AVC: What about how it looks?
DL: I like the way it looks. It's more like 1930s 35mm, in that there's not so much information. There's something about not seeing everything perfectly. There's more room to dream. It comes gently into a kind of impression, which can be very beautiful.
AVC: What did its ease of use ultimately allow you to do differently in Inland Empire?
DL: I don't know what certain scenes would have been like shooting in film. It would have been like pulling teeth. Shooting in film, there's a kind of stretching, unpleasant horror until a scene is finished and feels correct, when you don't know if you're going to get it. You wait, maybe for a few hours, to move the camera over here, and re-light over there. This kind of thing is a huge problem.
AVC: You've said that you decided to pull together Mulholland Dr. after a spell of transcendental meditation. How much does meditation influence the kind of stories you're trying to tell at this point?
DL: It's nothing and everything, sort of. I don't make films to talk about anything, really. Why I meditate is… When I was working on Eraserhead, I heard this phrase that stuck in my head: True happiness is not out there, true happiness lies within. This had a ring of truth. But I didn't know where the "within" was, nor how to get there. I didn't even know if there really was a within. I didn't know what "within" could possibly mean. Is it somewhere in the body that you go? Then I heard about meditation. I got a call from my sister, who said she started transcendental meditation as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I heard a change in her voice, and I just said, "That's for me."
AVC: How has it manifested itself in your work? Was there a change you observed in what you wanted to do?
DL: It doesn't make you make different films or do anything like that. Transcendental meditation is like a car, a vehicle that allows you to go within. It's a mental technique. You're given a mantra—the mantra that Maharishi gives is very specific, and you start to dive into subtler levels of mind, subtler levels of intellect. You transcend the whole show, into pure bliss consciousness. From your first meditation, you say, "Whoa!" It's a unique experience, but a familiar experience.
AVC: Familiar how? Where else have you found it?
DL: Well, I'd never had that exact powerful an experience, but it was familiar in that it was like, "Where has this been? I recognize it, but where has it been?" I realized I had transcended one time just daydreaming. I was daydreaming along, and all of the sudden—boom! I got this light, a fantastic feeling. Bliss is physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. It's thick. With the technique, you transcend during every meditation, and it's the experience of this deepest level, what modern science calls the unified field, what Vedic science calls Atma, meaning "the self." When you experience this deepest level, you enliven it and it starts to grow. So you grow in consciousness, in awareness, in understanding, in intelligence, in creativity, in bliss, in universal love, in energy, in power. Modern science says now that they've discovered this unified field—the unity of all the particles and forces of creation that have always been there and always will be there—one unified field from which everything that is a thing emerges. It's there, and you can experience it. The reason you want to experience it is that things get better and better. Then you just go about your business. The side effect of this is that negative things start to recede, like anger, tension, fear, depression. More and more, through regular practice, things just get real good.
AVC: Have the practice or the results of it informed the idea of identity drift central to your recent work?
DL: No. The danger of even saying I meditate is, then people say, "Oh, this is somehow connected to that. Right?" It's better that people don't know anything about the filmmaker, so the film can exist on its own. That's the pure way. It comes from ideas, and I translate those ideas. And what meditation does is make the joy of doing it increase like crazy.
AVC: Is it like dreaming?
DL: No. What they say is, there's waking, sleeping, and dreaming. But they have shown that there's a fourth state of consciousness. The nervous system functions in a fourth, unique way, as different as dreaming is from sleeping as sleeping is from waking. When you transcend, it's the only experience that lights the full brain on an EEG machine. It's the only experience that utilizes the full brain. So if you have this experience every day, you get more full-brain coherence. It's money in the bank for a filmmaker, an artist, a businessperson, whatever. Ideas start flowing easier, intuition grows more and more. You're banging on more cylinders.
AVC: Sound design plays a big role in Inland Empire, as in all your films. Are there ideas for scenes that you hear before you visualize them?
DL: Big time. When you get an idea, so many things come in that one moment. You could write the sound of that idea, or the sound of the room it's in. You could write the clothes the character is wearing, what they're saying, how they move, what they look like. Instead of making up, you're actually catching an idea, for a story, characters, place, and mood—all the stuff that comes. When you put a sound to something and it's wrong, it's so obvious. When it's right, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That's a magical thing that can happen in cinema.
AVC: You create art in so many different media. What is it about making movies that still draws you in?
DL: Because you make a world that didn't exist before, and you can go into that world deeper and deeper. It's unbounded out there. One film takes you into one area, another film takes you into another area. There could be trillions, zillions of worlds that exist in the big space.
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