Lynch Gives Cryptic Insight Into New Film
May 21 -- (CANNES, France) — Writer-director David Lynch, who world-premiered Mulholland Drive at the Cannes Film Festival, doesn't want to explain his latest puzzler, which is set in Hollywood and contains murder, suicide, and multiple scenes of amorous lesbians — while hinting that aliens really run a Hollywood studio.
"These are ideas that come to me and catch, and the ideas say the way they want to be. It's just like life and there's a realistic surface thing going on, but many other things going on we feel or sense. In other words, it's more than what we see in front of us," he said, sounding as cryptic as his film (and just about as comprehensible).
Originally shot as a pilot for ABC, Drive underwent extensive reworking and reshooting for theater screens. And don't even think of calling this Drive "Twin Peaks Continued."
"I see things being themselves. Each thing is its own thing. As soon as you make two films, they compare it to one. The secret is to make one film," Lynch said with a smile.
Asked if Mulholland Drive is his lesbian movie, Lynch said, "It's about love, it's a love story, and it doesn't matter whether it's with men or women, it's about love."
Shouldn't the film really be called "David Lynch: Welcome to My Head"?
"No," an unruffled Lynch replied. "There's a conventional narrative and also there's an intuitive logic going along inside of it. You sense what you see and your mind kicks in. Film can do so many fantastic things and show abstractions and abstract feelings, and words sometimes can't do that, but the language of film can." Okaaay, David.
His cast ranges from a Sunset Beach star (Laura Elena Harring) to legendary tapper Ann Miller, who began in the 1930s as a teenager, and a bare-chested, tattooed Billy Ray Cyrus ("I got a great feeling from Billy Ray").
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