by David Lynch
“He went off to Europe and we continued talking, and the idea for the Foundation came up,” Roth continued. “David, Dr. John Hagelin [a former physicist who’s now president of the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa], and I worked on the plans together, and then I asked David if we could use his name. I don’t think he was paying much attention, and he said, ‘Yeah, fine,’ thinking not much was going to come from it. Then we sent out a press release and a week later it was on the front page of a thousand newspapers around the world that David was starting a foundation.”6
“I was on the set of INLAND EMPIRE the day the Foundation became official, and David was really excited about it,” Skarbek recalled. “In those early years Bobby Roth was around a lot, and a lot of time was devoted to promoting TM. David doesn’t like traveling and he was doing a lot of public appearances, which he doesn’t enjoy, but when it comes to anything involving TM or Maharishi the normal rules go out the window. He’s game.”
When Sweeney and Riley Lynch returned from Madison that fall, Lynch moved out of the house they shared and into his studio, and he and Sweeney began discussing a separation. That was put on hold, however, until he completed a nationwide tour on the benefits of TM titled “Consciousness, Creativity, and the Brain.”
“We had no idea how big the Foundation was going to be or what would happen, and I knew David hated to travel, but that fall I said, ‘Let’s do a tour of thirteen college campuses and talk about TM,’ and that’s what we did,” said Roth. “He got nervous before going onstage—he hates public speaking—so he started going out there and saying, ‘Does anybody have any questions,’ and things would flow from there. David doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do, and when he did all that traveling for the Foundation I think he felt it was the right thing to do at the time. I would never ask him to do it now, but there was a moment in time when it was the right thing to do.”
Lynch and Sweeney were still sorting things out when he returned from the speaking tour, and he picked up where he left off with INLAND EMPIRE. “Once we got through the running-and-gunning phase, the MVP on INLAND EMPIRE became Sabrina Sutherland,” said Aaseng. “She’s an incredibly fastidious person and knows everything backward and forward in terms of producing, and once everyone else was gone, Sabrina was the last one standing in terms of tying up loose ends.”
“INLAND EMPIRE was a turning point for David, and I think it rejuvenated him,” said Sutherland. “He was able to get his hands dirty and really finesse everything from effects to props and sets, and it was freeing for him to shoot with a small camera. Not having a huge crew allowed him to work with the actors on a very personal level.”
Another candidate for MVP on INLAND EMPIRE was editor Noriko Miyakawa, who came to L.A. from Japan in 1991 to study film at California State University at Northridge. She worked her way up through post-production facilities and assistant-editing gigs, then was hired by Mary Sweeney in 2005 to help edit a commercial for Lynch. “The first time I met him, he just walked up and said, ‘Hey, I’m David,’ and I really liked that,” Miyakawa recalled. “Many directors barely see the people who work for them, but David’s very down to earth.”7
After working with Lynch on the commercial, Miyakawa moved on to other jobs, then a year later she got the call asking if she was interested in helping with INLAND EMPIRE. “We didn’t have a script when we were editing, but David had a map—literally, he drew a map,” Miyakawa recalled. “The most unusual thing about the way David edits is that he’s not afraid to change things. Yes, there was some kind of a script and we had dailies, but footage is a living thing to explore for him. If he sees a possibility for change in a scene he’ll just go for it, even though it might require restructuring the whole story.
“INLAND EMPIRE is an expression of David’s belief in different worlds and dimensions,” Miyakawa continued. “Everything’s in it and everything is connected and it’s my favorite of his films. I should add that I hated it by the time we finished editing it, because it’s a three-hour movie I watched more than fifty times and it became like torture. But when I see it now, I see how personal and intimate it is, and I enjoy the freedom it gives the viewer as far as how they interpret it. The parts of the film you don’t understand point to places in yourself that need examining.”
Lynch was still shooting INLAND EMPIRE when Miyakawa came on board, and early in 2006 he went to Poland, accompanied by Stofle, to shoot a few final scenes for the film. “I think it was pretty obvious on the set that we were in love,” Stofle recalled, “and it was so cool to be able to see him work. It was magical.”
The shoot in Poland came together with remarkable ease, largely thanks to Lynch’s friends in the Camerimage Gang. “David called and said he wanted to shoot scenes for INLAND EMPIRE in Łódź,” Żydowicz recalled. “I asked him what he needed and he said he wanted a green, poorly furnished room, an actor who looked like he’d just come out of a forest, an actress of delicate, ethereal beauty, and four or five older actors. I called a Polish actor named Leon Niemczyk, who’s known for his work in Polanski’s Knife in the Water, and contacted two great actors—Karolina Gruszka and Krzysztof Majchrzak—who thought I was joking when I invited them to collaborate with David Lynch. We rented an apartment where we were allowed to paint the walls green, the owners let us use their furniture, and we had everything prepared by the following evening. I’ll never forget David’s face when we took him to the set. Everything was ready, I introduced him to the actors while the set was being decorated, and we started shooting the next day.
“David then wanted to shoot a scene in a historical mansion that involved the effect of lightning striking,” continued Żydowicz, who appears in the film as a character named Gordy. “There was no such equipment in Poland then, so we came up with the idea of using a welding machine. In order to use it in the museum where we were shooting, we devised a construction with fireproof blankets and managed to convince the museum director it was safe. David also wanted to shoot at a circus with dancing horses. There were only two circuses in all of Poland and I called one of them and, incredibly, the manager told me he was just setting up the tent in Łódź. A few members of Camerimage performed in that scene as a team of circus artists.”
On returning to the United States he finalized his break with Sweeney. In May he married then immediately filed for divorce from her, a move that allowed them to make a financial split that was clean and clear. “He did that because he wanted to do right by her—at least that was my take on it,” Aaseng speculated. “I know he was very generous and it certainly must’ve been some kind of financial hit to take.” Lynch and Stofle continued to date for the remainder of the year.
INLAND EMPIRE screened for the first time on September 6th, 2006, at the Venice Film Festival, where Lynch received the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement award for his contribution to the art of cinema. The film premiered in the United States at the New York Film Festival on October 8th and was released in the States on December 9th. Initially booked in only two theaters in the country, it then expanded to one hundred and twenty venues for its widest release. Although The New Yorker said it “quickly devolves into self-parody,” The New York Times described INLAND EMPIRE as “fitfully brilliant,” and Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers said, “My advice, in the face of such hallucinatory brilliance, is that you hang on.”
The film’s total gross was just $4,037,577, a number that meant nothing to Lynch. “David is his own unique breed,” Stofle observed. “He’s not a Hollywood person and he’s not looking at box-office numbers. He thinks all of that is disgusting and doesn’t care about it. He likes making things, and once something is completed he’s sad that it’s over, but he never wants to deal with the things that come after the project is finished.”
Lynch isn’t keen on the business end of things but he’s willing when it involves an element of fun, and the release of INLAND EMPIRE coincided with the
launch of David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee. Nobody could question Lynch’s belief in this particular product—he’s lived for decades with a steady IV drip of coffee providing him with the fuel that powers him through his very busy life, and the company has operated successfully for more than a decade.
* * *
—
On October 22nd, 2006, Zebrowski and Lynch made their performing debut before an audience of one hundred in a candlelit room at the Polish Consulate, which is housed in the De Lamar Mansion in New York City. “Initially David didn’t want to perform, but he enjoyed it,” Zebrowski recalled. “With our concerts he’s relaxed and he has fun.” Since then they’ve performed approximately a dozen times at venues in Milan, Paris, and the United States.
Two weeks after returning from his gig with Zebrowski, Lynch decided to show the world how proud he was of Laura Dern’s performance in INLAND EMPIRE. On November 7th he parked himself on the lawn of a church at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea with a live cow, a FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION banner pitching Dern for an Oscar nomination, and another banner that read, WITHOUT CHEESE THERE WOULDN’T BE AN INLAND EMPIRE. “I’m here to promote Laura Dern,” Lynch explained. “Academy members love show business, and this is the show-business approach.” As for the cheese banner, Lynch explained, “I ate a lot of cheese during the making of INLAND EMPIRE.”
Reflecting on the film, Dern has no regrets, despite its commercial failure. “We worked on it for three years and it was the greatest experience I’ve had as an actor. David’s the bravest artist I’ve ever known and his goals are different from other artists. He started that project saying to me, ‘I want the crudest camera and I wanna do something that any seventeen-year-old sitting in Phoenix with their grandparents can do with a camcorder. Why can’t I just grab a camera and see what that looks like? What is digital? How can we take it further? How are we blending these new and old technologies?’ That’s filmmaking. If you’re in it for the result then you can’t experiment, but if you’re there to redefine art you can do anything. David’s gift to all actors is that he propels them into a void where there are no rules.
“I remember being in Paris with David and him saying, ‘Let’s write a scene,’ so we sat with cappuccinos in the morning and he wrote a scene and said, ‘Okay, learn this. Now, what should you wear?’ So we put on our coats and went down the Champs-Élysées to Monoprix, and we picked out clothing and a lip color, then we went back to the hotel, I got ready, and we shot this scene where I’m on the phone wearing sunglasses doing a tormented monologue. There was nothing like it, just the two of us alone, using the sound on David’s camcorder.
“The people who responded to that film most enthusiastically were other actors and directors,” Dern added. “When I worked with Jonathan Demme on Rachel Getting Married, he loved hearing stories about the making of INLAND EMPIRE, and even Spielberg told me he was haunted by it. I remember hearing Philip Seymour Hoffman talking about why it scared him, and what made him uncomfortable, and his effort to understand it—listening to him talk about INLAND EMPIRE was magnificent.”
Lynch spent Christmas of that year with Stofle’s family in Northern California and continued to maintain a high profile on multiple fronts. On December 28th, 2006, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin published Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, a collection of Lynch’s observations and anecdotes compiled during his speaking tour of the previous year. Explaining the genesis of the book, Roth said, “David’s answers to questions about life, not just about TM, were so real and true, and everywhere we went, from Estonia to Argentina, the questions were basically the same. So I thought, Why not record his talks then edit them down into a book so more people have access to them.” Reviews were courteously respectful, sales of the book were unexpectedly brisk, and Lynch was impressively obliging about promoting it. All proceeds went to the Foundation.
Lynch was keeping all these balls in the air—a book, a website, a film, a foundation, a new relationship, and several music projects—while undergoing a major upheaval on the home front. Over the years Sweeney had become an integral part of Lynch’s film projects, and the end of their long-term partnership was no small thing. Through it all, Lynch seemingly never missed a step. “David has the ability to put things in closets in the mind and deal or not deal with them on his own terms,” Hurley observed. “He’s got a mastery of his own mind and the world’s best poker face.”
ERIC AND NEAL and Churchy went to school together in Arizona, and they brought me into the world of computers. One night Eric and Neal set up a computer in the crow’s nest [a small structure at the highest point on Lynch’s property] and they sat me down and said, “We’re going to teach you about Photoshop.” They gave me the mouse and said, “Here are all your tools over here.” I don’t know how I got on to this Clone Stamp tool, but I said, “What does this do?” They said, “Click on it and see,” so I clicked, then I made a mark, and I’m looking, and then I make a bigger mark, and what was happening on the screen was a miracle to me!
I still don’t know how to do more than one tiny fraction of what Photoshop probably can do, but whoever dreamed it up and keeps making it better should be awarded a special place in heaven. I worship these people. They invented something that’s mind-blowing. The first thing I did in Photoshop was my distorted nudes series, and it was inspired by 1,000 Nudes, a book of a thousand vintage nude photographs that were mostly anonymous and had been collected by this German guy named Uwe Scheid. He passed away in 2000, bless his heart, but his son honored the agreement I had with his father and gave me free rein to work with these nudes, and I just loved it.
My website got up and running and it took forever to get it the way I wanted. A website can be really deep and go anywhere, but all this stuff has to be built—and then in a single afternoon a person can sit down and see everything. And then what? They won’t have to come back to this thing! It’s over! You have to keep updating the site and making new stuff and it becomes all-consuming. Everything takes time to make, so how do you feed this thing? Once I realized that you can’t charge people for a site you don’t update all the time, I lost interest in the Internet. I saw that it would be a full-time job. I liked doing the weather report every day, though, and I liked going in the chat room. I learned how to type with one finger then, too—I finally learned where the letters are! I couldn’t believe it! My spelling got better because of the website, too.
I was making a lot of stuff for a while there, and there were all kinds of things to get lost in. I made this thing called Head with Hammer, and there’s a mechanical device that brings this hammer back and back and back, then it slams into a rubber head. People understand that life is like that sometimes, and the hammer keeps hammering over and over again. I don’t know where Out Yonder came from, but it appeared in my head and I started writing. The idea is that this family is heavy into quantum physics and they talk in abstract ways about things. They’re interested in medicine and science, and they’re quantum physicists. The guys in Dream of the Bovine aren’t exactly quantum physicists, but they’re a little bit in that family, too. They watch carefully and analyze things.
One day the rabbits in Rabbits just arrived, and I learned Flash animation doing DumbLand. I didn’t know anything about it when I started, so the first ones are real crude, but they got better. The way that DumbLand came is, one day this man came in a big limo and he was from Shockwave. He told me, “I’m hiring you, Tim Burton, and somebody else to do animated series for Shockwave, and in return I’ll give you shares in the company that should be worth seven million dollars when we go public or whatever.” I said okay and started working. He came up a few times and he was kind of pumped and things are going good. Stop right there. At that very moment there were offices around the world full of guys and gals who’d just been given fifty million dollars to develop something they sold by talking. They’re laughing and drinking cappuccinos, an
d they were giddy with this money so they all had new sneakers and T-shirts, and Apple computers, and they’re having catered lunches and sitting on top of the world. Then the dot.com bubble burst and all those new-sneaker people, including the Shockwave guy, went up in smoke and those shares were absolutely worthless. I have the worst money luck.
For another experiment, we built a small room up on the hill. It was three walls and it didn’t have a roof, but when we filmed it the camera saw a room. It was carpeted and furnished and there was a chair in the corner with a chunk of beef on it, because I wanted coyotes to come in to the room. I had a whole thing I was going to do there, but I discovered that coyotes are super skittish and they’re smart and they wouldn’t just go in and eat the meat. They know that these walls are not nature and they go carefully, and it took them a long time to go and grab the meat. They got used to Alfredo’s scent and eventually they started to tentatively come in and we got some film of one of them.
