by David Lynch
Hotel Room was based on an idea Monty Montgomery had. The first episode, “Tricks,” was written by Barry Gifford and starred Glenne Headley and two of my all-time favorites, Freddie Jones and the great Harry Dean Stanton. I’m sure Harry Dean was a total inspiration to actors, and I didn’t want Harry Dean to leave this world. Hotel Room was set in the Railroad Hotel, where every room had train pictures on the walls and a view out the window of some railroad tracks down below. The idea was that throughout the years this one hotel room would have hundreds of guests and we would see what happened on a particular day in this room. We did three episodes, and Barry wrote the two I directed and I loved them. I don’t know how Jay McInerney got involved with Hotel Room—I guess Monty brought him in. Anyhow, the networks hated Hotel Room.
They’d hated On the Air, too. The idea for that was this live-television thing and all the things that can go wrong. You get a bimbo actress and a foreign director and you try your best and nothing can go wrong, right? And then you see what can happen. That’s the humor of it. But nobody wanted it. You know, people go up and then usually they go down, and if they come back up after they’ve been down, then they’ve got staying power. Actors like Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda and Clark Gable went up, then something happened and they went out of favor a little bit and then they came back. People liked them again and wanted to hold on to them, and they didn’t go away again.
Things change, though, and they’re always going to keep changing. In October of 1993 I was shooting a Barilla pasta commercial in Rome. We were in this beautiful plaza and the star was Gérard Depardieu, who’s great to work with, and it was a funny commercial. The DP was Tonino Delli Colli, who’d also been the DP for Intervista so I met him way long ago when I met Fellini, and now he’s my DP on this thing. The production manager on this commercial also worked with Fellini, and one day the two of them were talking and they said, “David, Fellini is in a hospital in the north of Italy, but he’s being moved to a hospital here in Rome.” I asked if it might be possible to go say hello to him, and his niece made a plan to visit him on Friday night. We wrapped on Friday, and when Friday night came there was the most beautiful sunset. I get in the car and Mary Sweeney is there and some other people—the car is full—and we get to this hospital and out in front are tons of, like, they’re not homeless but they’re sick people or something, on these steps, and inside it’s really crowded. The niece came out of the hospital and leaned into the car and said, “Only David and Tonino can come in,” and we got out and started walking with her deeper and deeper into the hospital, until finally we got to a place where there was nobody, just all these hallways, and we went down a long hallway and finally got to the door of Fellini’s room. We go into this room where there are two single beds, and Fellini’s in a wheelchair between the two beds, facing out. He’d been talking to a journalist named Vincenzo who was in there, and Tonino knows Vincenzo, so the two of them start talking. They got me a chair and I sit down in front of Fellini’s wheelchair with a little table attached and he holds my hand. It was the most beautiful thing. We sit for half an hour holding hands, and he tells me these stories about the old days and how things have changed and how it’s depressing him the way things are. He said, “David, in the old days I’d come down and take my coffee, and all these film students would come over and we’d talk and they knew everything about film. They weren’t watching TV, they were going to cinema, and we’d have these great talks over coffee. Now I come down and there’s nobody there. They’re all watching TV and they’re not talking about film the way they once did.” After our time was over I stood up and told him the world was waiting for his next film and then I left. I ran into Vincenzo much later and he told me that after I left that night, Fellini said, “That’s a good boy.” He went into a coma two days later, then he died.
I think things happen the way they’re supposed to happen. When you get old you remember the way it was when you were doing your stuff, and you compare it with what’s happening today and you can’t even begin to explain the way things were to young people, because they don’t give a shit. Life moves on. One day these days will be their memories, and they won’t be able to tell anyone about that, either. That’s just the way it is, and I think Fellini was in that place. There was a golden age of cinema for Italy and France and he was one of the kings then, really important, so important to cinema, beyond the beyond important. Damn.
Lynch has a vast library of ideas archived in his head, and he often gets an idea and shelves it until another one comes along that marries well with the first one and both ideas ignite to their full potential. On the final night of shooting Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me in 1991, the idea of disturbing videotapes arriving on the doorstep of an unhappily married couple came to him. The idea wasn’t ripe yet, though, so it percolated in the back of his mind while he did other things. Lots of other things. Between 1993 and 1994 Lynch directed six commercials. He built furniture and tried unsuccessfully to get funding for a script he’d written based on Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” set in Eastern Europe in the mid-1950s. Then there was The Dream of the Bovine, the absurdist comedy he’d co-written with Bob Engels; that never got off the ground, either.
In 1995 Lynch was invited to be one of forty directors participating in Lumière and Company, a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of film. Participants were asked to make a fifty-five-second film comprising one continuous shot using the original Lumière Brothers camera. In an effort to simulate conditions at the turn of the twentieth century when the camera was invented, the directors were allowed just three takes, couldn’t use artificial light, and there were to be no cuts; it was to be a single fifty-five-second shot. “The Lumière project is bite-size David Lynch, but it’s as satisfying to watch as any of his feature films,” said Neal Edelstein of Lynch’s Premonition Following an Evil Deed. “Gary D’Amico is a practical-effects guy and a wonderful human being who lives in La Tuna Canyon on a huge piece of property, so we built a set in Gary’s front yard. It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. David was massaging four or five segments at once, each had to go off perfectly, and it was high-risk filmmaking. We were all laughing like kids that we were managing to pull this cool thing off.”
Lynch’s film is widely acknowledged to be the most ambitious and successful of the forty shorts. “They thought we cheated,” recalled D’Amico of the visual sophistication of the film. Born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, D’Amico got a job sweeping floors at Disney when he was nineteen, worked his way up to the props department, and by the end of the 1980s was a skilled special-effects artist. In 1993 Deepak Nayar called D’Amico to the set of On the Air and asked him to create a machine that spit plumbing parts. “I rigged that up and David came over to my trailer to check it out,” D’Amico recalled, “but he was more interested in looking at my stuff, because he’s a nuts-and-bolts guy. David is very hands on and loves building things, and the day we met he struck me as inquisitive, low-key, very polite, and calm as a Hindu cow.
“When they were preparing the Lumière project, I got a call from his office and they said, ‘David wants you to work on this thing.’ They gave me the date and I said, ‘I booked a commercial and can’t get out of it.’ I hear his assistant holler, ‘Gary’s on a commercial that week and isn’t available,’ and David said, ‘We can’t do it without Gary,’ and pushed the shoot until I got back! Every director should go to the David Lynch school for how to treat people on set. He’s a total pro and a super guy, and there’s not a finer person in the industry.”1
Lynch went to work on a new script during that period, too. In 1992 he’d optioned a novel by Barry Gifford called Night People, and some passages of dialogue in the book stuck in his head. Two phrases in particular seemed to sidle up next to that idea he’d had back in 1991 about mysterious videotapes. “That’s a beautiful thing David does,” said Sweeney. “He takes random things and unifies them to c
reate a world.”
Early in 1995 Lynch contacted Gifford. “David called one day and said, ‘Barry, I want to do an original film together, and we’re gonna do it if I have to finance it myself,’ and he came to my studio in Berkeley,” Gifford recalled. “He said he was struck by two bits of dialogue in Night People. A woman says, ‘We’re just a couple of Apaches riding wild on the lost highway,’ and Mr. Eddy says, ‘You and me, mister, we can really out-ugly the sum’bitches, can’t we?’ So those were the starting points.
“David was staying at a nearby hotel,” Gifford continued, “and at seven minutes to nine every morning he’d call and say, ‘Barry, I’ll be there in exactly eight and a half minutes,’ and eight and a half minutes later he’d walk in with a big cup of coffee. We spent a couple of weeks writing what we liked on a legal pad, then Debby Trutnik typed it up.”
A second draft of what came to be titled Lost Highway was completed in March, and a shooting script dated June 21st was finished three months later. As with Hotel Room, the writing in Lost Highway is minimal; you don’t learn what the story is about through the things people say, and the physical action is deliberate and slow. The story of a man who may or may not have murdered his unfaithful wife, Lost Highway explores themes of paranoia and shifting identity and is Lynch’s most classically noir film. It’s one of his toughest and darkest, too.
Lost Highway was a joint production of Ciby 2000 and Lynch’s company, Asymmetrical, but early on, Joni Sighvatsson was interested in getting on board. In 1994 Sighvatsson partnered with Tom Rosenberg and Ted Tannebaum to launch the production company Lakeshore Entertainment, and he recalled, “I wanted to do Lost Highway at Lakeshore and offered David a budget of six million dollars. He had the check in his hand, but before going forward I said, ‘David, nobody is going to understand what’s going on with one actress playing two different characters and two different actors playing the same character.’ He said, ‘What do you mean? It’s obvious!’ He was adamant this wasn’t a problem, so Lakeshore didn’t make that picture.”
Ciby 2000 was totally game, despite the unconventional aspects of the script. Challenging the veracity of linear time, Lost Highway is a kind of existential horror film that was summarized by The New York Times’s Janet Maslin as “an elaborate hallucination that could never be mistaken for the work of anyone else.” The story of an avant-garde jazz saxophonist who morphs into a teenage garage mechanic, and a suburban wife who morphs into a porn star, it’s a startlingly original film that has echoes of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Robert Altman’s 3 Women.
Bill Pullman plays a jazz musician named Fred Madison who’s in the grip of a psychogenic fugue, a psychological condition that causes him to abandon his own identity and take on a new one. A form of amnesia, psychogenic fugue allows the mind to protect itself from itself when reality becomes unbearable. Lynch has said the film was partially inspired by the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, and the televised trial of O. J. Simpson, which he found riveting. Like Fred Madison, Simpson seemed to have persuaded himself that he had no complicity in the crime that had been committed.
It’s a sinister story, but Lynch’s set was copacetic. “When I met David I felt like I was meeting a member of the family,” recalled Pullman. “It was like we were tuning forks humming together, and once we got on the set I could see that everybody else felt the same way about him—David’s very good at narrating the day so everybody feels like they’re part of the same creative act. I loved his sense of humor, and the way he expresses himself felt very familiar, maybe because he has that country background. David has a sense of the bounty of the land and we share a Montana connection. He spent time there with his grandparents as a child, and his son Riley worked on the ranch my family has there.
“We had a little shorthand for my character,” Pullman continued. “I don’t know which of us said it, but the shorthand was ‘it goes kabuki,’ which meant that what happens in the scene moves into some kind of ritualistic modality and unknowable mystery involving masks. Kabuki meant all that.”2
Co-starring as Pete Dayton is Balthazar Getty, who made his film debut at the age of fourteen in Harry Hook’s 1990 film adaptation of Lord of the Flies. The great-grandson of J. Paul Getty, he was cast in Lost Highway after Lynch saw a photograph of him in a magazine and called him in for a meeting. “David’s a very intuitive guy, and he basically said then and there that I was the guy for the job,” Getty said of the meeting.
“The only person who has the big vision on a Lynch movie is Lynch, and Patricia [Arquette] and I didn’t even know what kind of movie we were making when we were shooting,” Getty continued. “When I finally saw the film I had no idea it was going to be so frightening. Patricia and Bill coming in and out of that dark hallway, the heavy sounds—none of that came across in reading the script, and so much in it was open to interpretation. Part of David’s technique is to keep his actors guessing, because it creates a certain atmosphere on set.
“David’s very into details of production design and wardrobe, and I remember him dressing the set as we prepared to shoot a scene,” Getty added. “He went to the corner of the room and placed something there—some coffee beans, I think—that the camera and the audience would never see, but David has his process and he needed that to be there.”3
Getty had just turned twenty-one when he was cast in Lost Highway, and the shoot was challenging for him. “Early on we shot a scene where Pete is sitting at home with his parents, and I was supposed to just look at them,” Getty recalled. “We did take after take and finally, when we got to around take seventeen, David said, ‘Let’s break for lunch and we’ll get it when we come back.’ I went to my trailer and was just devastated. David’s somebody you want to make happy and I was actually crying, thinking that I couldn’t deliver. Then he sent a note during lunch that said, ‘Imagine being a child and seeing a hummingbird buzzing around your father’s head as he speaks to you. What would that child’s face look like? What would it be like to see fire for the first time? What kind of wonder and amazement would you feel?’ Pretty out-there stuff, but it was effective, and after lunch we got it in one take and moved on.
“There’s another scene where Patricia and I meet at a hotel and she lays out a plan she has for a robbery,” continued Getty of Lynch’s directing strategies. “I was struggling with the scene and finally David had me sit on my hands and do the scene that way. Actors use their hands to communicate, so sitting on my hands forced me to go deeper and play the scene entirely with my face, which is what David wanted.”
Pullman had to pull off challenging things, too, including a frenzied saxophone solo that spins out into the stratosphere. “Angelo wrote a piece of music, and a session musician named Bob Sheppard was hired to perform it,” Pullman recalled. “David said, ‘This will be easy for you. You’ll just get with the guy who played it and he’ll show you how he played it.’ I got hold of Bob and said, ‘I’d like to film you playing the solo,’ and he said, ‘I can’t play it again like that.’ Apparently David was in the studio with him and after each take David would say, ‘Crazier! I want the whole thing crazier!’ So he got into a state and gave David what he wanted, but he said, ‘I can’t get that back and I don’t want to get it back. You’re on your own.’ It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and the applause I got from the crew after I did it is one of the most cherished of my career.”
Lost Highway has not one but two Frank Booths, one of whom is a menacing pornographer named Mr. Eddy, played by Robert Loggia. While Pullman was working with him on the 1996 science-fiction blockbuster Independence Day, he gave the Lost Highway script to Loggia, who immediately loved the character of Mr. Eddy. Loggia turns in a hilarious set piece in the film, too. When a driver unwisely decides to tailgate him, Mr. Eddy proceeds to use his own car as a battering ram and forces the offending driver to the side of the road, where he gives him a lecture on the dangers of tail
gating as he beats him to a bloody pulp. This is Lynch’s sense of humor at its wicked best.
Equally terrifying is the Mystery Man, played by Robert Blake. A child star who grew up to turn in an acclaimed performance in Richard Brooks’s 1967 film adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Blake gives an eerily detached performance that conveys how subtly evil can invade everyday life. Blake’s character makes the point that evil never arrives without being beckoned. “You invited me,” the Mystery Man tells Fred Madison. “It’s not my custom to go where I’m not wanted.” Five years after Lost Highway was released, Blake was arrested and charged for the 2001 death of his wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley, and was then acquitted in 2005. Lost Highway features his final screen performance and the last onscreen appearances for Richard Pryor and Jack Nance, too.
Following the 1994 death of the owner of the house next door to the two houses Lynch owned, he purchased this third house with plans to transform it into a soundstage with a recording studio. The property was poised to be gutted when location scouting for Lost Highway began, and after searching unsuccessfully for a site for the Madison house—a primary location in Lost Highway—they decided to temporarily transform Lynch’s new house into a set. Some key plot points in the film revolve around the Madison house, which has peculiar architectural elements, including windows in the façade that are best described as a network of vertical and horizontal slots, and a long hallway leading into darkness.