UnDer the siLver Lake
UNDER THE SILVER LAKE I The director of It Follows returns with a divisive detective story…
Andrew Garfield lost in an LA noir. Well, it follows…
Iwas in a bit of a mad, crazed state, when I wrote this,” David Robert Mitchell tells Teasers from behind a pair of shades on a sun-kissed Cannes rooftop. This will come as little surprise to anyone who watches Under The Silver Lake – a labyrinthine LA neo-noir that could generously be described as batshit. “The thing was ambitious.
It’s a unique film.”
Written in 2012, two years before Mitchell’s breakout horror It Follows and closer in ethos to his 2010 debut The Myth Of The American Sleepover, Silver Lake is a surreal shaggy dog detective story that plays like the love child of Inherent Vice and Southland Tales. Appropriately enough, it was inspired by a journey past Mulholland Drive. “I was talking to my wife,” Mitchell recalls. “We were having this conversation about: ‘What’s really going on in those big houses up in the hills there? What’s happening?’”
It’s a question that eventually dominates every waking thought of Andrew Garfield’s Sam, a thirtysomething slacker who falls hard for his glamorous neighbour Sarah (Riley Keough), until she and her flatmates inexplicably disappear overnight.
Following the breadcrumbs through the underbelly of LA in search of Sarah, Sam encounters a comic-book artist whose eponymous zine chronicles bizarre urban legends, messages in the lyrics of an insufferable goth band and a seemingly omnipresent Homeless King. Connecting the dots with dubious dream logic, Sam believes he’s stumbled on a conspiracy, but is he a rat in a maze with no middle?
“I wanted to make my own version of an LA noir, for sure,” reasons Mitchell, who rules out comparisons to Pynchon (he’s never read him) and PTA. Instead he looked to the past, while bringing his story up to date by placing an aimless millennial obsessed with videogames and comic books at the heart of a big city detective story. “The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown and Kiss Me Deadly… a lot of people look to these amazing works from the past, and try to find a new way to interpret them.”
Debuting to mixed reviews at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, its multiple release date delays sparked rumours that Mitchell was working on a more accessible re-edit. But the Silver Lake releasing next month will be in its go-for-broke original guise, for better or worse. After the stylised scares of It Follows and this idiosyncratic, unexpected follow-up, what’s next for the 44-yearold filmmaker? “I have a million stories, and a million scripts, and a million genres that I want to explore,” Mitchell smiles. “I’d like to do my version of a lot of different kinds of films.”