An interview with the director and star of Inland Empire.
With Stanley Kubrick gone, David Lynch is filmmaking’s reigning undisputed King of the Weird. This is not to be confused with “quirky.” Quirky is a term reserved for the work of directors like Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) or Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre) – different, perhaps, but relatively safe and uncontroversial.
Not David Lynch. No director working today serves up more head-scratching “What the heck was that?” moments than Lynch, and he’s done it to great acclaim, garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Director for his 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Dr. His latest film, Inland Empire, is a three-hour mélange of unsettling images, uncomfortable moments and folks dressed in rabbit suits – classic Lynch.
Inland Empire marks the first time the enigmatic director has worked with digital video. “I was shooting DV with a small, lightweight camera,” says Lynch. “It was so beautiful to me, to be able to hold a camera and float around and let it move according to what I was feeling or seeing.”
Lynch welcomed the freedom that video provided. “Before, you were behind a massive camera,” he explains. “In front of you is an operator and a focus puller, and you’ve got kind of a barrier. If you wanted to move, if you felt a thing, it was impossible.”
“(Video) gives you this ability to really be in there and stay in there, because it’s 40-minute takes,” Lynch adds. “It’s very beautiful.”
Inland Empire star Laura Dern found the process refreshing. “You’re liberated as an actor in the same way David described,” says Dern. “You never miss anything, because you’re right there. You never miss an opportunity of being in the moment, because suddenly now the camera is offering that. You can catch anything and (Lynch) can hear what an actor is doing off-camera and flip around and capture that.”
Dern adds: “Because of the luxury of a 40-minute take – if you need it – you can shoot an entire scene without ever stopping and he can get all the coverage he wants. We’re staying within the moment of acting out this scene and not cutting or re-setting.”
“As an actor, it’s an incredible feeling to stay true to the mood, the feeling that’s going at that given time.”
Working without a set script or a traditional shooting schedule, Lynch could shoot scenes whenever he felt inspired. “Ideas come along,” says Lynch. “You catch an idea. Sometimes you catch an idea that you fall in love with and you see the way cinema could do that. It’s a beautiful day when you do that. The idea tells you everything. We’ve got out own kind of mechanism. We fall in love with certain things.”
Dern wasn’t fazed by Lynch’s unstructured approach: “Given that we shot in such a way that David would write a scene and we would film that, David would write another scene and we would film that, and so on, it forced me – very luxuriously – into the moment.”
“I didn’t necessarily know what had come before or what was coming after,” adds Dern. “That was extremely freeing. In a way, I think it allows for more imagination as an actor.”
Lynch’s vision evolved with each scene as Inland Empire's story gradually took shape. “After a while, the scene-by-scene revealed more,” explains Lynch. “And then I wrote a lot of stuff and we went and shot more traditionally. We could shoot for several weeks and have more stuff to shoot.”
“And those could have ended up just being that – a scene, separate, by itself for the internet or whatever,” adds Lynch. “But I didn’t know what it was going to be, so I’d shoot a scene and then I’d get an idea for another scene and shoot that scene. And lo and behold, after a bunch of them, a thing came out.”
Inland Empire is now playing in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Pasadena.