[OBS: in Brazil the movie title was replaced for Cidade dos Sonhos ("City of Dreams"). I decided to use the original name for this translation. Also, the original text referenced other movies by their brazilian titles (i.e., História Real for Straight Story), not by the original titles, as I did below.]

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David Lynch speaks of Mulholland Drive, another one of his challenges to the linear conventions of cinema.

By Ana Maria Bahiana, from Los Angeles.

A blonde girl wins a dance contest. A dark limousine slides through the mists of the Hollywood hills. A young director is forced to show up at a meeting where mysterious mob types noisily manifest their predilection for expresso coffee. A young actress arrives in Los Angeles, the head filled with stardom dreams. A monster hides behind a snackbar at the heart of Hollywood. An amnesiac actress takes the name and persona of Rita Hayworth.

All these plots interlace, touch, do and undo their knots in City of Dreams (Mulholland Drive), David Lynch’s new film, that arrives now in Brazil. And that’s not to mention the cowboy dressed in white and his hollywoodian ranch, the theatre that only stages productions in playback, the clairvoyant that haunts a set of buildings, the box with psychic powers and the body that rots over the bed of an empty apartment.

For those who feared Lynch had surrendered to the pressures of the mainstream with the (deceiving) simplicity of Straight Story, Mulholland Drive is a comfort. Lynch proves that he continues in total control of his cinematographic project, and that this implies, almost always, a challenge to the viewer.

Ironically - in a very lynchian way -, it is the most visually sophisticated viewer that falls more easily on the smart trap of Mulholland Drive. The story that Lynch apparently suggests to him, in the first half of Mulholland, is of total innocence, not unlike a soap opera: young actress (the fantastic Naomi Watts) arrives in Hollywood from the country, full of stardom dreams, sees herself comfortably living in the apartment of her aunt, a third rate [movie] industry veteran, and has her peace shaken by the sudden appearance of a beautiful brunette (Laura Harring, ex-miss United States) with a wound on the forehead, apparently a survivor of a car accident and totally amnesiac.

A tenuous mystery tale follows, intertwined with seduction and with what seems to be another narrative of instant success in Hollywood. It is when the viewer is already filling the tale’s apparent gaps with his own imagination - and with references of other films - that Lynch begins to play with our ability to follow a narrative, or yet, with the movies’ ability to create, in our head, different narratives.

The adventures of the two girls - and of the young director (Justin Theroux) on whom both keep bumping - in the city of dreams become gradually more awkward, until a complete narrative subversion that Lynch throws, without warning, at the unprepared viewer’s forehead. What were we seeing, really? And which story was being told? By whom? As David Lynch himself says in this interview - a chat intertwined with many sips of black coffee with sugar and blows of Marlboro, in a meeting room of a Beverly Hills hotel -, everything makes sense. But maybe not the same sense for everyone.

David Lynch (laughing very much): Ok, that’s right. Thanks for the sincerity. Well, there are many kinds of films. Most of them, nowadays, don’t demand much thinking. That makes me very, very upset. It makes me upset that they think the audiences have grown unused to thinking and that they only want things spelled out for them, in a platter. That’s bullshit, and a big one. People love to think. We are all detectives. We love to observe, we love to deduce. It is great to pay attention. We have a lot of fun this way. It is important not to be afraid of paying attention, not to be afraid of using intuition and thinking/feeling what way will take us to some conclusion. After an experience like seeing this movie, each person gets an intuitive, personal knowledge, which may lead to a personal conclusion. We know much more than we admit, or maybe we are afraid to admit. It’s wonderful to have an abstract thing over which we can talk and draw our own conclusions. It’s one of the things I like the most on cinema - that it can be this big abstract and beautiful thing.

I don’t confirm anything (more laughter). I didn’t come here to confirm anything. What for? Taking away the pleasure of everybody? When I see a film, or when I read a book, I don’t go after the author to ask what I read or saw. A good work was woven and planned for a long time to be what it is and to have a certain effect on our mind. Anyway, most of the authors I like is dead and I can’t dig them up to ask what they meant.

Of course it is. And a very nice one. Look, what I can recommend to everybody is: watch it again; pay attention; everything starts at the beginning, since the very beginning. Above all things pay attention - at least that’s what I like to do when I go to the movies.

No. I almost never remember my dreams. But the idea of the dream and the way dreams work fascinates me. The way a dream is a story, with the structure of a story. I keep more the sensation of dreams. The best for me is to combine the surface of a simple story with the sensation of a dream, with the abstractions possible in a dream.

This was going to be a series for ABC [network], and it would be an inconclusive, open-ended pilot. In a pilot you have the opportunity to explore many different storylines, and we were working at it at the time of Straight Story. Many strange things happened at the time we finished the pilot. When at last it was in a shape we believed we could show ABC…Well, it wasn’t a hit. They hated it. Hated it completely (laughs very hard). And it seemed it would be the end of everything. But then, and I love when this unexpected things happen, came the opportunity to turn the project into a film. A film has other needs. I needed new ideas. Very interesting ideas. And I had none.

I sat on my favourite chair, one night, and the ideas simply came. Naturally. Without any effort. But they meant a whole new structure, and many additional scenes, more work. Then you see, this project wanted to assume these traits, wanted to be this way, but it had to come this far through the longest way.

I really don’t know. Not in details. But I suspect that it is a bit of the process that is occurring with cinema, too. In the beginning, the studio founders oriented themselves by instinct. There were no rules. There were no polls. There was no need for any of this. All of it ended in cinema and, with much more intensity, in TV. Now everything is measured and polled. And one of these polls, it seems, determined that people don’t watch TV series anymore because they don’t have patience to follow a story that develops along many episodes. And that’s it, basically, what interests me. I love a story that evolves along many episodes. That’s the only thing that draws me to TV. Because the rest is just suffering and boredom.

There is this huge bag of talents that is Los Angeles. This is one of the best things about this city: you can throw a rock in any direction and it will fall on a sea of available talent.

It doesn’t change much. I believe that, if the right person for a role exists, it will show up. Usually, I start with photographs. I look photos of the actors within the parameters of the characters and make a selection. On the next stage, I meet personally with the selected candidates. It’s not really a test, it’s a chat, mostly. In this chat, I start to involve them in some scenes and watch their reactions. Actually, you have much more than simply their reactions to the text. You have an universe of feelings and emotions. It’s not hard, in this context, to see who is the right person for a role.

For me, the name of this street, its very existence, knowing that this street is there, gives me a feeling of deep mystery. In some moments, Mulholland Drive seems entirely peaceful and beautiful. In others, completely mysterious, and with a very clear element of fear. Maybe it comes from Mulholland Drive’s surroundings, from the fact that from one side you can see the whole (San Fernando) Valley, and from the other, Hollywood. This was one of the first ideas that came to me, it was the basis of everything.

Definitely. The city is a fundamental part of it all. It is not the whole truth about Los Angeles, nor the whole truth about Hollywood and the industry. It’s just a story, with these characters. But it has to be told in Los Angeles, and that’s why it was filmed entirely here.

I love music. And I thank Angelo Badalamenti (composer and arranger of soundtracks, including Mulholland Drive’s) for bringing me into the world of music. My first interest was not exactly for music, but for sound effects. It was from my collaboration with Angelo that I began to understand and to appreciate better the world of music - and I realized that many of the laws of music are identical to the laws of cinema, in terms of rhythm, in terms of presenting themes, of atmosphere. It’s very common for a musical piece to be the basis for a whole cinematographic architecture, for me. I remember, for instance, that during the filming of The Elephant Man, in a Sunday afternoon, I wasn’t working, I was at home and I listened to an adagio for strings on the radio. Suddenly the whole ending of the movie came to me (it was the Adagio for Strings, by Samuel Barber, which, in fact, was used in the movie’s soundtrack). The more I work, the more I see that there is a real magic in music and in the way it relates to images.

It was a song I was going to use in Blue Velvet. I listened to it for the first time in a cab in New York when I went there to meet Kyle MacLachlan (Blue Velvet protagonist), and we were crossing Central Park. I went crazy with the song and, when I came to North Carolina, where we were going to film, I bought a Roy Orbison greatest hits collection. I listened to In Dreams, loved it even more and forgot about Crying. Many, many years later, I am at home and my agent calls me saying that he wanted me to meet a person, a singer that had an incredible voice. I said "sure", and he said "I’m going now to your house". I have a small recording studio at home and, said and done, in that same morning this girl came to me, Rebekah Del Rio. She had barely arrived, I hadn’t even offered her coffee or anything, and she was already in the studio - and then she started to sing the most amazing version of Crying that I had ever heard. A version in Spanish, that I didn’t know. It is that recording, exactly - the recording we made four minutes after Rebekah came to my house - that is in the filme. She has the voice of an angel. An unbelievable talent.

I’m not an intellectual! Artist, maybe.

I usually say that, on that day, we all suddenly found out we had cancer. Perhaps many of us, in the so called creative community, were with our heads stuck in the sand. After that morning, that became impossible. We found out there are terrible things in the world - and what are we going to do about it? I still don’t have the answer except, constantly, wish the best possible for the whole world. Of course I want justice, but above all I want peace in the world, and I think we must watch very carefully what we are doing, and really try to understand the rood of all these problems.