by David Lynch
Lynch directed six commercials that year, and when Francis Bouygues died that July, his relationship with Ciby 2000 began to fray. By the end of the decade he would meet the company in court. That same year Lynch began a friendship with an aspiring young producer named Neal Edelstein, with whom he was to work throughout the following decade. Born and raised in Chicago, Edelstein moved to L.A. in 1992 to pursue a career in film. “I met David through Jay Shapiro, who was production coordinator on a PSA for breast-cancer awareness that David directed in 1993, and Jay brought me in as a PA,” Edelstein recalled. “David was an auteur in another universe to me, and to be able to work with him, and seeing how friendly and approachable he was, and watching him direct—I was in awe of how he handled things.
“Not long after we met, David hired me to work on an Adidas commercial that we shot on a freeway down by LAX,” Edelstein continued. “Then in 1994 I get a call from Gaye Pope and she says, ‘David wants to talk to you.’ Then David gets on the phone and said, ‘I need you to produce a music video for this Japanese guy named Yoshiki,’ who was the leader of the band X Japan and was kind of the Michael Jackson of Japan. I said, ‘I can’t produce! I’m only a production manager!’ And he said, ‘If you’re production manager you’re already doing the job! Come to the office and we’ll figure it out.’ I was around twenty-five years old and I hung up the phone and thought, Wow, I’m going to produce a music video directed by David Lynch. I didn’t think I was ready by any stretch, but David had confidence in me and it went swimmingly well and was a brilliant piece of directing.
“We were once shooting a commercial at Point Dume in Malibu, and the call time was six in the morning,” Edelstein continued. “David and I drove out there together and arrived a bit early and the sun’s not up yet. David wanted the sand flat and very organized, so these PAs are out there raking the sand, and David runs out and starts raking the sand with them! There he is, the director, raking the sand in the dark. It was so David, so about who he is, and his respect for other people, and his love for that homespun filmmaking experience. What I’ve learned from him about life and filmmaking and how to treat people is something I can’t put a value on.”5
PIERRE EDELMAN IS an adventurer and a character and my oldest French friend, and he played a part in many of my films. I love him. I met Pierre on the set of Dune and Raffaella threw him off the set because she didn’t want me talking to journalists, and he was a journalist then. Pierre knows everybody, he’s been all around the world, and he can give directions in any city. It’s amazing. He was in Hollywood in the sixties and knew everybody, and he made a fortune in blue jeans, but the money went away because of some bad behavior. He was in prison for a while, and the prisoners must’ve been so happy to have Pierre in there because he made prison fun. He organized cockroach races, where they’d paint the cockroaches and the prisoners would bet. I can just see him. Pierre has a company callcd Bee Entertainment and he wears a little bee pin on his lapel and Pierre is a bee—he pollinates. He’ll put this person together with that person, and he’s done this for countless numbers of people. So he told me at Cannes that Francis Bouygues loved Wild at Heart and that he had a new company and wanted to meet me, and this is a thing Pierre does. He puts people together.
Pierre is a good person, but some people have a problem with him because he can get in a sarcastic put-down kind of mood and he insults people. One time I was sitting next to him on an airplane, and when the stewardess came over he said something unpleasant to her. After she left I said, “Pierre, I don’t like the way you’re acting; don’t do that around me. Why do you treat people like that?” He apologized to her and by the end of the flight Pierre and the stewardess were best friends, so he’s got the charm, but he’s also got this thing where he’s got to insult people.
You can get derailed by rude behavior. All people have drives that could derail them if they allow them to—drugs, sex, food, strange thinking, and you can get in trouble with your attitude, too. Most people have a little bit of corral around things and they stay okay, but prisons are filled with people whose corral got broken.
There used to be this great Italian restaurant across the street from the Beverly Hills post office called Il Giardino. It was this nondescript place and wasn’t any great shakes looks-wise, but the food was incredible. I went to dinner there one night with Pierre, Tom Hansen, and Jean-Claude Fleury, who was running Ciby 2000. I found out that night that Jean-Claude and I were born ten or eleven hours apart on the very same day, him in France, me in Montana. Fellini was born on my day, too, and so was George Burns. George was exactly fifty years older than me, and in 1991, on my forty-fifth birthday, George and I shared a cigar. Not the same cigar—we each had our own cigar, and we had a smoke together. George Burns was little and light as a feather, and you felt like you could just pick him up like a piece of cardboard. George fell in the bathtub and hurt himself and that ended up taking him down. That was the beginning of the end. If he hadn’t fallen he could still be alive.
Anyhow, Pierre was always talking about his buddies, and a lot of people thought he was full of hot air. That night at Il Giardino he said something about his buddy Clint coming by, and two-thirds of the way through dinner we look up and in comes Clint Eastwood, and he comes over and says, “Pierre!” and he gives him a big hug. I wasn’t surprised, because I knew Pierre by then and I figured Clint would show up.
So I went to Paris to meet with Francis Bouygues at his office on the top floor of a building on the Champs-Élysées. Tony Krantz and Tom Hansen went to Paris with me, and they were supposed to be at this meeting. We’d been at the Maison du Caviar the night before and Tony had been shooting these cherry vodkas and it had snowed. There was six inches of snow in Paris, and Tony puked his guts out at the curb—I could see him out the window puking into the snow. Pierre brought all these girls—it was quite a night. Tom and Tony didn’t show up at this meeting, so there I was without my team, and right across from me was Mr. Bouygues and on either side of him are these two French guys that worked for him. These guys were the smarmiest lowlifes, and they were looking at me with these smiles that said, We’re going to crucify you. They didn’t like Bouygues going into the film business, and the vibe coming off them was so bad.
At a certain point Mr. Bouygues said, “Tell me the story of Ronnie Rocket,” and it was sort of like, If you don’t tell me, then there’s no deal—you know, prove yourself. I thought we already had a deal, but then this thing came about. I started thinking, Okay, I’m so fuckin’ out of here; this is not a bunch I want to be with. I wanted out of that fuckin’ building and I got up and started walking to the elevator; I was going to get a cab and go straight to the airport and say goodbye to these fucks. Those assholes sitting next to him with those French smiles on their faces—the worst part of France is this certain smugness, and it says so much, those smiles. I got a lot of that in the early days talking about meditation. Journalists loved to talk to me about film, but once I brought up meditation, here come those smiles.
Anyhow, Pierre sees me leaving and comes running after me and talks me down. I went back into the meeting and said, “I’ll tell you the story, but only if Pierre translates,” and I’m sitting there looking right at Mr. Bouygues, and Pierre is standing there translating, and these guys were quiet. When I stopped talking there was silence, then Mr. Bouygues said, “Bon,” and that was it. The deal was done. I just had to do the dog-and-pony show. He said yes to Ronnie Rocket, but when it comes down to it, I’ve always been afraid to make that film. Something isn’t right with the script and I don’t know what it is; plus, I started thinking about Laura Palmer then.
Francis Bouygues wasn’t really sophisticated about movies, but he loved Wild at Heart. I think he liked its power and strength. He and his wife, Monique, were real people and I got along with him really well, although in business he was probably different. In business he was a tough guy who surrounded himself with tough peo
ple, and a lot of people didn’t like him because of that. But Francis and I liked each other. We’d ride around on his golf cart and talk like he was a relative. He was a regular guy who understood how to get things done. He built the Chunnel and the Grande Arche, which is in Puteaux, northwest of Paris. He took me to see it with his top engineer, and there were fifteen vans filled with bodyguards and people. He once visited Stockton, California, and he loved the people and the factories in Stockton so much that he almost stayed there. He went back to France instead and formed this giant company, which was his destiny. Francis once asked me how many employees I had and I told him, “Three,” and he told me he had three hundred thousand employees. He had a lot of power.
I love France because everything they do there is art. The buildings, the chairs, plates, glasses, railroads, cars, tools, food, drinks, fashion—everything is an art form, and they believe in good-quality materials and great craftsmanship and killer design. The Italians and the French both have this thing. The Italians are a little bit different, but the Italians do great stuff, too. I like the hotel I stay in in Paris, and the people, and I like foie gras, and Bordeaux, and croque madame. I even like the coffee, although it’s not as good as David Lynch Signature Cup. It has a certain taste that makes me feel like I’m in France, though, so I love it.
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I don’t know why I loved Laura Palmer but I just loved her, and I wanted to go back and see what she was going through during those days before she died. I wanted to stay in the world of Twin Peaks, but it was a strange time. People were put off Twin Peaks at that point, so it was a hard sell. Bouygues went for Fire Walk with Me, but other people in the business wouldn’t have done it. Some of the Twin Peaks cast didn’t want me to do it, either. When an actor signs on for a series they’ve got to make a commitment, and a lot of actors worry they’re going to get known just for that role and nothing else will come along. A lot of the actors in Twin Peaks wanted to move on for different reasons, and when the series ended it gave people freedom and they could go off to stardom or whatever.
When somebody doesn’t want to do something it’s not the end of the world. You think of something else, and I love that in a way. We had to rework the script so we needed less from Kyle. The original script had a lot more actors in it, but lots of stuff was cut. I didn’t make those cuts because it was too long, though—that stuff was cut because it didn’t fit into the film. It was the film it needed to be. So some people got cut and other people got added. I have no idea how we got David Bowie in there, but I just love him. I don’t think he liked his accent, though, probably because somebody told him that’s embarrassing or something. All it takes is one person to make a comment like that and it can wreck something for you. He’s great in it, though, just great.
The Red Room is an important part of Fire Walk with Me, and I love the Red Room. First of all, it has curtains, and I love curtains. Are you kidding me? I love them because they’re beautiful in and of themselves, but also because they hide something. There’s something behind the curtain and you don’t know if it’s good or bad. And contained spaces? There’s nothing like a beautiful contained space. Without architecture everything’s just open, but with it you can make a space, and you can make it beautiful or you can make it so hideous that you can hardly wait to get out. Maharishi talks about this thing called Sthapatya Veda, which is about how to build a house that helps you have a better life. They say the soul builds the body and the body builds the house, and just as the body is a certain way, a house should be a certain way. The things people live in these days are absolutely not correct. A south-facing door is the worst direction. Facing east is best and north is good—the Pink House has a north-facing door—but all the rest is not beneficial to the human being. That’s the number-one thing, the orientation of the house. To really do it right, the kitchen’s got to be at a certain place, where you meditate has to be at a certain place, where you sleep, where you go to the bathroom—they have to be situated in a certain way and have a certain proportion.
Before I went to shoot Fire Walk with Me, Angelo and I were recording a song called “A Real Indication,” which ended up being used in the film. We were working with a killer bass player, Grady Tate, and Angelo was on keyboards and they did this great track. I had these lyrics I loved and I said, “Angelo, I don’t know who we’re gonna get to sing this,” and he said, “David, I’m gonna do it.” Angelo sings sometimes while he plays, and it almost makes me cringe, but I said, “Okay, give it a try.” So Angelo goes into the booth and he’s sort of bouncing in there, and [engineer] Artie [Polhemus] hits the button and the thing starts and he did it so perfect! He got me going so hard I just buckled over laughing, then it was like there was a light bulb in my stomach that suddenly broke, and I had a hernia. Angelo gave me a hernia. I was in a lot of pain but I didn’t know what I had, so we went up to Washington to shoot. I was in so much pain that they brought a woman doctor over who was just beautiful, and she examined me and said, “You’ve got a hernia.” I said, “I’ve gotta shoot this film,” and she said, “That’s okay, but you need to get an operation when you finish.” I had to mostly sit down during the shoot.
Anyhow. People were finished with Twin Peaks, and Fire Walk with Me didn’t go over well at Cannes. It was just one of those times in life when you can’t get arrested. Oh man, that was a horrible, horrible, stressful time, and I got really sick. And when you’re down, people just love to kick you. But it could’ve been worse. Like I said, with Dune I died twice because I didn’t believe in the work I’d done and it flopped. I only died once after Fire Walk with Me, so it wasn’t nearly so bad. You don’t like the film? Fine. I like it and you really can’t hurt me. Well, you can hurt me a little bit, but I still really like the film. Ray and Grace and Sheryl—the Palmers are fantastic and I love their world.
I recovered pretty quickly from Fire Walk with Me and bounced back and got to work. It’s not about being tough, either. It’s about getting ideas that you fall in love with, and I just stayed home and worked. I didn’t ever really like going outside the house, and now I really don’t like it.
Going to Lake Mendota was something new then, and I liked going there. Mary has six brothers and sisters and her family is great, and the Midwestern people are so kind and up-front. There’s no game-playing and they’re really friendly and nice. I ended up buying a two-story house on the lake that was a good deal, then I designed a top story and had that built. Then Johnny W. brought the Little Indian out from Long Island on a trailer. Johnny wasn’t really on my payroll, but he worked on pretty much everything I did back then and he got the boat for me. I got a bigger engine and there was a boat dock there and it was a great setup for summer. I could paint in the basement, and I also worked at Tandem Press in Madison, making monoprints with Paula Panczenko, who runs the place. They had this squeezing machine and a paper that was a quarter of an inch thick. The master printers handmade this paper in the summer, and that was beautiful stuff.
During the summer of 1993 I was in Madison and a musician named Yoshiki, who’s in a band called X Japan, asked me to make a music video for him. I said, “Okay, let me hear some music and I’ll see if I get any ideas.” So they sent one piece of music over that was basically just talking with some kind of music in the background, like a poem. I said, “I don’t have any ideas,” and turned it down, and they called back in a giant panic and said, “We’ve already announced it!” They offered me more money, so I did this thing for a song called “Longing” that wound up being really fun. I wanted smoke, fire, rain, and different-colored lights, and we went out to the dry lakebeds with rain machines and these thirty-five-foot columns of fire.
We were out there in the dry lakebeds with these lawnmower smokers that put out tremendous billowing clouds of white smoke, but it was windy and all the smoke was blowing out into the desert. So we decided to work on something else, a rain thing or something, an
d all of a sudden—it was one of the most incredible things—all the smoke that had blown away came rolling back in like a wall. Some of the frames are so fuckin’ beautiful you can’t believe it. There were a lot of cool things in that video, but it all sort of fell apart and I don’t know if Yoshiki ever used it. He wanted the video to end with him sitting at a Victorian desk, writing with a feather quill in his hand and a bottle of ink on the desk, but I thought, That’s not going to go with this desert scene, so I didn’t shoot it. He hired me and wanted me to come up with an idea, but it’s still his video, so I gave him all the footage I shot and that was the end of it.
Another time I’m in the living room in L.A. and my phone rings and there’s Michael Jackson on the phone, telling me he wants me to do some kind of trailer for his album Dangerous. I said, “I don’t know if I can do it; I don’t have any ideas for it,” but as soon as I hung up and started walking toward the hall, all these ideas came up. I called back and said, “I got some ideas,” and I worked on that with John Dykstra in his studio. We built this miniature world that was a red room with a little teeny door, and in the room were these weird modern-shaped wooden trees and a mound with silver fluid that was going to erupt in flames and then reveal Michael Jackson’s face. It was stop-action, and it took a long time to do. For me, things don’t have to be so exact, but these people working on it plotted it out to the nth degree. The trees were lacquered red or black, and the people who went in to move them wore white gloves and moved them along this precisely marked-out route. That was one part of the thing. The other part was shooting Michael’s face, and we had a camera rig for that with a circle of lights that created this fantastic look of focus with no shadows. All Michael had to do was stand in one place for a few minutes, but he was in makeup for eight or ten hours. How could somebody be in makeup for ten hours? It’s someone very critical about their looks. Finally he was ready and he came out and I met him for the first time and all he wanted to do was talk about the Elephant Man. He tried to buy the bones and the cloak and all his stuff from the museum, and he asked me questions and was a really nice guy. Then he stood there and we shot it and one minute later he was done. Obviously he had final cut over it and if he didn’t like it he wouldn’t release it, but it came out in theaters and it looked cool and I loved doing it.