Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  Once Chris and Eric and I started writing together, I realized pretty soon that each of us had a different idea of what Dune was. I knew what Dino liked and didn’t like by then, and I knew we’d be wasting our time if we wrote the script the way Chris and Eric wanted to do it, because Dino would never go for it. Dino didn’t understand any kind of abstraction or poem, no fuckin’ way—he wants action. I felt bad when Chris and Eric left, because they were banking on working on Dune, but I just continued working on the script on my own. I don’t recall Dino ever saying anything about the script except that he liked it or “I no understand this.” He’d never get ideas or anything; he would just react to things. Dino wanted to make money and I didn’t have a problem with that—that’s just who Dino was.

  We were looking in L.A. and New York to find the actor to play the role of Paul Atreides, but we couldn’t find anybody that was right. So Dino said, “Okay, now we have to start looking at secondary cities,” and this woman in Seattle recommended Kyle and sent a picture. One thing led to another, and Kyle came down, and of all the people I’d met he was a standout. Here’s the thing. Kyle is a great guy, but he’s also a great actor. Kyle’s got two things. Then he had to go meet Dino at “boongalow” nine at the Beverly Hills Hotel. That’s how Dino said it: “boongalow.” He always stayed in the same one, and it was a huge “boongalow.” They met and Dino made Kyle test and he tested great. Then he made Kyle test with his shirt off in a fight scene to see what he looked like fighting—you know, Italian action movies, the beefcake thing. So Kyle did that, then Kyle got the job.

  Raffaella and I were in Mexico to look at Churubusco Studios, and she hired a Middle Eastern man with a jet helicopter to take us around and look at landscapes that could represent a foreign planet in the film. This helicopter was huge, and he took us up into this place that was all black lava rock for as far as you could see, except for the green cactuses popping through. It was really weird and beautifully strange.

  So we were at Churubusco Studios and I see Aldo Ray in the cafeteria and I thought he’d be perfect for Gurney Halleck. I talked to him and told him I wanted him to play this part, and he was happy. When Dino heard I wanted Aldo Ray, he said, “He’s a fuckin’ lush,” and I said, “Let’s bring him down and see if he can do it—he’d be perfect for the part,” and Aldo came down with his son, Eric, who was around seventeen years old then. [Actor Eric Da Re went on to appear in the first two seasons of Twin Peaks.] In the morning I get to the studio and I’m told, “Aldo’s in the green room,” and I went up there. It’s eight-thirty or nine in the morning and Aldo is flopped on the couch and he’d been drinking all night, and poor Eric is sitting across the room hangdog, with his head down. I brought a chair over and sat down in front of Aldo and said, “Aldo, can you do it?” And he said “No.”

  We did a lot of location scouting, looking for a place to make the film, and finally Dino found the cheapest place, which was Mexico, and Mexico was fantastic in those days. Mexico City is the most romantic city in the world. No one would believe that unless they’ve been there, but anybody who’s seen it would say, yes, you’re right. First of all, the lighting and the colors are so dreamy. It would be completely black in the sky, and there would be these little bulbs that would illuminate these beautiful green or pink or yellow walls. The buildings in Mexico are colored and they have a patina from age, and at night everything would be black but there would be these little funnel shapes of color where light hit the walls. It was a real poetic city, and the young painters there were doing incredible things. There were no drug cartels, and the people were nice and easygoing, even though their leaders were fucking them royally in the ass, stealing all their money. When a president lost an election there he’d just take all the money he could get his hands on and go build a castle in Spain, and everybody sort of accepted it.

  I don’t know if Dino ever came down to Churubusco—I don’t remember him being there—but Raffaella was doing his bidding, because they’re cut from the same cloth. Raffaella was such a character. She was super smart, no nonsense, no bullshit, a powerful producer, and so much like Dino, but a woman, and I loved Raffaella. The crew came from all over the world. There were Italians, Brits, Germans, some Spanish—all kinds of people, and there were lots of heavy drinkers on that film, and parties for sure. One time I came home really late and needed to call Mary, and I was so drunk, and for some reason I got in the bathtub fully dressed. I don’t know why I got in the bathtub, but I’m leaning back in the bathtub and I have the phone and I had to concentrate hard to dial each number. Then I had to close my eyes and really concentrate to sound sober while I talked to Mary. I pulled it off, but I think I vomited afterward.

  Charlie Lutes told me that when I took a shower in Mexico, I should take a sip of vodka and hold it in my mouth, then shower, then after the shower spit out the vodka. Otherwise the water from the shower would get in your mouth and it would be like drinking it. I did that every morning and I never got sick, and everybody else got sick. Raffaella said half the crew was missing every day because people were always getting sick.

  Churubusco Studios had eight giant stages then—I think they lost four of them to housing or something—and we filled those twice. Churubusco’s big and it’s spread out, so I had a three-wheel bike I loved and I’d ride from one set to another to check shots, and I’d motor all around because there were four crews going at once. It was crazy. And these sets were fuckin’ beautiful! The Mexican craftsmen were unbelievable, and the backs of the sets they made looked as good as the fronts. They were building them out of lauan mahogany from the rain forest—they were incredible. There were at least eighty sets, and some of them were really elaborate. Tony Masters knocked it out of the park. He’d just zero in on something and out would come something magical. He wanted to make the production design more science fiction, but that trip I took up the waterway in Venice was super important, and I talked to Tony about it a lot, so we leaned in that direction. The spaceships in the film were beyond the beyond. They combined this sort of bronze, silver, copper, brass, and pewter, and then some gold, and it was incredible. Carlo Rambaldi designed the Guild Navigator. I wanted it to be like a giant grasshopper. That’s what’s in the script and that was the starting point, and I talked to Carlo about it, but it’s weird: If you look at E.T., you see Carlo Rambaldi. People sculpt themselves, and the Guild Navigator’s face is a little bit Carlo Rambaldi.

  Dino hired a guy named Barry Nolan to do special photographic effects, and Barry is a great guy who knows what he’s doing, and he did a good job, considering what he had to work with. Dino interviewed a lot of people before Barry, and Barry was the cheapest—Dino also probably put the fuckin’ screws on Barry to make him even cheaper to get the job, so Barry probably hardly made any money. Dino would knuckle people down to the bare bone.

  The Harkonnen world was so much fun to design, that industrial thing. The Harkonnens didn’t have any roofs and their world would go up into darkness, then the trains would be up there on platforms, so it was pretty cool. Baron Harkonnen could float up and go above the walls, and the walls were really high. One time we were in Baron Harkonnen’s room, and there were about sixty people on a set on this huge stage with walls that were at least a hundred feet tall, really big. The real deal. So people are milling around between takes and suddenly there was this giant bang! These big heavy pliers had fallen from a catwalk, and if they’d hit a person it could’ve killed them. Then we hear somebody way high above us running to get away, because they would’ve been fuckin’ fired.

  One day we’re shooting something that requires motion control, which means you have to do a number of different passes for different reasons, and each pass has to be exactly the same as the one before. There are people who do motion-control things using computers and mechanics that duplicate the move the same way each time, but we’re down in Mexico City and we don’t have that stuff. So we’re going to shoot this
thing that involves a dolly move and a crane, and I turn around and see this motion-control setup, and it’s like a child’s wagon on these rails. Little bitty dolly rails, and the floor is dusty, and this little child’s wagon is made out of Band-Aids, lamp cord, and bare wire. This rig is such poor man’s stuff—it was bubble gum, rubber bands, and sticks, and this was our motion-control rig! It worked, but it’s not the way you picture a forty-million-dollar production.

  What Brad Dourif said is true. I did want Jürgen Prochnow to get surgery for a scene in the film. I told Jürgen I wanted to operate, but I don’t think he even considered it. But you know, I feel my cheek, and there’s not much flesh there, so putting a little hole in a cheek doesn’t seem that extreme! But listen to this. Duke Leto—Jürgen—is lying on a table and he’s got a poison tooth in his mouth, and he’s got to break the tooth and blow out this poison gas to kill Baron Harkonnen, but he’s sick and delirious. We’d built this rig to shoot this scene, but you could only shoot it from a certain angle. There was a tube that came up one side of Jürgen’s face, then it turns around and goes into his mouth, then it turns around again and goes back up, and the whole thing was taped to his face. So we’re shooting on the side where you couldn’t see the tube but could see the gas shoot up, and it’s the first take. He’s lying there and he crunches down and blows out this colored gas. The take looked good, but as soon as the camera stopped, Jürgen jumps up and starts screaming and he rips this thing off and races out of the set. He went to his trailer and he would not fuckin’ come out he was so pissed off. The steam, or whatever they had going through the tube, was hot, and this pipe was super hot, and it burned his face very badly. I had to go to his trailer and talk him down and tell him how sorry we were. He wouldn’t shoot it again, though, and that one take we shot is the one we used.

  After we finished shooting and I’d been there for a year and a half, we went to L.A. to edit the film, and I had three or four different places in Westwood during the six months that we were editing Dune. I don’t know why I kept moving. I never hated being down in Mexico, but I got real crazy when we came back to L.A., because by the time we got to the editing room the writing was on the wall. It was horrible, just horrible. It was like a nightmare what was being done to the film to make this two-hour-and-seventeen-minute running time that was required. Things were truncated, and whispered voice-overs were added because everybody thought audiences wouldn’t understand what was going on. Some of the voice-overs shouldn’t be there and there are important scenes that just aren’t there. Horrible. But here’s the thing. For Dino it’s money. This is a business, and if it’s any longer than two hours and seventeen minutes the theaters lose an extra screening. That’s the logic, and you’ve got to hit that number, and it doesn’t matter if it kills the movie. I loved Dino. Dino the person was fantastic and he treated me like a son, and I loved the whole family and loved being with them. But he thinks a certain way and it’s different from the way I think. It’s like if you work real hard on a painting then somebody comes in and cuts it up and throws a bunch of it away, it’s not your painting anymore. And Dune wasn’t my movie.

  There was a party after we had a final cut of the film that Mary came out for, and there was a girl fight at the party. I don’t know how physical it got, but a little bit, maybe. Then the movie screened at the White House and I went to the White House with Mary Fisk, Raffaella, and her husband. Mary and I stood there with Nancy and Ronald Reagan and he was real interested in talking about Dune and movies and stuff, and then we all danced. I’ve blacked out the experience of sitting through the film, and I didn’t read any of the reviews when it opened.

  A while later they wanted to cut a television version of Dune and asked me to do it, but I said no. I’ve never seen the cut they did and never want to see it—I know they added some stuff I’d shot and put more narration on it. I’ve thought about what it would be like to go through all the stuff I shot and see if something could be made from it, but I always knew Dino had final cut on Dune, and because of that I started selling out before we even started shooting. I knew he would go for this, but he wouldn’t go for that, and I just started selling out. It was pathetic is what it was, but it was the only way I could survive, because I signed a fuckin’ contract. A three-picture deal for Dune and two sequels. If it had been a success I would’ve been Mr. Dune.

  Mary and Austin moved to Virginia while I was making Dune, and that made sense. Mary’s mother is in real estate and she found this incredible deal, and Jack and Sissy had the farm out there, and I was off, and I guess Mary wanted to be near her mom. It was a great place, and that’s where we lived when Dune was over. By the time I got to Virginia I was so weak—all these nerves, and all that failure. I remember we went for a walk out on the lawn and there were these plants; they were like not weeds really, but kind of between a tree and a weed. There were clumps of them and they were about an inch in diameter, and they went up twelve or fourteen feet, thin little things. I didn’t like them there so I got up from where we were sitting and I grabbed one and pulled and the root came right out. I figured I could get rid of these things, so I grabbed two of them and those popped out, too. Then I grabbed five of them, and when I gave a tug I heard and felt something tear in my back. That clump of five didn’t come out, so I decided to stop doing that. There wasn’t any real pain immediately, so I sat down and we continued talking, but when we finished talking I couldn’t get up. That night Mary wanted me to go in and say good night to Austin, so I got on my back and pushed myself out of our room on the floor and across the hallway into Austin’s room and he’s up in the bed. I pushed myself right next to the bed and told him a bedtime story while I was lying there on the ground. Then I pushed myself back into our bedroom and somehow, in screaming pain, I got into bed and I didn’t get out for four days. I couldn’t move. A doctor came the next day and told me I’d torn a bank of muscles in my back, and it took a long time to heal. That film took a lot out of me in lots of different ways, but getting to know Dino and his family was worth the nightmare of making Dune. And it led to Blue Velvet.

  Dune was the wrong project for Lynch on the most fundamental level, and it brought him to his knees. “Sometimes I guess you’re supposed to have a bad experience, and I really had one with Dune,” Lynch has commented. A primary aspect of Lynch’s genius is his ability to burrow into the microcosm; he finds the mystical and surreal in the tiniest aspects of everyday life and lavishes attention on everything from a small mound of dirt to a scrap of fabric. “Some people open windows of houses, but I like interiors and don’t care about windows,” he’s said. “I like to go deeper into a house and find things underneath things.” Clearly, epic battle sequences and vast expanses of empty desert are wrong for Lynch on a purely spatial level. As for outer space and the distant future? Leave that to others.

  Dune did, however, play a crucial role in Lynch’s evolution as an artist in that it helped clarify precisely who he is as a filmmaker. Lynch is first and foremost an American artist, and while the themes in his work are universal, the location of his stories is America. It’s where he was imprinted with the indelible childhood memories that mark his work and where he had the rapturous love affairs of youth that infused his subsequent depictions of romantic love as a state of exaltation. Then there’s the country itself: the soaring trees of the Pacific Northwest; suburban Midwestern neighborhoods murmuring with the sound of insects on summer nights; Los Angeles, where the movie business eats the soul; and Philadelphia, the terrifying crucible where his aesthetic sensibility was forged during the 1960s. He’s been faithful to all these things since he returned from those difficult months in Mexico City.

  Lynch’s indomitable creative drive was undimmed by the ordeal of Dune, and throughout the shoot he never stopped looking to the future. “David gave me the script for Blue Velvet while we were shooting Dune and said, ‘Take a look at this,’ and I was excited when I read it,” said Kyle MacLachlan. “It w
as erotic and powerful and I was amazed by the journey Jeffrey goes on. For some reason I understood and related to it.”

  Deeply personal and darkly funny, Blue Velvet was the kind of film Lynch was meant to make, and it marked out territory he continues to explore. “The mood of the film is of a small town, of neighborhoods, and of something that’s hidden,” Lynch has said. “It’s not a real upbeat thing. It’s dreamy and on the darker side. It’s much more open than Eraserhead, but it still has a mood of claustrophobia.”

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  Returning to Blue Velvet after Dune, Lynch realized the script had the darkness but not the light that it needed and was somehow incomplete. A last piece of the puzzle that had eluded him was the climactic finale to the story, and then the solution came to him in a dream. Lynch’s dream was set in the living room of the apartment of Dorothy Vallens—Blue Velvet’s tragic femme fatale—and involved a pistol in the pocket of a yellow suit jacket and a police radio. With those simple elements Lynch was able to bring the story to a conclusion, and he completed a final shooting script dated July 24th, 1985.