Sunday, January 31

• Rethinking Dune: A New Script and Maybe 3-D

  Pierre Morel, the director of Taken and the upcoming From Paris with Love, was recently tapped to helm the remake of the sci-fi epic Dune, replacing Peter Berg. Surveying the the state of the project , he explained in an interview with IGN, he has decided to go for something completely different.

  We're starting from scratch. Peter had an approach which was not mine at all, and we're starting over again. I don't think we're going to keep any elements of the Peter Berg script. It was good, actually. It was interesting. It was just not our vision. I can't tell you right now [who's writing it with me], it's going to be official next week. The deals are not done!

  It's a daunting project, but he says he's taking the next few months after wrapping up From Paris with Love to really think it through. The key issue: How to move out of the shadow of David Lynch.

  It's tricky. Everybody refers to both the book and to David Lynch's film, which was in a way a monument to the '80s. It became a huge event. It didn't do well theatrically, I think, but in a way it kind of marked and printed an image on Dune. Everybody now who reads Dune reads it with David Lynch's images in mind. So we have to get away from that. It's not a remake of David Lynch's movie. We're doing a re-reading, a brand new approach on the book, a very true approach to the book, the original material. So we will have to deal with trying to erase the image that David Lynch did so we can propose our image.

  That's a tall order of course, and some fascinating video interviews between Lynch and Dune author Frank Herbert have recently re-surfaced, suggesting that Lynch's vision of the planet Arrakis was not so far off as many critics have claimed.

  Still, a lot has happened in movies and technology since Lynch's version made its 1984 debut, and Morel says he plans to take full advantage of the innovations, possibly including 3-D:

  I'd love it to be 3D, of course. It's the kind of movie that has the scope to be 3D. Will they do it in 3D? I'd push for that, but I don't know. As a viewer, I've just been watching Avatar with my kids twice in the theater already and had a blast. It's an amazing experience.

  
  

  Posted 01/31/2010 by Bill

  Related: Pierre Morel | Peter Berg | David Lynch | Frank Herbert | Dune

Wednesday, January 13

• L.A. Critics Name Mulholland Dr. the Movie of the Decade

  The Los Angeles Film Critics Association cast its votes for the best movies of the "aughties," and in the end, it was David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. that came out on top, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

  The organization made the following statement in announcing its decision:

  Lynch's film stands as both a cautionary tale and a mascot for the triumph of art and personal vision in an industry that, from where we sit, often seems actively devoted to the suppression of both.

  Mulholland Dr. stars Laura Elena Harring as an upscale LA woman who suffers from amnesia after a car accident. She meets Naomi Watts (in her breakout role), an ingenue trying to break into Hollywood, and the two set about trying to solve the mystery of the accident. The movie also features Justin Theroux as a director whose project is sabotaged by big-studio producers.

  The movie both glamorizes and satirizes Hollywood, often in the same moment, and the tone runs the gamut from absurd hilarity to outright horror. It's a rhapsodic celebration of the history of movies on one hand, and yet at the same time a ruthlessly bitter denunciation of industry evils. Perfect territory for Lynch, whose very success depended partly on Hollywood capital and partly on his ability to keep his distance from it.

  Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood was second on the critics' list, followed by Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. Other contenders included Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, and Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también.

  
  

  Posted 01/13/2010 by Rich Z

  Related: Hayao Miyazaki | Justin Theroux | Michel Gondry | Paul Thomas Anderson | Peter Jackson | Ang Lee | Alfonso Cuaron | Naomi Watts | Laura Elena Harring | David Lynch | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King | Spirited Away | Y Tu Mama Tambien | There Will Be Blood | Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind | Brokeback Mountain | Mulholland Dr. | The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers | The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Thursday, December 10

• David Lynch's Funny Tale of Meeting George Lucas and Rejecting Return of the Jedi

  FORA.tv recently posted an interview with David Lynch at the Hudson Union Society. The 63-year-old creator of Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and Twin Peaks took time to talk a little about his experience meeting George Lucas, who offered him the chance to direct Return of the Jedi.

  Lynch amused the audience by saying he had "next-door to zero interest" in the project, but he thought he should at least meet with Lucas. He then described the elaborate process of simply getting to Lucas.

  It was incredible. I had to go to this building in LA first and get a special credit card, and I had to get special keys; a letter came, and a map.

  Finally, after taking a flight and driving a rental car to some building, he met with Lucas in an office.

  Now, right about in this time, I started getting a little bit of a headache. He took me upstairs, and he showed me these things called wookies. And now this headache is getting stronger.

  The two then jumped into Lucas's Ferrari and went to a restaurant. That's when Lynch's headache turned into a full-blown migraine.

  Not that I don't like salad, but that's all they had was salad.

  So needless to say, Lynch didn't take the job. He instead went on to direct Dune, which was one of the most disastrous experiences of his career. Thankfully, Blue Velvet came two years later.

  
  

  Posted 12/10/2009 by Rich Z

  Related: George Lucas | David Lynch | Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi

Thursday, November 19

• David Lynch's Next Project? Documentary on Transcendental Meditation

  If you're a David Lynch fan, you probably know he's been spending the bulk of his time on transcendental meditation lately. He's even started his own foundation, which seeks not only to promote awareness about meditation, but also to bring it to schools nationwide.

  With so much time devoted to the practice, Lynch has not made a feature since Inland Empire (2006). But in a recent interview with Vulture, the 63-year-old director said that his next project will be a documentary about the founder of transcendental meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Maharishi spent more than 50 years teaching and advocating the meditation technique to people worldwide, even attracting the attention of The Beatles in the late '60s. He lived into his 90s and died of natural causes in February 2008.

  While it sounds like a fascinating project, it certainly doesn't sound like the "typical" Lynch fare, and the man himself stated as such in the interview.

  It won't be a so-called David Lynch film, really; it will be about Maharishi and the knowledge he brought out. It'll hold a lot of abstractions. We're on our way to India in December to start the India part of it ... I don't think it'll be a talking heads kind of thing, but we're going to do a lot of interviews with people. We'll interview — I hope — in India, a 97-year-old man who was with Maharishi from the beginning and get stories of times that weren't so well recorded.

  If you're unfamiliar with the work of the Maharishi, check out his address from Lake Louise, Canada in 1968, or the interview (below) he gave on Larry King Live in 2003.

  
  

  Posted 11/19/2009 by Rich Z

  Related: David Lynch

Tuesday, June 10

• Will the New 3G iPhone Make Cell Phone Flicks Viable?

  When Apple's iPhone first debuted, lovable oddball filmmaker David Lynch decried cell phone movie-watching in a hilarious rant (check it out on YouTube), declaring, "It's such a sadness that you think you've seen a film on your (expletive) telephone. Get real."

  For the most part, we've been inclined to agree. But Apple's recent unveiling of the iPhone3G, with its dramatically increased download rates, promises to make the prospect of downloading a feature-length movie and watching it on your iPhone much more viable than ever before. The experience may never be up to Mr. Lynch's standards, but for movie lovers looking to pass the time on a cross-country flight, it'll probably do just fine -- so long as you've got a few extra batteries on-hand.

  
  

  Posted 06/10/2008 by reelz

  Related: David Lynch