Iconic moviemaker, Pedro Almodovar, has a long history of producing female-centric stories. To mark the release of his latest film, Broken Embraces, Damon Wise discusses the importance of women with the Spanish director.

“I think,” says Pedro Almodovar, “that the reason that there are mostly female characters in my films is that when I was a child – like many children of my generation, at the end of the 50s – I was brought up by women. I was surrounded by women. My mother took me round with her all the time, and when she didn’t, she left me with our female neighbours, or she sat me on the patio. So I was able to observe this kind of family life that was completely governed by women – by strong women, this generation of post-war women.” He sighs. “I don’t know how they got by, but they did. They managed to feed us and clothe us every day. I think my country owes them so much.”

For many people, Pedro Almodovar is a once absurdly camp Spanish filmmaker who, over the last 25 years, has somehow mellowed into something more soulful and classical. It is true that his early films featured penis-measuring competitions, close-ups of splattered diarrhoea and a love story featuring not one but two serial killers locked in a torrid romance. But there’s a side to Almodovar that has always been serious. His films focus on women not as empty, shallow drag queens but as fully fleshed, emotional creations, and even his trashy comedies treasure freedom in a political way, reacting against the tyrannical reign of the dictator General Franco, who held Spain in his ultra-conservative grasp for nearly 40 years.

Almodovar’s new film, Broken Embraces, re-teams him with Penelope Cruz, the muse he discovered on his 1999 film All About My Mother and to whom he gave a blistering role in his last film, Volver. Volver was a film about life after death, in several unexpected ways, and so is Broken Embraces. But where Volver was bright and earthy, Broken Embraces is dark and sad, a melancholy study of loss starring Lluis Homar as a film director who has lost his sight and his lover (Cruz) and lives in a state of denial. Taking the fake name Harry Caine, he refuses to face the painful memories of the past – of the struggling starlet he discovered and fell for, and the jealous millionaire producer who drove them apart.

Like several of Almodovar’s previous films – notably Women On the Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (1990) – it’s a film that explicitly references the movie world, but the reason here is not to foreground artifice of the film itself but to reveal how far real life falls short of the movies. “I realise that, over time, I’ve become more aware of what filmmaking means to me,” says Almodovar. “I could almost say that cinema perfects all the imperfections of life. And the gravity of my recent films, the seriousness, is a result of age, I think. One can’t help maturing. Over time, I grew up, I changed, and I believe my films reflect that.”

In person, Almodovar is a surprisingly sober individual; a thoughtful chatterbox who prefers to ‘habla espana’ when talking about his movies but who can’t help interrupting his translator (in English) to clarify certain points. He’s big too, and the shock of wiry, bouffant grey hair makes him look elemental, and much more masculine than his films might suggest. It’s interesting to note, then, that Broken Embraces is as much a film about a man as a woman, in particular the forlorn Harry Caine.

“In this film, there’s much more equality than in the other films,” agrees Almodovar. “There are as many male parts as there are female parts, so it’s perfectly balanced. It’s true, though, that there are usually more female characters in my films, and the female characters are much stronger. Much more tough and solid. Robust. These are women who struggle but they can fight, whereas the male characters are much weaker and more hermetic. They’re darker. Why?” He pauses, then laughs. “Perhaps a psychoanalyst could explain it to me! But I don’t ask myself that question.”

Almodovar turns 58 on September 25, and insists he has loved films since he was small, growing up in a small village out in the plains of La Mancha. He went to the cinema every weekend, and in the early 60s saw pretty much everything that played there, thanks to a doorman that let him in even to see adult movies such as Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. “I used to see all the movies of the period with my sisters,” he recalls. “And when they went out with their friends they’d say, ‘Pedro, tell us the story of the movie that we saw yesterday.’ And I would. But I was so enthusiastic that, in the middle, I invented completely new scenes. My sisters liked just to listen to me, because it was a new movie that I was making in my head.”

Almodovar still works this way, using the characters to dictate the story, and not the other way round. “In the case of some actors,” he says, “I provide them with the full information before we begin shooting the film. I fill them in on the way I view the character and the way I see the part, but on other occasions I’ll say nothing. I provide no information, because I want them to play the scene instinctively, based on intuition. But, if necessary, I will play all the parts myself on the set. Now, I’m actually very shy, even if I don’t appear so and you may not believe me. But when I’m shooting a film, I’m absolutely prepared to play all the parts just to show the actors. In one of the films I shot some time ago – I won’t give you the title! – I even performed cunnilingus on an actress to show the actor how he was supposed to play the part.”

It’s this attention to detail that gives Almodovar’s films their humanity, and even when the storylines are at their most bizarre – as with the drug-taking, lesbian nuns of 1983’s deceptively tragic Dark Habits – there is always a powerful life force present. “The actors are truly essential in my films,” he nods, “whatever kind of tale I’m telling. And when the film is provocative, or a bit exaggerated, or a bit crazy, then it’s even more essential for the actors to play it in a realistic way. So, in those cases, and even though the situation may appear ridiculous, I ask actors to be as realistic and natural as possible in their portrayal of the characters. That’s the key to all my films. That’s why those scenes appear quite real, and they do look like something that could actually occur in real life.”

This seamless blending of high and low art made Almodovar attractive to Hollywood from the start, with Jane Fonda snapping up the remake rights to Women On The Verge just as soon as it appeared on the release circuit. No movie version has so far emerged, but, according to Almodovar, two other major US versions are in the pipeline and imminent. “The first is a TV series produced by Fox,” he grins. “They’ve finished the adaptation and they’d like this series to go on forever. I don’t know whether they’ll manage to do that, but let’s hope, for them, that they can. Anyhow, the pilot has been shot, and the screenplay writer did Grey’s Anatomy, so who knows? The second adaptation is a musical adaptation on Broadway. They’ve been working on this for more than a year; the dialogue is ready, the songs are virtually all ready, and the director is the director who did South Pacific.”

But despite his enthusiasm, Almodovar has steadfastly resisted all the overtures he’s had to make a studio movie in America. “I have been offered projects – many projects – in Hollywood,” he reveals. “But I feel it’s increasingly unlikely that I’ll take them up. Because the way I work, and the way they work over there, are very different. I would even say they’re opposites.”

To put this into perspective, it’s worth noting that what happens to Harry Caine in Broken Embraces goes beyond just the loss of a woman: his last film, Girls With Suitcases, is taken from him by his enraged producer and deliberately cut to ribbons. “If that happened to me,” Almodovar growls, “or rather one of my films, I think I would kill the producer or the person who destroyed the material that I had shot. In Europe we’re very fortunate because we have laws that protect the rights of authors. The laws are very clear and well established, so in fact this is the kind of situation that could never arise in Europe. However, such a situation could occur in the United States, and it’s even frequent.”

“What’s very important to me is the very last line of the film,” he concludes. “Harry says, ‘Films always have to be finished, even if it is done blindly.’ For me, that’s very important. One shouldn’t let somebody else come between the author and the film. The director must go through with it to the very end, even if he ends up in a wheelchair or has catheters all over the place. Even if he’s being given oxygen, he has to make that film. But I also wanted to add this last line, because I fully believe that the cinema can make life more perfect.” He smiles. “You know, even if the characters go through all sorts of trials and tribulations in their life, in the cinema, everything works out.”

WORDS: Damon Wise

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #19, Sep/Oct 2009

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The cold sweats and crazed imaginings of Charlie Kaufman have given us Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Now, with his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, things have got really weird. Damon Wise takes him on.

Charlie Kaufman has changed a lot since the year 2000. Back then, he was a shy, frizzy-headed man of 41, and the most noticeable thing about him was his height. He was sitting down, perched on a sofa at the Dorchester Hotel, but even then it was obvious he was tiny: his shoes barely touched the floor. After a string of non-encounters with journalists, his publicists were at their wits’ end, hoping for a miracle, praying he’d open up. He didn’t, and they finally gave up on him altogether, combining his interviews with those of Spike Jonze, the director of the film he was supposed to be promoting: his first produced screenplay, Being John Malkovich. That didn’t work either. After just one sensible interview, Jonze became bored and went gonzo, electing to answer questions with awkward pauses and a blank stare.

Those thirty minutes with Kaufman were bizarre. Not because he was bizarre, particularly, but because, when I played back the tape, it was barely useable. Where had all the words gone? What was frustrating was that I knew we had communicated. He’d talked about the trippy, strange Malkovich. And, more fascinatingly, he’d talked of the films to come. Like a new script he’d written, based on the outrageous autobiography of Chuck Barry, host of The Gong Show, in which Barry claimed to have been a hitman. And another, which was about to filmed. Kaufman, I remember, was unhappy with rumours that it was about a man with the world’s smallest penis and the world’s hairiest woman (even though it was). There was a third screenplay, this one still at the treatment stage, which even he thought was ludicrous – he’d been asked to adapt a book about an orchid thief, but since it had no story, he’d added one, with himself and his fictional twin brother as its heroes. And, finally, there was the script he was in the middle of writing: a romantic comedy set almost entirely in a man’s memory.

His ideas seemed wonderful but unworkable, yet one by one they have materialised. First came Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, then Human Nature, then Adaptation. And when I saw The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind it dawned on me that this must have been the film keeping him awake at nights when we first met. I realised then that Charlie Kaufman was not to be underestimated. He didn’t talk in riddles, just a very abstract form of the truth. Which explains why he’s really not joking when he says that his directing debut, Synecdoche, New York, began life as a horror movie. Because, although it deals with art, mortality and relationships rather than axe-wielding psycho killers, it does in fact tap into some of the same primal fears.

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffmann, Synechdoche (pronounced sin-ek-docky, it means ‘the subsititution of the part for the whole’, as in when threads mean clothes or plastic means credit card) tells the story of Caden Cotard, a small-time theatre director whose world is in freefall after his wife leaves him. Things pick up when he receives an arts grant, but Cotard’s plan is quite insane – wonderful but unworkable. He creates a life-size replica of New York and fills it with actors who play ordinary people, to no discernible end, for an audience that never arrives.

If it seems like a fever dream, it is. It could even be the death dream of a suicidal man, a suggestion Kaufman takes in his stride when we meet again, this time at London’s Charlotte Street Hotel. “It’s certainly not the first time I’ve heard that,” he grins amicably, “and it’s certainly not something I haven’t considered. But your interpretation is what I want – you could tell me that it’s about anything and I would be happy to hear it!” Which is just as well, because, I say, the film also seems to be about writing: Caden can’t figure out how to finish his spectacular art project, a problem Kaufman has surely encountered while crafting his kaleidoscopic fantasies? “Well, again, it can be about the writing process,” he admits, “but it’s also about constructing your view of the world, which we all do, even if we’re not writers. And I think there isn’t really any ending that isn’t artificial. Except your death. That’s the ending. Every other ending for every story is not an ending. It’s an artificial stopping point. How do you finish something? You can’t. That’s why Caden can’t finish his play, because it doesn’t end.

“Death is the only end,” he continues. “Just look at a very concrete example in film: the romantic love story that ends at the beginning of the relationship, that ends when the obstacles are overcome and the couple gets together. But that’s not the ending. Even if it takes them through the first ten years of the marriage, that’s not the ending. Even if they separate and go their different ways, that’s not the ending. There’s no ending! There’s only an ending when they die!”

Caden – whose surname is a taken from a delusion called Cotard Syndrome, which causes sufferers to believe they are already dead – is a hypochondriac, afraid of being alone, afraid of dying and, worst of all, of dying alone. With such a specific set of neuroses, it would be tempting to see Synecdoche as a personal exorcism of some private fears. Kaufman, however, denies this. “I think Caden’s fears are everybody’s fears,” he says. “Maybe with a few extraordinary exceptions, I think everyone’s afraid of time passing and loneliness and getting ill and dying. We’re the animal that knows it’s going to die. That’s our speciality. But it’s really important when you’re trying to do something like this to not get immersed in the ego of it – because then I think you’re in danger of writing crap.”

Looking at Kaufman now, it’s hard to reconcile him with the shifty, inarticulate novice of 2000. He still looks at the floor when he’s speaking, but he’s better dressed (in black) these days, his body language is less guarded and the conversation much more fluid and confident. Nevertheless, he bristles slightly at the suggestion that he’s changed. “It’s hard to say,” he shrugs. “I don’t feel like I’ve changed. I feel like there’s a continuum. I’m the same person I was when I was nine. But if you say that I’m different in this interview, I’ll take your word for it. I don’t feel that, but I do know it’s probably true. I couldn’t meet actors nine years ago without being really nervous, and the fact that I can direct them now obviously means there has been a change.”

One thing he will agree on, however, is that he is no longer crippled by nerves: “Something I think has served me in doing interviews is: if you’re nervous, you’re nervous. Be nervous. Don’t try to pretend you’re not. And it’s actually really helpful. It goes away once you acknowledge it.” To illustrate the point, he mentions the scene in Adaptation where Nicolas Cage is having lunch with his publisher, sweating and twitching like an idiot. “Afterwards, when everyone had seen that movie,” he explains, “I realised, ‘Everyone knows I sweat a lot.’ And suddenly I didn’t sweat a lot. Once it was, like, out of the bag, it stopped. Which is bizarre, and curious, and I don’t know what it means. But there’s a life lesson there somewhere!”

By time the sweating stopped, Charlie Kaufman had become a phenomenon. In the course of those four screenplays, the word “Kaufmanesque” was coined, usually as an unimaginative way to describe the over-imaginative. “You know what’s funny?” he grins. “I just did a radio show in the US. They used a clip from Adaptation, the scene between the Charlie Kaufman character and the executive who’s hiring him to do this screenplay, and she says, ‘Boy, I’d like to find a portal into your brain!’ I used to get that all the time. All the time. So I was listening to it, thinking, ‘God, I haven’t heard that in years.’ And I always say exactly the same thing that Nic Cage says in the movie, which is, ‘Believe me, it’s no fun in here.’ Y’know, that self-deprecating bullshit thing! Because… what do you say?” He laughs. “So that was this little Abbott and Costello routine I did with everyone who said that to me.”

If Kaufman feels insulted or trivialised by this, he hides it well. “Yeah, people think everything I do represents me in the world,” he chuckles, “and of course naming a character after myself probably contributed to that! I guess there are elements of me in everything I write, but it’s not me. Otherwise I’d be writing my autobiography and I’d be calling it that. I like using fiction because it gives me the freedom to move away from myself.”

So what’s next? “I dunno,” he sighs. “Trying to write something new. I got nothing.” Which, in a sense, is truly Kaufmanesque: the bathetic drama of a writer whose brilliant career is based on the new, trying to think up something new… and failing. It’s a worrying thought that Synecdoche, New York took five years to make, and after the amazing 1999-2004 run from Malkovich to Eternal Sunshine, there’s now nothing left unproduced lying in the drawer back at Kaufman’s home in Pasadena. “I wanna write something that’s challenging,” he muses, “that gets me to think about things I haven’t thought about. I’m a little concerned about the world of film, and how it’s closing up. There might not be a place any more for what I like to do. So that keeps me anxious. I don’t really want to embark on something that I’m not gonna be able to sell.” He lightens up, realising that the conversation is getting a little bleak. “But I’m trying to put that out of my head a little bit.” He shrugs, because, after all, even the woolliest, most berserk ideas have come through for him in the past. “I have to trust that the work will provide.”

Words: Damon Wise

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #18, Apr/May 2009

The post Charlie Kaufman appeared first on Wonderland.

Marc Almond and Gene Pitney have knocked Jason and Kylie off the top of the UK charts. Reagan has just left the White House. The last Soviet tanks are rolling out of Afghanistan. Madonna is filing for divorce from Sean Penn. Ayatollah Khomeini has slapped a $3million bounty on Salman Rushdie’s head. The poll tax that will bring down Margaret Thatcher is a month away from being introduced.

Oblivious to these international convulsions, a small grey-brown wren, native to Washington State, cocks its head. A sawmill belches smoke. Machines whirr, giant rusty cogs spin, sparks spray. A forlorn town sign, crudely painted with two mountaintops, stands against a background of Douglas Firs. Music swells. Water falls.

Lumberjack Pete Martell says goodbye to his indifferent wife and steps outside their lakeside lodge into the crisp North Western morning. “The lonesome foghorn blows,” he murmurs to himself. On the shore, next to a massive fallen tree bleached to concrete by the elements, Martell sees a white bundle. He edges closer. The package has come unstuck like some vile, abandoned birthday present. It’s a human parcel, tied with string round the torso and at the knees. A golden spray of hair tumbles from the nearest end. Martell begins to shake uncontrollably. He calls the sheriff’s office, trying to figure this thing, this terrible thing, but can’t find the words. “She’s //de-e-ead//,” he cries in a wavering voice. “Wra-a-a-apped in pla-a-stic…”

So begins the pilot episode of Twin Peaks. The director is David Lynch. The girl is Laura Palmer. And, as of the show’s debut on ABC in April 1990, not only is she Homecoming Queen of the local high school and the apple of her father’s eye, she’s the most famous corpse in television history. Each week, millions will tune in to watch FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) find her killer…

Lynch and screenwriter Mark Frost were struggling. For three years the pair had been working on a film adaptation of Goddess, the best-selling biography of Marilyn Monroe. After a trio of dark, challenging outings (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet) Lynch was keen to edge towards something a little more mainstream – and Goddess fitted the bill. But it just wasn’t gelling. “I loved the story of this woman in trouble,” says Lynch, “but I didn’t know if I liked it being a real story.”

When the studio refused their script, the duo’s agent, Tony Krantz, had an idea. Frost had been involved with the hit cop series Hill Street Blues, and Krantz suggested they collaborate instead on a TV project. At the back of Krantz’s mind was Peyton Place – the torrid 60s soap juggernaut in which illicit passions, insanity, murder and secrets ran amok. Lynch and Frost loved the idea of a soap opera with bite, and came up with a new idea they called Northwest Passage, which they took to ABC in 1988. “We just described a murder-mystery loosely set in a small town in the Pacific north-west,” says Frost. “And that was about all we had at that point. We said we wanted it to have the feel of a lush 50s melodrama; David made some strange motions with his hand as he described the wind. And they seemed to like that.”

Six months later, ABC greenlit the pilot. And in a booth at DuPar’s coffee shop on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevard in downtown LA, Lynch and Frost came up with the newly christened Twin Peaks’ most enduring image: a girl’s body bound in plastic sheeting. “We developed the town before the people,” explains Frost. “We drew a map. We knew it had a lake and a lumber mill, but the specifics we weren’t sure of.” Lynch continues: “We knew where everything was, and it helped us decide what mood each place had, and what could happen there. Then the characters just introduced themselves to us and walked into the story.” Frost admits that it took them a while to solve the murder: “We had to know the town before we could make up a list of suspects. Only after we knew most of its people was the killer revealed to us.”

Though its roots were in the soaps of the past, the action would take place just one year before Twin Peaks aired; in this fictional world, Laura Palmer drew her last breath in the early hours of 24th February 1989. “We always felt it should be in the present,” says Frost, “but that it should have a kind of timeless feel, as small towns in America often do. This is a place where time has stood still for a while.” Having grown up in a succession of Montanan small towns, Lynch was only too familiar with the atmosphere it needed. “I love a small town,” he smiles. “But it has to be a certain size. It can’t be too small. It has to be big enough so that you don’t know everybody and yet there’s these pleasant places and then strange secrets and sickness there as well.”

The crime-solving elements came from Frost, a longtime fan of Arthur Conan Doyle. Thanks to him, the series’ hero emerged as Agent Cooper, Sherlock Holmes with Bryl-cremed black hair and a biscuit-coloured macintosh. “When you come down to it,” ponders Frost, “the art of the detective is pretty basic. Whatever period you’re in it’s ratiocination, deductive and inductive reasoning, and then a smattering – sometimes mysterious – of intuition. Though I think we pumped intuition a little bit more than people were used to seeing!” Cooper’s unorthodox methods of investigation involved mystical Tibetan and Native American shamanism, and visions in his bedroom of a helpful giant in a bow-tie.

The Twin Peaks pilot was written in just nine days and shot in 23. Lynch embraced the chaos of such a fast turnaround. Mistakes ended up in the show – like a flickering fluorescent light that distracted one extra so much that when McLachlan asked him to leave the room he inexplicably answered, “Jim”, his real name. Lynch loved that. But not as much as he loved a scene in which Laura Palmer’s mother Sarah (a skull-faced Grace Zabriskie) looked into her daughter’s bedroom. Set-dresser and sometime actor Frank Silva had been moving furniture, and Lynch shot some footage of him crouched at the foot of Laura’s bed. At this point, Lynch had no idea what he’d be doing with it. Later, he shot a scene in which Sarah Palmer wakes up screaming. It was ruined because a crewmember was visible in a nearby mirror. The crewmember was Silva; and the film’s supernatural villain, Bob, was born.

Lynch always planned Twin Peaks to be the soap to end them all; a show so twisted that even its own soap-within-a-soap, Invitation To Love, was eventually phased out because it exhausted the writers. “I really like soap operas,” he explains. “I got hooked when I was printing engravings at art school. This lady I was printing with was so completely addicted to two particular soaps – Another World and The Edge Of Night – that I got hooked as well. I dug them. But the frustrating thing about them is that they draw the smallest torments out forever. It works, but it’s frustrating.”

For Twin Peaks, Lynch didn’t want drawn-out torments. He wanted detail. And lots of it. He daydreamed about a mysterious red curtained room, which he put into the show. There, Agent Cooper encounters the Man From Another Place, a dwarf dressed in a red three-piece suit and brown cowboy boots, who dances a funny little jive, feeding Cooper lines like “When you see me again, it won’t be me” and “That gum you like is coming back in style”. To achieve the strange-sounding dialogue, diminutive actor Michael J Anderson had to say his lines backwards for them to be flipped around in the edit. For most performers it would have been a Herculean task but, bizarrely, Anderson had actually used backward-speak as a secret language with his school friends. What Anderson did have a problem with, however, were last-minute scenes that he believed had “no context”. He even claims to have heard Lynch in the edit suite whooping, “I’ll betcha that’s what I meant by that!”

McLachlan, who had previously starred in Dune and Blue Velvet, knew Lynch better than anyone. “Whenever David would come in and do an episode,” he remembers, “the script would just end up being destroyed. He would take out pages, we’d rearrange scenes, we’d change dialogue. I mean, we’d just completely bastardise what we had. And that was fun. It really felt like the inmates were taking over the asylum for a week, which he enjoyed as well. But it was always with a purpose.”

When it came to the Twin Peaks score, Lynch was just as purposeful. He brought in composer Angelo Badalamenti – Isabella Rossellini’s music coach from Blue Velvet – and together they created a nightmarish wall of sound, alternately mournful and playful, with 50s fingerclicks, Roy Orbison guitar licks and snare-drum shuffles. “David would say that the music should begin very dark and slow,” recalls Badalamenti. “He said, ‘Imagine you’re alone in the woods at night and you hear only the sound of wind, and possibly the soft cry of an animal.’ I’d start playing and David would say, ‘That’s it, that’s it! Now keep playing for a minute, but get ready for a change because now you see a beautiful girl. She’s coming out from behind a tree, she’s all alone and troubled, so now go into a beautiful melody that climbs ever so slowly until it reaches a climax. Let it tear your heart out…’” Not a single note was ever changed.

When it debuted in April 1990, facing off against Cheers in a Thursday-night slot that had been tough to Dynasty and killed off The Colbys, the pilot took a third of the available viewing audience. This show had everything; deliberately steeped in teenage sex, it made instant pin-ups of the sultry Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), the demure Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) and the moody bad-boy Bobby (Dana Ashbrook). At its height it was watched by 35 million Americans. “We were in exact the right place, at the right network, at the right time,” believes Frost.

Inevitably, though, the moment couldn’t last. Frost and Lynch had resisted constant network pressure to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer, ensuring that Twin Peaks was commissioned for a second season. And then – in episode 16 of series two – they caved in. “The question of what happened to Laura Palmer was the goose that laid the golden egg,” Lynch says. “Then ABC asked us to snip the goose’s head off, and it killed the goose. And there went everything.

“The murder of Laura Palmer was the centre of the story,” he continues, “the thing around which all the show’s other elements revolved, like a sun in a little solar system. It was not supposed to get solved. The idea was for it to recede a bit into the background, and the foreground would be that week’s show. But the mystery of the death of Laura Palmer would stay alive. And it’s true: as soon as that was over, it was basically the end. There were a couple of moments later when a wind of that mystery, a wind from that other world, would come blowing back in, but it just wasn’t the same.”

Lynch’s hunch was right. With the murder solved, the audience lost interest. And so did ABC, who finally put it on “indefinite hiatus” in February 1991. Bowing to massive fan demand, the network agreed to six more shows, including a brilliantly baffling final episode in June 1991, directed by Lynch. It was both too much and not enough. Lynch being Lynch just walked away. “I left it because you can’t do everything,” he shrugs. “I have misgivings about the way it went but I still – and always will – love that world.”

Words:Damon Wise

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post David Lynch appeared first on Wonderland.

In the flesh, Busy Gangnes and her ex-girlfriend Melissa Livaudais don’t look like hip-hop fanatics. Slim, boyishly pretty and favouring the oh-I-just-threw-this-on sweater and jeans look more associated with Sofia Coppola circa 1999 than hardcore electronica, the Brooklyn 20-somethings don’t even look like rock chicks. But they formed their current outfit Telepathe – pronounced ‘telepathy’ – from the ashes of a regular four-piece called Wikkid.

“We started Telepathe as a reaction, because we were bored,” explains Gangnes, who trained as a classical pianist. “We wanted to make some drastic changes, we wanted to make greater sonic landscapes and play around with structuring songs in a different way.” Gangnes was a punk in high school, which goes some way to explaining Telepathe’s fuck-you attitude to the music mainstream. “Looking back,” she says, “I guess I decided I wanted to start a band when I realised that people could make music and not technically know //how//! I love the idea that anyone can do it. There are no rules… it’s about creative energy. And besides, does the world really need another regular rock band?”

Lately, Telepathe (named in honour of an animal psychic the pair wrote about on an early track) have been pitched as a vital prop of the avant-garde Brooklyn scene that – since the breakout success of sound collagists TV On The Radio – has been making headlines in the music press. But Gangnes is quick to point out that the hype is just that. “We get asked about the ‘scene’ all the time,” she says. “And yeah, Dave Sitek from TV On The Radio produced our debut album, Dance Mother. But we keep getting asked to be photographed with bands we don’t even know! People think there’s this movement there; that every band knows every other band, and it’s one big cosy family. The truth is that there //are// tonnes of bands there, which is awesome. But it’s not quite the scene that people are asking us to tell them it is!”

Appropriately enough, Telepathe’s music is all about mental associations, either the ones the listener imagines or the ones Gagnes and Livaudais deliberately make themselves. It didn’t take long for them to hit their stride. “At first we wanted to use more effects and ambient sounds in our music,” continues Gangnes. “But then, slowly, after about a year of experimentation, we got into the idea of using computer programmes. We definitely wanted to make dance music, but although it’s dance music, it’s not strictly club music. I’m a dancer from a contemporary dance/choreography/performance background, so it’s dance music in a wider sense!”

To the casual ear, the band’s sound is deceptively familiar: imagine the sounds that would emerge if Pony Up joined the Human League in the studio and Timbaland fought Tackhead at gunpoint for the final mix. Gangnes has no comment to make on the subject: she’d rather be listening to rappers Three-6 Mafia than precisely defining what makes Telepathe tick. “Hip-hop is the most current pop music that we feel is the most influential,” she explains. “It’s the most futuristic music out there already. We wanted to be inspired by that, which you can probably hear in the music – with the beats, the bass and the hi-hat patterns – we use.”

An open, unpretentious woman, Gangnes prefers not to comment on the band’s sometimes “post-apocalyptic” lyrics. But she does admit that she recently spotted an unhealthy obsession with death, war and childhood. When asked to pick her favourite song from Dance Mother she becomes equally tongue-tied. “I think it’s ‘Crimes And Killings,’” she says, then pauses. “’Or Devil’s Trident.’” She pauses again. “Actually, between those two, it’s a toss-up. I really love the melodies and the beats we came up with. The lyrics are really strong and they represent us in the best possible way.” She laughs. “I guess this is how perfect music sounds to us: music that we made ourselves, in our own world.”

Photography: Andreas Laszlo Konrath
Words: Damon Wise

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #16, Dec/Jan 2008/09

The post Telepathe appeared first on Wonderland.