'A Damn Fine Cup of Coffee'

David Lynch has beautiful hands. They stay folded much of the time, but when the director gets going, when his conversation begins to flow and an idea buzzes in his head like a fluorescent bulb, his fingers flutter in unison and his palms sweep in synchronized arcs. When this happens, Lynch could be a magician working some undefined "presto-change-o" mojo over an upside-down top hat. It makes you wonder—is he about to manifest a rabbit?

Actually, yes. Three of them. Life-sized humanoid suckers, trapped in some purgatorial deadpan sitcom. They materialize early and late in Inland Empire, and are scarcely the strangest things on display in this three-hour excursion through disintegrating consciousness, multiple darkened rooms of gloom and pretzeling movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie ambiguities. The film-which Lynch shot himself, on and off for three years, with a consumer-model Sony PD150 digital-video camera-is easily his most challenging and out there since the midnight-movie era of Eraserhead, some 30 years ago. Much as then, the new film is trickling out to theaters, city by city. It's practically being hand-distributed by Rhino (best known as a record company specializing in sometimes zany archival reissues) who will release Inland Empire as a DVD this summer.

It is, like every Lynch film save Dune, exactly what he wanted to make-a kind of parallel to the Hollywood noir of Mulholland Dr. (Just whose voices belong to those rabbits?) This time, however, there's only one actress, a fading, 40-ish star played by Laura Dern (who also starred in Lynch's Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart), whose onscreen and off-screen personas get scrambled inside her head. There's also a grim Polish saga that might have something to do with white slavery, a chorus line of streetwalkers, a Gypsy curse, a pretty brunette who sits alone in a hotel room weeping, and a pet monkey. But that's the easy stuff.

"When Mulholland Dr. came out, no one understood it," says Lynch, sitting in a candy-colored studio in a huge Chelsea nonprofit arts complex that's been secured for his low-budget promotional visit to New York. His silver hair is swept up into the kind of semi-pompadour that would do a televangelist proud, and his white shirt is buttoned to the neck under a formal black blazer. "Now, everyone understands that one but they don't understand this one." Not that Lynch understood it himself when he began shooting the fragments that would eventually become Inland Empire, a title that alludes to the non-coastal region southeast of Los Angeles, but primarily to the interior landscape of the mind, the director's playground.

'CINEMATIC JAZZ'

"When he called me, he said 'Let's experiment.' Those were the first words out of his mouth," says Dern, who appears in almost every scene of the movie, and who gave up so much of her time to assist with the often nebulous enterprise that Lynch gave her a producer credit. Dern was given a 70-minute monologue that Lynch had written, its segments forming the oscillating core of the finished work. "I loved that I played a character I couldn't even define. It's so all over the map, and to have someone trust you enough to say you can be all these aspects of a woman-it's the greatest sense of flying off a mountain."

Dern's co-star, fellow Lynch veteran Justin Theroux, reaches for a different comparison. "It's like cinematic jazz," says the actor, who had a key role in Mulholland Dr. "There's just something that happens in his films that obviously doesn't follow the conventions of normal storytelling. It eventually becomes its own animal." As the actors worked in scenes that were assembled in bits and pieces, they often seemed to be performing in a kind of void. "There are some scenes we shot, and on that day the lines are so funny, we're just cracking up. Then when you see them in the film it's a heart attack."

That's the sort of juxtaposition on which Lynch thrives. "The unknown pulls you in and it's kind of thrilling," he says, never quite explicating the journey. He becomes verbose, however, when discussing his experience with digital video. "My film students tell me, 'Geez, David, they make us work on the PD150 and we can hardly wait to get ahold of a Panavision and shoot 35 [mm] and you're leaving Panavision to use the PD150!?!'"

Fine for taking cinematic notes, perhaps, but, c'mon man, it's not even high-def.

"It's the way I want to shoot everything," Lynch insists. "It's not just for 'taking notes.' I'm falling in love with the way it goes with this small lightweight camera, with its 40-minute takes and the automatic focus, and seeing what you get, seeing it right there. You see exactly what it's going to look like and if you don't like it you can alter it. Once you get into a scene you can stay in there, deep, for a long time. You can talk to people while you're shooting the thing. Start again, get a little deeper. Start it again and catch a thing, and you don't have to interrupt it."

Suggest to Lynch that he's pushed the camera to its visual limits-giving Inland Empire a grainy, sometimes harsh look that might come from poor TV reception augmented by a broken contrast knob-and he gets even more excitable. "Yeah, it's bad quality," he says. "I'm not pushing it to make it worse. I'm seeing that it's out of focus and I don't give a shit! It's workin' for me. It's just beautiful to me."

'JIMMY STEWART FROM MARS'

This does sound perfect for Lynch, who's a full-time creative tinkerer, not terribly unlike the urbane scoutmaster he might be in a parallel universe, easily suggested by his warm, "Hey, Buddy!" persona and Midwestern twang. ("Jimmy Stewart from Mars," is how Mel Brooks described him, and it still rings true.) Daily, he indulges his love of painting, enjoys photographing nudes, builds his own furniture, and even delivers brief video weather reports weekdays on the free section of his website: DavidLynch.com. And, lately, Lynch has spoken a lot about another enthusiasm, Transcendental meditation, and the influence it's had on his life. Once a skeptic, he's practiced the discipline for 20 minutes twice a day since 1973 and credits it with leading him to "this unified field, pure-bliss consciousness." Lynch refers to this interior space by the Vedic phrase atma. "The self," he says. "Know that. Know it by being it, and you got the whole thing." Puzzled moviegoers groping for a skeleton key to the Lynchian funhouse, there you have it.

"Life becomes more like a game," Lynch says, fingers dancing. "It's way more fun to me. Way more fun. Every morning becomes more like a Saturday morning, a really sunny day. And all weekend you get to do your favorite things." He shares his inspirational thoughts in a new book, Catching the Big Fish, which is only one of many current projects. There's also Dynamic: 01, a DVD of weirdness from the website; the DVD release of the second season of Twin Peaks, Lynch's cult TV series; a March exhibit of paintings in Paris; and even his own brand of coffee.

That's right, look for David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee online and at theaters showing Inland Empire. "It's really good coffee," Lynch exclaims, settling for Starbucks this particular afternoon, smoke curling from the American Spirit cigarette he pinches between his left thumb and forefinger, held perpendicular from his upturned palm. "I drink 20 cups a day. But they're cappuccinos. There's not that much espresso in with the milk."

Now, we can all drink this strange brew. "It's perfect for art houses," Lynch says. "Like going back to the Beatnik days. Like coffee should be!"