Behind the Scenes of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive

Ahead of its re-release, we sit down with Mulholland Drive star Laura Harring to hear the remarkable story behind its intuitive conception

APRIL 13, 2017

TEXTDaisy Woodward

By the age of 34, Mexican-American actress Laura Harring had almost entirely abandoned her hopes of making it as a Hollywood star. She had parted ways with her movie agent and thrown herself into music and theatre instead. But that all changed in January of 1999, two months before her 35th birthday, when she received a phone call saying that David Lynch had seen her photograph and wanted to meet her to talk about a part in his next project, a television series called Mulholland Drive. She was driving to the gym and was “so excited... that I crashed the car!” Upon arriving at her appointment with the feted director, the very next day, Harring was stunned to discover that her character, the glamorous yet vulnerable Rita, is also involved in a car crash within the pilot’s opening minutes. “I went into quiet mode for a bit, and then I kind of relaxed,” she tells us over the phone from her Beverly Hills home, speaking ahead of the masterful film’s re-release in a newly restored edition. “I thought that was some sort of signal from the universe that I was in the right place.”

The 50 best films of 2015 / While We're Young / No 12

The 50 best films 

of 2015 

in the US  

No 12

       

 While We're Young

A fine bromance

Noah Baumbach’s excruciatingly pleasurable portrait of Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as a middle-aged couple who befriend dazzling twentysomethings would be unbearably sad if it weren’t so funny

Peter Bradshaw
Thursday 2 April 2015 15.02 BST

N

oah Baumbach’s While We’re Young is a comedy of middle youth: the story of one man’s midlife crisis, made more exquisitely horrible by his making a fool of himself – not with a younger woman, but a younger man. It is not a sexual relationship, but something more painfully intimate: a matter of self-esteem and social status.

Ben Stiller once again plays the role of a middle-aged man whose mind has furred like a kettle with disappointment: the suppressed resentment of others’ success shows in his face. He is Josh, a once-promising documentary film-maker easing placidly into his 40s, teaching a film theory class but beginning to fear that his latest work, a solemn non-fiction film on which he has so far spent eight fruitless years of part-time work, may never get finished. He has a very happy marriage with Cornelia (Naomi Watts), but resents his father-in-law (Charles Grodin), himself an intimidatingly successful documentarian, a titan in the league of a Wiseman or Maysles. Cornelia and Josh’s friends are having babies, and they start to feel antsy and self-conscious about being childless.

At this uniquely dangerous moment, their lives are invaded by Jamie (Adam Driver) and his wife, Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a dazzlingly seductive twentysomething couple. Jamie, a would-be director, professes he is a huge admirer of Josh’s work – although Darby, it seems, is a little unfulfilled in a way that mirrors Cornelia. The lives of these young people seem so much freer, sharper, more passionate and captivating to poor Josh. He is fascinated by their casual nobrow consumption of high and low culture, so easily available digitally, and falls a little in love with them. This is the YOLO generation, through whom he might miraculously be able to live once again. He persuades Cornelia to neglect their own ageing, greying circle of friends to hang out with Jamie and Darby, and mentor Jamie in his film-making career. He even tragically affects to wear a hipster hat indoors like his new best friend. But from the standpoint of someone older and more disillusioned, might there not be something strange and disturbing about these young people – in fact, all young people?

As Jamie, Adam Driver is brilliant at conveying the fearless, tactless conceit of a very entitled young person. (I’ve seen nothing like it since Anna Paquin in Kenneth Lonergan’s 2011 film Margaret). Jamie never has the good grace to thank Josh for anything he does for him, but instead lavishes him with man-flirting and praise, and indulges in the annoying mannerism of putting his palms together, as if saying namaste. This is precisely what infatuates Josh: the idea of being on equal terms with a self 2.0, a Dorian Gray portrait taken down from the attic – a self-affirming protege or Mini-Me. Yet the awful truth is that he is turning into Jamie’s maxi-me. Amanda Seyfried and Naomi Watts cleverly create their own symbiosis: aware they are being sidelined by what is going on, they are at once sympathetic and suspicious of each other.

Baumbach has produced another excruciatingly pleasurable and wince-inducing study in insecurity. Josh is, of course, very like Woody Allen’s Cliff Stern, the documentary film-maker in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) who, at the nadir of professional failure, is forced to film a tribute to his hated brother-in-law, a highly successful man at home in the same world of tuxedo dinners and speeches from which Ben Stiller’s Josh feels excluded. His relationship with super-cool Jamie is maybe closer to Bette Davis and Anne Baxter’s in All About Eve (1950), and another, more distant inspiration for their curdling bromance could be the careworn journalist Albert Brooks and smooth young newsreader William Hurt in James L Brooks’s Broadcast News (1987).

The terrible realisation is that Jamie might actually be more talented than Josh, but that could be because he is young. To be middle-aged in a roomful of young people is to be Salieri in a roomful of Mozarts: they have boundless enthusiasm and energy, and are not encumbered – or as encumbered – by the knowledge of where the paths of glory lead.

Baumbach’s movie encourages you to make an emotional investment in the authenticity of love and marriage, or at any rate, Josh and Cornelia’s love and marriage, and to save your amused cynicism for the awfulness of careerist obsession. This means the pair finally, and paradoxically, have some emotional growing up to do – and that perhaps comes a little too easily. None of which stops While We’re Young from being a very sad and very funny film.

THE GUARDIAN

The best 50 films of 2015 in the US
01. Son of Saul

02. 45 Years
03. The Revenant

04. Anomalisa

05. Bridge of Spies

06. The Look of Silence

07. Carol

08. Amy

09. Joy

10. Mistress America

11. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
12. While We're Young
13. Paddington
14. Mommy
15. Chi-Raq
16. Diary of a Teenage Girl
17. Taxi Tehran
18. Appropriate Behaviour
19. Salt of the Earth

20. Beasts of No Nation

34. Mad Max: Fury Road

35. Inside out

36. Room

37. Creed 

Golden Globes 2013 / Best Dressed

Nicole Kidman Golden Globes 2013 Best Dressed

Golden Globes 2013

BEST DRESSED

Glenn Close Golden Globes 213 Best Dressed

Naomi Watts Golden Globes 2013 Best Dressed

Film / The Painted Veil

The Painted Veil

Philip French

Sunday 29 April 2007

S

omerset Maugham's 1925 novel The Painted Veil, previously filmed rather beautifully in 1934 starring Greta Garbo and indifferently in 1957 as The Seventh Sin, is the tale of Kitty (Naomi Watts), the errant wife of Walter (Edward Norton), a strait-laced English doctor in China.

As a form of punishment, he takes her into a remote, cholera-stricken province where she experiences redemption and comes to love her husband. The novel was inspired by an incident in Dante's 'Purgatorio' which Maugham had read as a medical student in the late 19th century, and much influenced by his terminally troubled marriage.

This version is tougher than the previous ones and convincingly in period. The three principal actors (two Americans and an Australian) affect acceptable British accents, and there are admirable performances from Diana Rigg as the acerbic mother superior of an orphanage for Chinese children and Toby Jones as dodgy colonial official. The film is inevitably more critical of Europeans in Asia than is the novel and, for no good reason, Kitty's child has been changed from a daughter to a son, but Ron Nyswaner has generally made a decent adaptation.

I admire Alexandre Desplat greatly but found his score here a trifle excessive. On the other hand, I can't praise too highly the cinematography by New Zealander Stuart Dryburgh, whose interiors, shot in a Beijing studio, are as beautifully lit as the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby.

THE GUARDIAN