Filmmaker at HOME patron Asif Kapadia speaks to our Artistic Director of Film, Jason Wood, about David Lynch’s classic of American cinema, Blue Velvet.
Jason Wood: Blue Velvet is one of those films that exerts a profound grip from the very first viewing. Can you recall when and where you first saw it and what kinds of feelings it inspired?
Asif Kapadia: I was studying filmmaking in Newport, Wales, and I think I first saw Blue Velvet at Chapter Arts in Cardiff. The film did have a profound effect on me as I was still learning about world cinema. At the time, Blue Velvet felt so unusual, dark, shocking, confusing and perverse – but made with Hollywood stars! And a terrifying Dennis Hopper…
JW: The late Philip French described David Lynch as being one of the first major filmmakers since Luis Buñuel who combined the avant-garde with commercial cinema. Do you see these two elements as co-existing in the film?
AK: I guess the late great Philip French should know! I don’t know if he’s the first major filmmaker to combine avant-garde and commercial cinema, but I guess Lynch was doing it in American cinema. At the time he was such a major force in filmmaking, he had stars, his films were in English, he worked in Hollywood and he really messed with the form. Obviously there are direct visual references to Buñuel’s L’Age Dor – particularly in the scene where Kyle MacLachlan finds a dismembered ear with ants crawling over it. But throughout the film, Lynch is playing with the audience with his use of dialogue and self-conscious performances, his use of sound and music. He continued to push boundaries with Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, which are all incredibly original works. No one now appears to be doing what Lynch was doing back then.
JW: The film also brings to the forefront Lynch’s interest in what lies beneath the surface of American small town life. It was a theme he regularly returned to. As a filmmaker, is this fascination with ‘what lies behind the curtain’ something you share?
AK: Every filmmaker has something, a theme of sorts, which they come back to. It’s not always a conscious thing, but deep within each film there is probably something personal which links my work. Having grown up in Hackney and having lived pretty much all of my life in London, I’m certainly not the guy to know about life in a small town! My tutor at the Royal College of Art looked at my student films and said they all had something in common: they were all about ‘outsiders’ taking on a ‘system.’ I didn’t agree with her at the time, but now having made many short films and six feature films, I see that somewhere within them, this theme keeps coming back.
JW: Finally, I think Blue Velvet was something of a revelation, not only for its subversive tendencies but also for the way it uses sound and fetishes the song Blue Velvet by Bobby Vinton. How influential do you think the film has been?
AK: Lynch has been incredibly influential. Some of the most powerful and visceral moments in Blue Velvet and Lynch’s wider body of work are through his fantastic use of sound design and music. He was doing it right from Eraserhead. Even his animated short films are terrifying – just through the use of sound. In many ways, Lynch pushed the boundaries of sound design in commercial cinema. So many present day filmmakers have been influenced by him, many have tried to copy him, but few have managed to make films as perfectly perverse as Blue Velvet.
Blue Velvet screens with Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses as part of our Love Double-Bill on Sat 14 November. You can find out more about the event and buy tickets here.