by David Lynch
“I was impressed by David’s ability to create a world that was totally believable,” said Raffaella De Laurentiis. “We tend to pigeonhole directors, but a good one can work in many different genres, and I felt confident he could handle Dune.
“I was there the day David and my father met, and I loved him right away,” she continued. “David and I were two kids at the time and we had a fantastic time together, and David became like a member of the family. My father loved directors and he thought David was as good as Fellini. He was really a huge fan of David’s.”2
It was kismet when Lynch met the De Laurentiis family, but their meeting threw a wrench in the works for Stuart Cornfeld. “When David and I met the plan was to do Ronnie Rocket, but we couldn’t make it happen, because people thought David was a nut at that point,” he recalled. “That changed after The Elephant Man, and we had a shot at getting Ronnie Rocket made. Then one day David and I went to lunch and he told me Dino De Laurentiis had offered him Dune and a fat paycheck. David was a guy in his thirties who’d done great art and really gotten nothing, so when Dino said, ‘I’m going to give you everything you want,’ he went for it.”
De Laurentiis, who died in 2010 at the age of ninety-one, was apparently a hard man to say no to. A larger-than-life character who introduced Lynch to the glamorous world of international cinema, De Laurentiis was born in Naples in 1919 and was an important supporter of Italy’s post-war neo-realist style; he produced the early Fellini classics The Nights of Cabiria and La Strada, for which he won an Academy Award in 1957. De Laurentiis had a lot of range—he produced Roger Vadim’s Barbarella as well as Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg—and he produced or co-produced more than five hundred films over the course of his seventy-year career. A notoriously tough businessman, De Laurentiis was nonetheless a greatly loved figure and he played an important role in Lynch’s life. “Dino was a phenomenon and a master at putting deals together, and he really loved David,” said Fisk.
Attempting to bring Dune to the movie screen is like trying to condense a Thanksgiving meal into a TV dinner, but De Laurentiis was persuasive, and he succeeded in signing Lynch to a three-picture deal. “I’m sure Dune was a case of the siren song of big picture, big money, but it wasn’t ‘I’ll take the money and go home,’ because David would never do that,” said Nicita. “He felt the story and it resonated with him.”
The protagonist in the story is a young hero named Paul Atreides, who’s characterized in the novel as “the sleeper who must awaken”; this spoke to Lynch for obvious reasons. Lynch loves inventing alternate worlds, too, and Dune involved the creation of three entirely different planets and incorporated a variety of rich textures, dream sequences, and subterranean factories. It’s no surprise that Lynch said yes.
A year was spent on the script, which required a PG rating, so limits were in place before Lynch had written a word. He was further hamstrung by the need to please De Laurentiis—who hated Eraserhead—and he first tackled the script in tandem with his co-writers from The Elephant Man, Chris De Vore and Eric Bergren. “David generously invited Eric and me in as co-writers, so the three of us went up to Port Townsend and spent time with Frank Herbert,” De Vore recalled.
“We wrote together in an office on the Universal lot and completed two drafts of the script, but Dino thought what we’d written was too long and that the project couldn’t be broken down into two movies,” De Vore continued. “David felt it could be shorter, too, but we worried about straying too far from Herbert’s book. David felt it was important to be faithful to the book, but he wanted to put things in the script that aren’t in the book, and we couldn’t go that way. We absolutely felt David should stay true to his vision, though, and told him by all means, go there.” Lynch completed five more drafts of the script before arriving at a 135-page final draft dated December 9th, 1983. Although Lynch says today that he “sold out” with Dune, he wasn’t aware that was happening while he worked on the script.
“David is eager to make money but he won’t compromise and never has, and that’s not what was happening at the beginning of Dune,” said Nicita. “David keeps it very pure. There are temptations in this business, and his success bred forces that tried to corrupt him—there were many opportunities for him to do big pictures that would’ve paid him a fortune and he turned them all down. He was offered a lot early on when people thought he’d do what they wanted him to do, but when it became clear he was a true auteur, that aspect of things dried up. All the major stars wanted to work with him, too, but he isn’t star oriented. David is an artist and he doesn’t want some big gorilla in the middle of his vision.”
Lynch was hunkered down in Granada Hills writing Dune when Fisk went into labor on September 7th, 1982. “David was in the delivery room, and I never would’ve made it without him,” she said of the birth of their son, Austin. “I was in labor for thirty-six hours, and he cheered me on and pushed on my back because the baby needed to be repositioned.” Lynch now had two children. He always had several projects going at home, too: During those years he was making incense holders and string bolo ties that fastened at the throat with a black dot or a white dot. “Lots of his friends had one of those dot ties,” Reavey recalled.
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In late fall of 1982, casting agent Elisabeth Leustig traveled to several U.S. cities looking for a young unknown actor to play the lead in Dune, and she came across Kyle MacLachlan. A recent graduate of the actors training program at the University of Washington, MacLachlan was performing onstage in a production of Molière’s Tartuffe at the Empty Space Theatre when Leustig arrived in Seattle. “She asked around about actors who fit the age range of the part and somebody said, ‘Well, you’ve got to see Kyle.’ So we met late that December at the Four Seasons Hotel and she put me on tape,” recalled MacLachlan, who was flown to L.A. early in 1983 to meet Lynch and Raffaella De Laurentiis.
“I’d seen Eraserhead and didn’t know what to make of it,” said MacLachlan. “My taste in movies ran to swashbucklers like The Three Musketeers—that was my speed—so I didn’t know what to expect before meeting David. We met in a bungalow on the Universal lot, and I remember sitting there waiting for him to get back from Bob’s. He was driving a Packard Hawk, which was a car he loved, and he came in and we talked about growing up in the Northwest and red wine, then he said, ‘Here’s the script. Learn these scenes, then come back and we’ll film them.’ ”3
MacLachlan returned to L.A. a few days later and did a screen test at special-effects artist John Dykstra’s Apogee Productions, Inc. “They struggled with my hair, which has been a problem throughout my career—the hair problem started with Dune.” MacLachlan laughed. “I was in this huge space with tons of people around and the camera looked like the biggest thing I’d ever seen in my life, but once David arrived I felt connected and grounded. We shot a few scenes, including one where I had to speak right into the camera, and I said, ‘David, I don’t know if I can do this,’ and he said, ‘You’re gonna be great!’ He was very encouraging.”
Lynch developed a friendship with MacLachlan—whom he calls “Kale”—that’s been one of the key relationships of his career. They’ve worked together on two of Lynch’s best-loved works—Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks—and MacLachlan has been described as Lynch’s onscreen alter ego. They are alike in important ways, too. Both are open and optimistic and have a humorous perspective on things that allows them to operate with a light touch; they both exude a kind of radiant happiness.
“I went back to my hotel and there was a bottle of Château Lynch-Bages on the table,” MacLachlan continued of his initial meeting with Lynch. “When David and I talked about wine, he said it was one of his favorites and I thought it was so nice that he sent this. I waited there while they looked at the film, then they called and said, ‘We like it, but we want to change your hair and do a second screen test,’ and they flew me down to Mexico for that.
“This was January and the film was in pre-production and David’s birthday passed while I was there. They had a party for him and I joined in and I remember thinking, These are really nice people—I hope this works out. Later I was downstairs having a beer in the lobby, and I got a call saying, ‘You got the part.’ Once David hired me I put my complete faith in him to steer me through the process.”
Like everything about Dune, the cast was huge, and there were thirty-nine speaking parts. José Ferrer, Linda Hunt, Jack Nance, Dean Stockwell, Max von Sydow, and De Laurentiis’s first wife, Italian film star Silvana Mangano, are among those who put in an appearance. A few actors clearly had a ball with the over-the-top characters they were playing; Kenneth McMillan pulls out all the stops as the villain of the story, and Freddie Jones and Brad Dourif play wonderfully weird court advisers.
“When I met David, my first thought was, This is the preppiest-looking guy I’ve ever seen in my life,” Dourif recalled. “Slacks and a jacket, button-down shirt, a voice that sounded kind of like Peter Lorre from Philadelphia. I walked over to him and said, ‘Hi, I’m Brad,’ and he said, ‘I know. I’ve gotta ask you a question: How do you feel about actors having surgery?’ Apparently he wanted to cut a hole in an actor’s cheek so they could put a tube through it for this effect of a tooth that emits a gas. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or it was an ongoing joke, but I heard him saying to Raffaella, ‘But why not?’ She said, ‘No, you don’t get to do that.’
“I hadn’t seen Eraserhead until he screened it in Mexico for us,” Dourif continued. “Before it started he got up and said, ‘This is a film I did, and I hope you guys don’t leave town.’ I had no idea what I was looking at, then all of a sudden I realized it was a surreal exploration of male terror of the female psyche and persona. It’s an unbelievable film.”4
The cast also included the musician Sting, who was exploring acting at the time and had had featured roles in four films by the time he met Lynch. “David was in London casting Dune, and I met with him at Claridge’s hotel,” Sting recalled. “I was a big fan of Eraserhead and I expected him to look something like the lead character in the film, but he looked very Midwestern and normal and said things like ‘peachy keen.’ I never considered myself an actor, but I’d been in a few films and he seemed to like me, and he said, ‘Would you come to Mexico,’ and I said, ‘Sure.’ I was in the middle of finishing what turned out to be the Police’s biggest album, Synchronicity, but I had the summer off and I spent it in Mexico in a rubber suit.”
Cast as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a spectacularly beautiful killing machine, Sting first appears in the film emerging from a wall of steam, glistening and wet, wearing nothing but what he described as rubber underpants. “David presented them to me and I said, ‘No, I’m not wearing those,’ and he said, ‘Yes, you are.’ That first entrance I made was kind of a bone of contention because I’d never really seen myself as a homoerotic item, but in those flying underpants I felt there was no other way to play the scene, and David agreed.”5
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After being in and out of Mexico for six months of pre-production, Lynch settled in for the shoot in March 1983. Two weeks were devoted to rehearsal, and filming began on March 30th. No expense was spared on Dune, which had a budget of forty million dollars, a good deal of money at the time. There were 1,700 people in the cast and crew. Four camera units worked simultaneously on eighty sets that filled eight soundstages, and exteriors were shot in the Samalayuca Dune Fields in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. It was there that the shoot began in 120-degree heat; they were there for two weeks, and a crew of three hundred swept the sand dunes in preparation. Production designer Anthony Masters, who did 2001: A Space Odyssey, was on board, as was special-effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, who gave us the creatures in Alien and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It was a massive undertaking and a lot of fun in the beginning.
Early in the project, Lynch had visited Dino De Laurentiis at his villa in Abano Terme, an hour outside of Venice, and the city made a big impression on him. “David loved Italy and we were in Europe a lot on that movie—I can’t remember why, but it was probably casting,” recalled Raffaella De Laurentiis. “David was a vegetarian then but he loved pâte, and I remember he was always having foie gras.”
On one of those trips, Dino De Laurentiis gave Lynch a book on Venetian architecture that proved to be an important source of inspiration for the film, the plot of which revolves around royal houses warring over control of natural resources. Many scenes take place in elaborately ornate palace courts, and there’s a great deal of intricately carved wood and many sweeping staircases. There’s also a hellish, subterranean industrial world with marching drones evocative of the silent film Metropolis, and the Guild Navigator, a gigantic amorphous oracle Lynch described as a “fleshy grasshopper” that speaks through a disturbingly sexualized orifice. There are surprising details throughout the film, too. The Atreides family has a pug that accompanies them on their adventure, and when spacecraft enter new galaxies they pass through a keyhole. The combination of elements is distinctly Lynchian.
“David could spend hours putting dots on a wall, and that’s probably one reason he’s never wanted to do another huge movie like Dune,” said De Laurentiis. “One day we were in the desert in Juárez with two hundred extras in rubber outfits. People were fainting and there was a huge crew, and we’d made this massive effort to make it to this desert, and he was doing a close-up on the eye of one of the leading men! I said, ‘David! We can do that on the stage! We’ve built all this, so shoot it!’ He was smart enough from then on to realize that detail is a big part of his vision, and since then he’s made movies that accommodate that.”
Taking on Dune was a leap for Lynch, and Sting recalled being “amazed that David went from making this tiny little movie in black and white to this huge canvas, and I was impressed by how calm he was about it. I never had the sense he was overwhelmed, and everybody loved him. He remained peachy keen throughout.”
Jennifer Lynch was on the set for a few weeks and was put to work operating the Guild Navigator’s left hand and lower jaw. “I remember how big that production was,” she recalled. “That might’ve been the first time I was aware of Dad feeling the immense size of something. It was so much money and so many people.”
Lynch is nothing if not game, and his love life was growing increasingly complex during this period; it was then that Eve Brandstein came on the scene. Born in Czechoslovakia, Brandstein grew up in the Bronx, then moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s and got a job casting and producing television for Norman Lear’s company. In 1983 she joined her friend Claudia Becker, who handled the casting in Mexico on Dune, for a vacation in Puerto Vallarta.
“One night Claudia said, ‘Let’s go to this art show at Galeria Uno.’ For some reason I didn’t know who the artist was, and when we got there David and I saw each other across the room and eventually we sort of circled around each other. It still hadn’t registered who he was, though. After the opening I went with a group of friends to this bar called Carlos O’Brian’s, and while we were sitting there David came in with his group and sat down next to me. The rest of the night was magical, and we stayed up all night walking on the beach and talking. The next morning I was returning to L.A. and he was going back to Mexico City and we ran into each other at the airport. He was flying domestic and I was international, so we were in different areas and there was a curtain between us, and we both went to the curtain and started kissing. That’s how it started.”6
One of Lynch’s great gifts is his ability to focus exclusively on what’s in front of him, and once that flight from Puerto Vallarta landed in Mexico City it became all about Dune again. “David worked on Dune the way he always works, which is to finesse every aspect of the set,” MacLachlan recalled. “From the guns and the uniforms to colors and abstract forms, David’s hand was in all the scenic design and the effe
cts. His artistic sensibility was there in a really strong way all the time.
“I was in Mexico from March to September of 1983 and I had a great time,” MacLachlan added. “I stayed in a house in Coyoacán, and somebody was always having a party. The De Laurentiis family often had dinners at their house, and I was always there.” It was by all accounts a rambunctious set; Dune was an exhausting movie to make and people blew off steam accordingly. “It was a pretty wild set,” said Sting. “I was surrounded by all these great actors and was just a rock star having fun.”
Mary Fisk was aware Lynch was in an environment he hadn’t previously encountered. He was directing his first big-budget Hollywood movie, which is a complicated bit of business both on set and off. “David was Mr. Clean when we were first married, and he didn’t smoke or cuss,” said Fisk, “but Raffaella was a big party girl. I called him once and he’d been out drinking vodka gimlets, and that shocked me. It was a wild group down there and I think he started to party. He liked the hotel he was in, he was driven to work, and he lived in a bubble.”
A master of multi-tasking, Lynch always does more than one thing at a time, and he made the Duck Kit (which he deemed a failure because the photograph of it was blurry) and the Chicken Kit while he was in Mexico; instructions for reassembly of the chicken are written in both Spanish and English. During the making of the film he also launched The Angriest Dog in the World, a four-frame cartoon depicting a growling dog that’s chained to a post and strains against its chain. It appeared weekly in the L.A. Reader, then the L.A. Weekly, for the next nine years, and while the drawings never changed, Lynch phoned in new thought bubbles every Monday. “The humor in the strip is based on the sickness of people’s pitiful state of unhappiness and misery,” Lynch explained. “There’s humor in struggling in ignorance, but I also find it heroic the way people forge on despite the despair they often feel.”
