Betty and Rita in an ad for Mulholland Dr |
Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts at Movieline Awards |
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Betty and Rita in an ad for Mulholland Dr |
Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts at Movieline Awards |
The Cast/People Involved
Naomi Watts - Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn
Nicole Kidman - Rita/Camilla Rhodes
Tom Cruise - Adam Kesher
Parallels
When you compare Naomi and Diane's lives, both Diane and Naomi came naively from countries outside of the US to Hollywood with wide eyed dreams of a career. They both struggled as actresses, and just as Diane lived in Camilla's shadow, so did Naomi live in the shadow of Nicole. The similarities between Diane and Naomi stay right up to the point where Diane kills herself, Naomi had mentioned once before that she had been suicidal, driving on Mulholland Dr no less (although she has since retracted this statement).
NW: After that I was offered a role in a soap called A Country Practice, but I turned it down.
GF: Why?
NW: Naiveté. I felt I didn't want to get stuck on a soap for two or three years. Everyone thought I was mad. I probably should have done it, but it doesn't make any difference. Eventually I got a few more high-profile jobs and then I came to Hollywood - again naively.
GF: Which is exactly what your character, Betty, does in Mulholland Drive.
NW: People keep mentioning that, but it never occurred to me.
Diane and Camilla made The Sylvia North Story together, which led Camilla on to bigger and better things while it got Diane nowhere. Naomi and Nicole did Flirting together, which was a stepping stone in Nicole's career, but Naomi dropped back to obscurity.
Even Camilla and Nicole's lives have similarities, Camilla was with someone established in the movie industry in order to help her own acting career. Nicole arguably did the same thing when she married Tom Cruise. They also met working on a film set together.
"Did talent alone help Camilla?" is one of Lynch's official clues from the DVD.
Timeline
If the whole script had been written before Naomi was involved in the movie, this would all be moot. But it wasn't.
Mulholland Dr was supposed to be a pilot for TV that was left open, there was no fixed storyline in place. Lynch made Twin Peaks in the same way, not really knowing from the beginning where he was going.
Basically, the entire movie up until the point where they go to bed was the pilot, almost intact and uncut.
All the rest of the story was tacked on after the fact, and Lynch didn't come up with it until after it was decided it wouldn't be a TV show. So Diane and Camilla being lovers, Camilla abandoning Diane and marrying Adam to get ahead in the business, all came up after the pilot was finished.
When David Lynch was working on Mulholland Dr, he already knew Naomi briefly. He had talked to her during her audition about her life and about his for two hours.
"He asked me about my life and I asked him about his life," Watts recalls. "It was just an exchange between two humans, which is completely irregular. Normally it's all about testing and selling, all that stuff."
After Lynch had wrapped up the first half of the filming, he had most likely gotten to know the people involved in the film a lot better than when he talked to them at their auditions. Naomi herself said it was unusual to have an audition like hers, but that it was nice, he wanted to get to know them. During the time it would take to film half the movie he would know them even better. Did Lynch come up with the idea after knowing Naomi well and seeing her act out the part, seeing it to be a missing aspect of the film?
After Lynch had gotten to know the actresses involved, he decided to change it to have a lesbian theme. This might be David Lynch after all, but he had to come up with the idea from somewhere.
"Now, looking back, I see that [the film] always wanted to be this way. It just took this strange beginning to cause it to be what it is."
"It was strange because it was as if the clues were all there in the original script, but they weren't really. I don't know how to explain it. it was strange."