by David Lynch
Hurt was in Montana shooting director Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate at the time, but he came to Los Angeles early in 1979 for the Academy Awards, as he’d been nominated as best supporting actor for his work in Midnight Express. “Mel called John’s manager and asked to see John while he was in town,” said Sanger. “Mel then came up with the idea of having photographs of the real Elephant Man blown up to wall size and hanging them in his office, and he orchestrated this whole thing. Mel said, ‘Okay, this is where John will sit, and we’ll hang the pictures here, and we’re not gonna mention the photos. We’re just gonna start talking about the movie.’
“Everybody shows up and sits down and Mel starts pitching the movie, and we could see John’s eyes going to these pictures,” Sanger continued. “John is being very polite and his manager is saying things like, ‘This sounds interesting,’ then John suddenly interrupted him and said, ‘I want to do this movie.’ David stood up and walked over to John and shook his hand, and the two of them developed a special relationship right away. There was something about David that really intrigued John. The two of them are very different, but David is the most winning guy—he really is hard to resist—and the two of them bonded from the get-go.”
The film was hurtling forward at a brisk pace and Lynch jumped in with both feet. “He loved the project and the story stirred something in him, but the reality of making a Hollywood movie was completely new to him,” said Mary Fisk. “Everything happened so fast and it was a constant barrage of things to do. My brother didn’t know whether he’d be able to do it, because David is an artist.”
Lynch apparently never doubted his ability to handle the film—he’s fearless when it comes to art—and he initially planned to employ the same hands-on methodology for The Elephant Man that he’d used for Eraserhead. “David said that if he did the movie, he wanted to do the makeup himself,” Brooks recalled. “I told him, ‘I’ve directed a few movies and you’re pretty busy,’ but I let him have a shot at it.” So, shortly after Hurt returned to the set of Heaven’s Gate, the Lynches traveled to Montana, where David made a full body cast of the actor. “Making the cast was an ordeal,” Mary recalled. “There was John, encased in plaster with straws up his nose, but he was a real trooper.”
With a finished draft of the script in hand and a lead actor attached to the project, Lynch, Sanger, and Brooks headed to London to begin pre-production. “It started getting really cold right after we got there,” Brooks recalled, “so I bought David a blue overcoat, and he wore it every single day of the shoot.”
The trio landed in London, then headed for Wembley, a nondescript suburb that’s a forty-five-minute drive northwest of the city center. Once a thriving manufacturing area, Wembley didn’t have much to recommend it other than its soccer stadium by the time Lynch arrived. However, Lee Studios, a recently remodeled television studio owned by brothers John and Benny Lee, was located there and was a good fit for the film. It was a modest studio measured against London’s three major movie facilities—Shepperton, Elstree, and Pinewood Studios—but production manager Terry Clegg chose it because he felt it would be beneficial for the shoot not to have to compete with larger productions for studio services. Prior to returning to L.A., Brooks spent half an hour a day on set for the first three days of the shoot, “being very happy and loving and supportive,” Lynch recalled. “He said he was given breaks in life and he wanted to help some young people who were getting going.”
With the exception of Anne Bancroft and John Hurt, all the casting was done in London and overseen by casting director Maggie Cartier. Anthony Hopkins was given the lead role of Sir Frederick Treves, and Sir John Gielgud and Dame Wendy Hiller came in to discuss secondary parts. “I was surprised that people at their level would even come in to meet, but they were happy to do it,” recalled Sanger. “Wendy Hiller was delightful, and John Gielgud was a sweet, self-effacing man, and he had that beautiful voice and perfect diction. He loved the part and it was always ‘whatever you want’ with him. David said it was terrific working with John because you could just dial it in; you’d tell him you want a little bit more of something and he’d give you exactly what you needed. David was really impressed by his technical skill.”
Actor Freddie Jones, who went on to appear in several more Lynch films, including Dune and Wild at Heart, was a bit harder to recruit. “David liked him right away—he’s a dreamy, unusual man, and he fit into David’s world perfectly,” said Sanger. “But Freddie said the character we wanted him to play was too one-note and that he had to be more than just a guy who beats this defenseless creature. He wasn’t turning us down completely, so David said, ‘I really like you; let me track the script from the point of view of that character.’ David then agreed that the character’s feelings for the Elephant Man needed to be more complex, so Freddie’s input is definitely reflected in the final script.”
Two scenes in the film feature a cast of carnival freaks of the sort typical of the Victorian period, and this was a challenging bit of casting. Freak shows began declining in popularity in 1890 and had almost completely disappeared by the 1950s. Moreover, medical advances of the twentieth century dramatically reduced the incidence of the bizarre physical anomalies that were central to nineteenth-century freak shows. “Maggie Cartier put an ad in a newspaper in London that said, ‘Live human freaks required,’ ” said Sanger, “and we got such shit over that!”
The Nottingham Goose Fair has occurred annually in England since the Elizabethan period, and one of its primary attractions was its freak show. While the film was in pre-production, Lynch learned that someone affiliated with the fair managed a set of Siamese twins. “David was very excited about this,” Sanger recalled, “so we called this guy and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got the twins—I manage them.’ So David and I drove up to the Goose Fair, which turned out to be this backwater place with a bunch of dumpy trailers. We go to this guy’s trailer and knock, and a fat guy in a dirty T-shirt opens the door, and he and his wife invite us in. This place was straight out of David’s dreams. So the guy says, ‘Honey, go get the twins,’ and she went to the far end of the trailer and came back with a big bell jar filled with formaldehyde and the embryo of a set of dead twins. David was disappointed.”
Cartier found an agency in London called Ugly that provided the giant and several dwarfs who appear in the film; Lynch and his art department created the other characters in the freak show. Frederick Treves’s great-nephew makes a cameo appearance playing an alderman, and writers De Vore and Bergren turn up, too. “We appear briefly in the first scene of the film,” De Vore recalled. “We portray minstrels playing a Lyra Box, which was a unique instrument David built with the art director, Bob Cartwright. It was a barrel organ with the weird David Lynch addition of a sort of bladder bag on top.”
During the making of the film, Fisk and Lynch lived in a small house in Wembley, with a garage that he transformed into a studio where he worked on the Elephant Man makeup during twelve weeks of pre-production. “David was the mad scientist working alone in his garage, and nobody knew what was going on in there,” recalled Sanger.
There was one person who did get past the no-entry sign. “I was on The Elephant Man’s set for a little while,” recalled Jennifer Lynch, “and I was Dad’s head model when he was working on the makeup. That’s a potent memory for me. I remember having straws in my nose and this feeling of warm compression, and him talking, and the sounds he makes, and the thing he does with his lip when he’s thinking out loud, and I felt privy to his process. It was nice.”
Less nice was the day Lynch unveiled the makeup for his colleagues. “He made something that looked like a sculpture of the real figure, but it was basically a mask,” said Sanger. “He hadn’t had John Hurt to work on directly, so it was impossible to make it blend into John’s face and clearly wouldn’t work, and this was devastating to David.”
After the film wrapped, Lynch told Sanger that h
e’d considered getting on a plane and leaving the film at that point because he felt that he’d failed. “David was riding a wave that he could do it all, because he’d done unique, special things all his life,” said Fisk. “But as talented as David is as an artist, he didn’t have the knowledge to do this. When they realized the makeup had to be redone, David and Jonathan rearranged the schedule so the scenes without John Hurt were shot first. They found a way to work around the problem with the makeup, but David still went into a horrible place. He sat bolt upright in bed for three nights in a row and he was terrified. David always seems like he’s on solid ground and is unfazed by things, but that’s not always the case. Shortly after the makeup fiasco Mel called and said, ‘David, I want you to know we’re behind you a thousand percent,’ and that helped him. Mel was amazing the way he supported David.”
Hopkins was slated to begin shooting A Change of Seasons with Bo Derek and had a stop date, so there was no time for hand-wringing over the makeup. Sanger immediately called Chris Tucker, who was born in Hertford, England, in 1946, and had abandoned an opera career in 1974 to become a makeup artist. Tucker declared that in order to do the job he’d need the original life cast of Joseph Merrick, which was in the permanent collection of the Royal London Hospital Museum and Archives, so Lynch and Sanger went to see head curator Percy Nunn. “Initially he was totally uninterested in the project,” Sanger recalled. “He thought the making of the movie was a bit of a sacrilege, but after talking with David he realized what he wanted to do was a good thing. Still, I thought there was no way he would let us borrow the life cast of Merrick—to this day it’s mind-boggling that he gave it to us. This is the pièce de résistance of their collection and David just said, ‘Could we borrow that?’ David was naïve enough to ask, and he just charmed the man.”
Having the life cast made things easier for Tucker, but he still worked slowly. Makeup for the head alone required eight weeks to complete and involved fifteen different overlapping sections fashioned out of soft foam; each piece could only be used once, and Tucker cooked a new set of pieces every day in the oven in his warehouse. Applying the makeup took approximately seven hours, so Hurt worked on alternate days. He’d arrive at the set at 5:00 A.M. and sit for seven hours while the makeup was applied. Unable to eat, he occasionally sipped raw eggs mixed with orange juice, then shot from noon until ten at night.
Fortunately, the cast and crew didn’t laugh when they first saw the makeup, Hurt has recalled. “You could’ve heard a pin drop, and that gave David—who was a very young director at the time—confidence. At that moment we knew we had something.”5
Commencing in September 1979, the shoot continued through Christmas and into early 1980. Lynch wanted a big canvas to work with, so he shot the film in widescreen, which is customarily used for Westerns and epic films. The mood of London in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution is oddly evocative of the worlds of both Eraserhead and Ronnie Rocket: All of them involve lots of soot and smoke, and it’s a milieu Lynch is brilliant at manipulating for dramatic effect. The film was shot by cinematographer Freddie Francis, a two-time Oscar winner who played a central role in defining the look of the British new wave films; Francis was the DP on several black-and-white classics of the period. The widescreen format Lynch opted for gave Francis plenty of room to play with shadow and light.
The bulk of Merrick’s story takes place in the Royal London Hospital, where he spent the final years of his life. It was impossible to shoot there—it’s a working hospital; moreover, motifs of the Victorian era had been largely erased from the building by 1979. The film was shot instead at Eastern Hospital in Homerton, a medical facility founded in 1867 that was in the midst of downscaling its services when Lynch arrived. (It was completely closed in 1982 and demolished shortly thereafter.) The hospital had unused wards that were a perfect match for his vision of London Hospital during the Victorian era. A few scenes in the film are set in London’s East End, where the most horrific slums of the Victorian period were located, and short stretches of worn cobblestone street dating from the period remained when Lynch shot the film but are long gone now. Lynch has said it would’ve been impossible to make The Elephant Man in England after 1980. He got there just in time.
Lynch loved the crisp, gleaming world of the hospital, with gas lamps, cast-iron fireplaces, lacquered floors, and exquisite woodwork. Juxtaposed with the darkness and filth of Victorian factories, it was a realm tailor-made to his aesthetic. It took a while for the crew to grasp his visual sensibility, however. “The knock on David early on was that everything was too dark,” said Sanger, “and Bob Cartwright, the art director under Stuart Craig, said, ‘We’re doing all this work and we’re not seeing any of it.’ David had very clear ideas about what he wanted, though, and when he made choices he knew what the end result would be.”
“David was very directorial and authoritative on the set,” recalled Brooks, “but right behind that façade was this childlike person thinking, Yeah, we’re making a movie! He acted like a grown-up, but the kid in him directed the movie.”
With The Elephant Man Lynch showed that he was an actor’s director, and he mostly worked well with the classically trained performers in his cast. Hopkins gives what is by any measure one of the great performances of his career. “There’s a scene where Anthony Hopkins’s eyes well up and one massive tear falls, and David got the angle and the lighting—he just got it,” said Brooks. “Everybody loved David right away, but there were a few uprisings. John Hurt was always supportive of everything, and John Gielgud and Wendy Hiller were total professionals. If you’re a private in the army and an officer walks by, you salute; David was the director, and they saluted him. Anthony Hopkins didn’t actually try to get him fired but he did complain, and he said, ‘I don’t think he has a total grasp of what has to be done here.’ ”
Sanger recalled, “Hopkins wasn’t openly hostile but he was aloof, and one day he called me into his dressing room and said, ‘Why is this guy getting to direct a movie? What has he done? He did one little movie. I don’t understand this.’ So Hopkins wasn’t happy. The only time there was a real problem on set was when they shot a scene where Treves brings Merrick home to meet his wife. Hopkins enters the doorway into a hall with a mirror on the wall, and David wanted Hopkins to walk in and look in the mirror. Hopkins refused. He said, ‘My character wouldn’t do that.’ David, in his straightforward way, tried to persuade him that it was not an illogical thing to do, but Hopkins refused to do it. David finally said, ‘Okay, I’ll change the shot,’ and it wasn’t discussed again. At the end of the day David told me he would never make another movie where he didn’t create the characters, because he didn’t want to be told what a character would or wouldn’t do.”
Fisk said, “It was a hard movie to make, and David was on trial the whole time. There he was, this kid from Montana, directing John Gielgud and Wendy Hiller, and I think they thought, Who is this American person? They were both at the end of their careers, and did they want it to end like this? I have a photo of John Hurt as the Elephant Man, and John Gielgud wrote on the bottom of the photo, ‘I hope it’s all worth it.’
“It was tough for David,” Fisk continued. “But he went to work every morning at five and had a wonderful driver he had coffee and croissants with on the way to the studio, and there were many things about the making of the film that he loved. David enjoys life. But they worked long hours and Sunday was the only day of the week they had off, and David was catatonic on Sundays.”
During her time on set, Jennifer Lynch could see that “Dad was up against a lot of insanity and a lot of talent who thought they were older and smarter than him. I know Hopkins wasn’t kind to him then later apologized, but I never got the sense that Dad felt stressed. When I think back on it now, I’m impressed by how beautifully he held everything together, because he didn’t seem upset. He handled it very well.”
“David grew in competence as
the film went on,” John Hurt recalled. “There he was in England, this very young man, and nobody knew him. People were wary and quite dismissive of him to start with, and I don’t think they were by the end. David’s very determined when he’s got an idea. He’s not easily dissuaded.”6
As was his habit, Lynch lived modestly during the shoot. He had a cheese sandwich for lunch every day and saved enough of his per diem to buy a car when he got back to Los Angeles. He ran a closed set and there were few visitors. “David made it clear that he didn’t want me on the set and wanted to keep his creative life separate,” said Mary Fisk. “I was fine with that, but he’d come home every day and tell me what happened that day, and I was a sounding board when he needed one.”
Shortly after arriving in London, Fisk and Lynch got a dog. “David liked Jack Russell terriers, and I went to a breeder and got one,” she recalled. “We named her Sparky, and she was insane but she and David got each other. She’s the only dog I’ve ever known David to relate to, and he played games with her that she understood. He wanted her in Blue Velvet, and she’s in a scene at the beginning of the movie.”
Fisk was mostly on her own in a foreign country while Lynch worked, and she became pregnant with twins while the film was in pre-production. “David was excited about it—he said, ‘We’re gonna call them Pete and Repeat,’ ” said Fisk. It was a difficult pregnancy, though, and Fisk was hospitalized for three weeks during her first trimester. “David would come every other night and sit with me in the hospital after they’d been shooting all day. He couldn’t get there until ten at night, after the ward was closed, but the nurses liked him so much they let him stay with me. Then Mel stepped in and paid all the medical bills—he was just awesome.” After Fisk was sent home from the hospital, Lynch’s mother came to stay and help out, but Fisk miscarried two weeks later.
