MOVIES > Lynch and his 'ocean of knowingness'

IHT.COM: LOS ANGELES To hear him tell it, David Lynch has spent the last five years killing the thing he loves, for fear that it will kill him first.

"The sky's the limit with digital," he said in a recent conversation. "Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit. People might be sick to hear that because they love film, just like they loved magnetic tape. And I love film. I love it!" He contorted his face into an expression that suggested pain more than love. "It's so beautiful," he said. But "I would die if I had to work like that again."

Not one for understatement or half measures, Lynch takes a giant leap into the post-celluloid future with the three- hour "Inland Empire," his first feature since "Mulholland Drive" in 2001, his 10th overall and the first to be shot on the humble medium of digital video. The movie had its premiere last month at the Venice Film Festival, where Lynch, who turned 60 in January, was awarded a Golden Lion for career achievement. It will have its first North American showings at the New York Film Festival on Sunday and Monday.

On this clear Los Angeles morning, his first at home after three weeks in Europe, Lynch was knocking back a huge cappuccino in his painting studio. The sunlit atelier is perched atop one of the three sleek concrete structures that make up his compound in the Hollywood Hills. He lives in one building; another is the office of his production company, Asymmetrical. This one served first as a location for his 1997 film "Lost Highway" and was later converted into a production facility.

The moods and objects throughout inevitably bring to mind that most resonant of eponymous adjectives: Lynchian. Propped against one wall is an Abstract Expressionist canvas by Lynch. A photograph of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Transcendental Meditation guru, sits on a conference table.

Lately Lynch has emerged as a keen proponent of Transcendental Meditation. Last year he established the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness- Based Education and World Peace with the goal of raising $7 billion to create "universities of peace."

His other consuming passion has been the Internet. His sprawling Web site, davidlynch.com, begun in 2001, carries merchandise and subscriber- only content. As it turns out, some of Lynch's online experiments found their way into "Inland Empire," which, despite his claims for the speed of direct video, took three years to make. It was shot in fits and starts and, for the longest time, on his own dime and without a unifying vision.

Only after the project was well under way did he contact the French studio Canal Plus, which financed the transformation of "Mulholland Drive" from a rejected television pilot into a feature film. Canal Plus signed on to "Inland Empire" even though, Lynch said, "I told them two things: 'I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm shooting on D.V.'" Eventually the grand design revealed itself.

In interviews Lynch has repeatedly advanced a poetic, democratic notion of ideas as independent of the artist, waiting to be plucked from the ether: He's working on a book about the creative process titled "Catching the Big Fish." With "Mulholland Drive," he said the eureka moment came while he was meditating. With "Eraserhead," his indelible debut in 1977, inspiration came while reading the Bible. There was no equivalent lightning bolt on "Inland Empire," but in due course "something started to talk to me," he said. "It was as if it was talking to me all along but I didn't know it."

Still without a U.S. distributor, "Inland Empire" may be his most avant- garde offering since "Eraserhead." In tone and structure the film resembles the cosmic free fall of the mind-warping final act in "Mulholland Drive." "Inland Empire" refers on one level to the landlocked region east of Los Angeles but also evokes the vast, murky kingdom of the unconscious. Like "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive," the new movie is hard-wired into its protagonist's disintegrating psyche, a condition that somehow prompts convulsive dislocations in time and space.

Laura Dern, who worked with Lynch on "Blue Velvet" and "Wild at Heart," plays an actress who lands a coveted role, only to learn that the movie, a remake, may be cursed: The original was aborted when both leads were murdered. Actor becomes character. The various narrative strands start to unravel.

A nightmare vision of the dream factory, "Inland Empire" belongs to the lineage of Hollywood bloody valentines that runs from "Sunset Boulevard" to "Mulholland Drive." In one scene a character, stabbed in the gut with a screwdriver, runs down Hollywood Boulevard, leaving a gory trail on the Walk of Fame. Like "Mulholland Drive," the film is at once a tribute to actors, especially those chewed up and spit out by the industry, and a study of the metaphysics of their craft.

Acting, Lynch suggests, is a kind of out-of-body experience. Like Naomi Watts in "Mulholland," Dern summons an almost frightening intensity in a performance that requires her to inhabit three (if not more) overlapping parts.

"I thought of it as playing a broken or dismantled person, with these other people leaking out of her brain," Dern said in a telephone interview. She noted that the stop-start shoot had its advantages: "It's unbelievably freeing. You're not sure where you're going or even where you've come from. You can only be in the moment."

Watching "Inland Empire," it's hard not to miss the tactile richness of Lynch's celluloid images. Instead of a state-of-the-art high-definition camera, he used the Sony PD-150, a common midrange model.

"Everybody says, 'But the quality, David, it's not so good,' and that's true," Lynch said. "But it's a different quality. It reminds me of early 35-millimeter film. You see different things. It talks to you differently." Mary Sweeney, Lynch's longtime producer (and former wife), called the new film a return to the obsessive experimentation of "Eraserhead," which he also shot piecemeal over several years. "I think it took him back to a pure and fearless way of working," she said.

Lynch also stressed the importance of fearlessness. "Fear is like a tourniquet on the big tube of creative flow," he said. And thanks to meditation, "negative things decrease," he added. "You get more ideas. You catch them at a deeper level." The dissonance between this upbeat philosophy and the abysmal terror of his films is not lost on him. "You can understand depression much more when you're not depressed," he said. "You go to this ocean of knowingness. That's what you use."

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