naomi watts: 'this is the girl.'

by bec watts
inside film
australia's filmmaker magazine
feb|mar 2002


In David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, a director is given a photo and told that the subject will play the lead in his latest film. 'This is the girl,' the investors reps tell the director with Mafioso certainty.

In casting Mulholland Drive, director Lynch himself looked at a photo. And stories and fate and circumstance such as this one are as much a part of the Lynch legend as the films themselves

That face in the photograph belonged to an Australian actor who - not unlike her countryman Simon Baker - had been faithfully slogging it out in the LA scene for some ten years, playing unremarkable characters in forgettable films (and getting her ego badly punctured as a result of a lead role in a disastrously unsuccessful Tank Girl). With Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts, who began her career in Australia with John Duigan's Flirting, has finally fulfilled that dream she landed at LAX with all those years ago.

'There were different ways we were all cast,' she recalled at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where Lynch went on to share Best Direction Award with Joel Coen (for The Man Who Wasn't There). 'I was one of those people who luckily had a good headshot, or something in my eye that David was looking for... He's very intuition based. He sees that and he gets you in and if he likes you as a person and can connect with you, his intuition will tell him 'this is the girl'. I got offered the role. I was shocked - I didn't even have to read for it.'

Originally, Mulholland Drive was developed as a pilot TV series for America's ABC. For this section of shooting, Watts playing 'Betty', a wide eyed wannabe actress from Deep River, Ontario who is quite overwhelmed to finally find herself in LA. As Betty, Watts is every bit Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. And with David Lynch at the helm, you know her days in Kansas are numbered.

'Even at that point [while shooting the TV pilot] I knew we were going to reach another layer, which would be a lot darker than the one we had been exposed to... There were a couple of times when we were doing the little detective scenes, the sexy audition scene where David would call 'cut', and people would go 'BAD, BAD BETTY!' And you just knew she was not all that she seemed to be. We knew she was going to go to a deeply disturbed place - I wasn't quite sure how David was going to get there at that point.'

Unfortunately, or fortunately, ABC passed on the TV pilot, deeming it too dark - what they thought they would get from Lynch is anyone's guess. However French investors eventually convinced Lynch to recut the television series and turn it into a feature film. The team came back together, two years after having wrapped, to shoot the final 25 minutes, during which Betty becomes Diane: spurned lover, out of work actress and diabolically depressed psychotic.

'Actors delight to find so much range in one role,' says Watts. 'I have such immense gratitude for David seeing that in me. He wrote it but he chose me, and that is huge. Hopefully I delivered and people will see that now, and be open to not just casting me as the sweet girl. I can go for the most demented and depraved roles too, because that's the fun.'

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