Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  Lynch had a script he was happy with, but this was just one step in the long process of getting the film on the screen. “Blue Velvet was a very hard project to get off the ground,” recalled Rick Nicita. “David is a final-cut director. If you’re going to be in bed with him, you can’t quibble over terms—you either enter his vision and his orbit or you don’t, and this is both appealing and unappealing for potential investors. In 1984, Tom Pollock at Universal got on board, and God bless Dino De Laurentiis—he was the greatest. He financed all or a lot of that picture.”

  After De Laurentiis green-lit Blue Velvet, he brought in producer Fred Caruso, who began getting gigs as a PA in the early 1970s then worked his way up in the film business. “I did Dino’s first picture in the United States, The Valachi Papers, then I did a lot of movies for him,” Caruso said. “So Dino tells me, ‘I want to make this movie with David Lynch, but I don’t know if we can make it, because the budget is ten million dollars.’ At the time Dino was building a studio in Wilmington, so he says, ‘Come and meet David and see what you can do.’ I read the script a few times and told Dino, ‘I have no idea what this movie is about, but I’m happy to work on it.’ I’m good at budgets and I got the budget down to four million, and Dino said, ‘Make the movie.’ ”1

  Fred Elmes recalled that “when Dino decided to do Blue Velvet he said, ‘You’ll use local people so I can save money.’ The deal was that if David made the film for less money, Dino wouldn’t tell him what to do, and David liked that idea because Dino was a first-class meddler.”

  In May of 1985, Lynch left Virginia to begin pre-production on Blue Velvet in Wilmington, which was a five-hour drive from his house. He was already on the set when Caruso arrived. “The first time I met him he was wearing black sneakers, but they were a weird black,” Caruso recalled. “I later found out that he’d buy white sneakers and spray-paint them black. I told David I didn’t understand the script and he started explaining it to me, and I thought to myself, I still don’t understand it.”

  “Explaining” Blue Velvet is a tricky business. Discussing the genesis of the film in 1987, Lynch told Cineaste that “the first idea was only a feeling and the title Blue Velvet. The second idea was an image of a severed ear lying in a field. I don’t know why it had to be an ear, except it needed to be an opening of a part of the body, a hole into something else. The ear sits on the head and goes right into the mind, so it felt perfect. The third idea was Bobby Vinton’s song ‘Blue Velvet.’ ”

  Lynch’s Blue Velvet has launched a thousand graduate papers. However, you can’t reduce it to a collection of Freudian symbols, although many have tried; the elements of the film are simply too complex and multi-layered for neat and tidy synopsis. Moreover, if Lynch fully understood the story—and intended that audiences be able to easily connect the dots—he wouldn’t have been driven to put it on film. Lynch prefers to operate in the mysterious breach that separates daily reality from the fantastic realm of human imagination and longing, and is in pursuit of things that defy explanation or understanding. He wants his films to be felt and experienced rather than understood.

  “David is always dealing with some sort of mystery in his work,” said Isabella Rossellini, who plays Dorothy Vallens. “He once said something that really helped me understand his work. He said, ‘In life you don’t know everything. You enter a room and people are sitting there and there’s an atmosphere, and you immediately know if you have to be careful about what you say, or if you have to be loud, or silent, or subdued—you immediately know it. The thing you don’t know is what’s next. In life we don’t know where the story is going or even where a conversation is going to go in the next minute.’ David’s awareness of this is central to his films. He’s very sensitive to the mystery that surrounds everything.”2

  The particulars of Blue Velvet’s narrative are fairly simple. College student Jeffrey Beaumont, played by MacLachlan, returns to his small hometown when his father falls ill, finds a severed ear in a field, attempts to unravel the mystery that put it there, and is confronted with the pure evil of Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper. Along the way he ventures into a forbidden realm of eroticism he was previously unaware of. Most of us never stumble into the unique set of circumstances that lead us to learn the hidden complexities of our own sexuality: Three of the four main characters in Blue Velvet—Jeffrey, Dorothy Vallens, and Frank Booth—have discovered theirs.

  “Certain aspects of sex are troubling—the way it’s used as power, or the way it takes the form of perversions that exploit other people,” said Lynch. “Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies usually depict it in a completely flat way. Being explicit doesn’t tap into the mystical aspect of it, either. These things are hard to convey in film because sex is such a mystery.”

  Erotic obsession is central to Blue Velvet and is one of the foundations of Lynch’s work. However, taking a longer view, it’s clear that the overarching theme in everything he’s done is the issue of the dualities we live with and our efforts to reconcile them. Blue Velvet swings dramatically from the purity of the bluebirds of happiness to the savagery of the psychotic Frank Booth, and the film suggests that the dualities of life aren’t as clearly delineated as one might hope. Frank Booth is brutal, yet he’s reduced to tears by a sentimental pop song. He tenderly strokes a scrap of blue velvet while watching Dorothy Vallens sing, and the longing and agony on his face humanize him. While remaining the film’s sympathetic protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont is also a voyeur who casually steals another man’s girlfriend. Dorothy Vallens is a fragile, heartbroken mother who enjoys it when men hit her. The virginal Sandy harbors a vision of compassion and perfect happiness but sneaks around behind her boyfriend’s back. Nobody is all one thing.

  Our guide through Blue Velvet’s world of darkness and light is Jeffrey Beaumont. “Having worked with David on Dune, I got to know him pretty well and I see a lot of him in Jeffrey,” said MacLachlan. “David is good at taking the issues in his own life and making them part of his art, and it’s amazing how emotionally candid he is in his work. As to whether I’ve functioned as a kind of alter ego for him in the things we’ve done together, I guess I’d just say that it’s easy for me to absorb and adapt some of who he is when I go into roles in his work.”

  Lynch isn’t coy about the degree of his presence in some of his fictional characters, and he said, “I do see a lot of myself in Jeffrey, and I identified with Henry in Eraserhead, too. Both of these characters are confused about the world. Many of the things I see in the world seem very beautiful, but it’s still hard for me to figure out how things can be the way they are, and I guess that’s one of the reasons why my movies tend to be open to many different interpretations.”

  Fred Caruso’s list of duties included finding an on-set assistant for Lynch, and he hired one, sight unseen, named John Wentworth. As a student at Brown University in the early 1980s, Wentworth had been impressed by Eraserhead, so after moving to Los Angeles in 1982 he decided to attend when he heard that Lynch was speaking at a venue in Venice Beach. “I loved the positive force he was putting out,” Wentworth recalled. “It’s very charismatic, but it’s not a hustle—it’s sincere and beguiling—and I thought, man, I’d like to work with that guy.” Wentworth met George Stevens, Jr., founder of the American Film Institute, when he attended the AFI from 1983 to 1984, and he asked Stevens to put in a word for him with Lynch. Then, early in 1985, he got a call from Caruso. “Fred told me that if I could get to Wilmington in a week they’d give me a job as David’s assistant,” Wentworth said. “Before I went down there I talked with David on the phone and he said he was hand-designing the logo for Blue Velvet and he needed some flocking for it. My duties as his assistant included the usual things like running errands and scheduling appointments, but there were also uniquely David kinds of projects like finding flocking.

  “Not long after I got to Wilmington, David had this idea tha
t he had to do something called a Chair Pull that involved several young women, some old furniture, and long lengths of rope,” Wentworth continued. “It was my job to find the furniture and the women. So we set this thing up out on one of the lots, and these women were out there pulling this furniture around, and they were filming it for some reason. There were projects like that happening all the time. David can make art out of anything, and working for him was like working with an inspired person who has a vision, knows what he’s doing, and enjoys the insanity of it all.”3

  Although the Blue Velvet shoot would start in July, they were still casting in the spring when the crew arrived in Wilmington to start setting up. Prior to heading to Wilmington, Lynch met casting director Johanna Ray, who was to become a mainstay in his filmmaking practice; he’s never worked with another casting director since meeting her. Born in England, Ray moved to the United States in 1960 and married actor Aldo Ray. Following the birth of their two sons, and a divorce in 1967, she began edging toward a career as a casting director. She landed her first big job in 1984 when she cast Mark Lester’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel Firestarter, which was produced by Dino De Laurentiis. He then recruited her to cast three more films for him, and Blue Velvet was one of them.

  “Dino’s daughter Raffaella called and said, ‘Why don’t you come in and meet David Lynch,’ ” Ray recalled. “He was working on Dune in some out-of-the-way office in the Valley, and we talked about the roles and what he was looking for. I fell in love with him when he said, ‘For Dorothy Vallens, I do not want an actress with a perfect body’—that endeared him to me.

  “He was hard to get to know in the beginning because I think he was shy,” she continued. “I was shy, too, and that may’ve been why he liked me, because I wasn’t aggressive. Eventually he became a really personal friend and I found myself easily confiding in him. We’re very affectionate with each other.”4

  Laura Dern, the daughter of actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, had starred in two films—Mask and Smooth Talk—but was just seventeen years old when she first met Lynch to discuss Blue Velvet. “I was pretty stunned by the script, but I also thought it was incredible,” said Dern, who plays Sandy Williams in the film. “And my character isn’t part of the darkest aspects of the story. Everyone talks about the violence and cruelty in David’s films, but he’s also a profound believer, and that’s where the characters I’ve played for him have hung out; that’s the part of David I have access to as an actor.”5

  It took Lynch a bit of time to wend his way to Dennis Hopper for the character of Frank Booth. Willem Dafoe came in to discuss the role, and Lynch offered it to Harry Dean Stanton, who said, “I didn’t want to go on that violent trip,” and turned it down. Hopper didn’t have much of a profile in movies by the mid 1980s and had a wild reputation that had long eclipsed public awareness of his gifts as an actor. “When his name came up, people said, ‘Oh my God, he’s a crazy person!’ ” Wentworth recalled. “But he’d just gotten sober and he showed up and said to David, ‘Look, I’m sober, I know what I’m doing,’ and he did a great job—Dennis really inhabited the character of Frank Booth.”

  Hopper’s performance in Blue Velvet went a long way toward restoring his professional credibility; he’s devastatingly great in every scene he plays. When he prepares to pummel Jeffrey Beaumont, smears his own face with lipstick, kisses him, then whispers the words “forever, in dreams,” he’s terrifying. Lynch’s dry sense of humor appears throughout the film in funny little flourishes. After being beaten, Jeffrey regains consciousness the following morning and finds himself lying in muddy gravel outside a bleak lumber mill. As he stumbles away, a street sign informs him that he’s leaving “Meadow Lane.” That location is mentioned elsewhere in the film, and Lynch has said that in his mind “it’s an important place where something happened,” but it is yet to be revealed what that something is.

  It took a bit of time for everyone in the cast and crew to adjust to Hopper. “The way David works is, when he gets ready to shoot a scene he clears the stage, works with the actors to figure things out, then brings me in and shows me how we’re going to shoot it,” recalled Elmes. “My God, the first time I saw Dennis’s first scene with Isabella, I was shocked. It’s completely overwhelming the way the words in David’s script lifted off the page with Dennis’s performance.

  “I liked Dennis once I got to know him, and he became the most responsible actor on the set,” Elmes added. “When he came to Blue Velvet he was coming off his bad rep and he was on good behavior. In fact, he got upset at other actors who didn’t know their lines, and people who didn’t come to set on time were on his shit list.”

  Hopper took the opportunity Lynch had given him seriously; he knew he didn’t have a lot of leverage at that juncture in his life and that it was a great part. “This is an unusual movie,” Hopper said in a conversation in Wilmington, “and although your basic horror-film audience will probably turn out for Blue Velvet, it’s much more than a horror film. Looking at it on another level, it’s about the schizophrenia of America, and if people allow themselves to relax and go with the film, I think they’ll recognize a sort of collective nightmare up there on the screen.”6

  “Frank Booth, to me, is a guy Americans know very well,” said Lynch. “I’m sure most everybody has met someone like Frank. They might not have shook his hand and gone out for a drink with him, but all you’ve got to do is exchange eye contact with someone like that and you know that you’ve met him.”

  It was purely by chance that Isabella Rossellini came to be cast as Dorothy Vallens. The daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini, she was raised in Rome, mostly by her father. She moved to New York in 1972 and worked as a journalist for Italian state television until her modeling career took off in the late 1970s. Rossellini had acted in just one American film when Lynch met her in New York.

  “I was at a restaurant with some girlfriends and two of them worked for Dino,” Rossellini recalled. “We were at Dino’s restaurant, which was called Alo Alo because that’s how Dino said ‘hello hello.’ David was there with another member of the De Laurentiis family—I think it was Raffaella’s ex-husband—and we pushed our tables together, so David and I met. I mentioned I’d just finished shooting a film with Helen Mirren called White Nights, and he told me how much he wanted her for a film he was casting called Blue Velvet. The following day he sent me the script with a note that said, ‘Maybe you’d like to read for the part.’

  “I asked Marty [Scorsese, Rossellini’s husband from 1979 to 1982] about David, and he told me to go see Eraserhead—Marty has an incredible eye for art and is the best film scholar I’ve ever met, and he had a huge admiration for David. I’d seen The Elephant Man, and the range between that film and Eraserhead is so vast, and that’s when I understood that he was a very talented director. So I called David and told him I’d like to test with Kyle to see if I captured the character for him, and David gave me a lot of time rehearsing with Kyle. It wasn’t as if we were rolling around on a bed or kissing—it was more conversation. How would I seduce him? How would I surprise him with my behavior? How would I portray a woman who was a victim but also a perpetrator of crimes against herself? We discussed the most difficult scenes, and after we’d tested, David offered me the part. I felt confident I could handle it because David had given me so much time during the test.”

  Rossellini more than handled the part and gave a searing performance that was every bit a match for the volcanic Hopper, whom she initially approached with trepidation. “Everybody knew he’d been in rehab—for years, I think. Before I met Dennis I asked David what he was like, and he said, ‘It’s like sitting next to a ticking bomb.’

  “David thought we should shoot the kind of ceremonial rape scene first so we’d get it over with, and I thought, We’re going to start with that scene? That’s terrible,” Rossellini continued. “I hadn’t met Dennis yet, so I asked t
he first assistant director to ask him if we could meet for breakfast before we went to the set. So we met for breakfast and he was very cold and seemed annoyed, like, what did I want? We’re doing a film and you don’t need to know me. Yes, we’re going to shoot a difficult scene but this is our job. He scared me, and I thought maybe professional actors don’t ask to meet one another before they begin shooting. Looking back, I think he was cold because he was as afraid as I was. Of course he was afraid. He was returning to acting after years of rehab and David started with this very difficult scene.

  “In that first scene I have to sit in front of Dennis and spread my legs, and he leans over and looks at my vagina, like a crazy kind of worship,” she continued. “Then he punches me and I fall, but when I fell backward my robe opened and you could see that I was wearing underwear. David asked me to take my underwear off and I said to Dennis, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve been asked to take my underwear off because it shows in the shot when I fall backward.’ So when we did the first run-through and he leaned over and stared at my vagina, I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and he just looked up at me and said, ‘I’ve seen it before.’ That made me laugh, and when he saw me laugh I could see that he liked me. Later, after we’d become good friends, he told me about when he was very sick and lost his mind and was high on drugs, and how frightening it was. And here he is playing a character on drugs who is completely out of his mind. It was difficult for him, and I understood that later.

  “By the way, David laughed throughout the shooting of that rape scene! I said, ‘David, what is there to laugh at? Are we doing something ridiculous?’ I don’t know why, but he was laughing. There is something about Blue Velvet that is funny, though. When I saw it years later I found that it had a naïveté that made it slightly comical. But I still don’t know why David was laughing!”