Trailer
Plot summary
Betty Elms arrives in Los Angeles from Deep River, Ontario, to pursue acting and settles into her aunt's apartment, where she finds a woman hiding. The stranger has survived a crash on Mulholland Drive and cannot remember her name; she calls herself Rita, after a poster of Rita Hayworth, and knows only that she is in danger. She and Betty find a blue key and a large amount of cash in her purse, and Betty takes up the question of who Rita is. A film director, Adam Kesher, faces pressure from men tied to organized crime to give a part to an unknown blonde, Camilla Rhodes, and refuses.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Mulholland Drive (2001)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- When Lynch showed ABC a rough cut of the pilot, the person who saw it was, according to Lynch, watching it at six in the morning, having coffee and standing up. He hated the pilot and ABC immediately canceled it; Lynch's friend from Paris, Pierre Edelman, then started talking to him about the film being a feature.
- ABC's expectations soon clashed with Lynch's vision: the network found his pacing too slow and objected to his casting of Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, who were said to be "a little old", with ABC thinking Betty "too aw-shucks and Okie-from-Muskogee".
- Ben Stiller visited the set one day, and Lynch, thinking he was an extra, offered him a background role in the film, which Stiller declined.
- Actress Sherilyn Fenn stated in a 2014 interview that the original idea came during the filming of Twin Peaks, as a spin-off film for her character of Audrey Horne.
- Lynch sold the idea to ABC executives on the story of Rita emerging from the car accident with a purse containing $125,000 in cash and the blue key, and Betty trying to help her. An executive recalled: "Obviously, we asked, 'What happens next?' And David said, 'You have to buy the pitch for me to tell you."
- Mr. Roque, the shadowy figure who seems to control film studios, is played by Michael J. Anderson, who has only two lines and is seated in an enormous wooden wheelchair; he was fitted with oversized foam prosthetic arms and legs in order to portray his head as abnormally small.
- Rebekah Del Rio's Spanish a cappella rendition of "Crying" at Club Silencio was caught almost by accident: Lynch flew to Nashville, where she was living, and she sang the song for him once without knowing that he was recording her. He then wrote a part for her and used that version.
- Badalamenti described a technique of sound design used on the film: he would provide Lynch with multiple ten- to twelve-minute tracks at slow tempo, which they called "firewood", from which Lynch "would take fragments and experiment with them resulting in a lot of film's eerie soundscapes."
