A 'DRIVE' TO DREAM 15 YEARS AFTER 'BLUE VELVET,' DAVID LYNCH'S WORK IS STILL ENIGMATIC.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

David Lynch wants to be popular.

``We're shootin' for $100 million. I'm not kidding ya,'' the director says in his folksy, friendly way about his latest feature film, ``Mulholland Drive.'' A typically Lynchian compilation of alarming imagery, dream logic, shifting identities and transgressive eroticism, it won a directing award at last spring's Cannes Film Festival and has been receiving advance acclaim of a kind that the often inscrutable artist-turned-filmmaker has not enjoyed since his 1986 signature masterpiece, ``Blue Velvet.''

But blockbuster status? Though markedly more compelling than more recent Lynch psycho-circuses such as ``Lost Highway,'' ``Wild at Heart'' and ``Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,'' and darkly intriguing in a way that his lovely, G-rated last feature, ``The Straight Story,'' never intended to be, ``Mulholland's'' surreal depiction of Hollywood fantasies gone 180 degrees awry hardly fits the current definition of mass popular entertainment.

Still, the onetime Eagle Scout from Missoula, Mont., has - like the aspiring actress played by Naomi Watts in the new movie - his fragile, hope- filled dreams.

``My films have never made very much money,'' admits Lynch, 55, his high stack of white-blond hair making him look more than ever like Eraserhead, his breakthrough midnight movie protagonist. `` 'The Elephant Man' and 'Dune' actually made a lot of money, and 'Blue Velvet' did OK, but not as much as you'd think. So what needs to happen for this thing to cross over? People say they enjoy watching the film; there's really very little negativity surrounding it, there's just some scratching of the head.''

Well, yeah. What starts off as a relatively straightforward story about an unlikely friendship between a naive young Canadian actress (Watts) and the amnesiac party girl (Laura Elena Harring) she meets on her first day in Hollywood implodes, about halfway through, into a harrowing counter-reality of dashed hopes and thwarted desire, with the leading ladies and many of the supporting players suddenly morphing into completely different characters.

Head-scratching? You bet, although when Lynch explains, with trademark earnestness, that the movie does unfold according to a certain logic, it's hard to dispute him.

As almost seen on TV

But there hasn't been an absolute absence of negativity. At least in its initial form, as a series pilot for ABC, the network that broadcast Lynch's landmark ``Twin Peaks'' series in the early 1990s, ``Mulholland Drive'' could not have been more despised.

``The interesting thing about this was that it started as an open-ended TV pilot,'' notes Lynch, who made that version of what would eventually become his film in 1999. ``At a certain point, ABC saw that pilot - which wasn't really finished - and hated it so much that they canceled everything.

``Now, you could say that is a real blow and that is a bad thing,'' he adds, um, cheerfully. ``But it was a blessing. A year or so later, (French production company) Canal Plus, who spent a lot of money getting this thing back, gave me the opportunity to make it into a feature.''

Sounds like a director's dream. But Lynch, a trained painter who usually builds his films around aesthetic notions rather than standard narrative concepts, was initially at a loss as to what to do with his good fortune.

``I had zero ideas on how to turn it into a feature film,'' he says. ``I just had an open-ended pilot. Then one night, I'm just sitting in my chair and - it was a such a beautiful and lucky thing - the ideas came in. Everything was seen from a different angle after that. There was a whole new additional shooting and a restructuring of everything that had gone before, based on the new ideas. There are things different from the pilot in the beginning, middle and end, and it's as if the thing wanted to be this way all along.''

What exactly that thing is is both easy and difficult to articulate.

``At Cannes, they asked me to write a one-sentence description of the film, so I said it's a love story in the city of dreams,'' Lynch explains while looking out a window across the L.A. Basin.

City of dreams, film

``This is the city of dreams; every city is, but this is the city of film, and all films are like dreams. When you enter a theater or put in a tape, it's a chance to go into another world. This is something that's part of the human condition that we love to do. And it's not escaping; there must be some key to it, why it's so compelling. They're very special things, films, and they're somewhat, you could say, like dreams.''

Hence a movie about peoples' struggles to fix their dreams in a kind of celluloid permanence. But ``Mulholland Drive'' also delves deeply into the psychological risks such obsessive fantasizing can can entail, especially for the most active participants in the movie illusion.

``Hollywood is a town of acting, and an actor gives up his or her identity and takes on another,'' Lynch notes. ``There are dreams everywhere in that; there are desires, daydreams, nightmares swimming in it. And sometimes, we can create things mentally, out of desperation, that make us feel good. It's just a question of how long you can hold onto those things.''

The hope of finally bringing ``Mulholland Drive'' to the point where people could see it had just about faded for everyone involved when Lynch called the actors to a meeting, more than two years after filming the original pilot, to tell them the good news.

``We went over to his office and he said, ' ``Mulholland Drive'' is going to be an international feature film! But there's going to be nudity, OK?' and smiled and thrust out his hand,'' Harring recalls. ``There I am, shaking his hand, and I leave the room, thinking, 'Oh my God, what just happened?' It tormented me for a few weeks, knowing that there was going to be some nudity in it. But you have to trust your director and David's an amazing director, and I was delighted that it was going to be a film.''

One that required more than just nudity, as it turned out. In at least two of their multiple character incarnations, Watts and Harring become lovers, and their sex scenes have been praised as some of the most erotic and emotionally resonant ever portrayed in an American movie.

What he meant to say was ...

Lynch cautions against searching for anything as simple as direct correlations between the film's depiction of movie-industry misbehavior - such as a ``Godfather''-ish confrontation between a young director and overbearing producers - and vengeance against Hollywood philistines who may not have gotten his work in the past.

``The word 'revenge' is a tricky word,'' he notes. ``The executives at ABC, say, are allowed to be their way. They've got a lot of problems and they have a right to hate my stuff. I can relate to the scenes about Hollywood in the movie, but they're not from my life. They're from the ideas, and who knows how come they come in like they do. But they do.''

That last statement could sum up the central mystery, and ongoing exploration, of David Lynch's cinema. It may not make him the most popular filmmaker in town, but it is why he'll always be one of the most interesting.

``I guess I've got a fascination for the mind, and that is a world that goes from the surface to the source,'' he says. ``There's an entire range the mind will go, and most of our minds don't go so deep, but it's as big as big can be. How it works is pretty interesting, but it's not like a study, like I'm in school. The ideas just come, and why I fall in love with certain ones have to do with complicated inner desires to go that way.''

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5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) David Lynch goes back to his old bag of surreal, atmospheric tricks in `Mulholland Drive'

(2 -- cover -- color) Laura Elena Harring in ``Mulholland Drive''

(3) David Lynch, center, talks with actors Justin Theroux and Laura Elena Harring on the set of ``Mulholland Drive.''

(4) Naomi Watts, who plays Betty, takes direction from Lynch.

(5) Watts, left, and Harring in a scene from ``Mulholland Drive.''