Jason Solomons 

Trailer trash

David Lynch prepares to unleash his suitably surreal debut pop promo, while Catherine Deneuve and daughter reveal an enduring love for Boots the chemist. By Jason Solomons
  
  

David Lynch in a printing studio in Paris.
'Bizarre and unsettling': David Lynch has directed the video for his new single, Crazy Clown Time. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian

Lynch mob

David Lynch has made his first pop promo – and it's possibly the weirdest, angriest video of all time. The director of Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks released an album, Crazy Clown Time, last year, and its two previous singles, "I Know" and "Good Day Today", had videos directed by other people, submitted through online competitions a nd judged by Lynch and his UK music label, Rob da Bank's Sunday Best recordings. However, for the next single (the album's title track) Lynch has decided to take charge himself.

The result is as bizarre and unsettling as you'd hope. It shows a group of young people trying to have a good time in a backyard but instead creating a nightmare scenario of topless women having beer poured over them and a punk boy setting his mohican on fire with barbecue lighter fuel. Then they all run around the yard. "It's crazy clown time," shrieks Lynch, inset and pictured at the mic with headphones on. It certainly is. The video will premiere on Vice magazine's Noisey.com on 2 April.

Boots camp

Pay attention when you next visit your local branch of Boots the chemist – you may just spot Catherine Deneuve rummaging for toiletries. For I hear that the glamorous French actor, rather than strolling the boutiques of Bond Street, likes nothing better on a trip to London than to pop into Boots and grab as much British swag as she can.

Indeed, Deneuve and her daughter Chiara Mastroianni were among the lipsticks, suncreams and conditioners only last week as they visited London to open the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema season with Christophe Honoré's musical drama Les Biens-aimes (Beloved), in which they co-star.

"We're very close, Mother and I," Chiara tells me. "I wouldn't call us best friends, but we do have fun and she makes me laugh. We love to go shopping together, but not for clothes. We like supermarkets and funny little shops – here in London we only go to Boots. We love Boots." Chiara, whose father was the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, has two children of her own. "We pick up funny toothbrushes for my kids, you know, ones that are in bendy shapes, and since I was little I've been obsessed by toothpastes. Mother would go off shooting films in America and all I'd want is her to bring me back toothpaste. So it's kind of a family tradition now and we go straight into Boots and get all the toothpaste." I can just see the Belle de Jour No 7 range coming soon…

Old-school cinema

Trash had a tour of the self-styled "birthplace of British cinema" last week. The hitherto hidden gem belongs to the University of Westminster on Regent Street and was formerly its lecture theatre. However, in 1896, already famous for magic lantern shows, it was the place the Lumière brothers chose to bring over their cinématographe and moving images for their first public showing in Britain, a year after premiering them to shock and wonder in Paris.

Still housing a working 1935 Compton organ, the theatre is now receiving a £6m makeover to turn it into a 250-seat cinema showing a wide mix of films, including the work of the university's film graduates (it offered Britain's first course in cinematography in 1933). It should be one of the most beautiful places to watch films in the country. Guests on my tour included Richard Eyre, Steven Berkoff, Tim Bevan, Roger Michell – he'd just put the finishing touches to his latest film, Hyde Park on Hudson, starring Bill Murray as FDR – and screenwriter and Westminster alumnus Tony Grisoni.

They're still seeking funds but the aim is to be ready – combining restored Victorian splendour with 21st-century boutique chic – by 2014. There was, however, some concern about plans to get rid of the 1920s art deco balcony and railings, which I thought looked rather good. "I can tell you," said the university's director of development, Sarah Carthew, "that it's a pile of poo and not worth saving." So now you know.

 

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