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Dugpa: So tell us about Mulholland Drive.

John Neff: Mulholland Drive. My nemesis. The cross on my back. The movie that refuses to die.

Dugpa: So you have actually mixed that film twice.

John Neff: At least.

Dugpa: What were the major differences mixing Mulholland Drive for the TV Pilot versus mixing Mulholland Drive for it's theatrical version?

John Neff: First of all, the TV pilot' David's first cut was I think 2 hours and 4 minutes, way beyond what the network allowed. He said that was as short as he could make it and they should make a special presentation of it' They didn't like that. We did not do a complete mix of that. We did a temp mix. He ended up cutting it to 88 minutes running time to be a viewable pilot. He was never ever happy with that cut. We still only did a temp mix of that. However, he was shooting Mulholland Drive while we were mixing the Straight Story. There would be days that David worked in the studio all day, shot all night, and grabbed four hours sleep, just to show up back in the studio. It was a wild time. When Mulholland didn't get picked up, we thought that was it, that was the end of it, and we kissed it goodbye. David and I worked on a few music projects, and did a couple of commercials last year and then the French company that had produced the Straight Story said, 'Hey, you've got this thing sitting there. What would it take to finish it?' And he said 'Oh that would be too much, that's crazy. It can never happen. It was a TV show.' Discussion just sort of went away. And one day. He said, 'I've got it, I've got it.' And he had how he could thread together the two main girls characters into a cohesive, well as cohesive as his stories get, but into a story that he could finish and be happy with. When we went into principal photography again, last September, David shot, and I don't know the percent, but I'll guess that 40 percent of the film is all new. Then in December we all went to Prague to score it, and January 2nd we started mixing. It took 14 weeks to mix the film.

Dugpa: One of the things I have heard most about the film is that people have been absolutely raving about the sound mix. Can you tell us about the type of equipment was used to record Mulholland Drive?

John Neff: I took a Protools rig to Prague, and we recorded the whole orchestra direct off the consoles preamps into Protools at 24-bit. The original dialog was recorded on DATs at 16-bit, and the cut effects libraries are 16-bit. Those two stems of the movie resided in 16-bit. It hurts to convert bit rates, and that it hurts the audio quality, so we left those two stems at 16, and the music at 24. We had two Protools rigs running and the Euphonix console. But, we got a new 24-track, 24-bit hard disk recorder; and once the various elements and stems were mixed, they were recorded to 24-bit, 48khz sample rate. We also did safeties to DA-88 at 16-bit, but that makes the quiet parts livable. See in 16-bit digital, if you have something quiet, it sounds sandy and grainy, because it's really a 4, 5, 6, 8-bit recording because the amplitude helps determine the bit depth. So recording back to DA-88's or something like that' God love 'em, they're great machines. Sorry Tascam, but the quiet moments, never really sounded that good. This 24 bits stuff, which by the way is a Tascam, sounded terrific, and so we were able to do subtle little things in the quiet moments that you could have never gotten away with before, and would never survive optical soundtracks of days gone by. A digital, with essentially a theoretical, beyond the realm of human hearing noise floor, we were able to do some incredible dynamic ranges from itsy bitsy little quiet moments to everything the digital system allows right up to the top zero db level. David of course is very hands on in the sound department. He is the sound designer for the movie. He conceptualizes things and says 'I need it to sound like a 30 ton piece of metal being scraped across a polished piece of smooth granite' Well, you have to imagine in your mind how that's gonna sound, then you have to go make it out of things that exist in the everyday real world. But he directs' he's an act and react guy. You come up with something you think might get you started on that path an then he goes 'ok, no, it's gotta be lower, it's gotta be slower, it's gotta have this, more reverb,'' So he directs the creation of the sound like he directs the picture. I mean on this picture, David was moving faders. So he's very active in the mix. He and Alan Splet, who had been his sound mixer for all of the experimental films through Blue Velvet worked like that. They would just dig in, and make stuff out of nothing. So a lot of the stuff in the film doesn't come from, it's not stuff that's in standard libraries, or stuff you just go out and record. You take some raw material and you work it to death, and turn it into something that doesn't exist in the real world, but it's an impressionistic, surrealistic element that supports the picture, and makes it in his mind, and once it's ok with Dave, it's part of the picture. So there's a big dynamic range, extremely low noise floor, quiet moments' we had to insert room noise in the quiet moments, because it was too quiet.

Dugpa: I noticed on the trailer, there was a new face' Rebekah Del Rio, who performs a cover of Roy Orbison's 'Crying'. Could you tell us about that?

John Neff: Yes. A Spanish version of Crying, which in Spanish is 'Llorando' or in certain areas of the Spanish-speaking world, it's 'Jorando', which is how she pronounces it. She came into the studio with her agent in November or December of '98. And she walked in, and the guy was telling us what a great voice she had' she's real nice, she's very personable, and very friendly, and Dave just' she's in there 5 minutes and he says 'Well, sing us something.' Meanwhile, I had a beautiful old tube mic heated up in an isolation room, and a Protools system up and running. So she walked in the booth, put on headphones, I had some reverb on it, and she blasts out 'Llorando' right there. And except for one tiny edit, just to shorten a note just a hair, what you hear in the film is exactly what she walked in the room and did. No EQ. No compression. No nothing. Just reverb added. She walked in and knocked this out acappella, and knocked us out right off the bat. David wrote her into the TV Pilot based on that. So then that didn't go anywhere, but now she's in the movie, and it's sort of a pivotal scene. And we're also producing some other stuff with her. We've got one song finished, and a couple of other songs started with her. We'll also have some showcase shows slightly after the film is released.

Dugpa: So can you tell us more about the Mulholland Drive Soundtrack?

John Neff: Well, we recorded in Prague, with the symphony there. David and Angelo had been there two other times. Blue Velvet, and Lost Highway. So some of it is orchestral, and some of it isn?t. The opening track is a ?jitterbug? kind of theme. We had a band, and members of the orchestra that played other instruments the last day of the session, and they set up, and we sort of coached them through that. The main title theme from the TV show was done by Angelo on the synthesizer, and then in Prague, we recorded the strings to go underneath it. They didn?t replace the synth, because David loved the feeling and timing of how Angelo played, but it?s augmented with the orchestra. Some of the incidental music is recorded by the orchestra, and then once we get it on the mix stage, Dave likes to sometimes slow thing down, add a lot of reverb. He uses reverb like an instrument. Lots of long reverbs that then produce notes that we blend in, and things like that, so he really paints with a broad brush reverb wise. Mr. Roque?s theme was cut back in December of 1998 before David started mixing the Straight Story. There?s other artists music in the film, not like Lost Highway, that really modern heavy metal stuff? except for mine and David?s music of course (Blue Bob), but he has some 50?s stuff in there as well. We actually ran into a snafu with this movie, one of the songs in the film is not on the soundtrack album because the licensing fees and the other requirements were so far and beyond what the other artists were getting, that the record company said ?No, we?re not going to do it.? So there?s already a major song from the film that?s not on the soundtrack CD. The record company does their artist and themselves a disservice by doing that. I?m not badmouthing them, but I?m just speaking in concept. If for a few thousand bucks, you prevent your artist from being on a soundtrack CD, and selling to a whole new audience all over again, they might go out and buy stuff from the catalog that you still own. I mean, that sounds pretty stupid to me.

Dugpa: Agreed.

John Neff: I mean, take the hit in the beginning? It?s not that much money. But it was significantly more than the other songs. So, take the hit. You?re gonna get paid on every CD sold, and if the song helps sell more CD?s, everybody wins. But by being selfish in the beginning, and preventing it from being on the CD, that record doesn?t get heard again. And how many people are going to go and search out the original album it came off of? Maybe it?s not in print. I don?t know.

Dugpa: That?s too bad, but from what I?ve heard so far of the Soundtrack, I am very pleased. Tell me, was the concept of DVD production a consideration while filming Mulholland Drive?

John Neff: No. David is only really concerned with the film. He doesn?t really care about the home audience when he is making a film. That?s becomes a consideration later. Although, for the first time, as he was color timing and correcting the picture for release, he was also timing it for DVD. So that work has been done now.

Dugpa: What can you tell us bout the aspect ratio used for Mulholland Drive?

John Neff: The picture was shot in a 16x9 format for high def television and for later DVD release. So the theatrical release is a 1:85 ratio. Which is perhaps? I think it might be just a hair skinnier on the sides. But not much. I think we took from one side. Instead of optically reducing it to make it fit 1:85, which was two generations away from the image. We experimented with it, and David hated it. What we ended up doing was just matting the 16x9 for 1:85 and averaging the field of exposure for the best framing for the overall picture. So the picture itself is incredibly sharp and rich in color because it didn?t have to go through another two generations of optical printing.