by David Lynch
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I would’ve loved to have Jack Nance play the Elephant Man, but I knew very early on that wasn’t going to happen. And, just like Dennis Hopper was Frank Booth, John Hurt was the Elephant Man. It was meant to be that he played that role, and I don’t remember any other actors we considered for the part.
I was going to do the Elephant Man makeup, but after I got to London a bunch of strange things happened. The house in Wembley where we lived had a garage where I was working on the makeup using glycerin, baby powder, latex rubber, and some other materials. We were living in this real British little house with knickknacks all around, and one day I was walking through the dining room and suddenly I had a déjà vu. Usually a déjà vu feels like “Oh, this has happened before,” but as I entered the déjà vu it got slippery and it went into the future! I saw it and I said to myself, “The Elephant Man makeup is going to fail.” Because I saw it. I saw the future. You can go into the future. It’s not easy, and you can’t do it when you want to, but it can happen. I was quite a ways into the makeup by then, too, but when I tried a piece of it on John Hurt, he couldn’t move and he said, “A valiant effort, David.”
When Kennedy was assassinated, the country had the four dark days; well, that’s when I started my four dark days. When I was awake I couldn’t stand being awake, and when I was asleep it was solid nightmares. I thought it would be better to kill myself, because I could hardly stand to be in my body. It was something so powerful that I thought, How can anyone stand to be in a body with this torment? They found Chris Tucker, and he had so much fun bad-mouthing me and letting it be known that I was a joke and he was going to save the day. It was horrible and I was a fuckin’ basket case. Mel said, “I’m flying over and I want to see David,” and after four days of waiting, Mel arrives. I went in and Mel smiled at me and said, “David, your job is to direct this picture. You shouldn’t have taken this on—it’s too much to take on—and thank God for Chris Tucker,” and that was the end of it.
In London at that time there were streets you could walk down where you’d swear you were in the 1800s. The people in the streets, their faces, their clothes, the atmosphere—it was like Sherlock Holmes is going to come out a door, or a horse-drawn carriage could come around a corner, or Jack the Ripper’s going to pop out. It was incredible. Two years after we finished the film, the great DP Freddie Francis called and told me that almost every location we’d used was gone. Urban renewal hit London right after we finished.
We had a great cast for that film. Alan Bates was originally going to play Frederick Treves but for some reason that didn’t work out, and it was Mel’s choice that we go with Anthony Hopkins. And John Gielgud was one of the most elegant men ever. He smoked cigarettes but there was never one ash on his clothes, ever. Smoke went away from him! His cigarettes were oval and made especially for him in a shop in London.
Sons and Lovers was a film I really like that sort of caught the feeling of The Elephant Man. It’s black and white, and I liked Dean Stockwell in it, and Dame Wendy Hiller’s in it, and she was going to play Mrs. Mothershead. So I go into this room and there’s Dame Wendy Hiller, and she looks at me and grabs me by the neck, and she’s small, and she starts walking me around the room, squeezing my neck, and said, “I don’t know you. I’m going to be watching you.” She passed away, bless her heart, but I loved her, and I love Freddie Jones, too. He’s just my kind of guy. There are some people you get a great feeling from, and Freddie is one of them. He’s so funny and I love being around him. Freddie Jones was going to be in INLAND EMPIRE in the part Harry Dean Stanton wound up playing, but Freddie left his house to come to L.A. and collapsed when he was walking through the airport. I get this phone call, Freddie can’t come over and he’s under a doctor’s care. I don’t know what happened, but Freddie’s got staying power and he’s hanging in there.
Mary got pregnant while we were in London and we found out it was twins. There are two characters in Ronnie Rocket named Bob and Dan, so I wanted twin boys and I’m going to name them Bob and Dan, and they’d have round black shoes, polished, and slick haircuts. Neat little guys. I was pretty pumped about that and then one night I came home and Mary was bleeding and for some reason, who knows why, we went from Wembley to Wimbledon, which is a long way away, to some Catholic hospital. I don’t know how long it took us to get there, but I was up until the wee hours of the morning, then I had to get up real early to go to work. I go in that morning and this woman comes up to me and says, “Anthony Hopkins wants to see you.” So I go into his room at the end of this long hallway and I’m pale, hadn’t had any sleep, and he tears into me and says, among many other things, that I have no right to direct this picture. I said, “Tony, I’m sorry you feel this way, but I’m the director of this picture and I’m going to keep on directing it,” and I left. In a weird way Tony Hopkins was right—I had no right to direct The Elephant Man. I came from Missoula, Montana, and this is a Victorian drama with these giant stars, and all I’d done is this small film that ten people went to see—it was crazy. But there I was. That film was a baptism of fire. You cannot believe the stuff that went on.
There’s a scene early in the film where Dr. Treves sends for the Elephant Man to come to the hospital, so in comes the Elephant Man with the cabbie. There are all these people in the hospital lobby and two women are having a fight and they’re pulling at each other’s clothes, and all this stuff is going on, and Mrs. Mothershead is at the desk. She’s never seen the Elephant Man, so she’s looking at him in his cloak and hood, and the people in the lobby are looking at him because he’s got a smell, but Mrs. Mothershead doesn’t care about the smell. And then Dr. Treves is supposed to arrive. So we’re having a rehearsal and Anthony Hopkins comes down, almost running, and he races around and grabs the Elephant Man at hyper speed, and I said, “Wait a minute.” I took Tony aside and told him, “You’re coming down too fast.” And he says, real loud, so everybody could hear, “Just tell me what you want!” And this anger comes up in me in a way that’s happened just a couple of times in my life. It rose up like you can’t fuckin’ believe—I can’t even imitate the way I was yelling, because I’d hurt my voice. I screamed some stuff at him, then screamed what I wanted him to do, and Wendy Hiller turns to Tony and quietly says, “I would do what he says.” So he did. Then at lunch he called Mel and said, “I want this fuckin’ guy fired,” and Mel talked him down. Tony’s perfect in the film, he’s absolutely great, but he had a sullen attitude most of the time we were shooting. But it’s like those four dark days I had. When it’s inside you, it just comes out and you can’t really help it. Tony was just pissed off at life.
We were looking for a hospital so we went into Eastern Hospital, which was a derelict London hospital where everything had just been left, and it could not have been better. There was pigeon shit everywhere, and broken windows, but it just had to be cleaned up. The beds were still in the wards, there were these beautiful little stoves and gas lamps—it had gone electric, but stuff was still in place for gas. So I was standing in this hallway and I’m looking into the ward and a wind comes into me and I know what it is to live in Victorian England. I knew it. Just like that. No one could take it away from me anymore—I knew the fuckin’ thing. Anybody can tune in to something and know it, and it doesn’t matter where you’re from.
Mary wanted a dog after she had a miscarriage, and that’s when we got Sparky. I always say Sparky was the love of my life—you can’t believe what a great dog he was. We found out Sparky loved to bite water—he just bites water—and if you get the hose going, Sparky will go in and bite it. You can see him doing it at the beginning of Blue Velvet.
After we finished shooting, Al came over to work on the sound, and Al is an outsider, too. The British have their own sound department and they think they know best, right? After The Elephant Man, Al said, “I fuckin’ hate the British!” One day I was in with Al working on the mix at
Shepperton, and somebody from the production crew came in and said, “David, don’t you think it would be a good idea if you had a screening for the cast and crew?” I said, “Yeah, okay, but it’s not finished yet,” and he said, “They’ll understand—they’d just love to see it.” So they have a screening and see the film, and they don’t like it, and some of them wrote me letters saying how much they didn’t like it and what was wrong with it and how disappointed they were. I finished the film pretty soon after that and left on that bad note.
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Mary and I flew back home, and I carried the one print of the film through customs because Mel wanted to see it right away. John Hurt was in town and he had a bunch of people who wanted to see it, so there’s going to be a screening on the Fox lot. I tell Al, “I’m not going, but make sure the sound is good, okay?” So the film is supposed to have started and I get this call from Al and he says, “David, it’s not even mono! The sound system broke. It’s like the worst sound—it’s horrible.” So they run the whole film that way and John Hurt, bless his heart, said, “I am so proud to be in this film. I love it.” So it went well, and that was the beginning of the turn for the film. Then it started getting these reviews that were more than glowing—they were kind of cosmic. People just loved the film. The Elephant Man is a film that should come out every four years, because it helps the world for people to see it. It’s a beautiful story and a beautiful experience and it’s timeless.
I had to go to Europe to do press and I probably was on the Concorde again, although a lot of times I’d fly TWA. They had first class, and in those days, forget it. A giant 747, you’re in the front nose of the plane and they’re waiting on you from the time you get on until the time you get off. The silverware is heavy, things are being brought to you before dinner even arrives—really beautiful first-class treatment.
So I go to Germany and meet this guy Alexander, who worked for a film producer and distributor, and his father owned a hotel there. He wanted me to stay in his dad’s hotel and it was a nice hotel and I had a giant room. I was fuckin’ freezing in that room, though, and I came down after the first night of just freezing my butt off and said, “You Germans are pretty tough.” Somebody said, “What do you mean?” I said it was really chilly in my room, and he said, “Did you turn the heat on?” It turned out you had to turn on these radiators I didn’t see that were behind the curtains. While I was there I’m being interviewed by this woman journalist, and while we’re talking I’m drawing a picture of the Elephant Man because that’s what we’re talking about. When we were finished she said, “Can I have that?” I said sure and I gave it to her, and Alexander’s eyes are like saucers. When I was leaving he said, “David, could you do a drawing like that for me?” I said “Yeah, okay,” but I never did it. A long time later this guy he worked with came to L.A. and I met with him at the Chateau Marmont. He said, “Alexander asked me to remind you that you promised him a drawing of the Elephant Man,” and I said, “Yeah, I sure did. How long are you gonna be here?” So I did a drawing and got it to this guy and he gave it to Alexander, who was so happy. Then a short time later Alexander was walking across a street and was hit by a bus and killed. I was so thankful I had finally given him that drawing of the Elephant Man.
Now I’m in Paris and I’m liking these pommes frites—French fries, right? And they’re getting me tons of French fries while I do these interviews, and sauce Americaine, which is what I call ketchup. I’m having pommes frites and the phone rings, and I go into the bedroom to get it and it’s Mary calling and she says, “David, you just got eight Academy Award nominations.” I said, “Who got them?” She said, “You got two, but Freddie didn’t get one,” and I said, “Are you shitting me?” That’s not right! Freddie did incredible work on that film and he stuck up for me and was a true-blue friend.
Going to the Academy Awards was interesting. Martin Scorsese was there for Raging Bull and he was sitting behind me. At that time in the world—well, there’s no star now that even comes close to the burning-hot fame that Robert Redford had then, and he was there with a film he directed, Ordinary People. I went to the Directors Guild Awards and Robert Redford steps up to this podium and the paparazzi would not stop popping pictures. He had to beg them to stop. I’ve never seen anything like it, he was so hot famous. So Ordinary People won everything and Marty and I didn’t get anything.
I was still living in the bungalow when all this was going on with The Elephant Man, but here’s the thing: If I was on my own, I could theoretically still be living in that bungalow. I have more space now, and that’s good, but I liked the simplicity of the bungalow, and I could build stuff there. Like, I built Edmund that garage—I had so much fun building it, and I could’ve built another big room next to it. I could’ve kept building stuff. You know how some old factory buildings have wood floors, but they’re not like oak, they’re softwood floors? I have this thing where I want to drill holes through floors, and pour oil in the floors, and have it be dark around the hole. I love plumbing, and then I could do plumbing of copper pipes coming out, but not shiny new copper—it would be old copper. Then I’d have different kinds of sinks and plumbing and faucets. I don’t have a clue why this appeals to me, but the look of it and the design of it is thrilling. Plumbing is guiding water, and controlling water is such a thrill.
We moved over to Granada Hills then, into a little bitty neighborhood house, but it was a house, and it was cheap, and it was then that I started writing Blue Velvet. I built a twelve-by-twenty-four-foot shed in the backyard so I’d have a place to work, then after it was built we had the backyard decked, so you step out of the house and go down a couple of inches and go across the deck, then you go up a couple of inches and you’re in the shed. It was great. Because the deck was raised up a bit it meant that the oranges in the trees were lower to the ground, and Sparky loved fruit. One time I hear this god-awful screaming and I go outside, and Sparky is swinging in this tree with his tooth caught in an orange. He leapt up and bit it, and he’s hanging there wiggling around and he can’t get his tooth out. It was so funny. I didn’t mind living in Granada Hills. You got your own place, and one thing I like about the Valley was that all my neighbors were building things. They’ve got motorcycles in their front yards, they’re working on their cars—they’re workers. And you can do whatever you want. It makes a huge difference.
A few months into 1981 Rick Nicita, an agent at what was then the most powerful entertainment conglomerate in the country, Creative Artists Agency, began representing Lynch. “I was introduced to David by Jack Fisk, who is married to Sissy Spacek, who’d been my client since 1974,” said Nicita. “The first time I met David, he came into my office and he was wearing a string around his neck with a pen dangling from it. I said, ‘What’s that?’ and he said, ‘It’s a pen to take notes.’ I asked, ‘Do you take notes often?’ He said, ‘No, never.’
“As is the case with everyone, my first impression of David was that he was a wonderful, funny, smart, unique person,” Nicita continued. “When people used to ask me who my clients were and I mentioned David, they’d raise their eyebrows. People assume he’s going to be some brooding, dark, black-caped guy, and that’s just not who he is.”1
Offers were coming Lynch’s way by the time Nicita came on the scene, but Hollywood doesn’t write anybody a blank check; lots of producers were up for another Elephant Man, but nobody wanted another Eraserhead. “David wanted to do Ronnie Rocket after The Elephant Man, but people weren’t interested in it,” said Mary Fisk. “Jonathan and Mel wanted him to do the Jessica Lange picture Frances, which Eric Bergren and Chris De Vore were writing, and David was interested, but for some reason it didn’t happen. Then he was offered Return of the Jedi, and his agent said, ‘You’re going to bank three million dollars,’ so he went up to talk with George Lucas, but he didn’t feel comfortable about it.”
Lynch reluctantly put Ronnie Rocket on the back b
urner, but he had another original screenplay, Blue Velvet, that he tried to set up during this period. Ideas for the film had been coming to him in fragments since 1973, and the project had become increasingly prominent in his mind, but he couldn’t get it financed.
Then Nicita brought him Dune. The bestselling science-fiction novel in history, Dune is a coming-of-age story set in the distant future, written by Frank Herbert and published in 1965. The first in a series of six Dune novels, it’s a complex story, and various filmmakers had attempted and failed to bring it to the screen.
The rights to the book were first optioned from Herbert in 1971 by Arthur P. Jacobs, an independent producer who died of a heart attack shortly after acquiring the property. Three years later, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon bought the rights and hired Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, who planned to translate the novel into a ten-hour feature with design by H. R. Giger and a starring role for Salvador Dalí. After spending two million dollars and two years in pre-production, the project fell apart. (The 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune chronicles this grand folly.)
Dino De Laurentiis bought the rights in 1976 for two million dollars and commissioned a screenplay from Herbert, who delivered a script that was much too long. In 1979 De Laurentiis hired Rudy Wurlitzer to write a script to be directed by Ridley Scott, but seven months into the project Scott left to direct the 1982 science-fiction noir Blade Runner. At that point De Laurentiis’s daughter, Raffaella, entered the picture: When she saw The Elephant Man, she decided Lynch should direct Dune.
