Village Voice Interview 25\2\97 p63, by David Yaffe
In Lost Highway, characters seem to die, but reappear later in the film.
Death in my mind isn't a finality. There's a continuum: It's like at night, you go to sleep and in the daytime you wake up, or whenever you wake up, and it's a new day.
How does that conflict with Lost Highway, in which the distinction between reality and dreams becomes unclear?
Lost Highway is not really a film about dreams. The film is a product of two years of work, and it has to be a certain way. It took a long time to be correct. It's a depressing thought to even try to put that into a sentence.
Why do people laugh when Laura Dern says, "My dream came true," or when they see happy images of suburban life?
There's probably 100 reasons why that happens. It's embarrassing, in a way, because the cool things are pretty much the opposite of what's good. I don't like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don't really understand the word 'irony' too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it's much more exalted. The good is real. Those suburban images in the film are definitely real. That's the world I grew up in. People laugh at the good because they don't want to be fools. It's a natural laugh and I understand it 100 percent, but it's still a certain kind of world that a lot of people know about - a real kind of world. Once one person laughs, others have to follow. That's the difference between a single person watching a movie on video at home - with its pitiful picture and bad sound - but you don't get those same kind of reactions. People are so different, even though they're the same underneath.
