British Cinematographer
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Peter Deming ASC recounts working on David Lynch’s
surreal LA noir Mulholland Drive.
Peter Deming ASC was an established DP (Evil Dead II, My
Cousin Vinny) before beginning his collaboration with David Lynch first on
HBO anthology series Hotel Room (1993) then helping create
surreal murder mysteries Lost Highway (1996), Mulholland
Drive (2000), and Twin Peaks: The Return.
Mulholland Drive was conceived as a television
pilot by Lynch for ABC. When Disney’s network declined to commission it, Lynch
secured funding from StudioCanal to turn the material into a feature and
shooting a final third of material 18 months later.
“When it was resurrected, I was trying to think how David
was going to conclude it because there was a real effort on his part in the
pilot to start a lot of story lines to give himself somewhere to go for future
seasons. A lot of those story lines had to be dropped and distilled down into
the third act.”
Art works
The director’s background as a painter meant he had definite
ideas about colour and composition. “I always equated David’s prep process to
gathering his box of paints. That said, he was extremely involved in what shots
he wanted. I would maybe suggest something and
then we’d agree on, say, the eight shots we need for the scene. David
would leave and we would light it and as long as he felt that mood
when he returned, we’d start shooting.”
Deming gleamed what clues he could from Billy Wilder’s 1950
noir satire Sunset Boulevard, one of Lynch’s favourite films. “When
he built his screening room, that was the first film he screened, so for me,
internally, that was a guide for Mulholland. We never talked about
it. What was in my head was that, however we stylised it we had to have
one foot for the story to land.”
The mood he believed Lynch had in mind might be termed
romantic noir. “David loved Los Angeles and the city is often sunny but through
David’s eyes behind that sunny facade, a lot of dark things go
on. That’s a reoccurring theme in his work; the facade
versus what’s really happening.”
He shot 35mm on Panavision Panaflex using Primo
Primes and applied filtration and nets on the rear element to soften the
look.
A notorious jump-scare scene is among Lynch’s most
enigmatic. Two unidentified men chat at Winkie’s diner. One of them recounts a
recurring dream he’s having which takes place at the diner and
features a terrifying creature. When the pair go out back of
the diner they do indeed encounter… something.
“We discussed ways of making the camera more
nervous, maybe doing it handheld, but David thought that would be a
little too jittery and obvious. So, we ended up very low-tech with
a six-footjib arm and me operating the camera sort of
floating around nice and easy. Nothing aggressive.”
He recalls, “We shot all the material in
the diner and it was getting late in the day before we moved out
back. The light wasn’t anything I was thrilled about. I think
I managed to stall until that section of the alley was in shade or at
least didn’t have that hard late sun. On the page,
I don’t even think he called ‘it’ a person. It was sort of
a being, but it was hard for me to understand how it would affect our
character. I’m surprised to this day how freaked out people are by
it.”
The scene doesn’t fit into the narrative and is
not referred to again, except for a brief and unexplained glimpse of one of the
men and the creature in miniature later.
“It was edited in such a way that there were a lot of pauses
that gave it a lot of weight. And, of course, David’s sound design just propels
it into the weird zone.”
A later scene on Sunset Boulevard when Betty (Naomi Watts)
gets into a cab is filmed from a dolly without tracks on the uneven pavement as
the story itself begins to unravel.
“Sometimes we asked, mostly, we gave up,” says Deming of
trying to winkle information from Lynch. “That’s not to say
he wasn’t open on set. You could ask him anything.”
He recalls the scene shot for the pilot when Betty arrives
in California. “She’s all excited and bubbly. It’s a happy scene
and David is smiling. So, between setups our second camera assistant
Lisa [Ferguson] went up to David and said, ‘I feel like
something bad’s gonna happen to Betty down the line.’ David just
looked and doesn’t say anything. At this point it’s still a
TV pilot with episodes unwritten but I’m sure he had it in his head.
“He was pretty locked up that way. In a way, it was great,
because when you saw the finished film, you were also a spectator and
discovering things even though you were there for all of it.”
Deming supervised the film’s remaster in 2014. “This
is sort of quintessential David. I was shooting in London, and he was
in Los Angeles, so he did a pass, and then we had a long talk on the phone
about it. He didn’t want to change anything. He’s of course
fully aware of the post-production tools we had available, but he was
adamant – ‘People are used to the film a certain way and I’m not going to
change that.’”
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