Sight & Sound, March 2007, p. 18-19

Into the abstract

Parts of Inland Empire were shot in Lodz, which aptly is also where Mike Figgis (above) conducted the following interview with David Lynch at the Camerimage cinematography festival.

Mike Figgis: This is your longest film by some way.

David Lynch: By a few minutes. I don´t know what my second-longest film is. It´s not a conscious thing on my part.

My whole process begins when somewhere along the line I catch an idea. That idea is everything to me then. You catch a film idea and you fall in love with it for two reasons. One is the idea itself and the second is how cinema can translate it. And then you just stay true to that idea and go. It keeps talking to you, and you don´t walk away from anything until it feels correct based on that idea. That´s it.

These ideas spawn other ideas. Did you have the complete film in mind when you started?

No. I always use the analogy of fishing. You catch an idea, and even if it´s just a tiny fish of an idea, a fragment, if you focus on it and desire more they´ll swim in to you over time.

That means you have to have a particular type of focus throughout the process of making the film. It´s different from the studio convention.

For sure. Usually in a studio they come in with a script. By the time the script is finished and whoever wrote it presents it to the system then it´s one big idea and many little parts. All that catching of ideas and waiting has already occurred. But if you read that script, it´s just like getting ideas again. It all comes alive in your mind ad you see it. So you stay true to that. The script to me is like the blueprint, it´s not the finished house. There are millions of stories where once you start seeing the house, you say wait a minute, it would be better to have a slow curve instead of a hard edge and we need a fireplace here. There are certain things that the seeing of it conjures up and there are happy accidents that happen along the way that you need to be on guard fro. Who´s to say whether the waiting for the final piece could open up another whole thing that it was meant to be? The idea is that it´s not finished until it´s finished: when the whole feels correct, you say it´s done. Like with a painting.

Do you approach painting in the same way?

Painting is different because there´s no script. So if you´ve got a bunch of canvases ready to go, some paint and a place to work, all you need is to catch an idea to get you started. Then it´s action and reaction: the paint starts talking to you, the beautiful process begins and a whole bunch of different things happen. More often than not there´s a point in the action and reaction where the reaction is to destroy the thing: it´s pretty much bullshit surface baloney, and you just want to destroy it to get past it. The destruction is much more free, so you might just start building on the thing that was destroyed, another thing comes out and that´s the way it can grow. You can break through to something else, but if you´re not up for destroying you can´t get there.

So you need a starting point.

Exactly. The idea happens in a second, but if you really focus on just that fragment you might find you can write pages. I´m in awe of ideas: they seem to come from outside us and then suddenly they enter our conscious mind. It´s a gift.

I have the feeling that your films zoom in on portals way under the surface.

There are two things. There´s a surface, which is beautiful, but it´s the surface. When we see a person we see the surface, but as they begin to talk we get glimpses of something more. Cinema can say things that words can´t really articulate. A great poet might articulate abstractions wth words but cinema does it with pictures flowing together in sequences. It´s magical, it goes into the abstract. I love the idea of going deeper into a world of a character.

What made you concentrate on film rather than painting or writing?

I´ve told the story of the reason I got into film a million times. I was working on a painting of a garden at night at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The plants in the dark night painting began to move and I heard a wind. I thought, 'Oh, this is interesting. A moving painting.' That was the thought that started it.

There was an experimental painting and sculpture contest at the end of each year, so I built a moving painting, a sculptured screen. I went to a camera shop and got a camera that took single frames and asked the guy there how to light the thing and they told me. That would have been the end of it, but then one guy commissioned me to do one for his home. I got a used Bolex, beautiful, with a leather case, single frames. I worked for two months on an animation but I didn´t realise the camera had a broken take-up spool. When I went to get the film developed it was one continuous blur - everyone thought I would be upset but something inside made me happy, I called the guy and told him what had happened and he told me to keep the rest of the money and do whatever I wanted and give him a print. By then I´d been getting ideas about live action combined with animation. So I made a completely different kind of film out of that supposed disaster and it was actually a gift. A gift beyond the beyond. I don´t remember what your question was.

With 'Inland Empire' you worked on video and not even hi-def. Did you like it?

I liked video. I always say I like bad quality, though I don´t know exactly what I mean by that. I used a Lumière brothers camera and really early-days emulsion. Its more like a moving painting than it is modern 35mm, there´s something about it that gives you room to dream, something magical. What I liked about this video was that it reminded me of the 1930s films when it wasn´t so sharp and was more impressionistic. It made it less real. Then we did tests from that to film using a machine called the Alchemist. At first I was just experimenting but once I´d locked into some scenes I didn´t want to change my camera. Next time I might see what the state-of-the-art small camera is and lock into that. It´ll probably be hi-def but I could degrade it if I wanted.

You operated the camera on this film. Had you done that before?

Not much. As you know, if you´ve got the camera then you´re going to do something you wouldn´t do if you´re back here behind two people and you don´t have the hands on. So I don´t want to go back to having an operator - I just love being in there. We need to do what´s feeling correct right now, no matter what, and the digital world is giving us that chance more and more. Small crew. Long takes. Feel it and you´re staying true to the idea more than ever.

35mm developed towards perfect reproduction but I felt it was getting in the way of the image. Did you find it liberating to move away from that?

Very much. You see what you´ve got and if you don´t like it you can pop another 40-watt bulb over there. Because you don´t need giant lamps and you can work with what´s there 90 per cent of the time, you can move around the set. This freedom is unbelievable. In my mind that´s the way it´s supposed to be.

Film is beautiful and I really respect cinematographers for getting better and better images. But what it really comes down to is getting the image that´s true to the idea. Great cinematographers will help you get whatever it is you want in the best possible way, even if it goes against all the rules and is technically bad.

Film is beautiful, but having had this experience I would die if I had to go that slow ever again. It´s not slow in a good way. It´s death, death, death. I can hardly stand even thinking about it.