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David Lynch Goes Inland, Part I
August 13, 2007

In one of the specially prepared supplements found on the DVD of Inland Empire (Absurda/Rhino, Aug. 14), filmmaker David Lynch goes off on modern systems of movie “delivery,” scorning the notion of watching a film

on a computer or a cellphone. Clearly bothered by the idea, he sounds like an anti-drug preacher when he urges us not listen to friends who might advocate such viewing practices: “It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen the film on your f*cking telephone… get real!”

 

Anyone watching Lynch in his “steamed” mode may think that he opposes new technology, which couldn’t be further from the truth. When I spoke to the filmmaker and his two stars, Laura Dern and Justin Theroux, about Inland on the eve of the film’s theatrical release in NYC, it was evident that Lynch embraces digital video and loves the Internet as a sort of “laboratory” for his odder projects.

 

When I asked Lynch about the DVD compilations that have been released of the shorts he made for DavidLynch.com, it was clear that, while he enjoys producing films for the site, he prefers the DVD experience.” I wanted the site to be a home for experiments,” he says. “I would do little tiny films with the Sony PD-150” [the camera with which he shot all of the epic three-hour project Inland Empire.] For the time being, the DVDs are better quality.” He describes how the Dumbland cartoon series – a brutally violent and hysterical family saga – appeared on his site for a time with unsynched sound. “That was some kid of weird thing that happened if people didn’t upgrade their Quicktime program, they saw the films out of synch for some time. On the DVD, Dumbland is in synch, and the sound is closer to theatrical sound. On the Internet you only hear anything loud, because it’s played on little crummy speakers. For the DVD, I could open that up, and have fuller sound.”

 

Lynch crafted Inland in a highly unusual manner: he shot it sporadically over three years, employing his cast literally a scene at a time. Stars Dern and Theroux remarked during my interviews with them that the experience

of not knowing where the scenes “fit” into the eventual whole was “liberating.” Dern noted that as a result she could never be focused on “what was to come or what had come before.” The fact that Lynch’s shoots were sometimes weeks apart was invigorating. “I really did experience each day as its own separate and unique movie experience,” says Dern.

 

Theroux describes the method as “fun for an actor, and I’m sure it was fun for David. Doing it this way you didn’t have to worry about your performance as far as, ‘by this point, I should be playing up here as opposed to down there.’ Only David knew how it was going to be strung together. The actors stay in the present — which is really what actors should be doing anyway.” –Ed Grant

 

 

Check back here next week for Part II of Ed’s interview with David Lynch on his latest release, Inland Empire.

Posted by Laurence Lerman on August 13, 2007 | Comments (1)