Houston Chronicle, Oct. 13, 2001

Twin piques

Once a rejected TV pilot, Lynch's 'Mulholland' gets second chance as a film

HOW'S this for a Lynchian moment?

On her way to meet David Lynch to audition for a part, an excited actress gets into a traffic accident. When she arrives for the audition, flustered but not seriously hurt, she learns her character has a car wreck in the film.

 

Laura Elena Harring and Justin Theroux star in Mulholland Drive. David Lynch reshaped the former TV pilot into a film that was nominated for Cannes' Golden Palm award in May.

"To me that was an omen," says Laura Elena Harring, a brunette who has been compared to glamour queens of the past such as Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth. "They told me (during volunteer service) in India that the universe usually does communicate with us through omens and symbols."

To this former Texan, the odd coincidence of her wreck meant the job was hers. Now all she had to do was persuade Lynch.

Mulholland Drive, named after a road that winds through the hills north of Hollywood, opens Friday. Harring plays Rita, a woman who survives a car wreck (and attempted murder) on Mulholland at the beginning of the movie.

Bruised and suffering from amnesia, she climbs down the hill, penetrating deeper into Hollywood, crossing fabled streets such as Sunset Boulevard as if passing over demarcating lines of force. There her fate becomes mysteriously entwined with that of a young actress (Naomi Watts), a sunny blonde who has just arrived in the city.

What happens after that can be described sequentially, but literal meaning is up for grabs. Who is trying to kill Rita, and why? Who is she, really, and what was she before? Is this all just a dream? Whose dream? It is all open to interpretation.

Lynch, whose films range from the straight-ahead sincerity of The Straight Story to the haunting mystery and tonal shifts of the wonderful Blue Velvet to the grotesqueries of Eraserhead and Lost Highway, acknowledges that intuition is central to his work -- both to his creative process and to the viewer's experience of his movies. His films often have the logic of dreams.

"But it isn't pure surrealism," says Lynch, who was named best director at the Cannes Film Festival in May for Mulholland Drive, which also was nominated for the festival's Golden Palm award.

His movies can strike the unprepared as self-indulgent exercises in weirdness. But he says: "There are all different types of understanding. Some ways are more abstract. ... You intuit the meaning of some things. But some things are right there smack on the surface."

That could serve as an apt description of Lynch. For all the strangeness of his films, he has a wide-open, uncomplicated air, the sunny American outlook that life is dandy, so let's have another milkshake. He's an overgrown Boy Scout, albeit one with odd tendencies who knows what yucky things lurk in hollow logs.

There are stories of his eating every day in the same restaurant and always ordering the same things. But with Lynch you get the sense that such regimented regularity is his bulwark against the chaos and mystery inside his head.

A Montana native who studied art before becoming a filmmaker, he brings to movies both his naive small-town attitude and a surrealist's gift for getting at the ineffable through the commonplace.

As Harring says of him, with a laugh, "He's so normal that it's not normal."

Before Lynch hired her, Harring -- a former Miss USA who was born in Mexico -- mostly had acted in television and in movies such as Lambada, the Forbidden Dance. She had never worked with anyone like Lynch.

"He directs with metaphors and similes," she says. "He'd say, 'Walk like a broken doll' or 'like a kitty cat.' Most directors don't direct like that."

He always knew exactly what he wanted and how to ask for it. This helped tremendously, especially when he reassembled the cast more than two years after the initial filming so that he could reshape the movie.

Mulholland Drive had begun as a pilot for a TV series, but ABC rejected it. "They hated it," Lynch says.

When he revived it as a feature film, he wrote 18 more pages to provide closure.

Transforming the pilot into a theatrical feature wasn't a matter of truncating a series-long story. Lynch hadn't written the rest of it. Had ABC picked up the series, he would have made up the story as it went along, much as he did with Twin Peaks, his landmark series that aired in 1990-91.

"I love a continuing story," he says. "I love not knowing what's going to happen and seeing things unfold over time."

So now he had to figure out where all the narrative threads were going and tie them up -- or not -- in short order. "Interesting ideas were required," Lynch says, characteristically describing the process as "a wonderful situation."

"I've always said finding ideas is like fishing," he adds. "When you catch them, they become known to you." He had a lot of fishing to do to remake Mulholland Drive.

Ordinarily, it might be hard for an actor to get back into character after having moved on to other things. Harring, for example, had made The Elián González Story since finishing her work with Lynch. But because she was playing an amnesia victim, the long hiatus "didn't really matter," she says. "I didn't have a back story."

Instead of explaining the character's background to her, Lynch had always spoken in mysterious terms. "He often said my character was trapped between two worlds, that I had left one world and couldn't yet make it to the other one, and it was like a black cloud hovering over me," Harring says.

Her notion of what the film is about is no more authoritative than anyone else's.

With all the premieres and festivals she has attended, she's seen the movie several times. "Every time I see it, I think it's about a different theme," she says.

"The first time, I thought it was about Hollywood dreams and obsessions. The second time, I thought it was about identity, how we don't really know who we are. The third time, I don't remember what I thought."

She laughs, then says she felt it had to do with duality, the way the two central female characters represent yin and yang, black and white. "Each of them makes a 180-degree turn," she says.

The characters' transformations, however, are nothing compared to the turns Harring's life has taken.

After her childhood in Los Mochis, Mexico (her mother was Mexican, her father from Texas), she spent her teen years in San Antonio and El Paso before going to boarding school in Switzerland. Part of a summer she worked as a volunteer in India, digging ditches, then set off traveling with friends.

"I traveled like a hippie all over Europe," she says, laughing at the memory. "I was a vegetarian. I was a Peace Corps type, peace-and-love type girl."

When she finished her travels, school had started already. "I didn't know what to do," she says, so she returned to El Paso and worked in a store. Then someone told her that if she entered and won the Miss USA pageant (she would first, of course, have to be named Miss El Paso and Miss Texas), she would get to travel to Europe and visit her friends.

"I wanted to go to my friend's graduation (from the Swiss school), so I started learning to walk in heels and put on makeup."

In this simplified version of her life story, Harring hardly mentions her brief marriage to Count Carl von Bismarck of Germany. She makes her life sound like a succession of happy accidents (to use one of Lynch's favorite terms).

The oddness of Harring's journey from "peace-and-love type girl" to beauty queen struck her one day, in the midst of the Miss USA pageant in 1985.

"I was on the bus being driven to the pageant with the other girls and putting on my makeup thinking the mascara was like having butterflies on my face," she says. "I remember thinking, `What the heck am I doing here?'

"But I got accustomed pretty darn quickly," she adds with a giggle. "I started going shopping, getting all those pretty clothes. I've been corrupted ever since."

She turned to acting just as casually, she says.

"In certain ways, we're all acting -- when we pretend to be perfect Miss Humanitarian, for instance. Nobody's perfect. But physically what happened was that someone saw me when I was giving up the crown for Miss USA and asked me to come audition for a part as Raul Julia's wife in The Alamo: 13 Days to Glory.

"I was very detached and carefree," she says. "I didn't care."

She got the part. But watching Julia work transformed her. "He was so focused, and his voice was so resonant," she recalls. "There was magic in the air."

She studied at the London Academy of Performing Arts and has taken acting seriously ever since.

Harring is following Mulholland Drive, her first high-profile feature, with other theatrical films, including John Q with Denzel Washington and Robert Duvall.

Lynch, too, is leaving television behind. His bad experience with ABC persuaded him that there no longer is a place for him.

He felt pressured to edit the pilot in a much shorter time than he would have liked, he says, but he doesn't think that mattered. "They would've hated it if I'd spent years tweaking it," he says. "It was in the cards before they saw it."

Now, he says, "All my attention is going to the Internet, along with feature films."

He's "burning the midnight oil" to unveil a Web site (www.davidlynch.com) in mid-October. "It's many things," he says of the site, which he has been developing for two years. "There will be three exclusively for-the-Internet series," as well as short films and experiments, and the site will sell DVDs and music.

"And there will be places to get lost and things to do," he says.

"It's a random-access world and a world of fragments," he says of cyberspace. "It's an original world, this world of ether, and it's available 24-7."

Lynch has been criticized in the past for spreading himself too thin. There was a sense, for instance, that Twin Peaks started out intriguingly but then wandered aimlessly after Lynch moved on to film work, leaving the series in the hands of his associates and other directors and writers.

"These things happen," he says. "You have an idea to do something like that (the series), and it's a full-time job. I wanted to do other things as well. That can be a real problem."

He won't make that mistake with the Web site, he says. Though he has lots of help, he will remain involved all the way.

"I'm not farming it out," he says.