If there is any auteur film director who better portrays the dreamlike and the apparently inexplicable, it is David Lynch. Hated and loved in equal parts, what cannot be denied is that he conceives art in a multidisciplinary way , without looking for a specific meaning that explains the indecipherable nature of some of his most famous scenes. For Lynch, it is more valuable to provoke sensations to the public, twisting their logic until they have their own interpretation than to give their films easily decipherable metaphors. That is why it is not surprising that one of its actors, Justin Theroux, affirms in an interview that even the director had no idea what was happening in his masterpiece Mulholland Drive .
The interview in question is conducted by the Indiwire medium and the reason was to promote Theroux’s leading role in the Apple TV series, The Mosquito Coast . The actor was involved in the enigmatic Inland Empire , but fans of Lynch’s filmography will remember him for his role as a film director on Mulholland drive . The dreamy tale of the industry mecca won the Golden Palm for best shared director with Joel Coen’s The Man Who Was Never There at the Cannes Film Festival. Asked about the film, partly due to the 20th anniversary of its release, Justin Theroux spoke about what it’s like to work with David Lynch: “He’s a totally atypical director because he doesn’t answer questions. In the early days of Mulholland Drive I was peppered him with questions like Why am I here? Who is the cowboy? What’s going on? What reality are we in? And what do you think the director answered Theroux, well, “you know, I don’t know, friend. But let’s find out. “
In this way, Theroux confirmed that Lynch himself did not understand very well what was happening in the universe he had created. “He was not being nice, cheeky or evasive , he really did not know” said the actor and then make a metaphorical comparison, “it’s like you’re on an escalator to a cloud with him, you never know where the escalator leaves.” Some statements that do nothing more than confirm that the director takes the arcane of his style to the extreme , understanding that the creative process he uses requires a joint discovery, anchored in the artist-work-audience relationship. David Lynch’s cinema would never impact in the same way if it were easy to decipher, a quality that makes it unique.
