Megan Fariello: Amy Nicholson, in the first of the six chapters that make up the film, states that we’ve all been to Oz. It’s often a first favorite film—it was certainly mine. It seems to be wholly informative to an individual and group understanding of cinema. And so that said, what drew you to dive into such detail, into THE WIZARD OF OZ and into Lynch’s relationship and obsession with that film, and maybe a broader cultural impact that the film has.
Alexandre O. Philippe: Generally speaking… if I look at my general preoccupations, or my body of work, if you will, all the films that we’ve made at Exhibit A Pictures, I’m certainly very interested in the idea of the movies that have transcended their medium to become cultural events. Those are really the films that I’m specifically interested in, and there’s no question that THE WIZARD OF OZ is one of those films. A little bit unique, for me specifically, in this film, is that I grew up in Switzerland and so THE WIZARD OF OZ is not really very well known in Europe. So I didn’t grow up on THE WIZARD OF OZ, I grew up on Lynch. I was a Lynch fan long before I became a fan of THE WIZARD OF OZ… I discovered THE WIZARD OF OZ in my twenties.
MF: Oh wow, that’s such an interesting perspective.
AOP: Yeah, the moment that I did watch THE WIZARD OF OZ, I immediately became hooked. I’ve studied it and spent a lot of time trying to understand that film. But so for me, I think this film stems initially from the desire to make a film about David Lynch… I became just absolutely fascinated by the mysterious connections between America’s quintessential fairy tale and our foremost surrealist. What a mashup, right?
MF: That’s such an interesting, different perspective than I have, which is [that THE WIZARD OF OZ is a film] I watched a hundred times as a young kid. [AOP laughs.] I was really struck by the construction of this film, particularly the elongated six chapters. Can you speak a little bit about how you structured this film, how you came up with the form, and the process of finding the participants and those perspectives, and how it all came together?
AOP: There’s a lot of steps to that. The first step was COVID. [Laughs] We started working on this film in earnest in March 2020, just when things started to shut down. There wasn’t that possibility of actually filming interviews, but for something like this… which is again, it’s not a film that in any way, shape, or form attempts to solve the David Lynch riddle, because there’s nothing to solve… it’s a film that is about mysteries. It’s about the mysteries of the creative process, it’s about the mysteries of influence and inspiration, so it made a whole lot of sense for me to explore those mysteries through very specific lenses and to give each participant the room to develop a thesis. First and foremost, I had to find people who were completely willing to go there with me and just see how far we could go. It landed on those six people, or seven actually [directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson share a chapter]. It became this sort of organic thing. I went one by one, because I felt like each chapter informed other questions or triggered other questions or ways to look into this relationship between Lynch and OZ. I had to go one participant at a time… then I crafted what I essentially thought was their chapter. When [myself and the participant] were both really happy with where it landed, I sent them to the recording studio to record their voiceover, and that’s what you have in the film.
MEF: I really appreciated the amount of time that you allotted to each of these chapters. The participants, they really seem to dive into not only into analysis and theories, but also their own personal cinematic histories. Was there anything surprising that came out thematically or in individual chapters that you were not expecting to hear?
AOP: It’s all unexpected. I’m glad you picked up on that, because to me, the real beauty of those chapters is how personal they get. Of course it’s a film about the relationship between Lynch and THE WIZARD OF OZ… but on a larger scale it’s about the mysteries of influence and inspiration on the creative process, which is why we have this epic montage at the end, which I’m not going to give away for people who haven’t watched the film. But it’s about larger ideas, about when we grow up watching movies and we love movies, and we get influenced by certain films, and then you grow up and you become a filmmaker, that in a way we’re all sort of trapped by those films whether we like to admit it or not. But that’s a really cool thing, it’s a really beautiful thing, this idea that there are certain ideas, themes, motifs, and totems that keep coming back again and again and again in our work… it’s not that we’re trapped in a negative sense, we’re not made prisoners by those films, but those films become a part of our filmmaking DNA. As David Lowery mentions in his chapter, he says you sort of have to lean in on that, you have to keep digging, and the more you dig, the more you find. And I think that’s such a beautiful idea.
MF: In terms of putting the visual and the audio together, I think in the Benson and Moorhead chapter, they mention how unique Lynch’s approach is to sound and the combining of visuals and auditory elements. I found that through the film, through your combination of what the participants and the perspectives were saying, and the visuals that you were putting on screen… what is the process, how do you work through editing a visual essay in tandem with these very personal, in-depth perspectives?
AOP: That’s where the real work began. That particular work, it starts at the writing process, in the sense that as I started putting together their chapter, I had to think on a micro level about how I’m going to tell this story visually. That’s number one. But obviously I worked very, very closely with my wonderful editor, David Lawrence, who’s a wonderful filmmaker and editor in his own right; we literally pored over every single moment and every single clip and made sure not just that it landed, but that every single clip was really the best possible one, that it was really special, that it told a story on multiple levels. That’s very involved. We have well over a thousand clips in the film. It gets pretty wild. That was the real grind, in a way. It’s a fun grind, but it was a grind, you know, making this film.
MF: Speaking to that, there’s a really interesting balance between these personal, very in-depth film analyses, as well as a broader cultural impact of THE WIZARD OF OZ and Lynch’s engagement with that film, thematically looking at American mythology, the American dream. Can you speak to that theme running through the six chapters?
AOP: The idea of the American dream is very important to me and very interesting to me because growing up in Europe, and growing up as a cinephile very specifically, not exclusively, but very specifically, of American films and Hollywood films, when I was growing up, I dreamed of the United States. I think without necessarily knowing it then, I longed for the day where I would get to go or maybe there was a seed there that I would get to one day move to America, which I did, I eventually became American as well. I mean, I’ve lived this idea of the American dream. I was the first of my family to come here, and I followed my dreams and I worked hard. I became very lucky to have the opportunity to do the things that I do. But, the American Dream, also… first of all, it’s an idea, and, as we all know, it’s an idea that, unfortunately, you need all the right circumstances and a lot of luck to get. And I’m very cognizant of that, that I was very fortunate to be able to have the life that I have, to do what I do. The darkness of it, this idea of chasing the dream, if you will, which in and of itself is also a bit of a myth… I think certainly David Lynch explores that really beautifully in his films, from the character of Diane in MULHOLLAND DRIVE to the Laura Dern character in INLAND EMPIRE. All these characters who envision themselves living the dream, getting over the rainbow and everything’s wonderful, but it’s not. It’s all in their heads. It’s complicated, it’s a very complicated idea, and it’s a very loaded idea. What’s interesting is that, as complicated as America is, socially, politically, on just about every level, it's a complicated country, especially now, I think that that idea of America, true or false, true for some and not for others, but true or false generally speaking, it’s still very potent. People still dream about America. For good or not good reasons.
MF: In Lynch’s films, it’s so hard to parse through what he’s saying about the American dream and home and this return to something.
AOP: The one thing I would say about that, which is what I think makes his films so wonderful to me, certainly, is that even though a lot of his characters don’t get to go over the rainbow, truly, or they go over the rainbow but they can’t find a way back home, he still treats them with a great deal of empathy. Karyn [Kusama] in her chapter really talks about this particular idea so beautifully. This idea that Diane Selwyn [in MULHOLLAND DRIVE], in sort of creating the Betty character, who is innocent and optimistic and as she says a very golly-gee, gee-whiz kind of optimist, gets to project the best version of herself. That’s really a beautiful idea. I really responded to that idea when Karyn said. I think as dark as Lynch can get, he is very much the sort of innocent optimist, and I think that’s what makes him so relatable.
MF: It was interesting that that got brought up, how optimistic he is despite that darkness that runs through his work. I have one final question: I found this film incredibly self-reflexive, in the perspectives but also in thinking about my own relationship to THE WIZARD OF OZ and the connection to Lynch, and maybe the reason I’m a Lynch fan is because I watched THE WIZARD OF OZ so much as a kid [laughs]... but what in terms of your own process through making this film, was there anything you reflected about your own relationship to cinema, to the kinds of films you appreciate? Was there something new about how you understand and relate to cinema through this entire project?
AOP: I think inevitably every time I have the opportunity to dive into this kind of project and especially with, again, people I have so much admiration for, who are such wonderful thinkers, people who think very actively about not just movies, but art and how movies relate to life and the language of cinema, and all of that stuff, I really can’t stress enough what an incredible privilege it is for me to be able to pick their brains and then follow their trains of thoughts and ask them questions and see where that leads me. Everytime I make a film like this, I feel like I come out of the process richer. And I don’t mean richer just because so-and-so made a connection between Lynch and OZ that I hadn’t thought of; that’s all great, that’s always fun, when you get to discover that, but that’s not what the film is about. It’s when David Lowery talks about the experience of watching THE WIZARD OF OZ in black and white when he was a kid and how that experience became transformed when he got to finally watch it in sepia and color the second time around and then watching it again as an adult, having a better understanding now of the quote-unquote American nightmare. That’s really cool. There’s [also] this great moment where I ask [John Waters] a question about his own work, and he says, “Yeah, I think I’ve made some references, but I can’t really think of one.” So then I had to go through his entire filmography again and find those moments, and there’s some incredible stuff! Those are the moments that are transformative for me as a filmmaker, as a cinephile, and as a human, period.
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