All language subtitles for Classic.Movies.The.Story.Of.S05E04.Classic.Movies.Mulholland.Drive.2001.1080p.NOW.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-RAWR_track3_[eng]

David Lynch was one of a kind,
an artist turned filmmaker,

not that he saw the difference,

who gave us some of the most
beautiful, most haunting,

and most brilliantly elusive films
ever made.

Greatest of all his mysteries is
Mulholland Drive,

the film he described with nonchalant
brevity as a love story

set in the city of dreams.

But that doesn't begin to capture
the mesmerising complexity at work.

But what would you say
was the legacy of his career

up to the point where
he comes to make Mulholland Drive?

Well, by that point he had become
possibly unique in that he was,

I would say, a surrealist filmmaker,

who had achieved enormous critical,
commercial and awards-based success,

which has never really happened
before or since, I would say,

in, certainly not in Hollywood.

But he was making films
which defied the rules of

the Hollywood industry,
of the studio system,

of the conventions of Hollywood,

and yet he was making hit movies.

What are you doing?
We don't stop here.

Get out of the car.

It is the story of Laura Harring's
brunette, known as Rita,

who has survived a car accident on
that famous meandering road

above Los Angeles,
but has lost her memory.

And it is a story of Naomi Watts's
blonde, Betty,

a would-be actress newly arrived
in Hollywood,

who attempts to discover the secret
of Rita's true identity.

Only Betty is not quite who she seems
to be either.

I thought when I woke up,
I thought sleep would do it.

What's wrong?

I don't know who I am.

What do you mean? You're Rita.
No, I'm not.

I don't know what my name is.
I don't know who I am.

David Lynch's career
can be divided into two parts,

and one is his cinema, Eraserhead,

Blue Velvet,
and then of course Twin Peaks,

which is very interesting because
for him to move from the cinema,

and I mean a really particular
cinema,

and then take that same sensibility
to TV,

it's an interesting sort of arc,

and you can see elements of
both of those visions and shapes

in Mulholland Drive.

But by the time he
makes Mulholland Drive,

people are starting to question
whether he's in the dark

a little bit, in his career.

In 1992, he makes a spin-off
of Twin Peaks,

called Fire Walk with Me,
which is a huge flop.

He was working on various projects
around this time,

he makes Lost Highway, which is now
recognised as a great neo-noir

but didn't do very well at the time.

People found it baffling,
they didn't really get it.

They just thought basically that his
films didn't make sense any more.

And then Lynch begins to develop the
idea for a pilot called Mulholland,

based on Mulholland Drive
in Los Angeles,

and about an aspiring actress.

And so he goes ahead and writes
and casts this project,

even starts filming on it,

and then ABC watches the pilot
and turns it down.

They find it too weird,
too "Lynchian", ultimately.

And his idea was to make it
a mystery story

similar in some ways to Twin Peaks,
where the central mystery was

what would keep viewers
coming every week.

But ultimately, that version
of the story didn't quite work out

the way he had planned.

Now he lived in Los Angeles,
he worked in Los Angeles,

but he had a kind of spiritual
creative relationship

with Los Angeles.
How would you describe it?

In very practical terms,
he loved the light.

I mean he would go on and on
about the, I mean that's part of

his obsession with the history of
Hollywood as well,

the idea that filmmakers came to
Hollywood for the light,

and what the light in Hollywood
allowed filmmakers,

including himself, to do.

But he was also intrigued
by the duality of Hollywood,

so this idea of a City of Dreams
where theoretically anything

was possible, but that behind closed
doors, dark and sordid things

were taking place, and that terrible
murders had happened,

and he found it
both creatively liberating

and also incredibly restricting.

It was the fact that there was no,
that there was a constant city

of conflict in a sense for him,

but he loved the beauty
of its possibility.

Released in 2001, Mulholland Drive
asks more questions than it answers.

As far as Lynch was concerned, film
and dreams were much the same thing.

A man of many parts,

and finally they are all on show
together

in Paris's Cartier Foundation.

Sketches and sculpture,
wallpaper with a difference,

for David Lynch it seems the
creative process is unstoppable.

What fascinates me is ideas.

Everything we do, I believe,

starts with an idea.

And sometimes we get ideas
for paintings,

sometimes we get ideas for music,

sometimes we get ideas for cinema,

but everything starts with an idea.

Never before had so much of Lynch's
work been exhibited under one roof.

Dozens of canvases and
a hundred photographs,

giant mixed media installations.

Some of the work dates back to his
teenage years,

work that often defies
a verbal explanation.

To me, again, it's a wordless thing.

It's an intuitive thing. So much of
this is just writing ideas

that have nothing to do with
a kind of an intellectual thing.

It's an intuitive, um, journey.

The first word that comes to mind
when you speak about David Lynch,

is surrealist. Yes, he is
a surrealist to a certain extent,

but he is also a wonderful artist,

he's an archaeologist
of the subconscious,

and he's just...

he brings a painterly attitude
to his filmmaking.

So they are always great to look at,
even if sometimes

they are hard to understand.

The films that David Lynch make
are an extension of his own

creative impulse as a painter and
an artist.

He also makes furniture.

He is kind of a polymath in terms of
culture and his own art.

It started as a cancelled television
series before wending its twisted way

to a feature film. The result is that
stunning fable of Hollywood cruelty,

lost innocence, shattered identity,
murder,

and the city that the director had
called home for so many years.

It might be his most personal film.

This film was meant to be TV,
that's the way he was going to go,

and he did a pilot and all of that,

but ABC didn't like it.

And if you, I grew up on ABC,

so I can see what would've actually
made them nervous about this,

but he still had the material,
he still had the story,

he still had what he wanted to say.

So what was he gonna do with it?
He turned it into a film.

He had a kind of
a love-hate relationship

with the studio system itself,
- didn't he?
- Yes.

I mean I think that he felt that
Hollywood, you know,

owed its existence to the studio
system and the long tradition of

filmmaking was there
because of the studios,

but he also felt that his own
encounters with the studio system

had been creatively problematic and
that he was never properly welcomed

into that fraternity or club.

So he always felt like an outsider
even though he loved cinema.

One thing is certain. Once you have
watched Mulholland Drive,

you are held in its spell forever.

Oh...

I can't believe it.

Having trained as an artist,
David Lynch was driven by the idea of

creating what he called
breathing paintings.

This led him to Hollywood, where he
pursued an astonishingly surreal

variation on film noir.

Works such as Eraserhead,
Blue Velvet,

legendary television series
Twin Peaks,

and the time-twisting Lost Highway,
and then Mulholland Drive.

Up to the point of Mulholland Drive,

Lynch was already very well
established as an unconventional,

uncompromising director of films

that were mysterious, disturbing,

occasionally funny,

and he basically raised the game
for Hollywood

in terms of films that might
puzzle people

and yet also actually
find an audience.

So he kind of crossed over

from being a pure art filmmaker,

which is basically what he was,

into the commercial arena,
almost by default.

And it's because the work was
so interesting and varied,

and also because nobody was making
films like him at that time,

and so he attracted quite a lot of
really fine actors,

some stars, who just wanted to work
with this new guy on the block

and see what he would come up with.

'International capital
of the motion picture

is a fabulous suburb of Los Angeles,
Hollywood,

a community whose name alone is
a magic word throughout the world.

But in Hollywood, where 65% of all
films are produced,

the making of movies is a serious
and complicated business.'

Inspiration came from Los Angeles
itself,

in particular the road that snakes
along Santa Monica mountain,

from Cahuenga Pass to the Pacific.

This almost mystical, semi-wild
asphalt ribbon,

haunted by suicides and murders,

and named after William Mulholland,

the engineer behind the city's
waterways,

who robbed the farmers blind.

Lynch was struck by the image of
scarlet tail lights

twisting and turning and disappearing
into the dark.

Lynch's relationship to Los Angeles
was first of all

a working relationship because that
is where it was mainly, and still is

where movies and TV are made.

What's interesting about Lynch is
that he was able to sort of take

bits of Los Angeles,
look at Los Angeles,

as almost like a kind of Martian
in a way,

and find the Los Angeles

that actually told him the story
that he needed to tell.

Mulholland Drive is
quite a wild place

in relation to the rest of
Los Angeles,

so those of us who are not
Los Angelinos,

we don't think of Mulholland Drive,

we think of Sunset Boulevard
and so forth.

But Mulholland Drive is
a very different kind of escarpment,

it goes up, it has wild animals
in and out of it,

it's quite dark.

So it's, in a sense, the...

I guess this underbelly of LA,

the things that LA
don't want you to see.

And it's not even ugly, the part,
it's what's hidden.

It's what's wild, it's what's not
been tamed, quite tamed.

And so with his imagination,
he would have chosen that road

to make his story about.

And the other part of it, you know,
you think all the movies

that are named after roads,
this Mulholland Drive

is a kind of metaphor

for that which is not seen
by most people

who encounter Hollywood, and most of
us encounter Hollywood on screen.

So we see sun and we see sea,
the ocean,

and we see all of that,
and this is darkness.

This is darkness, this is secrets,
this is closed doors,

all the things that California
is not supposed to be.

It also has a sort of a tragedy
baked into it,

because it's named after a guy
called William Mulholland,

who built the water system and
the dams that allowed Los Angeles

to become a city, but whose work,
his finest work, fell to pieces

literally the following day after he
had given it a final inspection,

and absolutely guaranteed
that it was solid.

So he died broken-hearted and broke.

And so named after a man who was
essential for Los Angeles,

but also everything about him
crumbled to dust.

So you have these Hollywood mansions
on Mulholland Drive,

but then you also have this
incredibly dangerous road

that snakes off into the darkness.

It's, um, it's a road of
contradictions.

How would you say
it influenced the film itself?

How did it influence David Lynch?

Well, he used to love the oddity of
driving along Mulholland Drive

at night and the day,

the sort of the difference between
driving along it at night

and then driving along it during the
day. He found driving during the day

more sinister than driving at night.

He felt that the darkness of
the road was more apparent, oddly,

when the day was there.

He felt that the twinkling views
that you could occasionally get of

Hollywood, made Hollywood beautiful.

But in the daytime, the sort of
the very sharp speed bends

where people had come off the road,
reflected sort of the things

that he found alarming about it.

Mulholland Drive began life as
a television spin-off to Twin Peaks.

It then evolved into a stand-alone
pilot for a new noir-style thriller,

the story of Laura Harring's mystery
brunette,

who survives an attempted murder on
that famous road,

and blonde ingenue Naomi Watts,

who discovers this distraught woman
in her shower.

Somehow shocked by the Lynchian
strangeness involved,

ABC Studios shelved the project.

It was Pierre Edelman of StudioCanal
who came to the rescue.

Lynch had shown his old friend
the pilot,

and Edelman knew
this was something important.

Negotiating the rights from ABC,

he financed an additional shoot
a year later,

in order to refashion the pilot
as a cryptic feature film.

As Lynch described it, the story was
now divided into three parts,

a perfect mystery, a sad illusion,
and love. Make of that what you will.

So for Lynch, the kind of three acts
that he sees Mulholland Drive in

have to take shape, and the sort
of conclusions, if there are any,

and that's another question,
have to kind of happen more quickly

and more succinctly outside of it
being a TV series,

which is a much more long-running
project.

So StudioCanal wants him to shoot
more beyond the material

he already has, and he is then
tasked with figuring out

how to extend this story
in a satisfying way.

And for his part, he said he felt
that the story's plot tied up

all of its loose ends. I'm not sure
I totally agree with him,

but maybe that's on the individual
you are,

but that's the nature of
Mulholland Drive, it is,

some might say unwieldy,
kind of circular story,

which very much plays narratively on
the ideas of memory, dream, fantasy,

and is essentially
a giant question mark.

And so I think in many ways,
him having to change the narrative

from TV to feature, allowed him to
play a little bit less with

the viewer in terms of long-term
viewing, like TV does,

but also brought all those ideas
together

and make something really coherent.

The career of Australian actress
Naomi Watts was going nowhere

when she landed her greatest role.

She had looked so different from her
photo, rushing off her flight

without make-up to meet Lynch.

That stirred ideas in the director.

First, she plays Betty,

the over-the-top, golly-gee,
out-of-towner,

leaping like Nancy Drew
into a new case.

By the second shoot, she's playing
Diane, a washed-up actress,

filled with a bitter regret. We never
doubt they are the same person.

Naomi Watts is actually perfect for
these two different incarnations.

The thing is that both these
actresses on the screen

are a sort of part of,
they're split into two,

they become doubles of each other.

And Watts herself was actually on
the verge, having spent ten years

in Hollywood without any significant
success,

was about to actually leave
the business and go back home

to Australia, when Lynch finally
cast her.

He liked the look of her
straight away,

and when she turned up to actually
talk to him,

it wasn't even an audition,
he just wanted to meet her,

she was so relieved that somebody
had actually sort of,

somebody of his calibre as well,
wanted her in the film,

that she actually cried
during the interview,

and he knew that was the thing
he wanted.

He wanted someone who had strength,
was clearly a good actress,

but had this sort of unbelievable
vulnerabilities.

Bomb.

And action.

You're still here.

I came back.
I thought that's what you wanted.

Betty comes off as the all-American
girl, but she's actually Canadian,

which is his big... that's the
biggest joke actually in the film,

and it's very witty,

and it shows
about sort of his feeling about

the amorphous nature of Canadians
in relation to Americans.

So she's that.
And then she is this other person,

who is in the acting scene
where she does her audition,

you don't even know what to make of
that, it's so devastating.

Everybody who watches the audition
is applauding, except the women,

who are standing there like
Macbeth's witches

under all this black, thinking we've
got to take her out of here now

to the next place.
But you sit there, as the viewer,

I mean where did that come from?

And it overwhelms everyone in
the room, it overwhelms the film.

It also opens up a kind of Hades
as well,

that he wants you to enter into
because now he's gonna tell you

about the business,
how it really works,

how he's experienced what they call
the business,

which is making films in Hollywood.

Don't you be a stranger around here.
We'd love to have you here.

Come on, Betty.
Thank you again, Mr Brown,

and it was nice meeting all of you.

Bye.

Bye.

It's a slam dunk.
Where the hell did you find her?

God, that was awful.

Pfft! Cow.

Only in Lynch's inverted thinking
would the brunette be modelled on

Marilyn Monroe, and he was just crazy
about Laura Harring's head shot.

Then the actress had quite a story
anyway.

A former Miss USA, she was divorced
from the great-great-grandson of

German chancellor Otto von Bismarck,

and effectively a countess.

She had dabbled in daytime soaps,

but had the aura of
Isabella Rossellini.

And as if destiny were
making a point,

Harring was caught in a minor car
accident on the way to her audition.

So tell me a bit about Laura Harring.

I love this story that Lynch
liked to cast from head shots,

classic Hollywood head shots,
and he saw her head shot

and he was just crazy for it,
and I have to meet her.

But she sort of lived up to her
head shot, didn't she?

She lived like a Lynchian character
in a sense,

so she grew up in Mexico,
her parents divorced when she was

very young. She moved to Texas,

was shot in the head in a drive-by
when she was, I think, 12.

She then went on to become
Miss Texas,

Miss USA, travelled the world where
she met Count von Bismarck's...

- It's his great-great-grandson.
- Yeah,
who was still the Count von Bismarck

and married him for two years. They
divorced and she kept the title.

So she was Countess Bismarck for...

and then with those, I think,
excellent qualifications,

set out to become a Hollywood star,

and it's a phenomenally appropriate
training for the role of Rita.

Yet she walks into that film and
she brings the aura of

Isabella Rossellini, doesn't she?
She has something, a presence.

I mean Lynch can cast so well.
I think not just cast so well,

there's something about Lynch that
finds the right person,

but he then draws out of them
a performance that is quite often

their career best. I mean,

in terms of what's your favourite
Nick Cage role,

mine is Wild at Heart. So he just
gets the best out of actors.

Naomi Watts in this film is
phenomenal.

Laura Harring is
just perfect in this.

He knows, all he does is take
the head shot and a chat,

he doesn't even properly audition,

and then decides on that
that they're the right person,

and makes them become as good as he
wants them to be.

He knows that what you're looking at
is her, her beauty.

She is incredible looking.

Incredible presence.
You believe everything.

And so when she turns out to be
something else at the end,

toward the end of the movie, it's
flesh crawling because who is this?

Who is this and why is she doing,
and why did she do what she did?

It casts you out of the movie
for a second,

which is what he wants you to do
anyway.

It takes you out of the film, and
you have to, as I still have to do,

you have to rethink
bits of that film.

You have to actually go back
and think, wait a minute,

I'm looking for a clue, I'm looking
for something,

because he must have dropped
something and I missed it.

He must have because how could this
happen?

And he, you know, but, you know,

he didn't, you know, it's just like,
you know,

and the other incredible part
that people seldom talk about

and was the first stunning thing for
me when I first saw the film

when it was first released,
is the great

Ann Miller, a great diva
of Old Hollywood.

This woman was a tap-dancing
ballerina, incredible person.

He's made... He shows her at this
point in her life as almost rigid,

like she can't, she's not moving,
her face isn't moving.

And if you know her work -
and he knew her work of course,

Ann Miller would have been twirling
about in the day,

and that's really frightening.
That's really frightening too.

Because what he's saying is, this is
Ann Miller, everybody,

you know that if you're into
Hollywood movies,

so look at the phoniness
of the whole thing.

She's really, to me,
the scariest thing in it.

Justin Theroux plays hipster director
Adam,

resisting studio demands to cast a
mystery brunette in his latest film.

His life would descend
into a free-falling nightmare.

Kicked out of his Hollywood Hills
home, his bank account emptied,

he ends up guided by an enigmatic
cowboy

on stranger and stranger roads.

He is surely a cipher for Lynch
himself,

being drawn by those tail lights
deeper into his story.

Lynch had been around the block
a few times by the time

Mulholland Drive was being made,

and I think you can see some of his
frustrations with Hollywood

generally, as well as his own
specific frustrations in the film.

Justin Theroux is not an entirely
likeable character

by any stretch of the imagination,
which I think is interesting.

But he is someone who earnestly
wants to get his film made

and who has it taken away from him,
who loses control of the picture,

who becomes embroiled
in the intrapersonal politics and

sexual politics around movie-making.

And how much of that is directly
personal, you can't ever say,

but I think Lynch did struggle and
was very angry with the idea of

having his work interfered with
by money men, by outsiders,

by the commercial element of
Hollywood filmmaking.

And of course he had
quite a few projects fail,

or be pilloried or massively
misunderstood by the general public.

What better inspiration for a film
about the treachery of Hollywood

than the treachery of Hollywood.

Lynch translates his many studio woes
into the sinister schemes of

a fictional film company.

Twin Peaks villain
Michael J Anderson

is the studio head, Mr Roque,
who has mob connections.

While Lynch's composer,
Angelo Badalamenti,

was cajoled into playing
a monosyllabic hood

who spits his espresso out
in disgust.

David Lynch loves Hollywood movies,
he loves the older movies,

and he absorbs them. And he's
quite happy to quote from them.

He'll quote from Hitchcock,
he'll quote from Billy Wilder,

he'll quote from, in fact,
Ingmar Bergman,

so all of these things are sort of
floating around inside his head,

and ultimately manifest themselves
on the screen.

This is, you know,
this is great stuff because it,

apart from anything else it means
that you can consider yourself

very clever if you can spot which
elements are from other films.

But it, at the end of the day,

he layers them and
knits them together

into something that
could only be made by him.

But there's, you know, constantly
throughout it and throughout

Lynch's work, there's this
application of dream logic,

that a film can, you know, slip the
bounds of reality or the reality

it presents,
to move into very surreal places.

So this is a very surreal depiction
- of the Hollywood machine.
- Yes.

And perhaps even more than some of
his previous films,

the gears will shift and,
as you imply,

very strange things will happen.
Yes.

I mean his depiction of
the people in control of Hollywood

are, I would say, unique.

People have done films
about the, you know,

the horrors of the Hollywood elite,

and they're normally men behind
desks, sweaty guys with, you know,

they call through to their
secretaries and they're just,

it's a standard trope
in a lot of films.

These people are something
other entirely. Mr Roque

feels like a dream in himself.
His room is odd, he looks odd,

the way he behaves is
incredibly odd.

It's... it is like a nightmare
just watching his scenes.

The cowboy doesn't feel like a real
person either, the way he speaks,

the way he acts. This is how
Hollywood has never been, you know,

the studio heads have never been
depicted like this before.

So you're thinking, well,
are they real?

Is this some kind of fever dream
of Hollywood?

The powers that be can't be this
because this is,

but I guess for Lynch, what he's
saying is in this city

built on dreams and imagination and
lurid fantasy, well, why not?

Why isn't it run by mysterious
figures in unusual situations

who you wouldn't even recognise
in the real world?

The film effectively begins
with the original pilot,

the mystery set up between
Betty and Rita.

Named after Rita Hayworth,
from the framed Gilda poster

on Betty's apartment wall,
as combined of course with plenty of

weird Lynchian subplots.

But when they visit the Club Silencio
where the singer lip-syncs

to Roy Orbison's Crying, a temporal
rupture spins us into

the desperate more realistic events
of the second shoot.

The first two-thirds of the story

are now open to drastic
re-interpretation.

The way that Lynch inserts us
into his films

is through his generosity.

It seems an odd thing to say
about a film director,

but I think that David Lynch is
an incredibly generous filmmaker,

in spite of the fact that many
people believe his films

to be impenetrable. They may be in
strict possible terms,

but what he is actually doing is
inviting us

to A, bring our own interpretation
of these films,

he doesn't control
the interpretation, he doesn't say,

he doesn't guide us through it,
you know,

we're basically
working without a map.

He invites us and he's very happy
for us to have

different interpretations.

But not only that,
I think most importantly,

he's also inviting us to, or
inspiring us to use our imagination.

Lynch sought to capture
the different moods of Los Angeles.

Shooting in the Hollywood Hills
Downtown, El Segundo, Hancock Park,

and LAX. He also drew upon some
distinctive movie inspirations.

The West Coast noir of Vertigo and
Sunset Boulevard.

The familiar Lynchian parallels
with the dream reality uncertainty

of the Wizard of Oz.

And references to his own work.

Betty's hometown is Deep River,

the name of the apartment block
in Blue Velvet.

You can say in a way, well, I will
say it, film, the cinema for him

is the moving bits of his own art.

It's not to... it's not a thing you
sit and you cerebrate about so much,

you're not thinking in the way you
would think at a lecture.

It's about experiencing it,

and experiencing yourself in
reaction to it.

That's what he wants you to do

because if you look at a great piece
of art, a great painting,

you are in dialogue with this piece
of work.

So for him, and it's fascinating
that he chose films,

because he's saying all the time

that to get a piece of work on
screen, or on television,

is a kind of artform in itself to
actually get the thing there,

to actually get it there intact,

the way you saw it, with the people
you wanna work with,

98% of the people
don't actually ever accomplish that.

So it's an act of bravery.

You see this guy in the back, and
the director is in the back,

he's in the back of the film, he's
in the back of the actors,

he's at the back of the story,
actually trying to make this happen,

and he's inviting you to go into his
own, I wouldn't say chaos

cos that's incorrect, he's inviting
you to go into his own vision

of what this industry
and the world is about.

What resonates so powerfully
within Lynch's work

is his willingness to disturb
the reality of his stories.

Recalling the surreal turns
taken by Twin Peaks,

Mulholland Drive gives way
to a perplexing dream logic.

What are we to make of the monstrous
hobo that lives in a dumpster?

Or that enigmatic cowboy?

Or the sweet old couple befriended by
Betty on her flight,

who later return as homunculi,
barely inches tall?

The sense of dread is inescapable.

So Lynch is often talked about in
terms of using nightmare logic,

and I think he does definitely have
this fascination with the Freudian,

with the uncanny,
with the idea of doubles,

with the idea of something
just seeming innocuous

but then ever so slightly off.

And he evokes this so strongly in
Mulholland Drive,

but also in many of his other works.

This sense of normality, which is
just slightly punctured

by this pervasive sense of evil,

this pervasive sense of
almost unknown.

And I think you have that
in a nightmare, right,

you have that where you're going
about your daily business in a shop

or an office or your home,

and then something inexplicable
existing within that environment,

and it creates
an incredible sense of dread.

Reviews for Mulholland Drive
were rapturous.

This was the grand summation
of Lynch's themes.

He won Best Director at Cannes,

August French film journal
Cahiers du Cinema

voted it the film of the 2000s,

while a poll by the BBC declared it
the film of the 21st century.

Hollywood was left
scratching its head.

A bemused Academy would grant Lynch
his second Best Director nomination.

But it is one of the great Oscar
injustices that Watts

didn't even get nominated
for Best Actress.

The film wasn't just well reviewed,

it was adored by critics.

How did it elevate, what level
did it elevate Lynch to?

I think it elevated him to this sort
of kind of gnomic,

mystic director figure, who had some
kind of almost shamanic quality

in Hollywood. He was nominated for
Best Director,

the film made an enormous amount
of money.

And in that film,
there are no compromises.

So Hollywood looked at this,

you know, this is insane, this is
not the way everything should work,

but it's a hit, it's beautiful,
everybody loves it. We love it.

What do we make...
How do we make sense of this man?

We can't make sense of him.
And so his success in and of itself

was bewildering to the town
that he had this

very mischievous relationship with.

And I think it made him into this
phenomenal figure.

He... It's probably the high point
of his career, I would say,

it's probably his greatest work.

And it is without doubt
his most glorious moment.

That is the moment at which everyone
in the city that he both loves

and he hates, turns towards him
and says you are a genius.

Lynch asked that we surrender
to his mysteries,

yet he tapped into a collective need
to decode and demystify.

Fans love to posit theories,

that perky Betty is the hallucination
of heartbroken Diane.

That Rita is her ex-lover, an actress
actually named Camilla Rhodes.

With an air of mischief, in 2002
Lynch released a ten-point guide

to deciphering Mulholland Drive.

We must pay attention to red
lampshades, robes, ashtrays,

coffee cups, and the whereabouts
of Betty's Aunt Ruth.

Not that it really helped.

But don't you think there's something
a little bit infuriating about Lynch?

And what's delightful about his
films is that yes, he refuses,

yes, there's no confirmed
interpretation of any of his films,

but especially Mulholland Drive.

Yet he torments us with
the possibility of a solution,

and we as people like solutions,

we want the detective story to have
its ending.

And he's presenting those tropes to
us in this strange way.

But he sort of wants his cake and he
wants us to eat it at the same time.

It's an interesting dilemma
with Lynch.

Yes, I mean one question is, does he
know what's going on in his film?

And I think there's an argument
to say that he might not,

partly because he wrote one story
and then they said OK,

now you're going to have to make it
into a movie,

and he added another story
onto the end.

It may be that he didn't know if
there was a connection or not,

and he does uniquely, I think,
perhaps,

include a series of the ten clues.

He released this document,
- didn't he?
- Yes.

With the ten-point clues to, which
was partly a joke, wasn't it,

because they made things
- more confusing.
- Yes.

If you answer all of those questions
correctly, you learn nothing.

He basically asks you to go
through the film and

answer certain points,
what's the name of the film?

And you look out for things,
don't you, red lampshades,

and robes and ashtrays.
And then you try to connect them,

well, why is the red... why is the
red lampshade important?

And there is, it doesn't help.

It absolutely, trust me, I've done
it, it doesn't help at all.

And there's no doubt in anyone's
minds that we're watching

an absolute drop-dead masterpiece,

and it had sort of come out of
nowhere, you know,

and we knew that Lynch was an
extraordinary filmmaker, you know,

he had made some great, great, great
movies.

But I don't think any of us were
prepared for the sheer majesty

of this one. It's almost as if
every film he had made before then

had been leading up to this moment.

Just when you think you have a plot
or a mystery and

the film figured out,
it upends that,

it does something
totally inexplicable,

or it calls something into question
which you hadn't yet considered.

You're no longer sure about the kind
of character you're watching,

the kind of film you're watching, or
what any of us is supposed to be

or mean. So it...
it wrong-foots the viewer,

it invites you to mystery but then
it wants you to experience it

almost beyond logic.

The films aren't just puzzles to be
solved in a logical way,

they are
something to be experienced.

And that's I think what you come
away with, with Mulholland Drive.

Is Mulholland Drive his greatest
achievement in film? Yes. Yes.

It's his greatest achievement
because, first of all,

he's learnt a lot. He's learnt a lot
about how he has to make film.

He learns that
he is not an American filmmaker.

He is a filmmaker who is American,
and working in America,

but he is not an American filmmaker.

He knows the business inside and
out, but he's not of the business.

And he's got enough courage and
probably piss-off-ness

and everything else I can't say,

to say, right,
I'm gonna show you all,

ie, the audience and the business,
that I know exactly who you are.

I know exactly who you are, I know
exactly what LA is as well.

It's a dangerous place
because you guys are here.

And for all the people
who flock to LA,

all the sunny little girls who come
off the planes looking for a career,

they walk into the mall of
the business and you get churned up,

and you're spit out,

and you find things out about
yourself that you don't actually

need to find out, but you do,
and you're left high and dry

in the sort of meat grinder
that is Hollywood.

There is so much to treasure
about Mulholland Drive.

The tantalising mystery
that keeps it alive.

The astonishing multi-layered
performances.

That sense of a film unfolding
like a dream.

It is one of the great movies
about Los Angeles

and the dark magic of Hollywood.

Even compared to Eraserhead,
or Blue Velvet,

this is David Lynch's
defining nightmare.

And one more question, you know, you
say it's his greatest work. Why?

Because it is, I think,

for a filmmaker to make a film

which breaks apart the idea of what
film is whilst also celebrating

and despising film, is something
that is almost impossible to do

and I think it's
only been done once.

People have made films about the
problems that Hollywood presents,

people have made films about the
struggles of being a filmmaker in

Hollywood, but no-one has taken the
essence, the idea of film itself,

and torn that to pieces
in front of you on the screen,

and says this is what we're playing
with, this is what we're doing.

These are the mystic channels
that we go through.

This is something both wonderful,
incomprehensible,

and yet, at the same time, really,
really mundane.

And this is what you're watching.
So what are you gonna do about it?

And we are
flung to the back of our seats,

and we just, we're lost,
we're in his hands.

We just wish he'd keep going,
don't stop making this film,

don't stop this film, I just want
more of this, I need, I need more,

I need to know, I need to
understand. And he says no,

don't try to understand it,
just feel it.

Come on, sweetheart.

It's beautiful, a secret path.

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