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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

The Air is on Fire: David Lynch à Paris

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Via Italy’s Espresso and republished on the “David Lynch Electrical Resource”, Dugpa, a passel of pics of Mr. Lynch’s gee-wow art lookback in Paris; if you’ve wondered what the walls the art’s hung on looks like, here you go. In New Statesman, Alice O’Keeffe has a keen interview with Lynch about where he stands today: “Though a genius he may be, the thought of Lynch sitting alone in his studio with these images, lopping a leg off here and adding a festering gash there, is not pleasant. “Those distorted nudes thrill me, and I don’t know all the reasons why… Sometimes when there’s a distortion or a rearrangement it makes you see things afresh, and something jumps. I do like fragments of the human form, and then there’s all kinds of variations, and that’s interesting. It’s like jazz: there’s the melody – the human form – and then there’s all kinds of variants, and that’s real interesting.”
Would it bother him, I wonder, if someone got off on them? “Oh no, you can’t worry about stuff like that, because you would stop working,” he insists, but then says: “There must be some responsibility when you make something. They say for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. There could be something coming back from what we do, but I’m not positive.” [On a different note, Lynch collaborator Freddie Francis, cinematographer of The Elephant Man, Dune and The Straight Story, is dead at 89.)

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One Response to “The Air is on Fire: David Lynch à Paris”

  1. amine says:

    If you like David and his work you shouldn’t miss this event.
    The second annual Lynch Weekend will be hosted on the Maharishi University of Management campus in Fairfield, Iowa on May 25-27. http://www.lynchweekend.org, http://www.mum.edu

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon