WATTS, NAOMI: MULHOLLAND DRIVE

How did you wind up working with David Lynch?
He found me but with a lot of help from a wonderful casting director I had known and auditioned for a couple of times before. I was in New York and I got a call saying please come and meet David right away. I had just gone to New York to meet up with my mum, who I had flown over, and my brother was there and we were having a sort of family reunion. I have always had this sort of golden rule never to break a plan to get to an audition, especially when it involves a lot of traveling, because if you don’t get it it’s a double disappointment. But because it was David Lynch I figured I couldn’t miss it. I had also heard that he has a very irregular casting process in which he goes through a stack of photos and just by process of elimination selects maybe three or four pictures at the most that he responds to and meets with them. So basically the odds are with you if you’re only up against three of four other girls, and I had also heard that if you’re second on the list and he likes you, that’s it. You’re his choice. So I thought ok, this sounds good, hold on for 24 hours mum, I’ll be right back. So I met with him and we chatted for about 35 or 40 minutes, never mentioned any work or anything on my resume, nothing about acting at all, really. He just asked me about my family and we chatted back and forth. It didn’t feel like a normal audition process at all. And obviously it went really well because here I am!

What was he like as a director?
He doesn’t give very specific direction although it seemed specific in the way the story is told. He’s very much about trusting the actor and the actor trusts him. He wants to inspire your own free will so that, in other words, he’s looking for ideas and open to them and beautiful things can come out of accidents and that’s basically the relationship you have working with David. It’s all about trust and you’re like putty in his hand.

Was it important to understand the story and if you did understand it, can you share some of it?
I worked it out - how he works - pretty early on and in the beginning I felt tortured like, ‘please, tell me, enlighten me.’ But it’s not that he’s withholding or trying to torture you in any way. It’s just that I think he’s still working it out as he goes. I think he has a lot of very defined ideas, but leaves them open so new ones can occur. I had my own interpretation for the story because as an actor you have to. You can isolate a scene but you have to have a grasp on the overlying storyline. I interpreted it as Diane, who is the character I play in the latter part of the film, is the reality-based character and she dreams up Betty, this happy-go-lucky girl, with stars in her eyes, dimples in her cheeks, a bounce in her step. She’s that kind of all too perfect highly spirited girl and, it almost seems one-dimensional. But it’s unreal, it’s her dream and her fantasy because Diane is in this weird psychosis and she dreams up this fictitious character in her head because that’s who she wants to be, someone a little more in control. That’s how I interpreted it but that doesn’t necessarily mean that is what the movie is really about! (laughs).

Do you think David Lynch really understands women?

Yeah, he loves women. Somebody said to me once and I thought it was quite a funny analogy that all the women that enter his world or his building or his films or whatever you want to call it, end up like 40s film stars and the men end up like sort of dorky guys (laughs). It’s true. If you ever go up to his house it’s like all the guys are like (she imitates a geeky guy with glasses), ‘Hi Naomi, how are you?’ They really take on this sensibility, and that’s how he likes to see them.

What is it like to do a nude scene in front of the camera? Does it matter that the other person is of the same sex?
It’s usually the anticipation that’s difficult. You talk about it. You think about it and you panic basically and, I remember three days before we started filming the stuff, I went up the David’s house and basically just told him I was really nervous and burst into tears. He was very supportive. I had three scenes where there was nudity or partial nudity involved and I talked him down to two - a little negotiation through the tears. Then basically when we got down to it, the set was cleared. Laura and I had known each other for two and a half years and David too, so there was an enormous amount of trust. Then when we got to the actual filming, the lighting was very dim. You felt safe knowing that and then when we did it, we felt completely OK, but then he would call "cut" and we would literally fall back on the bed feeling like complete goofy, dorky idiots.

How did you feel starting out in a TV series and ending up in a movie?
We signed a five-year contract. A lot of times actors find that daunting to be committed for such a long time but with David Lynch who had done Twin Peaks, there was no risk. He was the guy who made breakthrough television ten years ago or more now, so it was an incredible opportunity and this has turned out to be the best ending possible to the whole story of how it started out. But I would have been fine carrying on with those characters and, you know, the one great thing about TV is that you get to go down a long journey, a long road with the same character and that can be interesting, certainly with David Lynch.

Published February 7, 2002