by David Lynch
Dennis was originally supposed to sing “In Dreams,” and the way it got switched to Dean Stockwell was fantastic. Dean and Dennis go way back and were friends, and Dean was going to help Dennis work on the song and they were rehearsing. Here’s Dean and here’s Dennis, and we put the music on, and Dean is in perfect lip synch. Dennis is going along fine at the beginning, but his brain was so fried from drugs he couldn’t remember the lyrics. But I saw the way Dennis was looking at Dean and I thought, This is so perfect, and it switched around. There’s so much luck involved with this business. Why did it happen like that? You could think about it for a million years and not know it was the way to go until you saw it right in front of you.
So we know now that Dean’s going to sing. Frank says, “Candy-colored clown” and puts in the cassette and Dean picks up the light. Patty Norris [the production designer] didn’t put that light there. I didn’t put that light there. Nobody knows where it came from, but Dean thought it was for him. It was a work light, and nothing could be better than that being the microphone. Nothing. I love it. We found a dead snake in the street around the time we shot that scene and Brad Dourif got hold of it, and while Dean was doing “In Dreams,” Brad was standing on the couch in the background working this thing, and it was totally fine with me.
I met Isabella in this restaurant in New York on July 3rd, and that was a weird night. Real weird. I was with Raffaella De Laurentiis’s ex-husband, and we were going to go down to some club and we had a limo. I was in Dino’s world and I flew Concorde all the time and had limos to drive around in. I don’t know how it happened. So I was in Dino’s restaurant; one thing about Dino, the Italian food he made sure was the best. So we saw a couple of people from Dino’s office sitting over there, and when we were on our way out we stopped to say hello. We sat down and I’m looking at this girl sitting there and I said, “You could be Ingrid Bergman’s daughter.” And somebody said, “Stupid! She is Ingrid Bergman’s daughter!” So that’s the first thing I ever said to Isabella, and then we started talking and in my mind I’m thinking and looking at her. I talked to Helen Mirren about playing Dorothy and she didn’t want to do it, but she did say, “David, something’s wrong. Dorothy should have a child,” and that made perfect sense. Helen Mirren is a great actress and that was her idea. There are women who wouldn’t need to have a child to react exactly the same way to somebody like Frank Booth, though—they’re kind of like victims, and with a great manipulator like Frank they could get into a place where they’d be like Dorothy. But it’s easier to understand Dorothy’s behavior when you see her as a mother protecting her child.
Isabella is so perfect for Blue Velvet—I was really lucky. She’s a foreigner in a country that’s not her own, so she’s already vulnerable to being manipulated, so that’s one thing Isabella has. And she’s got this incredible beauty—that’s another thing she’s got going. But you can see in her eyes that she could be a troubled person, and there’s a fear in there, and the combination of all those things was perfect for Dorothy. I knew she’d just done one movie when we met, but I didn’t care because I knew she could do it. People get used to seeing a certain kind of handsome and a certain kind of beauty in movies, and then you go on the street and see real faces and a lot of them have the stuff. Maybe they can’t carry a whole picture, but they can sure play a character.
There was a bar beneath the apartment where we shot the scene with Dean Stockwell called This Is It, and we went to this bar and were scouting it and they had cages where go-go girls were dancing. I met one of the dancers named Bonnie, and I loved her. The way she looked and the way she talked—she was incredible. I asked her if she’d be in the film, and she wound up dancing on top of Frank’s car, and the way she danced was perfect. And this is a found thing, this girl I met in some bar in Wilmington. I love her so much.
I don’t have it all together in my head when I get to the set. I like to rehearse and work it out, and then you show it to the DP, and, like Freddie [Francis] used to say, he’d just watch where I’m sitting during rehearsal and he knows that’s where the camera goes, and that’s sort of true. You see it for the first time when you’re on the set or on the location; they’re fully dressed, made up, and you have a rehearsal, and that’s when the idea comes to life and you kind of see a way to get it. It’s that rehearsal that’s important. I don’t do a lot of takes—maybe four, six at the most. You get a shorthand with people, and if you heard some things I say to actors you’d say, What the hell! But if you’re really looking at somebody a different kind of communication kicks in, and actors and musicians pick up on this. It goes right in them. I don’t know why, but some little word or gesture, and the next time it’s way better, and the time after that it’s perfect.
Some local people hung around when we were shooting, but I didn’t see them. I was looking at the actors, and I don’t care about what’s behind me. In fact, if I’d seen it, it would make me crazy. I’ve got to focus and get this thing and that’s it. The rest is bullshit—it drives me nuts. I tune out everything; you keep your eye on the donut not the hole.
People get this story of what happened with Isabella’s performance of the song “Blue Velvet” wrong, and here’s what happened. Isabella learned the song from sheet music that was given to her by an old lady who was teaching her, and what she learned was different from the Bobby Vinton version. I got a local band—not fancy, but they were good musicians—but Isabella had learned the wrong version of the song. It was apples and oranges; it was all over the place. I said to Fred Caruso, “Fred, we can get this if we just keep working,” and Fred said, “David, it’s not going to work; let me call my friend Angelo,” and I fought it. I said, “I want to get this thing,” but finally I knew it wasn’t happening and I said, “Fred, call your friend Angelo.” So Fred called Angelo and he flew down to Wilmington the next day. Isabella was staying in this bed-and-breakfast that had a piano in the lobby, and Angelo worked with her there. That same day we were shooting the scene where Mr. Beaumont has his attack, and my dog, Sparky, the love of my life, appears in that scene. At lunchtime Fred brought Angelo down the driveway, so I say hello to Angelo, and he plays me this thing on his little cassette player of Isabella singing and Angelo playing piano, and I said, “Angelo, we could cut this into the film right now, it’s so beautiful. Way to go.”
I wanted “Song to the Siren,” by This Mortal Coil, for the film, and I wanted that song, I wanted it, and I told Fred, “You fucking get that thing, man,” and Fred said, “David, there are a bunch of problems,” and it was mainly money—money, money, money. So Fred said, “David, you’re always writing little things on paper; why don’t you send Angelo some lyrics and he can write a song.” I said, “Fred, first of all, there are twenty-seven zillion songs in the world. I don’t want one of them. I want this song. I want ‘Song to the Siren’ by This Mortal Coil. I don’t think I’m gonna write things on a little piece of paper and send them to this guy I hardly know, and he’s gonna write something that will top what I want. Not in a million years. Get real, Fred.”
Angelo and Fred are crafty Italians, though, and Fred knew that if you send your lyrics you’re invested and that you’re going to have more of a chance of liking something if you helped make it. It was sort of a trick of theirs. So I was outside one night and these ideas came, so I wrote them down and sent them to Angelo, and he laughed when he saw them. He said, “These are the worst fuckin’ lyrics! They don’t rhyme and there’s no form!” Angelo is old school in those ways. But he thought and thought, and he did a version of the song he put together with a singer, but it didn’t have the quality I wanted. I told him I loved the melody but it needed to sound more ethereal. Then he brought Julee Cruise in to sing it, and they got this thing going, overdubbing again and again, and Julee just did beautiful, and Angelo did beautiful, and I had to admit I liked it. Maybe I liked it because I wrote the lyrics, I don’t know, but I did really like it.
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p; Still, I hesitated because I wanted “Song to the Siren,” so nothing was going to come up to that, even though I really liked “Mysteries of Love.” “Song to the Siren” is sung by Elizabeth Fraser. I hear she’s a recluse and is super private, but she has got the stuff. I think it was her boyfriend playing guitar on the song, washed in reverb like crazy, and they conjured magic. It goes into a cosmic kind of thing, while “Mysteries of Love” is warmer and it’s for two people. It’s got some cosmic thing that opens up, too, but it’s warmer.
I finally got “Song to the Siren”—it’s in Lost Highway—and “Mysteries of Love” ended up being pretty perfect for Blue Velvet. You never know how things happen, and Angelo, bless his heart, he’s the greatest. He’s like my brother, and he can write music that is so beautiful. It’s fate, that’s the only way I can figure it. It’s so much pleasure to work with Angelo.
Angelo and I went to Prague to do the score for Blue Velvet, and it was incredible there. There are rooms that have certain kinds of wood and acoustics, and they produce what I call Eastern European air, and it comes into the microphone. It’s a sound and a feel, and it’s not sad but it’s old and it’s so beautiful. When Angelo and I went to Prague the communists were still running things, and you’re walking down the street and you look into a clothing store and see beautiful dark wood shelves and there would be maybe three sweaters on them. Empty. And bleak. No one talks. You go into the hotel, there’s prostitutes all lined up in the lobby; it was fantastic. And you figure there are cameras and microphones everywhere, you just get this feeling. I’d lie in my bed and listen to see if I could hear high tones. I loved it there. We went up this one hill and looked out and it was like a Pieter Bruegel painting.
Patty Norris’s touch is everywhere in Blue Velvet. Patty is a genius with costumes, beyond the beyond. People come out of the dressing room, Frank is more Frank, Jeffrey’s more Jeffrey, Sandy’s more Sandy—it’s uncanny. Patty started with me on The Elephant Man, then on Blue Velvet she asked me if she could be production designer as well and I said fine. She thinks the same way about rooms as she does about costumes—she really thinks about it. We talked about everything, and when I would come up with something she would add stuff to it. Dorothy’s apartment—the color of it was perfect, but when I first saw the couches they were totally wrong. They were stand-alone couches and I wanted them built in. So we designed these arm things and then I loved them. Patty did a great job.
We shot film of feet walking up a flight of stairs and a hand with a gun that you see on the television in Jeffrey Beaumont’s house. We also filmed a Chair Pull to use that way, but we didn’t end up using it. You know how people have Olympics? People do running, there’s a hundred-yard dash, the fifty-yard dash, the mile run, and they pass off batons. The Chair Pull is like that, like an Olympic event. You have these overstuffed chairs, and there’s rope tied around the chair, and a long piece of rope comes off the chair. The girls competing in this race are wearing prom dresses, and each girl has a chalk lane, and they’re all lined up at the starting line with the chairs behind them, and the goal is fifty yards. A starting pistol fires to start the race and whoever pulls their chair across the finish line first wins. It was a hundred degrees and really humid the day we shot this thing, and it was too hot to do it but we did it anyway, and one of the girls passed out and had to see the medic. I invented this. It’s a Chair Pull.
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Alan Splet is a true sound thinker, and of course I wanted him to work on Blue Velvet. So there he was, working in his room in Berkeley, and one day he just stopped. Alan has this stubborn streak in him, and he came to me and said, “David, I can’t work on this film anymore. I can’t stand this film. I can’t stand Frank Booth and I can’t do it. It’s making me sick.” I said, “Jeez, Alan, holy smokes,” but that was it. We had half of the picture done, and I finished the sound with the rest of Al’s team.
The film wrapped at Thanksgiving, and about a week before that, Duwayne Dunham set up the editing room in Berkeley, and I got an apartment in Berkeley and we started on post. It seems like we were doing post for a long time. The first cut of nearly every movie I’ve done is usually four hours long, and I can’t remember what we had to lose from Blue Velvet. I think what I lost was a certain pace, maybe, and lingering on a few things here and there. Austin came to see me in Berkeley a couple of times. He was three or four years old. How the hell did he get out there?
I think Dino got Blue Velvet. The first time he saw it was in a little screening room in L.A. and there were maybe thirty people there. After Dino saw it he came out of his chair super happy and he was smiling. He thought maybe this could be a breakthrough film, so he wanted to screen it for a more regular crowd to see if they’d go for it. Kyle and Laura were living together on Blackburn Avenue then, and I lived with them for a while and then I got a place in Westwood. I had a few different places in Westwood—I don’t know why I kept moving around. The last one I had there I really loved. It was brand-new and I had very few things then and it had clean, empty rooms. I was doing small black-and-white oil paintings there. Anyhow, the night of this screening, which was in the San Fernando Valley, I was at Kyle and Laura’s and I didn’t go to the screening. Laura’s mom and her girlfriend went, though, and Rick Nicita was there with some other CAA agents. After the screening Rick called from a car and they were screaming, “It’s so fuckin’ great, David, so great!” Then Laura’s mom came home with her friend and they were sitting in the dining room and they were kind of quiet, like worried quiet. The next morning I call Dino and he gets on the phone and I say, “Hey, Dino, how did it go?” He says, “I put you on with Larry,” who’s in charge of distribution, and Larry says, “David, I’m sorry to tell you, but it’s maybe the worst screening I’ve ever been to.” I said, “You’re kidding me! I got a call from Rick and he said it went great,” and he said, “It did not go great. You should read the cards. People were asked to write what they liked best about the movie and they wrote things like ‘Sparky the dog,’ or ‘the end.’ ” So Rick and I go see Dino and he was great. He said, “It’s not for certain people, but it’s all gonna be okay.”
If I remember correctly, My Little Pony and Blue Velvet were the only ones out of those thirteen films he was making then that did anything in the theater. I think Dino was proud of Blue Velvet, too. One thing I admired about Dino was that when he got behind something, he just did not give a shit what anybody else thought. Blue Velvet probably wasn’t his cup of tea, but I think he was glad he made it.
I don’t know how I got to that thing of not caring what other people think, but it’s a good thing. The thing is, you fall in love with ideas and it’s like falling in love with a girl. It could be a girl you wouldn’t want to take home to your parents, but you don’t care what anybody else thinks. You’re in love and it’s beautiful and you stay true to those things. There’s this Vedic line that goes, “Man has control of action alone, never the fruit of that action.” In other words, you do the best you can and how the thing goes into the world, you can’t control that. It’s lucky when it goes good and it’s gone good for me, and it’s horrible when it goes bad and it’s gone bad for me. Everybody’s had those experiences, but so what? You die two deaths if you’ve sold out and not done what you were supposed to do. And that was Dune. You die once because you sold out, and you die twice because it was a failure. Fire Walk with Me didn’t do anything out in the world, but I only died one time with that picture, because I felt good about it. You can live with yourself perfectly fine if you stay true to what you love.
I was invited to Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party at Spago because I was nominated for best director for Blue Velvet, but I lost to Oliver Stone, who won for Platoon. I was at the party with Isabella, and people were there with their Oscars, and Anjelica Huston comes over and says, “David, I know you know my father,” because I met John Huston in Mexico. I had an art show in Puerto Vall
arta and John Huston came. Freddie Francis was at this art show, too, and Freddie shot B roll on John’s picture Moby Dick, so we talked and we had a great night. He was such a good guy. Anyhow, Anjelica says, “My father’s in the other room; why don’t you go and say hello.” I say, “I’d love to,” so I open up the door to this private room and there’s John, and at the table with him are George Hamilton and Elizabeth Taylor. I love Elizabeth Taylor and A Place in the Sun so much. That kiss she has with Monty Clift? That’s one of the best-filmed kisses ever. Grace Kelly moving in on Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window is a great filmed kiss, too.
Elizabeth Taylor presented the best director award that night, and there we are in that back room and she said, “I love Blue Velvet,” and my heart is going. I was surprised she saw it and loved it. I told her, “I wish I’d won, because when you presented the award to Oliver Stone he got to kiss you,” and she said, “Come here.” So I go over and she’s sitting down and I’m standing, and there’s Elizabeth Taylor’s face right there and I lean down and I see these violet eyes and this face and I go down on these lips and I keep going down, her lips are miles deep. So incredible. I kissed her and it was so fantastic, then we talked a little bit with John Huston and I left. I kissed her another time at Cannes. I was sitting at her table and I reminded her that I got to kiss her at Spago and asked her if I could kiss her again. I was there with Mary Sweeney, and Elizabeth called my room later and wanted to know if I was married. She liked to marry people and got married like seven or eight times, but I didn’t want to marry Elizabeth Taylor. I also kissed her at this amfAR event, then I went to lunch with her and she told me stories. That was the last time I saw her.
