Total Film, February 2002, Issue 61, p.72-74

Naomi Watts interviewed by Alan Morrison

Photography by Sheryl Nields Icon

When his new TV series Mulholland Drive was axed by its producers, David Lynch turned to his leading ladies Naomi Watts and Laura Harring to help him resurrect it as a movie. They agreed - whithout realising they´d have to jump into bed together...

When Naomi Watts and Laura Harring signed on for Mulholland Drive, they thought they were making a TV series - another small-screen psychodrama from a man who wrapped a blue-lipped Laura Palmer in plastic for Twin Peaks. They never dreamed that, two years later, they´d be at the Cannes festival promoting it as an feature film, following the mysterious Hollywood-based misadventures of a beautiful, amnesiac car-crash victim (Harring) and the naive starlet (Watts) who helps her.

The original pilot had been rejected by America´s ABC network (who were offended, among other things, by the swearing, the smoking and a "lingering" close-up of a dog turd), so Lynch re-edited the material he had and worked in two week´s worth of new footage paid for by French company Canal+ to make the project into a film. Says former soap-star Harring: "When I first met with David in 1999, he said, 'This character can go anywhere. He wasn´t kidding."

That´s for sure. After telling his actresses Mulholland Drive was to become a movie, Lynch informed them that one of the additional sequences they´d be filming was a nude love scene - with each other. "The anticipation was difficult but by the time we got around to the love scene, I knew it would be okay," Watts tells Total Film. "I don´t see it as erotic, though maybe it plays that way. The last time I saw it, I actually had tears in my eyes because I knew where the story was going. It broke my heart a little bit."

"I think of David as such a creative genius that whatever he asked me to do, I´d probably do," adds Harring. If the Sunset Beach star was at all uncomfortable doing the scene, it doesn´t show. "Somebody described me once as having the body of a woman who makes love all day and eats chocolate in bed," she says with a laugh. "I think it was a compliment."

Haring´s life story has enough high drama and plot twists to fill a mini-series of her own. Born in Northern Mexico (her original family name is Martinez), she moved with her mother and sisters to Texas when she was 11, where, within a year, she was grazed by a bullet during a drive-by shooting. "It came so close to shattering my skull," she recalls. "I could hear the blub, blub, blub of the blood gushing and my mother praying in Spanish."

Harring later attended high school in Switzerland, spent a summer in India as a social worker, and, at 18, was marooned in the Philippines when a man she had trusted held her passport hostage for eight months. After returning, she won the title of Miss USA, which led to her first acting job, playing the late Raul Julia´s wife in a TV movie about the Alamo. "At the end of the shoot," she says, "Raul challenged me to drink Tequila shorts with him. I don´t know if he had a crush on me, but he definitely wanted me to get drunk."

Watts, meanwhile, was born in Shoreham, England, and is the daughter of Pink Floyd´s tour manager, Peter Watts, who died when she was 10. At 14, she moved with her mother to Australia. "I had a real ambition to be a dancer," she says. "I remember seeing Fame and saying, 'Mum, can I go to New York and dance on table tops during maths?" She made her debut alongside Nicole Kidman in John Duigan´s coming-of-age pic Flirting, before playing Jet Girl in the big-screen adaptation of comic strip Tank Girl. Watts took that flop in her stride. "There ´re so mayn disappointments in this business, you just have to be resilient.," she muses. "It´s weird, though. The disappointment gets bigger as I get older. It´s like the scab keeps coming off."

Though both actresses are enjoying a career high with Mulholland Drive, neither has a clue as to what the film all really means, with the final act flummoxing critics and audiences alike. Lynch, of course, has never been one to offer explanations. "David didn´t really tell me much, but he never does, to this day," laughs Watts.

Still, both say they would work with Lynch again in a heartbeat. "Very few people know that he´s so funny, " says Harring, who reveals that the oddball director isn´t afraid of getting his hands - or, indeed, the rest of his body - dirty. "For one scene he asked me to roll in the dirt. I just looked at him with a blank stare and he said, 'Here, I´ll show you,' and started rolling around on the ground, and then all the crew joined him, too. It was really fun." For Watts, however, working with the man ehind Blue Velvet meant her getting dirty in an entirely different way. "He brings out the best in you," she says, "though the best doesn´t have to be the good. The best can be the dark side, too."

Dennis Hensley