After an exhausting 25-day run, the 2014 Seattle International Film Festival (America’s largest with 452 films screened this year) came to a close earlier this month with Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age epic Boyhood grabbing the lion’s share of the festival’s Golden Space Needle awards. Linklater’s episodic, observational film won more competition prizes than any other in the fest’s forty-year history, taking Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress for Patricia (Lost Highway) Arquette, who edged out Juliette Binoche in Norway’s 1,000 Times Good Night. Linklater’s twelve-years-in-the-making Boyhood is fast becoming the darling of 2014’s festival circuit, and appreciative Seattle audiences sold out every screening, applauding enthusiastically at the end of this sprawling journey of everyday American life. (See my colleague Jonathan’s in-depth review here.)
While I’ve long been a fan of Richard Linklater’s unique body of work, and Boyhood is indeed something very special, for me the highlight of SIFF 2014 was the appearance of David Lynch’s muse Laura Dern to accept the festival’s Outstanding Achievement in Acting award. After an hour-long discussion with film critic Elvis Mitchell, Dern’s second collaboration with Lynch (the Palme d’Or-winning Wild at Heart) was screened, and that Wizard of Oz-inspired l’amour fou remains as colorfully twisted as when it premiered at Cannes a full twenty-four years ago. The onscreen pairing here of Dern with her mother Diane Ladd (as Lula and Marietta Fortune, respectively) is one of the great mother/daughter cinema duets put on film (they’d work together again in Lynch’s Inland Empire). The fact that Ladd was also nominated for an Oscar as Marietta makes their collaboration all the more wonderful. Still, the heart of the film is the red-hot chemistry between Dern and Nicolas Cage and their characters’ undying passion, able to overcome all obstacles Lynch throws in their way before the film’s ecstatic Love Me Tender finale.
Before Laura Dern was presented her appropriately bizarre Dale Chihuly-designed glass award, Hollywood’s most fearless actress was introduced to the Egyptian theater crowd in a meandering, heartfelt speech by her longtime friend, Seattle’s own Eddie Vedder. “It’s hard to know where to begin, because of the depth of her work, the width of her work,” effused Pearl Jam’s frontman. “It’s wide, it’s high, it’s well-rounded, it’s jagged, it’s forceful, it’s gentle, and I don’t think there are any colors on the palate she hasn’t used.” Continuing in a musical vein Vedder added, “Wild at Heart is a classic album. Blue Velvet is a classic album. My favorite of all is Citizen Ruth, an unbelievable classic album. Laura is able to do this thing to be on the edge and take us with her. Laura Dern … she can play.”
The statuesque Miss Dern strode onto the stage, accepted the unwieldy cone of glass, then sat down with Elvis Mitchell to discuss her uniquely varied career. Being raised by two intensely talented parents, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, Laura was completely at ease on movie sets from the start. While her parents were making films with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese and Hal Ashby, around that time Laura made her first screen appearance at the ripe age of seven, eating an ice cream cone in the background of a scene from Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (for which her mother received her first Oscar nomination). They shot the scene nineteen times, so lucky Laura got to eat a total of nineteen ice cream cones. “Are you okay, you didn’t get sick?” asked Scorsese. When Laura replied that she was just fine, Scorsese went up to Diane Ladd and said, “You see this kid? She ate nineteen ice creams and didn’t throw up … this girl needs to be an actress!” Laura then laughingly explained that later when her parents would try to discourage her from taking up acting, she would trot out Scorsese’s words time and time again until they finally, helplessly relented.
Laura Dern’s fearless, vanity-free approach to acting fully began to blossom under the direction of perhaps the finest living film artist working today, the great David Lynch. Lynch (shockingly) has made only ten feature films, and Dern has starred in three of them. When Elvis Mitchell asked how she and Lynch first connected, Dern reflected on their first meeting regarding her eventual Blue Velvet role. “I came in, I was just turning seventeen. He asks about your life. We talked for about twenty, thirty minutes and then he said, ‘Yeah, you should be in this, you’re the person I should be working with.’ ”
“I didn’t believe it!” exclaimed Dern. “It was the only time I’d gotten a part without reading for it. But he looks for a quality, not performances. He doesn’t have an understanding of what he wants until he’s there, but he knows what he needs for the storytelling, which is really interesting and illusive … just like David.” Elucidating on what she feels makes a great director, Dern continued, “You know that there’s a boundarylessness that they’re looking for in the actor. You know they’re going to push you to places you wouldn’t feel safe to go, which is what interests me so deeply. And I think other than my childhood, probably David Lynch has been the greatest influence in that area for me because he creates an enormously abstract world, but the only way he feels that his film is served is if you’re perfectly authentic. If you get enormous, it doesn’t work. And so you have to be incredibly disciplined for David, which is really amazing. I mean it’s amazing in a very tight plot-driven script like Blue Velvet. It became more complicated a journey for myself and Nic Cage [in Wild at Heart]. And then Inland Empire, a film we made really over the course of three years, was the craziest acting lesson of my life.”
Following up on this thought, Elvis Mitchell interjected with an aside about how he’d been driving down Hollywood Blvd. at the time of Inland Empire‘s release and happened to spot David Lynch sitting on the side of the road with a cow in front of a Laura Dern for Best Actress banner. Dern laughingly expanded on the incident. “David felt offended by how much money it took to try to get your movie made, and that all this money that could be going toward making more movies was being spent on campaigns for actors, campaigns for movies, and advertisements. He’s a user of the internet, and was very early on. So he’s like, ‘How can we utilize this?’”
At this point Dern broke into a flawless David Lynch impression and continued, “ ‘You know what? Here’s what we’re going to do … you’re going to star in my next movie, and we’re going to do NO advertising!’ ”
“That sounds amazing, David!” Dern jokingly replied.
“ ‘There’s no script!’ continued Lynch. ‘Even better … you’re going to play ALL the people in the movie!’ ” to which Dern could only reply, “Great!” Continuing on in Lynch’s trademark mid-western accent Dern twanged, “ ‘And you’ll never know who they are or what they’re doing. I’ll just tell you where to go when we’re on the day. But I am going to do a campaign for you because you’re great in this movie, Tidbit!’ ”
“And then I heard a rumor that David Lynch was on Hollywood Blvd. with a cow on a leash, in a director’s chair with a sign that said ‘Laura Dern for Best Actress’. And it went all over the internet and people were like, ‘What’s Inland Empire? We should see that!’ So I guess it worked!” Dern laughed.
At that point, Mitchell opened up the discussion for questions and I jumped right in with a follow-up on Inland Empire, which I consider to be Lynch’s masterwork and one of the greatest films of the past few decades. I explained how I’d been fortunate enough to attend the Northwest premiere of the film seven years earlier, and speak briefly with Lynch after the sold-out screening. It took many additional viewings for me to tease out the film’s inherent meaning (and who knows, I may be totally off base there as well), but I thought it an important opportunity to get Dern’s perspective on her work in this truly amazing film.
“It took me about four viewings after that screening to really wrap my mind around the film, and I think I actually have (call me crazy)!” I said. “I was curious, I know it was subtitled ‘A Woman in Trouble,’ but to me it became ‘A Soul in Trouble,’ and how that soul travelled through many different women, eventually to a nirvana-like state of love with the beautiful climax where the boy runs in to embrace his mother. To me [in comparison] it spoiled most other movies because it had so many layers, such depth, and each time I get so much more out of it. I was wondering if Mr. Lynch instructed you on how many different characters you played, any clue?”
Dern seemed quite flattered when I added that I felt her performance in Inland Empire to be one of the greatest I’d ever seen on film, and replied, “Okay, first of all, if you’ve seen Inland Empire four times, you should be up here. You’re amazing! And I will now try to memorize what you’ve just said, and pretend that I know what the movie’s about and just repeat your words, because that was so very beautiful. I know that for David it is about transcendence, so I think you speak beautifully to something he’s deeply interested in. You know, as we see in all of his movies, he’s deeply interested in the deep darkness and how we can transcend into lightness. It’s a very common theme in the films I’ve been privileged to be part of.”
Circling back to my initial question, Dern answered, “I think I played four people?!” It’s an indication of the trust she places in Lynch that to this day she seems a bit unsure as to the number of characters she inhabited, much less the definitive meaning of the film. But by design, Lynch has created his masterpiece without supplying any concrete answers. He’s stated repeatedly that all interpretations are valid, and yet … the Nancy Drew in me wants to continue to seek out answers. Lynch in his films encourages such questioning, and it is one of the qualities that makes them most alive. Inland Empire’s eventual meaning is ever-changing and organic, but the experience of the film, and the questions (not answers) it offers up are where its ultimate value lies. “I had an incredible journey,” Dern concurred. “One that was terrifying, but also an amazing opportunity.”
The genesis of Inland Empire, according to Dern, was an outrageous monologue Lynch first wrote for her from which the rest of the film eventually sprang. “The core of it,” Dern explained, “is a seventy-minute take of me telling the story which is sort of the centerpiece of the movie. And in the movie, they’ve cut together clips and pieces from the monologue. But what he wrote was eighteen pages, and he came to my house with a yellow legal pad and said [again in her best Lynch-speak], “ ‘Memorize this!’ ”
“Are you kidding me?” a dumbfounded Dern replied. “I’m a nursing mom … I can’t remember anything!”
“ ‘Oh shut up. Stop complaining!’ ” Lynch demanded. “ ‘Just memorize it and come to my house at 4 o’clock.’ ”
“So I tried my best and I showed up at his house,” Dern said, before realizing that she may have offered up too much information. “I’m not supposed to say that we shot it at his house, because of permits…” She laughed. “Anyway, we got the mood just right … Peter Deming, our amazing DP, set some lights with David and we did this seventy-minute take, which is the craziest story and the craziest writing I’ve ever read/acted/anything in my life! But in a way, from it everything else was able to find itself, including a movie for him. So I’m still trying to find my way [with the film]. I’ve got to see it again!” That should soon become easier as Mitchell mentioned that an upcoming Special Edition of Inland Empire will be released which will include the entire seventy-minute monologue as an extra. With their upcoming blu-ray release of Eraserhead just announced, one hopes that it will indeed be Criterion who will handle all of the long-overdue upgrades to Lynch’s oeuvre. I, for one, cannot wait.
But even more exciting was what Laura Dern alluded to as we shared a few words after the discussion. I asked whether she had any upcoming plans to further the collaboration with her beloved maestro David Lynch, whereupon she flashed a mischievous smile, and said that Lynch was in the process of creating one of his craziest films yet, and that she’d most definitely be involved. That was rockin’ good news indeed, and all I really needed to hear to cap off a great 2014 SIFF and a beautiful afternoon spent in the company of the radiant, profusely talented Miss Dern.