Laura Dern

I only remember a couple of times where I really had to pinpoint him down and say “I need more.” That’s over a three year period so that’s pretty amazing considering there wasn’t a script. If I could say anything to someone who’s going to his film; I would want them to know about David before they entered the theatre. There’s nothing about David that is elitist. He hasn’t figured out the plot and is sitting back waiting for you to fail his test. He believes in the visual arts and he is a painter who’s start was about creating something on canvas and having interpretations be intuitive and completely different than anyone else’s. That’s how he created art and then cinema took off from there. David believes in the intelligence of an audience. He believes in an audience going into the experience and discovering it for themselves. He knows what it is for him but he doesn’t need it to be the same for you and I love him for that. I want people to know that because I had the same experience making it that they had watching it. I didn’t know what the plot was but I had to feel my way through it and consider behaviorally what the character is walking through in each scene as we did it because I didn’t know what was coming after or what had come before. I had no script to guide me. But David is so specific about the feeling he wants you to have. Even when he speaks in code, he gives you a word or a feeling or the mood that he wants then you can run with that for a long time. He told me at the beginning of shooting that it is about a woman in trouble. That really helped me. For me it became about many aspects of a woman going through a dismantling and maybe even a resurrection at some point. So I never saw it as these different characters and these different pieces. That’s a very exciting way to work.

Emotionally yes. I think most of people who see it, probably could get all the same feelings from it. But even though I figured it out for me, I don’t necessarily know what the rabbits mean or what does 47 mean or am I killing myself, is the guy my husband and what is the Polish connection? Is that woman me from a past life? Is it me in an altered state and I’m finding myself? There’s so many ways people are talking to me about it and they’re all pretty fantastic ideas. So I can’t wait to see it again to figure it out more and see what it makes me feel. The first time you see it you’re watching yourself and seeing what you all did and how it came together. So it takes a couple times before you just sit and witness the movie.

There are only a few filmmakers that I would take a three year journey with. But I would trust them because I either know them personally or because I love their work. But to have no script and to play several people takes the length of familial relationship. Also it wasn’t just me trusting him but also knowing how much he trusts me. That was an incredible gift. The greatest thing a director can learn from David is that he believes so much in his actors. That confidence and faith forces you to take risks in a much greater way.

Yeah, it was for Blue Velvet. I was 17 and I went in figuring I’d do what is always done at auditions which is sit down and be asked to read a scene. I’m sitting on a floor in the hallway when David came out of the office and said “I got to take a leak.” He ran to the bathroom and afterwards he invited me into his office with the casting director and we spoke about life for 30 minutes. I remember us discussing trees and meditation. He mentioned something about being a mediator. We talked about him growing up in the Northwest and me growing up in LA and that we lived near each other in LA when he was making Eraserhead. We never mentioned acting or movies. I don’t think he’d ever seen me in a movie but he’d been told something about me. Then he asked me to come to Bob’s Big Boy with him to meet Kyle MacLachlan for French fries.

That’s real. We went to Bob’s and he was drawing on a napkin and then he asked me to go do Blue Velvet. That was my audition process. So I should have known then that I’d end up doing Inland Empire because already it was going to be an unusual journey.

What’s incredible is that it’s only as fun or maybe even less fun than the journey itself. David is so much fun. He wants it to be such a good time. He’s a nice man. He wants everybody to have fun which is unbelievably rare to have on a movie set. He cares deeply about this spontaneous, fun, experimental feeling. Being pushed towards bravery is a blast. He had a camera operator working with us and he needed something like a dolly shot but we had no equipment. So he put the camera operator on rollerblades. That can only be paralleled by seeing it. It’s exhilarating, it’s scary, it’s exciting and you don’t know what to expect. That’s what everyday at work was like.

In some ways. I think he has more of a love of it than I but the parts of LA that I love, he loves equally. He loves old school Hollywood like Grauman's Chinese, the old Hamburger Hamlet restaurant on Beverly and places like the Beverly Hills Amusement Park. Those are things that I love too because they were my childhood and he has an appreciation for it on a whole other level and I love that about him.

Yeah, we talk a lot about everything but the movie. I think he’s a believer in not over talking, just like he’s a believer in not over plotting. Everything becomes an intuitive, feeling experience and that’s the way he describes it.

No.

Wildly different. Nothing like shooting a 35mm movie. With a 12 hour day on a regular movie, you hope for an hour’s worth of great footage. On a 12 hour day on this movie, we’d come away with probably ten hours of great footage. We shot all the time. We’d get to work and start shooting. The Sony PD-150 is so lightweight that we were close together the entire time. It wasn’t like he was in his tented little place watching a monitor. There are certain kinds of movies that require that, but there are other kinds of movies that are about human behavior and to have your director right there with you watching what you’re doing and pushing you to try different things or go to a different place is the way it should be.

Not really oddly enough. David has a different language with each person. He gets his own feeling with each person. Each experience is so unique with David. I’m friends with Naomi Watts and she and I did a movie together [We Don't Live Here Anymore] and we talked about how much we loved David and loved working with David, but it is still it’s own experience. But there are a couple of catchphrases we all know. He’s the most unique person and such a brilliant and extraordinary gift to film. I just feel really lucky to work with him.

I don’t know the answer to that because I haven’t seen that much digital video being transferred. I thought I would hate it because I love film. But what David did with the transfer process and how he transferred it and how he works with color and light and sound and mixing and matching them all together is so beautiful. The crudeness of the film that he was working with becomes its own art. I don’t know if in somebody else’s hand I would feel the same way but somehow the nastiness of it was the beauty. But David certainly feels like it’s his future and I’m sure it is the way of the future.

Great. That was the most like making a regular movie. The scenes with Jeremy and Harry Dean Stanton were done all together in five days. There was more crew as well. But we still were moving so fast which I think all the actors loved.

Something crazy like that at this point. But there are only two where I felt like we were really working together, Rambling Rose and Wild at Heart.

Oh, total coincidence. Rambling Rose is the only time we actually sought out doing it together. I was involved in the movie and the director [Martha Coolidge] and my mom were very good friends because they had done another film. She really wanted my mom but mom and I also wanted to do it together. But David asked my mom to do Inland Empire without me even knowing.

I heard that too. I don’t even know. People have asked me if I’m going to be in it so I don’t know if that means they’re writing it and my character is in it.

Well if Steven [Spielberg] were there I’d always be interested because I love him.

You never know. I guess it depends on where they take the dinosaurs and me.

It had an impact on people who were ready to listen. That’s the good news. But it did not have an impact on the Bush administration. So Ellen’s show didn’t make it any different. But what did excite me is that I’ve never received more fan mail for anything in my life. A lot of it was parents thanking me for being part of something that helped them to honor their children’s choices. That moved me so much. At the time, it was huge because these huge sponsors were pulling out and we were in the middle of shooting and it was becoming a huge controversy. It wasn’t just that she mentioned being gay but I was also playing a gay woman that she was coming out to and potentially coming on to. The whole thing was amazing and it seemed to be radical in this day and age, but it was at the moment. Unfortunately not quite huge enough to shift the tide of unconscious idiocy.

I don’t have a big part. It’s very much an ensemble. I had a hilarious time doing it and it was a hilarious character that I loved playing. I really wanted to do it because I think Mike White is totally brilliant. Mike is a born director. We tried to do a movie together a long time ago that he had written and that he wanted to direct. It never came to be so I wanted to support him when he finally got to direct.

I don’t. I had a small part in a movie with Russell Crowe [called Tenderness] and there’s a movie with John Travolta and James Gandolfini that’s supposed to come out called Lonely Hearts. But I don’t know when that movie’s coming even though we did about a year ago.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to do after this. I feel so liberated from doing Inland Empire that I’m like “Gosh, what do you do when you get to be three totally different people.” But I’ve been lucky enough to run the gamut so hopefully something fun will come up.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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