Justin Theroux Explains Mulholland Drive’s Secret Dune Connection

David Lynch‘s 1984 film version of Frank Herbert’s legendary sci-fi novel Dune has been a perpetual black sheep of the surrealist director’s filmography, with his later neo-noir projects like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive held in much higher regard by cineastes. While the failure of Dune dissuaded Lynch from making further big budget movies, it had a major downstream effect on his later works especially when it came to casting. (Think: Kyle MacLachlan, Everett McGill, Brad Dourif, Alicia Witt, etc.)

What many of his fans do not realize (and which I wrote about briefly in my book A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune – An Oral History) is that his acclaimed, Oscar-nominated film Mulholland Drive has a scene which is secretly a very pointed reflection of that negative experience making Dune. Referred to as the “espresso scene,” it involves the young hotshot director Adam Kesher (played by Justin Theroux) taking an involuntary meeting with a pair of gangsters led by Luigi Castigliane (the late Angelo Badalamenti, Lynch’s longtime composer). They produce a black-and-white headshot of an actress named Camilla Rhodes (Melissa George) and explain in no uncertain terms that Adam is to cast her for a plum role in his film. The scene ends with the other brother Vincenzo Castigliane (Dan Hedaya) telling Adam in an Italian accent, “It’s no longer your film.”

If you know anything about the making of Lynch’s Dune, you know that film’s prolific producer Dino De Laurentiis had a heavy-handed reputation, and kept a tight reign over Lynch throughout production. This resulted in a very visibly compromised movie.  As Lynch recently told NPR, “Dune wasn’t the film I wanted to make, because I didn’t have a final say.”

The Italian-accented De Laurentiis very much resembled Luigi Castigliane of Mulholland Drive with his slicked back gray hair, as well as a penchant for expensive suits and espresso. Also, Dino’s real-life brother was named Luigi. Incidentally, as detailed in my book, Virginia Madsen was cast last-minute without auditioning based entirely off of one black-and-white photo, though that’s not to infer that she was not Lynch’s choice. It should also be said that De Laurentiis was also critical in funding Lynch’s career-defining next movie, Blue Velvet, on which he gave Lynch final cut privilege.

All that being said, during a recent interview with Justin Thereoux about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, we took the opportunity to ask if he felt like Lynch’s avatar during the Mulholland Drive espresso scene, and if it was specifically echoing an autobiographical element of losing control on Dune.

“Yes, I did, actually,” Theroux says. “I had some awareness around the making of Dune and what a disappointing experience that was for him. Without sharing too many discussions I’ve had with David, I think whenever finances or expectations are involved, he gets very upset and is almost confused by it. He’s like, ‘Why wouldn’t you want me to do that thing?’ To your point, in that scene I think it was reflective of the downward pressure that he would feel when money, people, or studios, would try and interfere with what he was trying to do. I’m sure in some ways, not in a photocopied way, that the Adam character was a facsimile of some of his experiences in the commercial side of filmmaking.”

It’s no surprise that, in his initial review of the film, The New York Times’ Stephen Holden opined that Mulholland Drive “ranks alongside Fellini’s 8 1/2 and other auteurist fantasias as a monumental self-reflection.” However, as Theroux explains to us, the interference that Adam endures within the movie was also happening to Lynch while he was making it.

“I remember when we made Mulholland Drive, there was a lot of downward pressure from ABC at the time, giving him notes like, ‘Well, you can’t have smoking in the movie,’” Theroux recalls. “He would say, ‘But people smoke. Why would I not…?’ And then there was a shot of dog shit, which he wanted to include. They had all these weird rules, like, ‘You can’t show dog shit on television.’ And I remember him saying, ‘Why? Show me one person or kid or anybody who hasn’t seen dog shit.’ He was genuinely baffled by it. He’d say, ‘This is the thing that I’m trying to make.’ He didn’t make compromises, which is probably why it wasn’t picked up as a television show.”

Unlike the young Adam of Mulholland Drive, an older and more seasoned David Lynch did not bow to ABC’s pressure, and after the pilot was not picked up in 1999 he eventually wound up reshaping the potential series into a self-contained (and highly explicit) tour-de-force theatrical feature. Released in 2001, the final product resulted in $20.7 million dollars in worldwide box office as well as some of the best reviews of Lynch’s career, and an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. Unlike on Dune, Lynch stood firm like the base of the pillar when it came to doing things his way on Mulholland Drive. That artistic integrity paid off.

“He just didn’t compromise,” Theroux reiterates. “Same thing with Inland Empire. When we made that we took it all around, took it to Venice, took it to whatever, and everyone was like, ‘We love it. It’s amazing. It’s brilliant. We’ll buy it. Cut an hour out of it.’ And he’d go, ‘No, that’s not the film. I’ve told you what the film is and this is it.’” 

Theroux even took the time to compare Lynch favorably with his more recent director Tim Burton on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. He speaks of the strong connection between the vision in their minds and what ends up in the films they make. That’s extra fascinating, considering his character Adam Kesher’s surname is a Hebrew word meaning “connection.”

“I think David—not unlike Tim Burton—is a singular visionary director,” states Theroux. “The wonderful thing about both those guys is that when you watch the films that they make, it feels like the shortest distance between their brain and the screen… that whatever they were thinking went right to the screen, and that’s very difficult to do.”

Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in theaters now.