by James Mottram
“When I wrote the thing, it felt like I was in a fever dream. I wrote it in like a month and I was pretty much just writing obsessively, sharing pages with my wife at the end of each day and we’re laughing about it and I was drinking tons of coffee and I was definitely in a bit of a different state of mind. It was good to get it out of me.”
The thing is Under the Silver Lake, a comedic mystery thriller that David Robert Mitchell wrote in 2012, two years before his sleeper hit, It Follows. And now it is finally coming to Australian cinemas.
Since its debut in the US, Under the Silver Lake has regularly attracted comparisons with the writing of American postmodernist novelist Thomas Pynchon, whose ‘unadaptable’ 2009 novel Inherent Vice was filmed by Paul Thomas Anderson and released in the same year as It Follows.
“I’ve never read any Pynchon,” admits Mitchell. “I remember sharing the script with a good friend of mine and he was like, ‘you’ve read a lot of Pynchon, right?’ And I was like, ‘no, I really haven’t.’ He was saying, ‘it feels very Pynchon-esque.’ And I was like, ‘well, that’s cool’. I was like, ‘I’ve always wanted to read Pynchon, but now, I’m not going to do it until this movie is totally done.’ And it wasn’t long after, I remember hearing that PT Anderson was doing an LA noir based on a Pynchon novel. And I was like, ‘Oh fuck. I’m not going to be able to make my movie.’ And I was really upset about it. At that point, I’d really had set the script aside, because I just felt like there’s no way I can make this right now. We were putting together It Follows around that time. And then when Inherent Vice came out, I went to see it at the theatre, and I loved it. I saw it twice. But I also felt like, ‘you know what, this is different enough.’ There are certainly similar threads and similar themes and elements. But I felt okay going ahead and making this film.”
Described as ‘a surreal Philip Marlowe detective story for the Reddit generation’ by the Gold Coast Film Festival, where the film will be premiering in April, Under the Silver Lake stars Andrew Garfield as a man without purpose who searches for a mysterious woman across Los Angeles, uncovering a bizarre conspiracy. During his quest, he encounters various characters including one played by Topher Grace who speaks “about our desire for mystery in a world that sometimes feels absent. That’s interesting to me,” says Mitchell about the many theme strands and clues scattered throughout the film.
“There are many clues in the film, some of which you have to build on intuition personally to connect these dots,” continues the writer/director about the enigmatic nature of the film. “Some of it is about watching the film on different occasions and looking for things. The film is a mystery in a genre sense, but it’s also a mystery about this character. And then there’s mystery built within the structure and fabric of the film.
“There are some things that may be unknowable and then there are many things that you might feel are not clear, but if you look hard enough you might find some real answers. I enjoy creating something that asks questions and allows people to experience things differently depending on who they are.”
Filled with music and pop culture references, something that Mitchell will admit to is that the film is dealing with American icons. “We have the Marilyn reference and we have Kurt Cobain. It’s these people that carry this deep meaning with them. With Cobain, it’s the idea of some genuine pure art, even within the confines of this very commercial thing that happened in terms of making records that made a ton of money and that were purchased all over the world. Yet there’s still something so genuine within that art. I mean, the fact that you still see young people walking around, who probably weren’t even alive at the time, wearing Nirvana shirts. And so it represents something. It’s the question of: do you believe in love and art? Or do you believe in money and power and comfort? And that’s the question.”
For now, David Robert Mitchell is definitely interested in love and art when it comes to filmmaking.
“We set out to make a very unique film. And even though there are people that are saying, ‘oh, it’s referencing this and referencing that’, I think that we’re trying to do something that still has a boldness to it. And anytime you do that, there will be people that connect and there will be people who are repulsed by it and pushed away.”
