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00:30David Lynch was one of a kind, an artist turned filmmaker, not that he saw the difference,
00:35who gave us some of the most beautiful, most haunting and most brilliantly elusive films ever made.
00:42Greatest of all his mysteries is Mulholland Drive, the film he described with nonchalant brevity
00:49as a love story set in the city of dreams.
00:53But that doesn't begin to capture the mesmerising complexity at work.
00:59But what would you say was the legacy of his career up to the point where he comes to make
01:04Mulholland Drive?
01:05Well, by that point, he had become possibly unique in that he was, I would say, a surrealist filmmaker
01:13who had achieved enormous critical, commercial and awards-based success,
01:19which has never really happened before or since, I would say, certainly not in Hollywood,
01:25that he was making films which defied the rules of the Hollywood industry,
01:33of the studio system, of the conventions of Hollywood.
01:36and yet, he was making hit movies.
01:39What are you doing? We don't stop here.
01:54Get out of the car.
02:10Get out of the car.
02:41It is the story of Laura Haring's brunette, known as Rita,
02:45who has survived a car accident on that famous meandering road
02:49above Los Angeles, but has lost her memory.
02:52And it is the story of Naomi Watts' blonde, Betty,
02:56a would-be actress newly arrived in Hollywood,
02:59who attempts to discover the secret of Rita's true identity.
03:03Only Betty is not quite who she seems to be either.
03:09I thought when I woke up, I thought sleep would do it.
03:15What's wrong?
03:19I don't know who I am.
03:22What do you mean? You're Rita.
03:24No, I'm not.
03:26I don't know what my name is.
03:29I don't know who I am.
03:32David Lynch's career can be divided into two parts,
03:36and one is his cinema, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet,
03:41and then, of course, Twin Peaks, which is very interesting because for him to move from the cinema,
03:47I mean, a really particular cinema, and then take that same sensibility to TV,
03:52it's an interesting sort of arc,
03:54and you can see elements of both of those visions and shapes in Mulholland Drive.
04:02But by the time he makes Mulholland Drive, people are starting to question whether he's in the dark a little
04:09bit in his career.
04:10In 1992, he makes a spinoff of Twin Peaks called Fire Walk With Me, which is a huge flop.
04:16He was working on various projects around this time.
04:20He makes Lost Highway, which is now recognized as a great neo-noir, but didn't do very well at the
04:25time.
04:26People found it baffling. They didn't really get it.
04:28They just thought, basically, that his films didn't make sense anymore.
04:31And then Lynch begins to develop the idea for a pilot called Mulholland,
04:36based on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, and about an aspiring actress.
04:41And so he goes ahead and writes and casts this project, even starts filming on it,
04:47and then ABC watches the pilot and turns it down.
04:51They find it too weird, too, quote-unquote, Lynchian, ultimately.
04:55And his idea was to make it a mystery story similar, in some ways, to Twin Peaks,
05:02where the central mystery was what would keep viewers coming every week.
05:05But ultimately, that version of the story didn't quite work out the way he had planned.
05:11Now, he lived in Los Angeles, he worked in Los Angeles,
05:15but he had a kind of spiritual, creative relationship with Los Angeles.
05:20How would you describe it?
05:21Well, in very practical terms, he loved the light.
05:23I mean, he would go on and on about the...
05:26I mean, that's part of his obsession with the history of Hollywood as well,
05:30the idea that filmmakers came to Hollywood for the light,
05:32and what the light in Hollywood allowed filmmakers, including himself, to do.
05:37But he was also intrigued by the duality of Hollywood.
05:42So this idea of a city of dreams where, theoretically, anything was possible,
05:46but that behind closed doors, dark and sordid things were taking place,
05:51and that terrible murders had happened,
05:53and he found it both creatively liberating and also incredibly restricting.
06:01It was the fact that there was no...
06:05There was a constant city of conflict, in a sense, for him,
06:08but he loved the beauty of its possibility.
06:10Released in 2001,
06:13Mulholland Drive asks more questions than it answers.
06:16As far as Lynch was concerned,
06:19film and dreams were much the same thing.
06:23A man of many parts.
06:25And finally, they are all on show together in Paris' Cartier Foundation.
06:30Sketches and sculpture.
06:31Wallpaper were the difference.
06:33For David Lynch, it seems, the creative process is unstoppable.
06:37What fascinates me is ideas.
06:41Everything we do, I believe, starts with an idea.
06:45And sometimes we get ideas for paintings,
06:50sometimes we get ideas for music,
06:52sometimes we get ideas for cinema,
06:54but everything starts with an idea.
06:58Never before has so much of Lynch's work been exhibited under one roof.
07:02Dozens of canvases and a hundred photographs.
07:06Giant mixed-media installations.
07:08Some of the work dates back to his teenage years.
07:12Work that often defies a verbal explanation.
07:17To me, again, it's a wordless thing.
07:22It's an intuited thing.
07:23So much of this is just writing ideas
07:27that have nothing to do with a kind of an intellectual thing.
07:32It's an intuited journey.
07:36The first word that comes to mind
07:38when you speak about David Lynch is surrealist.
07:42Yes, he is a surrealist to a certain extent,
07:46but he's also a wonderful artist.
07:48He's an archaeologist of the subconscious.
07:51And he brings a painterly attitude to his filmmaking.
07:57So they're always great to look at,
08:00even if sometimes they're hard to understand.
08:02The films that David Lynch make
08:04are an extension of his own creative impulse
08:07as a painter and an artist.
08:10He also makes furniture.
08:12He's kind of a polymath
08:13in terms of culture and his own art.
08:16It started as a cancelled television series
08:19before wending its twisted way to a feature film.
08:23The result is that stunning fable
08:26of Hollywood cruelty, lost innocence,
08:29shattered identity, murder,
08:31and the city that the director had called home
08:34for so many years.
08:35It might be his most personal film.
08:38This film was meant to be TV.
08:41That's the way he was going to go.
08:42And he did a pilot and all of that,
08:45but ABC didn't like it.
08:48And if you, I grew up on ABC,
08:50so I could see what would actually
08:51made them nervous about this.
08:53But he still had the material.
08:55He still had the story.
08:56He still had what he wanted to say.
08:58So what was he going to do with it?
09:00He turned it into a film.
09:01And he had a kind of,
09:02I would call it a love-hate relationship
09:04with the studio system itself, didn't he?
09:06Yes, I mean, I think that he felt that Hollywood
09:10owed its existence to the studio system
09:13and that the long tradition of filmmaking
09:15was there because of the studios,
09:16but he also felt that his own encounters
09:19with the studio system had been creatively problematic
09:22and that he was never properly welcomed
09:24into that fraternity or club.
09:28So he always felt like an outsider,
09:31even though he loved cinema.
09:33One thing is certain.
09:35Once you have watched Mulholland Drive,
09:38you are held in its spell forever.
09:55As you can see,
10:18Oh, I can't believe it.
10:21Oh, I can't believe it.
10:51Works such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, legendary television series Twin Peaks and the time-twisting Lost Highway and then Mulholland
11:01Drive.
11:02Up to the point of Mulholland Drive, Lynch was already very well established as an unconventional, uncompromising director of films.
11:15That were mysterious, disturbing, occasionally funny.
11:20And he basically raised the game for Hollywood in terms of films that might puzzle people and yet also actually
11:30find an audience.
11:31So he kind of crossed over from being a pure art filmmaker, which is basically what he was, into the
11:41commercial arena, almost by default.
11:44And it's because the work was so interesting and very, and also because nobody was making films like him at
11:51that time.
11:52And so he attracted quite a lot of really fine actors, some stars, who just wanted to work with this
12:00new guy on the block and see what he would come up with.
12:04The international capital of the motion picture is a fabulously press-agented suburb of Los Angeles.
12:09Hollywood, a community whose name alone is a magic word throughout the world.
12:14But in Hollywood, where 65% of all films are produced, the making of movies is a serious and complicated
12:21business.
12:23Inspiration came from Los Angeles itself, in particular the road that snakes along Santa Monica Mountain, from Cahuenga Pass to
12:31the Pacific.
12:32This almost mystical, semi-wild asphalt ribbon, haunted by suicides and murders, and named for William Mulholland, the engineer behind
12:43the city's waterways who robbed the farmers blind.
12:46Lynch was struck by the image of scarlet taillights, twisting and turning and disappearing into the dark.
12:54Lynch's relationship to Los Angeles was, first of all, a working relationship, because that is where was mainly, and still
13:03is, where movies and TV are made.
13:06What's interesting about Lynch is that he was able to sort of take bits of Los Angeles, look at Los
13:12Angeles as almost like a kind of Martian, in a way, and find the Los Angeles that actually told him
13:21the story that he needed to tell.
13:24Mulholland Drive is quite a wild place in relation to the rest of Los Angeles.
13:30So those of us who are not Los Angelinos, we don't think of Mulholland Drive, we think of Sunset Boulevard
13:35and so forth.
13:36But Mulholland Drive is a very different kind of encarpment.
13:41It goes up, it has wild animals in and out of it.
13:45It's quite dark.
13:47So it's, in a sense, the, I guess, the underbelly of L.A., the things that L.A. don't want
13:55you to see.
13:55And it's not even ugly, the parts.
13:57It's what's hidden.
13:58It's what's wild.
13:59It's what's not been tamed, quite tamed.
14:03And so with his imagination, he would have chosen that road to make his story about.
14:09And the other part of it, you know, you think all the movies that are named after roads.
14:16This Mulholland Drive is a kind of metaphor for that which is not seen by most people who encounter Hollywood.
14:28And most of us encounter Hollywood on screen.
14:30So we see Sun and we see Sea, the ocean, and we see all of that.
14:36And this is darkness.
14:37This is darkness.
14:38This is secrets.
14:41This is closed doors.
14:43All the things that California is not supposed to be.
14:47It also has a tragedy baked into it because it's named after a guy called William Mulholland, who built the
14:54water system and the dams that allowed Los Angeles to become a city, but whose work, his finest work, fell
15:01to pieces literally the following day after he'd given it a final inspection and absolutely guaranteed that it was solid.
15:07So he died broken hearted and broke and so named after a man who was essential for Los Angeles, but
15:15also everything about him crumbled to dust.
15:17So you have these Hollywood mansions on Mulholland Drive, but then you also have this incredibly dangerous road that snakes
15:26off into the darkness.
15:27It's a road of contradictions.
15:30How would you say it influenced the film itself?
15:34How did it influence David Lynch?
15:36Well, he used to love the oddity of driving along Mulholland Drive at night and the day, the sort of
15:44the difference between driving along it at night and then driving along during the day.
15:48He found driving during the day more sinister than driving at night.
15:52He felt that the darkness of the road is more apparent, oddly, when the day was there.
15:59He felt that the twinkling views that you could occasionally get of Hollywood made Hollywood beautiful.
16:04But in the daytime, the sort of the very sharp speed bends where people had come off the road reflected
16:11sort of the things that he found alarming about it.
16:14Mulholland Drive began life as a television spinoff to Twin Peaks.
16:18It then evolved into a standalone pilot for a new noir-style thriller, the story of Laura Haring's mystery brunette,
16:27who survives an attempted murder on that famous road.
16:30And blonde ingenue Naomi Watts, who discovers this distraught woman in her shower.
16:36Somehow shocked by the Lynchian strangeness involved, ABC Studios shelved the project.
16:43It was Pierre Edelman of Studio Canal who came to the rescue.
16:47Lynch had shown his old friend the pilot, and Edelman knew this was something important.
16:52Negotiating the rights from ABC, he financed an additional shoot a year later in order to refashion the pilot as
17:00a cryptic feature film.
17:01As Lynch described it, the story was now divided into three parts.
17:05A perfect mystery, a sad illusion, and love.
17:09Make of that what you will.
17:11So, for Lynch, the kind of three acts that he sees Mulholland Drive in have to take shape, and the
17:18sort of conclusions, if there are any, and that's another question, have to kind of happen more quickly and more
17:24succinctly outside of it being a TV series, which is a much more long-running project.
17:29So, Studio Canal wants him to shoot more beyond the material he already has, and he is then tasked with
17:36figuring out how to extend this story in a satisfying way.
17:41And for his part, he said he felt that the story's plot tied up all of its loose ends.
17:45I'm not sure I totally agree with him, but maybe that's on the individual viewer.
17:51But that's the nature of Mulholland Drive.
17:53It is, some might say, unwieldy, kind of circular story, which very much plays narratively on the ideas of memory,
18:01dream, fantasy, and is essentially a giant question mark.
18:06And so, I think in many ways, him having to change the narrative from TV to feature allowed him to
18:13play a little bit less with the viewer in terms of long-term viewing, like TV does, but also brought
18:20all those ideas together and make something really coherent.
18:24The career of Australian actress Nermie Watts was going nowhere when she landed her greatest role.
18:30She had looked so different from her photo, rushing off for flights without makeup to meet Lynch.
18:37That stirred ideas in the director.
18:39First, she plays Betty, the over-the-top golly gee out-of-towner, leaping like Nancy Drew into a new
18:47case.
18:47By the second shoot, she's playing Diane, a washed-up actress filled with a bitter regret.
18:54We never doubt they are the same person.
18:57Naomi Watts is actually perfect for these two different incarnations.
19:03The thing is that both these actresses on the screen are sort of part of...
19:09They're split into two.
19:11They've become doubles of each other.
19:13And Watts herself was actually on the verge, having spent ten years in Hollywood without any significant success, was about
19:22to actually go leave the business and go back home to Australia, when Lynch finally cast her.
19:30He liked the look of her straight away.
19:32And when she turned up to actually talk to him, it wasn't even an audition, he just wanted to meet
19:38her.
19:39She was so relieved that somebody had actually sort of, somebody of his caliber as well, wanted her in the
19:45film, that she actually cried during the interview.
19:48And he knew that was the thing he wanted.
19:50He wanted someone who had strength, was clearly a good actress, but had this sort of unbelievable vulnerabilities.
20:22Betty comes off as the all-American girl, but she's actually Canadian, which is his big, that's the biggest joke
20:28actually in the film.
20:30And it's very witty, and it shows about sort of the, his feeling about the amorphous nature of Canadians in
20:40relation to Americans.
20:41So she's that.
20:42And then she is this other person who is in the acting scene where she does her audition.
20:50You don't even know what to make of that.
20:52It's so devastating.
20:55Everybody who watches the audition is applauding, except the women who are standing there like Macbeth's witches and all this
21:01black, thinking, we got to like take her out of here now to the next place.
21:05But you sit there as the viewer.
21:07I mean, where did that come from?
21:10And it overwhelms everyone in the room.
21:13It overwhelms the film.
21:16It also opens up a kind of Hades as well, that he wants you to enter into, because now he's
21:23going to tell you about the business, how it really works, how he's experienced what they call the business, which
21:30is making films in Hollywood.
21:32Don't you be a stranger around here.
21:34We'd love to have you here.
21:36Come on, Betty.
21:38Thank you again, Mr. Brown.
21:39And it was nice meeting all of you.
21:43Bye.
21:46Bye.
21:51She slammed up.
21:53How'd you find her?
21:55God, that was awful.
22:15God, that was awful.
22:37Only in Lynch's inverted thinking would the brunette be modelled on Marilyn Monroe, and he was just crazy about Laura
22:45Haring's headshot.
22:46Then the actress had quite a story anyway.
22:49A former Miss USA, she was divorced from the great-great-grandson of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and effectively
22:58a countess.
23:00She had dabbled in daytime soaps, but had the aura of Isabella Rossellini.
23:06And as if destiny were making a point, Haring was caught in a minor car accident on the way to
23:13her audition.
23:14So tell me a bit about Laura Haring.
23:17I love this story that Lynch liked to cast from headshots, classic Hollywood headshots, and he saw her headshot, and
23:23he was just crazy for it.
23:24And I have to meet her.
23:25But she sort of lived up to her headshot, didn't she?
23:27Well, she lived like a Lynchian character, in a sense.
23:31So she grew up in Mexico.
23:33Her parents divorced when she was very young.
23:35She moved to Texas, was shot in the head in a drive-by when she was, I think, 12.
23:43She then went on to become Miss Texas, Miss USA, travelled the world, where she met Count von Bismarck's...
23:50His great-great-grandson.
23:51Yeah, who was still the Count von Bismarck, and married to him for two years, and they divorced, and she
23:56kept the title.
23:57So she was the Countess Bismarck.
23:59And then, with those, I think, excellent qualifications, set out to become a Hollywood star.
24:05And it's a phenomenally appropriate training for the role of Rita.
24:09Yeah, she walks into that film, and she brings the aura of Isabella Rossellini, doesn't she?
24:15She has something, a presence.
24:17I mean, Lynch can cast so well.
24:19Well, I think not just cast so well.
24:22There's something about Lynch that finds the right person, but he then draws out of them a performance that is
24:29quite often their career best.
24:31I mean, in terms of what's your favourite Nick Cage role, mine is Wild at Heart.
24:36So he just gets the best out of actors.
24:39Naomi Watts in this film is phenomenal.
24:42Laura Herring is just perfect in this.
24:45He knows all he does is take the headshot and a chat.
24:48He doesn't even properly audition, and then decides on that that they're the right person and makes them become as
24:54good as he wants them to be.
24:55He knows that what you're looking at is her, her beauty.
25:00She's incredible looking, incredible presence.
25:03You believe everything.
25:04And so when she turns out to be something else at the end, toward the end of the movie, it's
25:09flesh crawling, because who is this?
25:12Who is this, and why is she doing, or why did she do what she did?
25:15It casts you out of the movie for a second, which is what he wants to do anyway.
25:20It takes you out of the film, and you have to, as I still have to do, you have to
25:25rethink bits of that film.
25:27You have to actually go back and think, wait a minute, I'm looking for a clue.
25:31I'm looking for something, because he must have dropped something, and I missed it.
25:35He must have, because how could this happen?
25:39And he, you know, but, you know, he didn't.
25:43You know, it's just like, you know.
25:45And the other incredible part that people seldom talk about, and was the first stunning thing for me when I
25:53first saw the film, it was first released,
25:54is the great Ann Miller, a great diva of old Hollywood.
26:01This woman was a tap-dancing, ballerina, incredible person.
26:06He's made, he shows her at this point in her life as almost rigid, like she can't, she's not moving,
26:13her face isn't moving.
26:14And if you know her work, and he knew her work, of course, Ann Miller would have been trolling in
26:21the day, and that's really frightening.
26:24That's really frightening, too, because what he's saying is, this is Ann Miller, everybody, you know that if you're into
26:31Hollywood movies.
26:33So look at the phoniness of the whole thing.
26:36She's really, to me, the scariest thing in it.
26:40Justin Theroux plays hipster director Adam, resisting studio demands to cast a mystery brunette in his latest film.
26:50His life will descend into a free-form nightmare.
26:54Kicked out of his Hollywood Hills home, his bank account emptied, he ends up guided by an enigmatic cowboy on
27:01stranger and stranger roads.
27:03He is surely a cipher for Lynch himself, being drawn by those taillights deeper into his story.
27:12Lynch had been around the block a few times by the time Mulholland Drive was being made,
27:16and I think you can see some of his frustrations with Hollywood generally, as well as his own specific frustrations
27:22in the film.
27:23Justin Theroux is not an entirely likable character by any stretch of the imagination, which I think is interesting.
27:30But he is someone who earnestly wants to get his film made and who has it taken away from him,
27:35who loses control of the picture,
27:37who becomes embroiled in the interpersonal politics and sexual politics around moviemaking.
27:43And how much of that's directly personal, you can't ever say.
27:46But I think Lynch did struggle and was very angry with the idea of having his work interfered with by
27:54money men, by outsiders,
27:55by the commercial element of Hollywood filmmaking.
27:58And of course, it had quite a few projects fail or be pilloried or massively misunderstood by the general public.
28:04What better inspiration for a film about the treachery of Hollywood than the treachery of Hollywood?
28:10Lynch translates his many studio woes into the sinister schemes of a fictional film company.
28:17Twin Peaks villain Michael J. Anderson is the studio head, Mr. Rock, who has mob connections.
28:23While Lynch's composer, Angelo Badalamenti, was cajoled into playing a monosyllabic hood who spits his espresso out in disgust.
28:33David Lynch loves Hollywood movies.
28:36He loves the older movies and he absorbs them.
28:39And he's quite happy to quote from them.
28:41He will quote from Hitchcock.
28:43He'll quote from Billy Wilder.
28:45He'll quote from, in fact, Ingmar Bergman.
28:48So all of these things are sort of floating around in inside his head and ultimately manifest themselves on the
28:56screen.
28:56This is, you know, this is great stuff because it, quite from anything else, it means that you can consider
29:02yourself very clever.
29:03You can spot which elements are from other films.
29:08But at the end of the day, he layers them and knits them together into something that could only be
29:15made by him.
29:16But there's, you know, constantly throughout it and throughout Lynch's work, there's this application of dream logic that a film
29:24can, you know, slip the bounds of reality or the reality it presents to move into very surreal places.
29:31So this is a very surreal depiction of the Hollywood machine.
29:34Yes.
29:34And perhaps even more than some of his previous films, the gears will shift.
29:38And as you imply, very strange things will happen.
29:42Yes.
29:42I mean, his depiction of the people in control of Hollywood, I would say, unique.
29:47People have done films about the, you know, the horrors of the Hollywood elite.
29:52And they're normally men behind desks, sweaty guys with, you know, they call through to their secretaries.
29:58And they're just, it's a standard trope in a lot of films.
30:02These people are something other entirely.
30:05Mr. Rock feels like a dream in himself.
30:08His room is odd.
30:09He looks odd.
30:10The way he behaves is incredibly odd.
30:12It's, it's, it is like a nightmare just watching his scenes.
30:16The cowboy doesn't feel like a real person either.
30:18The way he speaks, the way he acts.
30:21These are, this is how Hollywood has never been, you know, the studio heads have never been depicted like this
30:26before.
30:27So you're thinking, well, are they real?
30:30Is this some kind of fever dream of Hollywood?
30:33The powers that be can't be this because this is, I guess for Lynch what he's saying is in a
30:38city built on dreams and imagination and lurid fantasy.
30:42Well, why not?
30:42Why isn't it run by mysterious figures in unusual situations who you wouldn't even recognise in the real world?
30:49The film effectively begins with the original pilot.
30:52The mystery set up between Betty and Rita, named after Rita Hayworth from the framed Gilda poster on Betty's apartment
31:00wall.
31:01As combined, of course, with plenty of weird Lynchian subplots.
31:07But when they visit the club Silencio, where the singer lip-sings to Roy Orbison's crying,
31:13a temporal rupture spins us into the desperate, more realistic events, the second shoot.
31:20The first two-thirds of the story are now open to drastic reinterpretation.
31:25The way that Lynch inserts us into his films is through his generosity.
31:33It seems an odd thing to say about a film director, but I think that David Lynch is an incredibly
31:38generous filmmaker.
31:39In spite of the fact that many people believe his films to be impenetrable, they may be in strict possible
31:48terms.
31:48But what he's actually doing is inviting us to, A, bring our own interpretation in his films.
31:56He doesn't control the interpretation.
31:58He doesn't say, he doesn't guide us through it.
32:01You know, we're basically working without a map.
32:04He invites us, and he's very happy for us to have different interpretations.
32:08But not only that, I think, most importantly, he's also inviting us to, or inspiring us to use our imagination.
32:18Lynch sought to capture the different moods of Los Angeles, shooting in the Hollywood Hills, downtown, El Segundo, Hancock Park,
32:26and LAX.
32:28He also drew upon some distinctive movie inspirations.
32:32The West Coast noir of Vertigo and Sunset Boulevard, the familiar Lynchian parallels with the dream reality uncertainty of The
32:42Wizard of Oz, and references to his own work.
32:46Betty's hometown is Deep River, the name of the apartment block in Blue Velvet.
32:52You can say in a way, and, well, I will say it, film, the cinema for him is the moving
32:59bits of his own art.
33:03It's not a thing you sit and you celebrate about so much.
33:08You're not thinking in the way you would think at a lecture.
33:11It's about experiencing it, and experiencing yourself in reaction to it.
33:17That's what he wants you to do.
33:19Because if you look at a great piece of art, a great painting, you are in dialogue with this piece
33:25of work.
33:25So, for him, and it's fascinating that he chose films, because he's saying all the time that to get a
33:34piece of work on screen or on television is a kind of art form in itself,
33:42to actually get the thing there, to actually get it there, intact, the way you saw it, with the people
33:49you want to work with.
33:50Ninety-eight percent of the people don't actually ever accomplish that.
33:53So, it's an act of bravery.
33:56You see this guy in the back, and the director's in the back.
34:00He's in the back of the film.
34:01He's in the back of the actors.
34:03He's in the back of the story, actually trying to make this happen.
34:07And he's inviting you to go into his own, I wouldn't say chaos, because that's incorrect.
34:14He's inviting you to go into his own vision of what this industry and the world is about.
34:23He's in the back of the film.
34:24He's in the back of the film.
34:50What resonates so powerfully within Lynch's work
34:53is his willingness to disturb the reality of his stories.
34:58Recalling the surreal turns taken by Twin Peaks,
35:02Mulholland Drive gives way to a perplexing dream logic.
35:06What are we to make of the monstrous hobo that lives in a dumpster?
35:10Or that enigmatic cowboy?
35:12Or the sweet old couple befriended by Betty on her flight,
35:17who later return as homunculi barely inches tall?
35:24So Lynch is often talked about in terms of using nightmare logic, and I think he does definitely have this
35:30fascination with the Freudian, with the uncanny, with the idea of doubles, with the idea of something just seeming innocuous,
35:39but then ever so slightly off.
35:41And he evokes this so strongly in Mulholland Drive, but also in many of his other works, this sense of
35:49normality, which is just slightly punctured by this pervasive sense of evil.
35:54This pervasive sense of almost unknown.
35:59And I think you have that in a nightmare, right?
36:01You have that where you're going about your daily business in a shop or an office or your home, and
36:07then something inexplicable existing within that environment.
36:12And it creates an incredible sense of dread.
36:14Reviews for Mulholland Drive were rapturous.
36:18This was the grand summation of Lynch's themes.
36:21He won Best Director at Cannes.
36:24Auguste French film journal Cahiers de Cinéma voted it the film of the 2000s,
36:29while a poll by the BBC declared it the film of the 21st century.
36:34Hollywood was left scratching its head.
36:36A bemused Academy would grant Lynch his second Best Director nomination.
36:41But it is one of the great Oscar injustices that Watts didn't even get nominated for Best Actress.
36:48The film wasn't just well-reviewed.
36:51It was adored by critics.
36:53How did it elevate?
36:55What level did it elevate Lynch to?
36:57I think it elevated him to this sort of kind of gnomic, mystic director figure who had some kind of
37:07almost shamanic quality in Hollywood.
37:09He was nominated for Best Director.
37:11The film made an enormous amount of money.
37:13And in that film, there are no compromises.
37:16So Hollywood looked at this.
37:18You know, this is insane.
37:19This is not the way that everything should work.
37:21But it's a hit.
37:22It's beautiful.
37:23Everybody loves it.
37:24We love it.
37:26How do we make sense of this man?
37:28We can't make sense of him.
37:29And so his success in Love itself was bewildering to the town that he had this very mischievous relationship with.
37:37And I think it made him into this phenomenal figure.
37:41It's probably the high point of his career, I would say.
37:44It's probably his greatest work.
37:46And it is without doubt his most glorious moment.
37:50That is the moment at which everyone in the city that he both loves and his hates turns towards him
37:57and says, you are a genius.
38:00Lynch asks that we surrender to his mysteries.
38:03Yet he tapped into a collective need to decode and demystify.
38:08Fans love to posit theories that perky Betty is the hallucination of heartbroken Diane.
38:16That Rita is her ex-lover, an actress actually named Camilla Rhodes.
38:22With an air of mischief, in 2002, Lynch released a ten-point guide to deciphering Mulholland Drive.
38:30We must pay attention to red lampshades, robes, ashtrays, coffee cups, and the whereabouts of Betty's Aunt Ruth.
38:39Not that it really helped.
38:41But don't you think there's something a little bit infuriated about Lynch?
38:44And what's delightful about his films is that, yes, he refuses.
38:47Yes, there's no confirmed interpretation of any of his films, but especially Mulholland Drive.
38:53Yet he torments us with the possibility of a solution.
38:56And we as people like solutions.
38:59We want the detective story to have its ending.
39:01And he's presenting those tropes to us in a strange way.
39:05But he sort of wants his cake and he wants us to eat it at the same time.
39:09It's an interesting dilemma with Lynch.
39:11Yes, I mean, one question is, does he know what's going on in his film?
39:17And I think there's an argument to say that he might not.
39:20Partly because he wrote one story.
39:22And then they said, OK, now you're going to have to make it into a movie.
39:25And he added another story onto the end.
39:29And it may be that he didn't know if there was a connection or not.
39:32And he does uniquely, I think, perhaps, include a series of the 10 clues.
39:38Well, he released this document, didn't he, with the 10 point clues to, which was partly a joke, wasn't it?
39:44It made things more confusing.
39:45Yes.
39:45If you answer all of those questions correctly, you learn nothing.
39:48I mean, he basically asks you to go through the film and answer certain points.
39:52Is this film name, what's the name of the film?
39:56You look out for things, like red lampshades and robes and ashtrays.
39:59And then you try to connect them.
40:00Well, why is the red lampshade important?
40:04And there is, it doesn't help.
40:06It absolutely, trust me, I've done it.
40:08It doesn't help at all.
40:08And, you know, there's no doubt in any of our minds that we were watching an absolute drop-dead masterpiece.
40:13And it had sort of come out of nowhere.
40:17You know, we knew that Lynch was an extraordinary filmmaker.
40:23You know, he'd made some great, great, great movies.
40:26But I don't think any of us were prepared for the sheer majesty of this one.
40:34It's almost as if every film he'd made before then had been leading up to this moment.
40:39Just when you think you have a plot or a mystery in the film figured out, it upends that.
40:45It does something totally inexplicable.
40:47Or it calls something into question which you hadn't yet considered.
40:50And you're no longer sure about the kind of character you're watching, the kind of film you're watching.
40:54Or what any of this is supposed to be or mean.
40:57So it wrong-foots the viewer.
41:00It invites you to mystery.
41:01But then it wants you to experience it almost beyond logic.
41:07The films aren't just puzzles to be solved in a logical way.
41:10They are something to be experienced.
41:11And that's, I think, what you come away with with Mulholland Drive.
41:15Is Mulholland Drive his greatest achievement in film?
41:18Yes.
41:19Yes.
41:20It's his greatest achievement because, first of all,
41:24he's learned a lot.
41:25He learned a lot about how he has to make film.
41:30He learns that he is not an American filmmaker.
41:34He is a filmmaker who is American and working in America.
41:38But he is not an American filmmaker.
41:41He knows the business inside and out.
41:44But he's not of the business.
41:47And he's got enough courage and probably piss-off-ness and everything else I can't say to say, right, I'm
41:56going to show you all, I, the audience and the business, that I know exactly who you are.
42:01I know exactly who you are.
42:03I know exactly what L.A. is as well.
42:06It's a dangerous place because you guys are here.
42:11And for all the people who flock to L.A., all the sunny little girls who come off the planes
42:18looking for a career, they walk into the mall of the business.
42:23And you get churned up and you're spit out and you find things out about yourself that you don't actually
42:31need to find out, but you do.
42:33And you're left high and dry in the sort of meat grinder that is Hollywood.
42:40There is so much to treasure about Mulholland Drive, the tantalizing mystery that keeps it alive, the astonishing multi-layered
42:49performances, that sense of a film unfolding like a dream.
42:55It is one of the great movies about Los Angeles and the dark magic of Hollywood.
43:01Even compared to Eraserhead or Blue Velvet, this is David Lynch's defining nightmare.
43:09And now one more question.
43:11You know, you say it's his greatest work.
43:13Why?
43:14Because it is, I think, for a filmmaker to make a film which breaks apart the idea of what film
43:23is whilst also celebrating and despising film is something that is almost impossible to do.
43:31And I think it's only been done once.
43:33People have made films about the problems that Hollywood presents.
43:36People have made films about the struggles of being a filmmaker in Hollywood.
43:39But no one has taken the essence, the idea of film itself, and torn that to pieces in front of
43:46you on the screen and says, this is what we're playing with.
43:49This is what we're doing.
43:50These are the mystic channels that we go through.
43:53This is something both wonderful, incomprehensible, and yet at the same time, really, really mundane.
43:59And this is what you're watching.
44:01So what are you going to do about it?
44:03And we are flung to the back of our seats.
44:06And we just, we're lost.
44:08We're in his hands.
44:09We just wish he'd keep going.
44:12Don't stop making this film.
44:13Don't stop this film.
44:14I just want more of this.
44:15I need, I need more.
44:17I need to know.
44:18I need to understand.
44:18He says, no, don't try to understand it.
44:21Just feel it.
44:22Come on, sweetheart.
44:30It's beautiful.
44:32A secret path.
44:55I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need,
45:05I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need,
45:08I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need,
45:08I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need,
45:09I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need,
45:09I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need,
45:09I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need,
45:09I need, I need, I need, I need
45:39Transcription by CastingWords
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