Setbacks, now a comeback

By Susan King

June 26, 2009 12 AM PT

Sixteen years after the release of her first film, “Boxing Helena,” filmmaker Jennifer Lynch still can’t believe the often toxic personal attacks she endured from critics over her controversial love story involving obsession and amputation.

“Obviously, I am not going to make something that everybody likes all the time,” says the 41-year-old Lynch, who enjoys exploring the dark side of life as much as her famous filmmaker father, David Lynch.

“But the venom was really extreme on this. I had written it when I was 19, and it was an exploration of a fairy tale, if you will. I never thought it would become the big deal it became.”

Two years ago, Lynch finally returned to filmmaking with “Surveillance,” a creepy, surreal and violent thriller about two federal officers (Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman) who arrive at a lonely police station to investigate a string of vicious murders by a pair of serial killers. But all of the witnesses and the officers themselves are harboring secrets.

The film screened last year at the Cannes Film Festival and opens today in Los Angeles. Reviews have been decidedly mixed but nowhere near as scathing as those for “Boxing Helena.”

What happened to Lynch in the interim is as strange as a Lynch film. When she was 19, Lynch was hit while walking in an L.A. crosswalk. “It reversed every curve in my back,” says the good-humored director during a recent interview. “I had a few years of physical therapy, and I thought that would take care of it.”

Then, after her daughter, Sydney, was born 13 years ago, the pain became excruciating.

“I had no idea it was as bad as it was until after my daughter was born and I caught myself one day putting a towel in my mouth and crawling on all fours and pulling her behind me from one room to another,” she says. “I realized something was horribly wrong.”

Lynch has been pain free for the last five years after enduring back surgeries.

“I have some bolts and cadaver bones fusing my spine,” she says. “I think I found release from pain in humor, so I kept making jokes throughout all the surgeries. I wasn’t making a living at all. I was getting help from friends and family and chalking up the debt to spinal surgeries.”

Lynch also had to get off pain medications and other drugs.

“It became way too easy not to feel something,” she says. “I remember being at a certain point in the day where Sydney would go to bed and it meant, ‘Now I can smoke a joint.’ ”

Throughout her ordeals, Lynch knew she wanted to continue to make films.

“I wanted my daughter to see me at work, because she really hadn’t,” says Lynch. “I wanted her to know that mom did work and did love something and did have something that inspired her.”

And “Surveillance” was the inspiration that got her back to work. Her friend Kent Harper, who is also in the film, brought her a script he had written and wanted to know what she thought of it.

“There were some great things in it, but I wasn’t crazy about the script,” says Lynch. “We started throwing out ideas. Out of these discussions were born ideas.”

After finishing the script, Lynch sent it out to producers. Nothing happened for a year. Then one day her father, who was executive producer on “Boxing Helena,” called and asked about the status of “Surveillance.”

“He said, ‘Don’t be mad, but what if I put my name on it as an executive producer?” recalls Lynch.

Lynch, though, wanted to go it on her own.

“I said, ‘I will never live it down.’ He said let’s do it as an experiment and see what would happen. A few days later, we started to get bites and people were starting to read it.”

Upon completing the film, Lynch showed the film to her father and told him he could take his name off the credits if he wished. But he loved the film. “He said, ‘I got one thing to say -- I want my name bigger.’ ”

Lynch recently finished shooting in India for eight months on the thriller “Hisss,” about India’s ancient legend of the fertility goddess Nagin. And her father wasn’t involved.

“The producers had seen ‘Surveillance’ and found me,” Lynch recalls. “I got a phone call and, four days later, I got the job.”

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