The City of Absurdity   Lost Highway  
About the Film

  David Lynch | Barry Gifford | Patricia Arquette | Bill Pullman

Robert Blake | Robert Loggia | Natasha Gregson Wagner

Balthazar Getty | Patricia Norris | Mary Sweeney | Peter Deming

back


Barry Gifford (Co-Writer)

"This story is really about a man who creates a situation, finds himself in a dire situation and has a kind of panic attack. And that he really has a difficult time in dealing with the consequences of his action. And this action fractures him, in a way."

"Let's say you don't want to be yourself anymore. Something happens to you, and you just show up in Seattle, living under the name Joe Smith, with a whole different reality. It means that you're trying to escape something, and that's basically what Fred Madison does. He gets into a fugue state, which in this case means that he can't go anywhere - he's in a prison cell, so it's happening internally, within his own mind. But things don't work out any better in the fugue state than they do in real life. He can't control the woman any more than he could in real life. You might say this is an explanation for what happens. However, this is not a complete explanation for the film. Things happen in this film that are not – and should not be – easily explained."

"We realized we didn't want to make something that was linear, and that's why the Moebius strip. A Moebius strip is a long strip of paper curved initially into a circle, but with one end flipped over. The strip now has only one side that flips both inside and outside the shape. It made it easier to explain things to ourselves and keeping it straightforward. The story folds back underneath itself and continues."

"I really wouldn't work with anybody I don't respect. That doesn't mean you always love the result. But in this case, it's a challenge."

"There's a thing, where Michael Massee as Andy gets stuck on the table – that's so amazing the way David filmed it! We wrote it, thinking, 'If a guy launched himself at somebody like that, could his head get embedded?' Remember how your mother told you to be careful around the comers of a glass table? We were taking that fantasy, like 'Don't play with that BB gun; you'll shoot your eye out.' It's the same kind of thing: what's the most horrific thing that could happen, and could it really happen? David said, 'Don't worry about it; just write it. I'll worry about how to make it happen.' Having complete confidence in him that way is very liberating."

"It's all just fantastic. It's sort of beyond black humor. Because we had this freedom of being in a fantasy world, more or less, we could do anything. If spaceships came down, which they practically did, it wouldn't be out of context, given where we're at. That's a tremendous structure; I don't know if everyone understood it once we sprang it on them."

back top next


Lost Highway Interviews | Lost Highway main page | David Lynch main page
© Mike Hartmann
thecityofabsurdity@yahoo.com