Mulholland Drive earned Lynch the Prix de la mise en scène (Best Director Award) at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, sharing the prize with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There. He gave the film the tagline 'A love story in the city of dreams'. Lynch has declined to offer an explanation of his intentions for the narrative, leaving audiences, critics, and cast members to speculate on what transpires. The half-pilot, half-feature result, along with Lynch's characteristic surrealist style, has left the general meaning of the film's events open to interpretation. Lynch then provided an ending to the project, making it a feature film. After viewing Lynch's cut, however, television executives rejected it.
The American-French co-production was originally conceived as a television pilot, and a large portion of the film was shot in 1999 with Lynch's plan to keep it open-ended for a potential series. The story follows several other vignettes and characters, including a Hollywood film director (Theroux).
It tells the story of an aspiring actress named Betty Elms (Watts), newly arrived in Los Angeles, who meets and befriends an amnesiac woman (Harring) recovering from a car accident. Mulholland Drive (stylized as Mulholland Dr.) is a 2001 surrealist mystery film written and directed by David Lynch, and starring Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux, Ann Miller, Mark Pellegrino and Robert Forster.
