David Lynch (1946-2025) was one of the most indelible filmmakers of the past 50 years, and his filmmaking style was so unique that any film that came close to his method was dubbed Lynchian. He was certainly an important filmmaker to me in my formative years. As an avid film watcher in my youth, my life was changed when I saw a VHS copy of Blue Velvet when I was 13. No one ever made films like him and no one ever will again. His creativity and absolute command of all of the tenets of art bled out in every frame of his works.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. What makes our workshops unique? The inter generational connection that happens during the workshop is special. It stands out to me because you have people who grew up with film, who saw projectors in their classroom or who maybe worked as editors using celluloid film, and then they bring their kids in or they meet someone in the workshop who’s discovering it for the first time.
Nic Cage is a huge movie buff, so he knew exactly where he wanted to go with things. So we tried three noses. I was pushing for more of a classic plastic surgery nose, the smaller one, and I got voted out. He and the director were like, we tried it and they were right. It didn’t look as good as the final nose.
That’s one of those happy accidents where that squeak comes from that moment on set and there’s a natural progression to how that windshield chill wiper sounded based on the amount of snowfall that was hitting the windshield. So when the windshield was initially dry, it was grating, and then as the snowfall continued, it slowly changed over time until it became basically like a whisper.
The night scene on the staircase where the three cardinals discuss doing tactical voting. I really like that scene. It feels like the essence of the film, which is on the one hand these are religious men and on the other hand it’s kind of like a secular election. There’s a sort of paranoid aspect to it as well. They’re quite nervous the whole time.
I happen to think that the films that I do, I feel like in the end, are not going to be disposable, that they’re going to be movies that people want to revisit. So it’s up to me to make sure every detail goes into them so when they do revisit it, they enjoy it even more or see something they never saw.
When we were forensically figuring out this arc, we broke the script down into three sections that would guide us through his evolution. One was arriving in New York in ’61-’62, becoming well known in ’63-’64, and eventually in ’65 you can see he’s really adopted the mod look, that would become the kind of beginning of this Bob Dylan, the icon we know today.
What happened when it was finished was it was supposed to go to streaming. We shopped it to streaming and we got turned down and I thought, we can’t sell the movie. Nobody wants to take a risk. It was a bad time in Hollywood. The strike was going on. It was, it was rough. Ketchup Entertainment, saved the film.
We built an image-based treatment as an edit of the film to explore how Elwood and Turner see the world differently. Then we populated it with the necessary language to convey certain moments. We worked with this idea called adjacent imagery - imagery that’s not solely plot-driven. It has a sort of experiential, metaphoric, and symbolic resonance so that it’s not so utilitarian.
The idea was that Zoe is kind of taking control of the film at this moment, and she also takes control of the cinematography. She can point that very hard light that follows her to the people she talks about. She’s also able to bring the camera with her. We had built this lighting system that remotely operated and was able to point at every time ever she would go, you had a lighting operator that was able to follow her in the space.