Persona

They're, they're, they're lip-syncing to a tape, and that has a Twin Peaks quality to it as well.

And then you also have more than a, than a wink to cinematic history, you know, to, to Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, to Ingmar Bergman's Persona, to Hitchcock's Vertigo with all the doppelgangers, and Naomi Watts as the Kim Novak/Grace Kelly stand-in, which of course also gives a nod [laughs] to Lynch's own Lost Highway, another film about doppelgangers with echoes of Hitchcock running through it.

This was Naomi Watts' breakout role, and here she plays a woman named Betty who has just arrived in Los Angeles looking to break into Hollywood as an actress.

She's staying at her aunt's place, this little bungalow, and when she gets there, she discovers that there's another woman, played by Laura Harring, who's been hiding out there.

any bergman that i

like yeah there's definitely stuff there have you seen persona No. Persona was a big one for me kind of going down the road, especially in regards to Mulholland Drive.

It's like when you watch Persona, you're like, oh.

So

anyway, so anyway, yeah, it was very much like a realization of like, oh, there's like the short haired blonde lady and the dark haired longer woman.

um it's a uh it's definitely like uh was something that was just kind of like you know kind of came out of that frustration and and then brought into this whole new life of the film or whatever but the um but it i feel like yeah it definitely i think he had a fascination with old hollywood for sure um and the idea of of you know uh i mean you see it also in the holland drive um for sure like with well i don't know why i said also we're just talking about it but the um the uh the uh the different facets of it between actor but then also the dark side and the producers i guess was like the two parts of it that really like were were sort of um really interesting and also was like i think persona the bergman film is so fascinating to me as like a way to kind of pick it apart because it it all like it's persona the film starts off with like this um you hear the production getting ready to shoot Like it's over black and you hear them like getting ready right before they start a scene.

And then they start.

And it's the notion, I guess there's a bunch going on in Persona.

This is a crazy film.

But the difference, I mean, look, when May, December was hotly anticipated, the poster people were comparing to Persona because it had two women's faces on it.

Yes.

And people were doing, I may be people, maybe I did this when I had a Twitter account, I don't remember, were doing like a collage of all the different film posters with two women's faces on.

And I believe when I did this, I included Notes on a Scandal because it had been many, many years since I'd seen it.

Yeah.

Rewatching it, Notes on a Scandal has nothing to do with Persona.

No, not one bit.

And I've been back at school for three weeks and it is the usual chaos of the first three weeks back at school.

But on top of that, This week we had our school student production of Little Women, which went really, really well.

But again, I was this week.

I've been at school till at least seven slash eight slash nine o'clock for the last four days and fighting a cold as well.

And then it's this whole like their relationship.

They decided to live.

this kind of very traditional like she becomes a housewife but a 1950s housewife and it's kind of their relationship itself it's a really cool play i enjoyed it i thought um amy was great the production was really fun and really good um so that was good and then the other couple of things i've seen um is i went and saw pressure at the cinema And the reason I'm talking about Pressure, which has got Andrew Scott in it, and some really, really good names, Brandon Fraser plays Eisenhower, is because it originated as a play.

There's quite a lot of these coming out.

about the twinkle it's two plays in one and what they do at the beginning of each show is they flip a coin to decide who they're going to play

So it's called Electra Persona because the first half of the play, the first hour is an interpretation of the play.

Right.

Not maybe.

But it's like a Greek tragedy, basically.

And it's about like two women and their like problems.

And then the second half is Persona by Ingmar Bergman.

And that is a movie from the 60s, I believe, or 40s or something.

Cate Blanchett has a message to people who do that.

She's starring in this play in London, and it's called Electra Persona.

Mm-hmm.

And so it blends, as you're familiar with, the Sophocles Greek tragedy Electra-

Yep

... with the Ingmar Bergman movie Persona.

Okay.

You went to film school.

They seemed by reputation to be to be dense and overly art for art's sake and out of reach and out of touch and psychologically complicated in a way that wasn't inviting to me in the way some other filmmakers from his same time period, for me in particular, Antonioni, Godard, Fellini, De Sica, people I had done an examination of.

And so I was a little wary two years ago, but I started with Persona.

And within the first three minutes of that film, I was so drawn in and it felt very of this moment.

You said timeless, like that's a perfect description.

You know, this museum has so many great things to look at.

Is there a specific moment, a specific film? Is there something for persona in here that you would draw my attention to?

Persona is the film where he really reinvented himself as an artist.

You know, he was already an established and successful director and he had had a sort of international breakthrough with Smiles from a Summer Night.