Catching the Big Fish (6 page)

RELIGION

 

 

 

I was raised Presbyterian. I respect people who are religious, and I think they find something there that’s beautiful, just beautiful. There’s truth there. Because these religions are old, though, and they’ve been fiddled with, possibly, I feel some of the original keys from the masters have been lost. But we’re all going to the same beautiful goal; that’s the way I see it.

All religions flow ultimately to the one ocean.Transcendental Meditation is a technique to experience that ocean, and it’s a technique practiced by people from all religions. Transcendental Meditation itself is not a religion—it’s not against any religion; it’s not against anything.

DRUGS

 

 

 

We all want expanded consciousness and bliss. It’s a natural, human desire. And a lot of people look for it in drugs. But the problem is that the body, the physiology, takes a hard hit on drugs. Drugs injure the nervous system, so they just make it harder to get those experiences on your own.

 

I have smoked marijuana, but I no longer do. I went to art school in the 1960s, so you can imagine what was going on. Yet my friends were the ones who said, “No, no, no, David, don’t you take those drugs.” I was pretty lucky.

 

Besides, far more profound experiences are available naturally.When your consciousness starts expanding, those experiences are there. All those things can be seen. It’s just a matter of expanding that ball of consciousness. And the ball of consciousness can expand to be infinite and unbounded. It’s totality. You can have totality. So all those experiences are there for you, without the side effects of drugs.

TURN ON THE LIGHT

YOGA SUTRAS

 

 

 

We’re like lightbulbs. If bliss starts growing inside you, it’s like a light; it affects the environment.

 

If you go into a room where someone’s been having a big argument, it’s not so pleasant. You can feel it. Even if the argument’s over, you can feel it. But if you go into a room where someone has just finished meditating, you can feel that bliss. It’s very nice to feel that.

 

We all affect our environments. You enjoy that light inside, and if you ramp it up brighter and brighter, you enjoy more and more of it. And that light will extend out farther and farther.

INDUSTRIAL SYMPHONY NO. 1

 

 

 

Industrial Symphony No. 1
was the first and only time I’ve done a stage production. It was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.We had two weeks to set it up, but only one day in the actual theater to put it all together and do two performances.

I was working on the music with Angelo Badalamenti, and we were attempting some abstract musical things to tie different elements together. I had some people building sets. But from the time the sets went up, the whole thing had to be rehearsed and lit in
one day
.

 

So the day came, and we had the late morning and afternoon to rehearse and then put on two shows. I wanted to start rehearsing—from the beginning, to rehearse all the way through. We started, and about an hour and a half later, I’d hardly even gotten into the thing, even though it wasn’t very long. And I realized that I was facing a gigantic, definite disaster. I thought,
I’m never going to make it unless I get some kind of an idea.
And, bingo—it happened.

Maybe it’s not reinventing the wheel—perhaps it’s just common sense—but what I did was, I went one by one. I would grab this person and say, “Do you see that, over there? When that man there goes there, and then leaves, then you go there.” And he’d say, “Okay.” “And when you get there, you do this, this, and this.” “Okay.” Then I’d go to the next person, and I’d say, “Do you see that man there? When he does this, this, and this, then it’s your cue to go over here, and you do that, that, and that.” We never had a rehearsal, but fortunately it all worked out.

LOST HIGHWAY

 

 

 

At the time that Barry Gifford and I were writing the script for
Lost Highway
, I was sort of obsessed with the O. J. Simpson trial. Barry and I never talked about it this way, but I think the film is somehow related to that.

What struck me about O. J. Simpson was that he was able to smile and laugh. He was able to go golfing later with seemingly very few problems about the whole thing. I wondered how, if a person did these deeds, he could go on living. And we found this great psychology term—“psychogenic fugue”—describing an event where the mind tricks itself to escape some horror. So, in a way,
Lost Highway
is about that. And also the fact that nothing can stay hidden forever.

RESTRICTIONS

 

 

 

Sometimes restrictions get the mind going. If you’ve got tons and tons of money, you may relax and figure you can throw money at any problem that comes along. You don’t have to think so hard. But when you have limitations, sometimes you come up with very creative, inexpensive ideas.

 

My friend Gary D’Amico is a special effects man. And he loves to blow things up. He’s the one who blew up the house in
Lost Highway
. And he didn’t have the stuff to do it. I didn’t even know I was going to blow up that house.The production manager asked, “Are we going to tear the house down? Do you want to save any of the stuff?” And I said, “Tear it down?” And I started thinking. I went to Gary and said, “What if I wanted to blow up something?” His face lit up. And I said,“I want to blow up this house.”

And he said, “Oh, I wish you would have told me. I don’t know what I’ve got.” But then he said, “Yeah, yeah—we can do it.” And so he went in and wired up this thing with everything he had. And it was the most beautiful sight. If he had brought in what he would have, had he known in advance, it wouldn’t have been as beautiful. It was a
soft explosion
. It sent the stuff for hundreds of feet. But softly. And then we shot it backward. So it turned out incredible.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE

 

 

 

Mulholland Drive
was originally going to be a continuing story on television.We shot it as a pilot: open-ended, to make you want to see more and more.

I heard that the man at ABC who was making the decision whether to accept the pilot or not saw it at six a.m. He was watching television across the room while having some coffee and making some phone calls. And he hated what he saw; it bored him. So he turned it down.

Then I had the chance, fortunately, to make it into a feature. But I didn’t have the ideas.

 

Now, you don’t use meditation to catch ideas. You’re expanding the container, and you come out very refreshed, filled with energy, and raring to go out and catch ideas afterward.

 

But in this particular case, almost the day I got the go-ahead to turn it into a feature, I went into meditation, and somewhere about ten minutes in,
ssssst!
There it was. Like a string of pearls, the ideas came. And they affected the middle, the beginning, and the end. I felt very blessed. But that’s the only time it’s happened during meditation.

THE BOX AND THE KEY

 

 

 

I don’t have a clue what those are.

A SENSE OF PLACE

 

 

 

A sense of place is so critical in cinema, because you want to go into another world. Every story has its own world, and its own feel, and its own mood. So you try to put together all these things—these little details—to create that sense of place.

It has a lot to do with lighting and sound.The sounds that come into a room can help paint a world there and make it so much fuller.While many sets are good enough for a wide shot, in my mind, they should be good enough for close scrutiny, for the little details to show. You may not ever really see them all, but you’ve got to feel that they’re there, somehow, to feel that it’s a real place, a real world.

BEAUTY

 

 

 

When you see an aging building or a rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together. If you paint over a building, there is no more magic to that building. But if it is allowed to age, then man has built it and nature has added into it—it’s so organic.

 

But often people wouldn’t think to permit that, except for scenic designers.

TEXTURE

 

 

 

I don’t necessarily love rotting bodies, but there’s a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal? I love looking at those things, just as much as I like to look at a close-up of some tree bark, or a small bug, or a cup of coffee, or a piece of pie. You get in close and the textures are wonderful.

WORKING WITH WOOD

 

 

 

Wood is one of the greatest materials to work with. There are soft woods and hard woods, and they all have their own beauty when you are working with them. When I saw through a piece of freshly cut pine, the smell of it just sends me right to heaven. The same goes even for pine needles. I used to chew Ponderosa pine pitch, which is the sap that oozes out of the tree and dries on the outside of the bark. If you can get a fresh piece of pitch, it is like syrup. It will stick to you and you won’t be able to get it off your hands. But sometimes it hardens like old honey. And you can chew this, and the flavor of pine pitch will make you crazy, in a good way.

Pine, being a softer wood, is easier to work with and is readily available. When I was young, I did a lot of things with pine. But then, I started falling in love with Douglas fir, vertical-grain Douglas fir. When you varnish a piece of Douglas fir, it has a depth of beauty that is just phenomenal. And then when you put two pieces of wood together, you start realizing there are so many possibilities. And you learn some tricks along the way.

And then there’s Günter, a German carpenter, who didn’t use electric tools at all. He would just come up to the house with a set of hand tools in a beautiful wooden box with a handle, which he’d carry around. And Günter—I’d watch this man—did little detail work on Douglas fir. He would put these two pieces of wood together, and then he’d rub his old, battered thumbs against the seam—and the seam would disappear. It was like a magic act, the pieces fit so perfectly. Günter was a real carpenter.

HAVING A SETUP

 

 

 

Some mornings, in a perfect world, you might wake up, have a coffee, finish meditation, and say,“Okay, today I’m going into the shop to work on a lamp.” This idea comes to you, you can see it, but to accomplish it you need what I call a “setup.” For example, you may need a working shop or a working painting studio. You may need a working music studio. Or a computer room where you can write something. It’s crucial to have a setup, so that, at any given moment, when you get an idea, you have the place and the tools to make it happen.

 

If you don’t have a setup, there are many times when you get the inspiration, the idea, but you have no tools, no place to put it together. And the idea just sits there and festers. Over time, it will go away. You didn’t fulfill it—and that’s just a heartache.

FIRE

 

 

 

Sitting in front of a fire is mesmerizing. It’s magical. I feel the same way about electricity. And smoke. And flickering lights.

LIGHT ON FILM

 

 

 

Often, in a scene, the room and the light together signify a mood. So even if the room isn’t perfect, you can work with the light and get it to feel correct, so that it has the mood that came with the original idea.

The light can make all the difference in a film, even in a character.

 

I love seeing people come out of darkness.

THE STRAIGHT STORY

 

 

 

I didn’t write
The Straight Story.
It was something of a departure for me, because it’s completely linear. But then, I fell in love with the emotion of the script. So you can fall in love with something that already exists, too, and it’s similar to falling in love with an idea. You get that feeling of what it could be on film, and that guides you.

HEROES OF FILM

 

 

 

I am a huge admirer of Billy Wilder. There are two films of his that I most love because they create such a world of their own:
Sunset Boulevard
and
The Apartment
.

And then there’s Fellini, who is a tremendous inspiration. I like
La Strada
and
8
½
—but really all of them and, again, for the world and the characters and the mood, and for this level, which you can’t put your finger on, that comes out in each one.

I love Hitchcock.
Rear Window
is a film that makes me crazy, in a good way. There’s such a coziness with James Stewart in one room, and it’s such a cool room, and the people who come into this room—Grace Kelly, for instance, and Thelma Ritter—it’s just so fantastic that they’re all in on a mystery that’s unfolding out their window. It’s magical and everybody who sees it feels that. It’s so nice to go back and visit that place.

FELLINI

 

 

 

I was shooting a commercial in Rome, and I was working with two people who had worked with Fellini. He was in a hospital in northern Italy, but we heard he was being moved down to Rome. So I said, “Do you think it’d be possible to go over and say hello to him?” And they said, “Yeah, we’ll try to arrange that.” There was an attempt on a Thursday night that fell through, but Friday night, we went over. It was about six o’clock in the evening in summer—a beautiful, warm evening.Two of us went in and were taken into Fellini’s room.There was another man in the room and my friend knew him, so he went over and talked to him. Fellini had me sit down. He was in a little wheelchair between the two beds, and he took my hand, and we sat and talked for half an hour. I don’t think I asked him much. I just listened a lot. He talked about the old days—how things were. He told stories. I really liked sitting near him. And then we left.That was Friday night, and Sunday he went into a coma and never came out.