LiC Interview: Jennifer Lynch – Surveillance

(Image courtesy of Magnet Releasing)

“It doesn’t seem to me that women are nonviolent. I think we’ve just been societally taught to keep it under wraps until we’re either drowning our children or shooting our husbands.”
– Jennifer Lynch on women and violence

Jennifer Lynch’s thriller Surveillance starring Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond opens in limited release tomorrow and I recently participated in a series of separate round table interviews with Ms. Lynch and her cast. Here is the first one with Lynch by herself.

In the film, Pullman and Ormond play two FBI agents who show up in a small Midwestern town where three people have information that could help the agents solve a possible serial murder: a gun crazy cop, a drug addict and an 8-year-old girl. Unfortunately, no one’s story quite adds up and nothing is as it first appears.

Lynch is of course the daughter of LiC favorite David Lynch and this is her first feature since 1993′s critically divisive Boxing Helena. She seemed a bit nervous at first, but was clearly excited to be back making films and (justifiably) proud of the work she and her cast and crew had done.

You took about ten years off from filmmaking and now you’re back with a vengeance…

What the heck have I been doing? After Boxing Helena and a significant amount, I think, of rocking myself in a fetal position in a corner, I decided that the best thing to do was something totally different. Although I was shooting some commercials and music videos, thereafter I just decided I was going to have a baby. It’s tough to be somebody’s mother. I had a beautiful baby girl. Raised her on my own and kept telling stories through my own writing and to her.

Then I’d had a really bad car accident while I was writing Boxing Helena at 19 and my spine just degenerated so I had three consecutive spinal surgeries and now I’m titanium bolts and cadaver bone and 8 years sober. So I was getting my act together so to speak.

Was filmmaking always in the back of your mind as something you wanted to return to?

Always. Always there. Not even so much in the back of my mind as much as…I think it was two tiers: One was I really thought, especially as a single parent, it would be unfair for me to invite somebody into the world and then not be there for her as much as I possibly could and I wanted her to have a certain amount of maturity so that she could see mom going to work as something that improved mom and made her better and inspired her instead of an abandonment.

There came a point when I didn’t know if I was ever going to walk again and I realized that I still wanted to tell stories. I still wanted to make films so then I was sure. So, it stayed with me.

The things you mentioned – becoming a mom, the huge accident with surgery after surgery, 8 years getting sober – any one of those things really changes someone’s life. Did it change your work or your approach to the work as well?

Not being able to do it without that experience, I can only say I’m sure that it did. I know that I’m a lot older (laughs) and I think there was something really valuable about the level of fear I was able to put away this time around because I just realized people are going to say whatever they’re going to say. I know I want to do this and I’m lucky enough to be able to do this so I just do it and have fun with it. Then when we get to situations like this where people are either going to like it or not like it, I know I did everything I could to enjoy it myself and make a great story. I think ultimately that, yes, I’m very different. I certainly feel like I look different (laughs). I have a lot more scars than I did before, but hopefully I’m better than I was.

So, where did this story come from?

(laughs) With such disdain on your face too!

More quizzical.

This story was born of a lot of different things. One is I love a good thriller. I love a good serial killer film and I hadn’t seen the one I wanted to see yet. [One that] sort of explored in a different way what it is to be an open wound that therefore has to wound.

And being that I was someone’s mother, I was reminded of not only of her clarity of vision, but what it was like when I was a child and really saw things when I wasn’t worried “am I thin enough, am I good enough, do they like me, do they want to sleep with me” blah blah blah and all that ego and the alteration we do as adults to change the truth to suit ourselves. It’s not necessarily lying, but it’s a different thing. The egos come into play, but children just see things for what they are.

So I wanted to incorporate that clarity of vision that all of us had that we tend to ignore in children as we get older – out of the mouths of babes, you know, maybe tact-free but still very true – and really play with how good and bad don’t necessarily look the way we think they look. And that’s where that came from.

David Lynch…um…your dad…

(laughs) Oh, that guy.

He produced. How involved did he get and was that a big nod to you in a sense?

Oh god. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was a nod? It was a funny thing because when I wrote the script – you know we’re constantly sharing things back and forth and I consider myself really lucky to have the relationship I have with him as friend and father/daughter – and he called me at night after he’d finished reading the script and he said, “This is way too sick. You can’t do this. You cannot leave your film like this. It’s awful.” And he actually called me the sickest bitch he knew…and I said, “But that’s how the story ends”…and he actually challenged me, the bastard. He said, “I challenge you to write another ending” and after much hemming and hawing I did.

I wrote two and I shot both, but prior to shooting both, a year went by before anybody looked at the script…he called and said, “Why the hell aren’t you making your movie?” And I said, “I don’t know. It’s been fifteen years since I did anything…” and he said, “Well, what if I put my name on it as executive producer? Think of it as an experiment. ” Sure enough the fish started biting and I thought what about people who don’t have someone to pop a name on? It’s not necessarily that I thought it changed the material, but it just brought it to the top of the pile like a giant pink fuzzy cover might…and I thought wow it’s really about marketing even just that script, now.

When I came back from shooting it in Canada I said, “Look I know I’ve seen you before executive produce things and then later hate them and take your name off it so I’m prepared to have you see it and if you don’t like it we can fly the name” and he said, “I’ve got one thing to say. I want my name bigger.” I said, “Great then can I use that song of yours Speed Roadster?” So that’s his song playing in the drug addicts’ car and over the end credits. Rock and roll dad (laughs).

Did you keep the original ending and was he ok with it?

Yeah he said, “You’re absolutely right. That’s the way it should’ve been.”

So what have you learned?

Be in the joy of it and everything that goes wrong is an opportunity to make something better. I got hit with that big time on this when Mac Miller, who played the male drug addict, his appendix burst and he was in every shot for the next two weeks and he was gonna be in the hospital. There was no way – we were on one road, there’s only a few directions I can look and a few things I can do – and so I just quickly scrambled and rewrote some scenes and spoke to the DP and said, “Look we’re just going to have to wrangle the cast and the crew and change a few things and just not look that way in that car until he can get back.” Ultimately I think the scenes worked better and Mac came back with a huge incision and was a total trooper and I think his performance is better for it too.

So it’s like that joke about the optimist and the pessimist. The pessimist is put in a room full of presents and he’s just sort of like this (makes a glum face). The optimist is put in a room full of horseshit and he’s just digging through it like this (big smile) because there must be a pony with all that horse shit. So there must be a pony and I just kept looking for the pony.

What’s the biggest change you’ve noticed in the business in all this time that’s passed?

The good news is: everybody can make a film. The bad news is: everybody can make a film. And everyone should. It’s just really tricky so it makes those available spots and moments of financing really hard to get and you really earn it. Making a film is hard enough. Starting it’s hard, doing it’s hard, finishing it’s hard, and so I champion everyone who gets it done whether they’re doing it themselves or through a studio or independent financing.

And then I guess in the distribution of it, I’m astounded that it was my 13-year-old who had to say, “Of course it’s on VOD before it’s in the theaters. That’s how they get people talking about it” and I’m thinking, “It’s on TV first?” But, you know, I’m just a dinosaur and she’s the one who’s got her fingers on the pulse.

So I think, as far as the way media is handled now and the accessibility to producing your own material, it’s a brave new fabulous world and a brave new terrifyingly competitive world

Do you ever take a page out of your dad’s book? I think in the last movie he’s on the corner with a cow…he’s always thinking of new ways to get out there.

He is so unafraid to be different or absurd. He knew full well that it would cost him less and get him more attention to take a cow out to Hollywood Bouelvard and Sunset Boulevard and he was right. If there’s one thing I think people really remember it’s the whole cow campaign (laughs). “Vote for Laura Dern for Inland Empire!”

He’s got a huge set of balls – really creative balls. If I could afford a cow I might’ve done it myself. I don’t know where to get one. (laughs) He knows farmers.

So, are you ready to face the media again?

I don’t know. How am I doing? I mean I feel ok about it. I’m really proud of the film. I’m really proud that I worked with the people I worked with and that it turned out the way it did…

According to my father, you don’t listen to the good and you don’t listen to the bad. You just move on to the next thing and so that’s what I’m doing now. I’m editing another film right now so I’m just trying to be very grateful, promote this the best I can, and then try not to lose sleep over the good or the bad.

Because you’re a woman film director have they commented on the edginess of [Surveillance] or the violence?

Iin the same why that I think it came strangely as news but not news to people that the banter in the women’s room was just as crass as any banter in a boy’s locker room, it doesn’t seem to me that women are nonviolent. I think we’ve just been societally taught to keep it under wraps until we’re either drowning our children or shooting our husbands. In the same way that the earth benefits from 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark, so does the human body and human mind. So I think it’s the same for women as it is for men, we just don’t get the societal permission to express it as often as men do.

How difficult was it getting the money and the actors involved?

You know, it wasn’t easy. Kent Harper and Marco Mehlitz who finally came on as producers – Marco’s a genius – Kent got it to him in Germany and Marco read it and said I’m really interested in this film and I’m going to fly to the states to meet you guys. It was many years and lots of struggle and then ultimately nobody got paid what they were worth on this film. Everybody did it for no money. So the good news of that is they must really want to do it and the bad news is you can’t offer them any extra perks so you just hope that you’re providing them with what they want and need everyday so they can do the best job and not feel taken advantage of – especially out in the middle of nowhere in 80 mile an hour winds.

How did you end up [filming] in Regina [Canada]?

It rhymes with vagina, so I had to go. They call it “the town that rhymes with fun” (laughs). Actually it was Marco Mehlitz who heard about some of the tax breaks that were given in Canada. I thought “Canada? This takes place in middle America.” And he said, “let’s go look” and I said, “you’re right,” because I have to say some of the greatest things in my life have happened to me because I was wrong so I’m just going to go out there and see if maybe I’m not wrong about this. And I was totally wrong and it was a great thing. The prairie in Canada looks a lot like middle of nowhere middle America.

The crews are astounding and the production possibilities there are incredible and they’re so hungry for film and it has not been shot out. I mean there are locations there that just make you dream.

So that’s how we ended up in the town that rhymes with fun.

How did you get such a great cast?

Basically begging. What’s great is I’d written the FBI agent for Bill [Pullman] and he turned me down at first when the script was in an earlier incarnation. I called on him again when I lost an actor two weeks before going to camera. I said, “I know you said no but can I just ask you again?” He said, “Why did I say no?” and I said, “I don’t know. You weren’t clear” and I sent it to him and he said, “I’m in.”

Julia Ormond actually got the script through her agent and called me and said, “I really want to meet with you and have coffee. I really want to do this.” and I said, “THE Julia Ormond?” She’s so classy and beautiful and fabulous, you know? And again, what a gift because I think she works beautifully in the role.

French Stewart and Cheri Oteri…to me, comedians have such a potential to be funny because there’s so much untapped darkness and sadness in them – you know, tears of a clown – so I wanted to explore them as actors. Michael Ironside I never get to see him be sweet and good and he’s such an amazing actor. Kent Harper I wrote the role for. Mac Miller and Charlie Newmark and Gill Gayle I’ve been friends with for years and had to have them in the movie. Pell James I’d never heard of her and the casting director Lina called me and she said I think you should check out this woman Pell and I fell madly in love with her. She’s crazy.

What about Ryan [Simpkins]?

Oh god, that was tough. How am I going to cast someone inspired by my daughter? You meet enough children actors and you think, “Oh no, they’re all little performers!” and Ryan’s really a kid. She’s really a little kid and I credit her mother that she’s not just always on show. And that’s what I wanted was a real little kid. Ryan and I hit it off. After seeing literally maybe just under a hundred kids, Ryan was instantly it.

Did your daughter get to help in casting that role?

She didn’t get to help in casting it, but when I introduced her to Ryan she goes, “I like her. She’s good.”

How old did you say your daughter was?

13 now.

Showing any interest?

Yes, isn’t that awful? Yes. I told her that if she wants to give me the finger when she’s 18 she can go ahead and do it, but until then I don’t want her to be a part of it. She’s on set. She works on special effects. She works in wardrobe. She’s there all the time every day…I just want to make sure, especially if she’s working for me, that I’m never saying, “Not good enough. Go again. Not good enough.” I don’t think kids need to hear that. It’s hard enough to hear it as an adult.

What do you want people to come away with from this.

That’s a really good question. Hopefully some surprise. Maybe an element of, “well that was a really dark romantic comedy.” Maybe interest in seeing it again because I was very careful to make every movement and every line of dialogue work both ways whether you know or don’t know.

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Jennifer is currently in post-production on Hisss, a creature feature starring Irrfan Kahn (Slumdog Millionaire) and Bollywood star Mallika Sherwat. It’s based on an Indian legend about a cobra goddess who transforms into a human being and seeks vengeance. Lynch describes it as a “weird, beautiful roller coaster ride” with lots of in-camera special effects a la An American Werewolf in London and she hopes to premiere it at either Sundance or Berlinale. You can watch a promo here.

Meanwhile, Surveillance opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles and it’s currently available on VOD. Watch the trailer at the Surveillance website here.

Filed under: LiC Interview
Tags: Bill Pullman, Jennifer Lynch, Julia Ormond, Surveillance