Laura Dern and David Lynch Still 'Wild at Heart'

Dec. 7, 2006 — -- If you happen to be driving through Hollywood these days and see a cow and an older man standing on a corner holding a large, glossy picture of Laura Dern, slow down and take a closer look. You may be surprised.

More likely than not, that older man is famed film director David Lynch, and the sign is a grass-roots Oscar campaign for the star of his latest film, "Inland Empire."

The film -- a three-hour meditation on Hollywood, identity and giant rabbits -- is the latest collaboration between the notoriously enigmatic auteur and his frequent muse. "He called me three years ago," recalled Dern, "and he said, 'I want to experiment.'"

Fresh off the success of the Oscar-nominated "Mulholland Drive," Lynch was filming individual scenes on a consumer digital video camera for his Web site and trying to find a way to break out of the straitjacket of Hollywood filmmaking. Eventually, Lynch opted to produce the movie without the help of the studios, explaining it would be made slowly and on the cheap.

Dern quickly signed on to the project and became his traveling companion, co-producer and star.

"Every time he got an idea for a scene, we would shoot it, and he wrote the script through the course of this time," Dern said. "Even though he saw the movie in his head, he would just keep shooting along the way."

His ideas eventually led them to the wintry gloom of Lodz, Poland, in search of Polish hookers and folklore. And let's not forget about the rabbits. None of this was a surprise to Dern.

"If David is mad, he went mad many, many years ago and has been exposing it to us all these years," she said. "David is a nonconformist. He's never going to give us something traditional. He's never going to conform to a standard we're used to. God bless him for that."

Dern, 39, first met Lynch when she was a precocious 17-year-old. He cast her, in Dern's words, as the teenage "Sandra Dee" character in his cryptic masterpiece "Blue Velvet."