Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  People loved Sparkehorse and they hadn’t done anything for a while, so Danger Mouse coaxed Mark Linkous into doing something, and they built these tracks. By the time they finished the tracks, Mark had become too embarrassed to sing, though, so they invited different singers to write lyrics and do what they wanted to do on these tracks. At one point I jokingly said to Danger Mouse, “I thought you were gonna ask me to sing,” and he said, “Do you sing?” I said, “Yes, I just started singing on some stuff,” so he listened to some of it, then he calls and says, “I want you to sing.” So I ended up singing on two tracks and I came up with the title Dark Night of the Soul, which is nothing new. Everybody goes through a dark night of the soul. They decided to name the album that.

  I absolutely loved Danger Mouse and I loved Mark, too. He came to visit a couple of times and he was so comfortable to just sit with. He loved music, and he and Dean and I would sit in the studio and talk and he smoked unfiltered cigarettes down to where they were less of an eighth of an inch, so his fingers were orange and brown. He was a Southern boy. He had a lot in him, really a lot. Some musicians just carry a lot, and you can immediately spot the ones who do.

  Watching Janis Joplin in Monterey Pop, oh my God, I just break into tears. No one knew her then—it’s hard to imagine now, but nobody knew her—and she comes onstage and these guys play this guitar intro that’s so cool, then it sort of settles down and she starts in and it’s just fucking perfect. She does these things that are perfect, just the best, and it’s a great fuckin’ song and she kills it. At one point in the film they cut to Mama Cass, who’s in the front row while Janis is performing, and she’s saying, “Wow,” like she can’t believe what she’s seeing. That is solid gold. Then here comes Jimi Hendrix, and he and his guitar are one thing. His fingers are playing no matter where the guitar is—they are one. It’s unreal. The coolest fucking thing. So he knocks “Wild Thing” out of the park, and then Otis Redding is onstage. The song he did that night? That is the version of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” So much comes out of that vocal that it’s hard to believe someone could get all of that into a single song.

  By the time Lynch’s exhibition opened at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2014, he was starting to achieve a degree of recognition in the art world that had been slow to come, but at precisely the same time he began disappearing again down the rabbit hole of television. The journey that was to take him back to Twin Peaks commenced in 2011 with that Musso & Frank’s lunch with Mark Frost, and it essentially took over his life for four years.

  Lynch was attempting to line up financing for Antelope Don’t Run No More when Twin Peaks: The Return first materialized in the distance, but the film proved impossible to make. French producer Alain Sarde had assured Lynch he could set up any picture he was interested in making, but with an estimated budget of twenty million dollars, Antelope fell between the cracks of the current filmmaking paradigm: You can get a huge movie or a tiny movie made but anything in between drifts into a no-fly zone. That was increasingly apparent to Lynch as his writing sessions with Frost became more frequent. They wrote mostly by Skype—Frost’s home in Ojai is a two-hour drive from Hollywood—and they formed the production company Rancho Rosa Partnership, Inc. Lynch then tapped Sabrina Sutherland to produce the show they were developing; Sutherland had been brought into Lynch’s operation full-time in November of 2008 to do forensic accounting for his various businesses, some of which were in disarray, and she’d become an indispensable part of his working life by the time Twin Peaks got rolling. He trusts her implicitly, and she multi-tasks for him as a producer, accountant, agent, lawyer, and business manager.

  By the beginning of 2014, Lynch and Frost had completed enough of a script to begin looking for financing, and their first stop was cable network Showtime, which is a subsidiary of the CBS Corporation. “I heard rumors that David and Mark were thinking of reviving Twin Peaks and begged David through his representatives to meet with us,” said Showtime CEO David Nevins. “In February of 2014 he and Mark came in to meet with Gary Levine and me, and David sat on my sofa and listened quietly while I tried to convince him this would be a good place to bring his baby. He was reserved, polite, well dressed in his black suit and white shirt, and was trying to size up whether I’d be a safe collaborator.”1

  Negotiations continued for six months, then in October Showtime announced the reboot of the series and ordered nine episodes. In January 2015 Lynch and Frost turned in a 334-page script to the network, and at that point Frost shifted his energies to writing a book about the series, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, while Lynch continued working on the script. Negotiations dragged on and grew increasingly irritating to Lynch, and on April 6th, after fourteen months of haggling, Showtime presented him with a budget for the show that he found woefully inadequate, and he announced by tweet that he was pulling out of the project.

  “Showtime had it in their heads that this was episodic television and didn’t understand David’s vision,” said Sutherland of the contractual skirmish. “It was never television for David; it was always a feature film, and they couldn’t grasp where he was coming from. For instance, David wanted a complete feature-film crew there every day, including lightning machines, standby painters, and special-effects technicians, and that isn’t how television works. They don’t have big crews there all the time, so Showtime resisted this because in their minds it was television. When David said, ‘Fine, I’m out,’ he didn’t leave because he wanted more money for himself; he left because of the gap between what was being offered and what he’d need to make what was in his head. David doesn’t make a lot of money, actually.”2

  Walking out on the project wasn’t something Lynch did blithely. “Seeing him do that reminded me of how much integrity he has when it comes to his work,” said Emily Stofle. “That took place at a time when his accountant had just talked to him about how much it takes to run this place and he knew he was overspending on his staff. He’d just done a commercial for Dom Pérignon and that allowed him to sustain another year, but he hadn’t made a film since 2006 and didn’t have a reliable revenue source. But there was no way he would compromise his vision of what Twin Peaks should be.”

  After making his decision, Lynch called several of the actors who’d committed to the show and told them he was out but that it might still go forward without him. “I don’t think any of us would’ve touched it with a ten-foot pole if David hadn’t been involved,” said actor Dana Ashbrook, who played juvenile delinquent Bobby Briggs in the first two seasons of the show.3 At that point Mädchen Amick organized a video campaign, and eleven actors—Amick, Ashbrook, Sheryl Lee, Sherilyn Fenn, Kimmy Robertson, Peggy Lipton, James Marshall, Gary Hershberger, Wendy Robie, Catherine Coulson, and Al Strobel—filmed testimonials on Lynch’s behalf, as did his daughter Jennifer.

  “I was in Japan when negotiations broke down,” said Nevins. “In television you negotiate a budget on a per-episode basis, and our lawyers were dealing with Twin Peaks the way they always dealt with television, but this wasn’t a typical project. David made it clear from the start that he saw it as a movie and didn’t want to have to say going in how many episodes it would be—he said, ‘It could be thirteen, but it may be more.’ Our lawyers got dug in on this point and said they didn’t want to pay thirteen times our episodic fee, but that wasn’t what David was asking for.

  “As I was flying home he tweeted that he was leaving the project, and after I landed, Gary and I went to David’s house. He said, ‘I keep saying it’s more than nine episodes, and no one is listening to me.’ I told him, ‘I can’t give you a blank check and I need to know what I’m going to spend,’ and David said, ‘Figure out what you can spend and I’ll figure out if I can make what I want to make for that amount.’ So we budgeted the whole thing and gave him a pot of money we were comfortable with and said, ‘Make as many hours as you feel you need.’ He used the money efficiently and it ended up be
ing very reasonable on a per-episode basis.

  “We never considered going forward without David,” Nevins added. “What is Twin Peaks in somebody else’s hands? This isn’t a franchise that needs to be reinvented by a new director, and we already know what happens to Twin Peaks when David’s not involved. It becomes an ersatz version of itself.”

  On May 15th, 2015, Lynch announced that he was back on board and pre-production officially began. Although a script had been submitted to Showtime months earlier, he continued to write for several months after the show was green-lit. “David is the first one to say there wouldn’t be a Twin Peaks without Mark, and the overall arc of the story was there when Mark left to write his book, but David expanded the story substantially after he left,” Sutherland said. “Things that had been in his head for years were woven into the script, and the directorial vision is entirely David’s. He knew exactly what he wanted—how everybody looked, what they wore, the sets, the nuts and bolts in a piece of furniture, the zipper in a skirt—every visual you see is one hundred percent David.”

  “He worked so hard on the writing,” Stofle remembered. “During the period that he was writing with Mark, he’d come home every night and, because I didn’t like him smoking in the house, he’d sit outside and smoke and write on legal pads. He’d sit out there for hours. He spent so much time out there on this vintage lounge chair that we had to have a new cushion made for it. On cold nights he’d be bundled up in a blanket. There was an overhang on our house, and when it rained he’d turn his chair sideways so he wouldn’t get wet.”

  Lynch had hoped Jack Fisk would be the production designer for the show, but Fisk was just coming off Alejandro Iñárritu’s The Revenant and recommended his art director, Ruth De Jong, for the job instead. Duwayne Dunham was back as editor, Angelo Badalamenti was handling music, and Johanna Ray and Krista Husar did the casting. With more than two hundred speaking parts, Twin Peaks: The Return was the biggest project Ray had ever tackled.

  Principal photography began in September 2015, and by all accounts the 140-day shoot was a glorious experience for everyone, including Lynch. “It seemed so fucking natural,” said Michael Barile. “Starting on day one, sitting there in his chair with his bullhorn, it was if he’d done it a million times. He was in his place, where he belonged.”

  The first and most crucial piece of casting was, of course, Kyle MacLachlan. “They’d been writing but hadn’t finished the script and needed to know if I was on board, and I said I’m in one hundred percent,” said the actor, who was first approached by Lynch and Frost in 2012.4

  “It wasn’t just one great role—it was three great roles, and I’d never been challenged like that as an actor. The process into bad Cooper was quite a journey, and it was very slow and steady the way David and I found that character. The most difficult scenes for me were the ones with bad Cooper opposite David and Laura Dern. David and I are kind of goofy together, and being a dominating character in a scene with him was hard. And I have such a strong heart connection to David and Laura that shutting that off was hard.”

  Dern plays opposite MacLachlan as his love interest, Diane, and although she concedes that the shoot had its challenging moments, for her it was almost pure pleasure. “Acting with David and Kyle was like being at a family picnic,” she said. “David created a reunion for Kyle and me—it’s as if he wrapped up a Christmas present and handed it to us. The story that unfolds between Cooper and Diane over the course of the series is a story about love, too, and that made it even more meaningful.

  “The love scene between Kyle and me was tough to do, though—not because of the intimacy, but because the emotions Diane is feeling are so intense,” she added. “David didn’t have a preordained idea of what he wanted the scene to be. He talked me through it as he shot it, and I don’t think he knew it was going to be so anguished. Diane is Cooper’s true love because she understands the split in him that he’s battling, and she’s been the most victimized by it—perhaps more than Cooper himself. For me, the scene is haunted rather than anguished, and it’s haunting because she knows that they will never be innocent again. It’s heartbreaking and erotic and damaged and confusing. I don’t know what David intended, but that’s how I experience that scene.”

  Michael Horse, who plays Deputy Hawk in all three seasons of the show, said, “David called and said, ‘We’re getting the old gang together,’ and a day or two into the shoot I thought to myself, Oh, I’d forgotten who David is and how special this is. There are so many things that are out of the box with David, and I had a ball.”5

  Lynch shrouded the show in a cloak of secrecy, and with the exception of MacLachlan, the actors arrived on set knowing nothing more than the lines they’d be expected to recite. Nobody seemed to mind that, either. “The fact that there was such a mystery about the script added a beautiful dimension to the interaction between the actors,” said James Marshall, who plays moody loner James Hurley. “When you shot your scenes, there was a quality of extreme privacy about it that I think comes across onscreen.”6

  Among the twenty-seven alumni of the original series who returned for season three was Al Strobel, who plays Phillip Gerard, the one-armed man who first appears in season one as Bob’s evil partner in crime. Gerard has evolved into a kind of an oracle by season three. “I was living in Portland and my agent submitted a photo and résumé to Johanna Ray,” said Strobel of how his relationship with Lynch began. “David saw something in me he could use in his art, and I fell in love with him immediately. It was like being invited to play in this fantastic sandbox with somebody who was having more damn fun than you could imagine—and David was very playful back then. He seemed much more serious this time around, but, then, season three is a more serious piece of work. Back in the day we were having fun with the conventions of television, but David has gotten more deeply into his art and didn’t seem to care this time whether the show would be popular. He just wanted to express his art.”7

  Grace Zabriskie also noted how time and experience had marked Lynch. “As you grow as an artist—and as an asset—there are pressures you couldn’t have imagined earlier in your career. Now you’re dealing with expectations that are new, and you still have to come up with the goods and be even better at it. Those pressures have made David a bit less available over the years, but I understand why that is, and he hasn’t changed at all in important ways.

  “I remember sitting and talking on the set of Twin Peaks: The Return while we waited for something to be set up,” Zabriskie added. “We share a love of wood and making things by hand, and usually our conversation is about nothing but tools, so that’s probably what we were talking about. We kept being interrupted by people who needed his approval for one thing or another, but after each person left he’d pick our conversation up exactly where we left it. David is completely present when he talks to someone.”

  Actor Carel Struycken, who plays the enigmatic Fireman, observed a change in Lynch, too. “He didn’t tell me anything about the character I was playing,” recalled Struycken of his first appearance as the Giant in episode one of season two. “He just walked up and shook my hand and said, ‘Everything is going to be peachy keen,’ which sounded so fifties.

  “David was never in a hurry,” Struycken continued, “and he was always telling the actors to do everything slower. Hank Worden played a waiter in that first scene I did, and he was eighty-nine years old and was already shuffling very slowly, but David told him to shuffle more slowly. And this time he wanted things even slower. I didn’t know what he was trying to achieve back then, but now, watching the reboot, it made sense to me. The pacing is really kind of radical.”8

  Also back for season three was Peggy Lipton, who plays the queen of the Double R Diner, Norma Jennings. “When I went in to meet David in 1988, he was sitting at a huge desk he’d made himself and the only thing on the desk was my picture,” she recalled. “Nobody had ever honored me like that.
I hadn’t seen any of David’s films at that point, but I felt drawn in by his personality. When David looks at you, you’re the only person in the world. He’s never distracted, his eyes don’t roam, everything is focused on you, and you get all of him. I think he offered me the part that day.

  “Jumping forward two decades, I got a message on my phone machine—‘Hi, David Lynch here’—so I called him back and we gossiped for a bit,” Lipton continued. “He loves to get into your head and he asked me about my life, then he told me about the show and I said of course. Then I thought, My God, how am I going to re-create her, but I didn’t have to do anything, because it was all written. I love the way David integrated the diner into this phantasmagorical thing. Okay, it all started here and these are our roots and our anchor, and it all tied together so beautifully. To have David come back into my life after all these years has been very special.”9

  Lipton’s love interest in the show is Big Ed Hurley, played by Everett McGill, who retired from acting in 1999 and moved to Arizona. “I didn’t maintain ties to anyone in L.A., and David had been looking for me for a while; then Mark said to him, ‘Why don’t you see if someone in your Twitter crowd has a contact for him,’ ” said McGill. “Somebody got back to him with a number for a little house down the street that belonged to my father-in-law, who passed on years ago. I go down there every few weeks to check on things, and the chances of me being there and picking up the phone are slim, but the phone rang and I picked it up and it was David. We started talking as if we were picking up a conversation we’d left off the day before. We talked about the good old days and his Packard Hawk, which is an odd-looking car he had that he loved, and as our conversation was winding up he said, ‘If I need to be in touch with you, is this a good number?’ I said, ‘This is not a good number,’ and gave him a different one, and then I got a nondisclosure agreement in the mail and a call from Johanna. Long ago I said to David, ‘Anytime anyplace you need me, you just call and I will be there.’ He knew he didn’t need to ask if I wanted to be in the show.