MulhollandDr.-Audio


David Lynch on Mulholland Dr.

"Sound and picture moving together in time is a magical thing. And sound does so many things. You can have a scene and introduce the right sounds and the scene changes before your eyes and ears, a whole other world opens up, moods sweep in and those sounds can march us through and indicate so many things as we go. And it's one of the elements that's the most critical to the whole. And it's a process of action and reaction. You don't know everything going in but you act and react as you go. It's always an experiment. Mary will tell you I sit sometimes in the editing room and she'll turn around and I'm crying. Emotion is the thing that cinema can do. But it's tricky. It really shows you how this balance point is critical. A little bit too much and the emotion goes away, a little bit too little and it doesn't happen."

www.thecityofabsurdity.com


John Neff (MD sound designer) on David Lynch's "sound directing"

David of course is very hands on in the sound department. He is the sound designer for the movie. He conceptualizes things and says 'I need it to sound like a 30 ton piece of metal being scraped across a polished piece of smooth granite'. Well, you have to imagine in your mind how that's gonna sound, then you have to go make it out of things that exist in the everyday real world. But he directs - he's an act and react guy. You come up with something you think might get you started on that path an then he goes ''ok, no, it's gotta be lower, it's gotta be slower, it's gotta have this, more reverb'. So he directs the creation of the sound like he directs the picture. I mean on this picture, David was moving faders. So he's very active in the mix. He and Alan Splet, who had been his sound mixer for all of the experimental films through Blue Velvet worked like that. They would just dig in, and make stuff out of nothing. So a lot of the stuff in the film doesn't come from, it's not stuff that's in standard libraries, or stuff you just go out and record. You take some raw material and you work it to death, and turn it into something that doesn't exist in the real world, but it's an impressionistic, surrealistic element that supports the picture, and makes it in his mind, and once it's ok with Dave, it's part of the picture.

www.dugpa.com


Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

by Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch, John Neff

Song Lyrics of the Movie

I've told every little star, Sixteen Reasons Why I Love You, Llorando, Bring It On Home

Famous Lines

Download voice samples


Related: Interview with John Neff (MD sound designer)