Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  Barry Gifford is a killer fuckin’ writer and I’ve got a lot of respect for him. His writing is pure and minimal and it sparks things and gets your imagination going. There are things in the book he just mentioned in passing, but they’d get my mind going and I would expand them. Barry’s got these characters and they’re not going to be doctors or lawyers, but they’re smart and they live in a kind of subterranean culture, and I really love that world and the things that can happen there. It’s wild and free and there’s a kind of fearlessness, yet there’s also some kind of deep understanding of life.

  There are certain places I tend to like to go in my films. All artists have a particular machinery and specific likes and dislikes, and the ideas that they fall in love with are going to be certain kinds of ideas. It’s not like you set out to do the same thing over and over again, but there will be similarities. It’s like jazz. There are certain themes that appeal to you, and although there are many variations on the theme, those themes you love are going to always be there. The ideas come and they give the orders, and it may be a different slant on the theme, or different characters, but the ideas are in charge and your job is to be true to them.

  The casting happened almost immediately for Wild at Heart. I felt like Nic Cage could do almost anything, including Elvis Presley, who’s part of the character of Sailor. He’s a fearless actor and super cool, and he’s the only one I thought of to play Sailor. I met with Nic and Laura for the first time at Muse, and the night we met, this beautiful old art deco building down the street called Pan Pacific Park was on fire.

  Willem Dafoe is a friend of Monty’s and Monty probably brought him up, and Willem was like a gift from God. Once he got those teeth in, man, Bobby Peru just came to life, and he gave an absolutely flawless, perfect performance. It wasn’t just the teeth, though. You could put the same teeth in somebody else’s mouth and you wouldn’t get the same thing. It’s the marriage of the character with the actor, like, this person can do this thing and no one else can. Willem had the stuff. And I love Crispin Glover. His character is in Barry’s book, but I think maybe he’s just mentioned. I don’t think the cockroaches in his underpants are in the book, and his sandwich-making might not be, either. But Crispin was the perfect actor to do those things, and that’s another flawless performance.

  I don’t know if Mr. Reindeer was in the book and don’t know where he came from. He just arrived. Harry Dean’s character is in the book but I don’t know how much, and I don’t think Grace Zabriskie’s character is in there. Grace is from New Orleans, and when I met her for Twin Peaks she started doing a Cajun kind of talk that burned a hole in my head. I remembered that and when I was writing that character it was like I was channeling that Cajun thing. I knew it was right and Grace loved it.

  Sheryl Lee plays Glinda the Good Witch, who comes in at the very end when it looks like everything is lost and she saves Sailor and Lula’s love. In those days a happy ending made people puke—they thought it was a fuckin’ sellout and that the more down something was, the cooler it was. But it just didn’t seem right to end Wild at Heart on a down note. Everything is possible and sometimes something just appears out of nowhere and makes everything right. That can happen in life. But if you count on that happening, you might be let down.

  And you should always stay on your toes, because something could happen at any time. For instance, there’s a lady who walks through one scene in the film waving her hands, and she’s not in the script. I saw that lady in a restaurant and I had her do this thing, and it sticks in people’s minds how beautiful she is.

  There’s a lot of rock ’n’ roll in Wild at Heart. Rock ’n’ roll is a rhythm and it’s love and sex and dreams all swimming together. You don’t have to be young to appreciate rock ’n’ roll, but it is kind of a youthful dream about reveling in freedom.

  Wild at Heart was shot in Los Angeles and New Orleans, which is a great city. One night we were at this club there and it was kind of brightly lit and music was playing. In any restaurant in New Orleans you find all different kinds of people, and we were sitting next to this black family. The father wasn’t there but there was a mother and her daughters and maybe a brother, and they were visiting the city from someplace rural. This family had no pretense at all; they were just themselves, really enjoying life. We started talking and I asked one of the daughters to dance and she was solid gold. She was so pure. There we were, talking away, from completely different worlds. She knew nothing about my world, and she was such a good girl. I like that about that city, that different kinds of people are all together and it’s a city of music. There’s music everywhere and interesting food and lots of French things, and it’s a magical place that’s really dreamy at night.

  I don’t remember going to that club in New Orleans Monty described, but, sure, we could’ve gone there. I think peoples’ memories are different. Sometimes their memories are flat-out wrong, but mostly they’re just different. I do remember lots about New Orleans, though, and that’s a city I really love.

  I’m mostly in cities now and I don’t miss being in nature anymore. I guess I got it out of my system, and I don’t really long for it. When I was growing up in Boise, the forests were healthy and rich and the way it smelled walking through the woods was incredible. A bunch of things have happened since then, though. There are pickup trucks with gun racks and brightly colored off-road vehicles racing around in the woods, and those things don’t go together. And there’s also global warming and the bark beetle. When it gets super cold the bark beetle dies, but it doesn’t get cold enough for them to die anymore and they’re killing all the trees. My dad told me that when you see a tree that looks like it’s dying, it’s already been dying for ten or fifteen years. By the time you start seeing it it’s too late, and they say that a huge proportion of the forests are dying. That world of nature I grew up in isn’t really there anymore. There are all these people with backpacks and fancy camping stuff going into the woods and it’s crowded! When I used to go in the woods I never saw anyone. No one. You might see some weird people in the woods now and then, but mostly they were empty.

  So, places change, but not completely. When I went back to Boise in 1992 it was way different, but a lot of it stayed the same. Something about the way the land is formed to make a certain kind of weather and light—those things don’t change. But other things disappear. When you have those growing-up years in a place you get a feeling for it, and you always have a warm spot for it, and your heart feels good thinking about the things you experienced there. They’re gone now, though, and you can’t explain it to anybody. I could meet some kid now and tell him about Boise, but I couldn’t give him the feeling I get when I remember it, and he’ll have the same problem when he’s an old geezer explaining to somebody what life was like when he was sixteen.

  Making Wild at Heart mostly seemed pretty easy and the world seemed ready for that film. There was one scene that was just a hair too much, I guess, and we had to cut it. You can’t predict what’s going to freak people out, because you only have your own taste to judge things by—and I’ve come up with stuff that was too upsetting to me, too, and I couldn’t go there. When you fall in love with an idea that’s powerful you have to check the air and see how it would go in the world. And sometimes you sense that, no, it’s the wrong time for that.

  When I get an idea I usually have a real good clear feeling of where it goes. Sometimes I don’t, and I don’t enjoy being in that zone where I’m not sure. Sometimes you think you know and then you realize, no, I was wrong, that isn’t working. Like painting—it’s a process of action and reaction and you find your way. Sometimes that takes a lot of time, but when you find it you know it, and as soon as you decide, I want to go to New York, from then on you’re just going to New York and anyplace else is out of the question. You made a choice and now you’re going to New York and free will then is gone. Once you have a film you’ve decided to make, it becomes
a road and your road is set. You can veer off here and there, but if you go too far off you’re in a different film.

  I have more ideas than I can handle and I don’t get to them all. I get ideas for paintings, but I can’t paint now because I’m busy doing other things, and by the time I have the chance to paint, the ideas I have today won’t be thrilling to me anymore. I’ll be able to remember the ideas that went before, but they won’t be exciting to me. I miss painting when I’m not painting.

  * * *

  —

  The year Wild at Heart was at Cannes, Fellini showed his film The Voice of the Moon, and I was so thrilled that a film I made was going to fall on the screen right after a film by Fellini. It was just incredible. That whole experience was exciting, and we were working on the film right up to the very end, that’s for sure. Duwayne and I went into the screening room really late on the night before Wild at Heart screened, and you go up this ladder into the projection room and the projectors they have are like from a Russian science-fiction film. They’re huge, and we were running a dual system, picture and sound separate, full-coat mag analog, and this mag held so much smooth power. Unbelievable power.

  It’s rare now for people to get the chance to see a good print of a film projected right, and that’s a real shame. There are two things I think might happen next. Home systems could get really good, and you could have a TV screen the size of one wall of your house and sound that’s incredible. If you wanted to see a film you’d turn the lights down, turn off your phone, and crank the sound, and you’d watch this thing and could maybe go into that world pretty good. Unless you invited a lot of friends over it wouldn’t be a shared experience, though, and that’s an important part of it. The other thing that could happen is, movies will be streamed directly to your phone, and that wouldn’t be so good. As for what people want right now, well, they don’t want to go to the movie theater, and feature films have lost their allure. Cable television is the new art house.

  At Cannes you don’t know if you won until the last minute. If they tell you to stay until Sunday, you know you’re going to win something but you don’t know what it will be. I remember going up the red carpet that night with zero idea that I would win. You go up and shake hands with Pierre Viot, this cool guy who’s been with Cannes from the beginning and was the president then. He said, “David, it’s something and it’s definitely not nothing.” Then we went in and sat down, and before the ceremony started, Gilles Jacob, who was president of Cannes from 2001 through 2014, came by and said, “You won the Palme d’Or.”

  Lynch’s life was transformed by the juggernaut that was Twin Peaks, followed by Wild at Heart’s win at Cannes, and at that point he became a brand and an adjective. Suddenly you could describe something as “Lynchian” and people knew what you meant. This level of success has its pros and cons, of course. When you permeate popular culture completely it responds by absorbing you, then assuming it knows you, then assuming it has rights where you’re concerned. During the early 1990s the number of people wanting to get at Lynch, to get something from him, to share themselves with him, to express their opinions about him, just to breathe the same air he was breathing, increased exponentially, and the walls separating him from those people grew thicker. Cultural avatars live in bubbles; they have no other choice than to do that, because the demands made on them are simply too vast. Those forces were in play now for Lynch, and they brought about changes in his daily life. His staff got bigger and the chances of anyone spotting him at an L.A. coffee shop became slim.

  Winning at Cannes was a mixed blessing for Lynch, but something happened at that year’s festival that was inarguably good for him: He ran into an old acquaintance named Pierre Edelman. A colorful character known for his ability to make big plans hatch, Edelman has led an adventurous life that includes a stint in prison for deserting the French army; a fortune made in the garment trade; several years lost to drugs; a bankruptcy; a long stretch spent living at Jack Nicholson’s house; and a period as a journalist. In 1983 Edelman visited Churubusco Studios to write a piece on the making of Dune for a French magazine and met Lynch at the studio cantina. “We immediately clicked,” said Edelman, who attempted to produce some commercials for Lynch in the years following their meeting.1 Propaganda already had Lynch under contract in that department, so Edelman struck out there, but he wanted to work with Lynch and he isn’t someone who gives up easily.

  In 1990 French industrialist Francis Bouygues decided to get into the movie business. Founder of one of the largest construction companies in the world (he played a central role in the building of the Chunnel and Charles de Gaulle Airport), Bouygues launched his personally funded studio, Ciby 2000, and set out to corral the best directors in the world to work for him. Edelman was consulted as to which directors the company should recruit, and he drafted a list that included Lynch.

  “I crashed a party for Wild at Heart at Cannes and took David aside and told him that it would be great if he came to Paris to meet with Francis Bouygues,” said Edelman. “I explained to him who Bouygues was and told him that he would probably be able to make any film he wanted to with him. He told me that Ronnie Rocket was what he wanted to do. A short time later I organized a dinner with David at a restaurant in Los Angeles called Il Giardino. [Lynch’s lawyer] Tom Hansen was there, and I arranged for something funny to happen. A few months earlier I’d met Clint Eastwood in Saint-Tropez and we became friends, and I asked Clint to show up at the restaurant and say, ‘Oh my God, it’s Pierre!’ which he did. I don’t know if David was impressed, but I think he was surprised.” Surprised or not, Lynch did go to Paris to meet with Bouygues and signed a three-picture deal with Ciby 2000 stipulating that he would submit proposals for three different films, one of which was Ronnie Rocket.

  “David’s always had a great relationship with the French,” observed Mary Sweeney, who was officially Lynch’s partner by the time Bouygues came into the picture. “David believes that creativity is our birthright, and part of the reason he loves France is because you’re a rock star there if you’re a creative person, and your creative rights are respected.”2

  Those were early days in Lynch’s relationship with Sweeney, who went on to become a major part of Lynch’s creative life and lived with him for fifteen years. Born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, Sweeney discovered she had an affinity for editing while she was a student in the cinema studies program at NYU. On graduating in 1980, she began hunting for a job, and at that point Warren Beatty had commandeered most of the editing facilities in New York to complete his epic film Reds. Legendary editor Dede Allen was in charge of a crew of sixty-five, and she took Sweeney on as a seventh sound apprentice editor. In 1983 she landed a job at George Lucas’s Sprockets and moved to Berkeley, where Duwayne Dunham hired her as an assistant editor on Blue Velvet. She finally met Lynch in November of 1985, when he moved to Berkeley to do post-production on the film. “I remember the day David walked into the cutting room,” said Sweeney. “He was so happy, this sunshiny guy walking in, very sweet, hearty handshake, the whole nine yards.”

  In the spring of 1987 Sweeney relocated to L.A. for three months to edit the television version of Blue Velvet, which was a contractual requirement for Lynch, and in 1989 she moved to the city permanently to be script supervisor and first assistant editor on Wild at Heart. In 1990 she was script supervisor for the first episode of the second season of Twin Peaks, and in September of that year she worked directly with Lynch for the first time when she edited the seventh episode of the show.

  During the period when Lynch and Sweeney were growing closer Lynch was preparing for his first museum survey, which opened in Tokyo at the Touko Museum of Contemporary Art on January 12th, 1991, and was accompanied by a modest catalog. Included in the show were several of the dark, turbulent paintings from the late 1980s that had been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery, and a series of exquisite pastel drawings produced from 1985 through 1987. Uncha
racteristically tender, the series includes renderings of a shaft of light touching down on a barren landscape; a spiral form that hovers above a field of white mist; and a lozenge-shaped cloud that stretches like a UFO above an empty black field.

  On returning from Japan he launched his production company, Asymmetrical, and began working toward his next film. Lynch has said he was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and wasn’t ready to leave the world of Twin Peaks when the series was canceled in June of 1991, and shortly after it went off the air he began talking about making a movie set in the dreamy town he and Frost had cooked up. Toward that end he teamed up with Robert Engels, who’d written ten episodes of the show, and by July of 1991 the pair had produced a script called Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, chronicling the final days leading up to Laura Palmer’s murder. Slated to be executive-produced by Lynch and Frost, a Twin Peaks prequel wasn’t met with uniform enthusiasm from the cast of the show. Lynch has said that approximately 25 percent of the actors didn’t support the idea, and among the naysayers were Sherilyn Fenn, Lara Flynn Boyle, and, most significant, Kyle MacLachlan. The script as originally conceived relied heavily on his character, Agent Cooper, and on July 11th Ken Scherer, the CEO of Lynch/Frost Productions, announced the project wouldn’t go forward due to MacLachlan’s refusal to participate.

  Lynch is a master at adapting to any boundaries that are placed on him, however, and he revised the script to introduce new FBI agents played by Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland, and prepared to move forward. MacLachlan reconsidered and agreed to be in the film but in a diminished capacity. Harry Dean Stanton turns up in the Twin Peaks story for the first time, as the manager of a decrepit trailer park, and David Bowie gives a mesmerizing cameo performance as the mysterious Phillip Jeffries, an FBI agent with a Southern accent who appears to be having a breakdown.