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Lynch Goes Inland, Part III
August 22, 2007

Here's the third and final part of Ed Grant's interview with filmmaker David Lynch on his latest work, Inland Empire.

is known for being both charming to interviewers and quite elusive about the narratives he creates, and he was both during my chat with him. He explained the creation of Inland by saying, in

his trademark mix of laidback slang and visionary philosophy, that “I get an idea, a scene comes to me, but instead of getting another scene and building a script, I would go shoot the scene. …I thought that was that... Then I would get another idea for a scene that didn’t relate to that, it had none of the same characters, nothing. But there was something that unified it…. I believe in this kind of unity.”

 

He proceeded to clarify in his own particular way – which does indeed make sense when you hear it, but looks pretty strange in print – why he created Inland on a scene-by-scene basis: “Modern science says there’s a unified field. I’ve been a longtime meditator, and Vedic science is science of that field, and it is a kernel science, so it’s impossible that one seemingly strange scene over here couldn’t relate to a completely different kind of thing over there. The way the scenes unified… was interesting.” Suffice it to say that the preceding may seem baffling, but fans of Lynch’s work, in particular those who’ve already been drawn in by the dark power of (and wild fantasy) of Inland Empire, will know where he is coming from.

 

On a far, far lighter and less cosmic note, I asked Lynch if he watches DVDs. He says he’s “not really a film buff, but recently I watched Lolita by Stanley Kubrick and Sunset Boulevard by Billy Wilder. I look at them pretty often.” Given the harrowing tales of Tinseltown that are Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, the latter is indeed a natural choice for the impressively coiffed auteur’s DVD player.--Ed Grant

Posted by Laurence Lerman on August 22, 2007 | Comments (0)