Mulholland Drive

When this assignment came up, I was excited because David Lynch was a counterintuitive yet profoundly powerful visual storyteller. There were so many peculiar things about him, his regular smoking, his practice of transcendental meditation for decades, and being famous for eating the same lunch every day (tuna sandwiches, with feta & tomato). What can I bring that would pull out his character and communicate a story to the viewer?

I had a mounted taxidermy dog head from previous shoot and his people reluctantly okayed my bringing along a couple of items.

Picture us in a glass in room, the dog head discreetly mounted on the window beside him. He’s polite, but introverted, so I try to make conversation. “Thank you for letting me bring the prop today.“ “Yes, that’s fine, I like it.” “I reply, “Oh, you like dogs?“ Without missing a beat he said, “No, I like dog heads.”

I typically try to approach a subject multiple ways: a high concept picture, a simple tight face shot, and I pulled back environmental shot. This last scenario was achieved through his combination home and office space on Mulholland Drive. The architecture and landscaping were perfectly aligned, and have that great sense of playing where the line between nature and human influence meet.

At this point I knew that he wouldn’t do much in terms of gesture or opposing, so I asked him to sit on the ledge above the glass framed door to his office.

I struggled with the light, as it went from sun to cloud every 30 seconds. In frustration, I called out to him, “Mr. Lynch, you are a film director, please look up at the sky and let me know if we’re going to get consistent sun for a few minutes.” He looked up to the sky, squinting , and after a beaten said, “Yes, it looks good. You’ve got a few minutes…“

“Fantastic,“ I whisper to myself. I put the appropriate settings on the camera and started shooting the sun glowed shots in earnest and it looked so beautiful! 15 seconds in, it clouded over for good.

My takeaway was that either Lynch is the kind of big picture filmmaker who leaves the technical aspects to his team, or he was fucking with me in a darkly Lynchian sort of way.

Top Image: David Lynch, Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles CA. November 14, 2006.

Second Image: Mr. David Lynch, cigarette not shown.

Bottom Image: For the Presence series. With most subjects I had to spend a few minutes explaining the project before they would participate, often getting into some of the history of conceptual art. With Lynch, I was half way through my first sentence and he was already hiding in the shot.