Lynch Talks Inland Empire at NYFF

[Posted by Gregg Goldstein] ?For me, film is completely dead,? declared David Lynch onstage at Alice Tully Hall after Friday?s New York Film Festival press screening of his first feature in six years, ?Inland Empire.? He vowed never to make a feature on celluloid again, saying ?film gets dirty and breaks and scratches and the equipment is heavy? it?s like swimming through cold molasses.? Lynch said he ?fell in love with the digital look? during early tests working in the medium and on shorts for his website.

His film has garnered strongly mixed critical reaction - one journalist needed to take a break during the screening, stating ?Has he lost his fucking mind?? ? but there was a glowing writeup from the New York Times? Manohla Dargis, who detected the influence of Luis Buñuel. ?I?m not a film buff,? Lynch said, alluding to the comparison. ?I?m really not familiar with Buñuel.?

Lynch assembled the film scene by scene, with a central monologue from Laura Dern from one of the characters she plays providing the start of her involvement in the project. ?At the beginning I didn?t know how things were going to be related,? he said. ?It was completely magical. I didn?t know what the film held but I knew it held a lot. It was more smooth sailing in the filming, but in the editing there was somewhat of a struggle.

As to the films many jumps in tone, storyline and inscrutable scenes with less reliance on conventional narrative than most of Lynch?s films, he said ?I really believe in a story, but I believe in a story that holds abstractions and can go this way or that.? For many viewers of the film, that seemed like an understatement.

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