce, and Stofle. Also there was Anna Skarbek, an artist who became part of the Lynch crew in 2005 after she move
d to L.A. from Maryland to work in film.
“I was a prop buyer, there was some set dressing and painting, and I helped buy building materials,” said Skarbek. “Everyone on the film was really young, and it felt like a summer project you do with a college professor—it was so much fun. David was often covered in paint, and if he wasn’t actually directing he was making something. We were working for a modest rate, but everyone really wanted to be there.”5
Sweeney and Riley Lynch spent the summer of 2005 on Lake Mendota in Wisconsin while Lynch remained in L.A. working on INLAND EMPIRE. In July of that summer he also launched the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. Legally established as a 501(c)(3) in Fairfield, Iowa, the Foundation now has offices in L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., and works in thirty-five countries providing scholarships for schoolchildren, veterans, and victims of domestic abuse. It’s a very big operation that’s come to occupy an increasingly prominent part of Lynch’s life.
Bob Roth played a key role in the launch of Lynch’s foundation. Born in 1950, Roth grew up in a liberal family in Marin County, California, and enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1968. A political activist who worked for Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Roth was profoundly disillusioned when Kennedy was killed, and that same year he discovered TM. “Our paths crossed for the first time in 2003, then the following year I was in Washington, D.C., teaching at American University, and I heard that David was on his way to Paris,” said Roth of his initial encounter with Lynch. “I called and asked him to stop in D.C. overnight and give a talk about meditation and he said, ‘Fine.’ The talk was on a Friday night and I didn’t get a confirmation from him until Thursday night, and the weather was horrible, but it was still standing room only and a total mob scene. When I saw the response David got from young people, how they liked and trusted him and recognized him as an honest person, I realized what an effective spokesperson he could be.
