Original subtitles

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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