Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  “Then they called us in for a notes meeting,” Frost recalled. “I remember an executive taking a list of notes out of his pocket and saying, ‘I’ve got some notes if you’re interested,’ and David said, ‘No, not really,’ and the guy quietly put the list back in his pocket with a sheepish look on his face. That set the tone of, You wanted something different so don’t screw it up! And they did very little meddling.”

  Looking back on that period, Montgomery recalled that “there were a lot of projects happening on top of each other. David can do a lot of things at once, but he wasn’t paying much attention to Twin Peaks in the early period of pre-production. That train was definitely heating up at the station, though. So I told David, ‘Why don’t you come to Propaganda?’ We had a new office with plenty of room, and I suggested he put Mark Frost in an office and have Johanna Ray do the casting there.”

  The casting of Twin Peaks involved a bit of the serendipity typical of Lynch productions. Michael Anderson, who dances and utters sentences in reverse in the show, was someone Lynch met in 1987 at the Manhattan nightclub Magoo’s. Anderson was dressed in gold and pulling a wagon at the time, and Lynch immediately envisioned him as Ronnie Rocket. Deputy Andy Brennan was played by Harry Goaz, who happened to be driving a car Lynch hired to take him to a tribute to Roy Orbison. As for Kyle MacLachlan’s casting as the series’ star, Agent Dale Cooper, Lynch has said that “Kyle was born to play this role.” MacLachlan does deliver a pitch-perfect performance as Cooper, a kind of innocent sage who marvels at the wonders of the world while attempting to understand its darkest mysteries. MacLachlan has crack comic timing and is irresistibly charming and funny as Cooper.

  Actor Ray Wise, who played Leland Palmer, observed, “For David it’s all in the casting. He’s very intuitive, and for one reason or another he’ll feel a connection with an individual and know how to place that person in the piece. The actors feel the trust he has in them, too, and it encourages them to let down their inhibitions and just go with whatever happens in the scene.”9

  Leland Palmer’s grief-stricken wife, Sarah Palmer, is played by Grace Zabriskie in the first of five projects she’s done with Lynch. Sarah Palmer seems to carry the anguish of the entire town, and Zabriskie is required to operate at an extreme emotional pitch every time she appears onscreen; she turns in a bravura performance that’s wrenching, too. “I remember being on set one day and David asking ‘You got another one?’ I replied, ‘David, I went over the top seventeen takes ago!’

  “You don’t realize how much you’re withholding until you work with someone who doesn’t want you to hold back,” said Zabriskie. “I can present just about anything that comes into my head to David and if he can use it, he will. Every project I’ve done with him has been deep fun. There’s a back and forth between us that’s subliminal and unspoken, and all the more precious for that somehow.”10

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  Twin Peaks launched several careers, and the actors he discovered for the show remain deeply grateful to him. “I was so young and nervous when I met David that I sat on my hands because they were shaking so badly,” said Sheryl Lee, who played Laura Palmer. “But David has such a kind, warm way about him that he puts you at ease immediately. He asked me how I felt about being dipped in gray paint and wrapped in plastic and being in cold water, and I said, ‘No problem!’ ”11

  The part of Nadine Hurley, which was originally envisioned as a minor character but grew to be more, went to Wendy Robie, who said, “I had a wonderful conversation with David and Mark, then David said, ‘One of your eyes is going to be shot out,’ and I said, ‘Oh? Which one?’ He liked that and laughed, and a friend of mine who worked in the office where we met told me that after I left David said, ‘There goes Nadine.’ ”12

  Mädchen Amick, who played waitress and abused wife Shelly Johnson, was running late the afternoon she was slated to meet about the show. “I didn’t get to our meeting until eleven at night,” she recalled. “And David waited! Johanna, Eric [Da Re], and Mark were there, too, and Eric read with me, then David said, ‘So, do you wanna do a TV show?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do!’ ”13

  Twin Peaks also featured a handful of veteran actors who hadn’t been seen in a while. Russ Tamblyn, Piper Laurie, Peggy Lipton, Richard Beymer, and Michael Ontkean were among them, and they all came to the show in different ways.

  “In January of 1986 Dennis Hopper had a fortieth birthday party for David, and I was living with Dean Stockwell at the time and Dean took me with him,” said Tamblyn. “I was a big fan of David’s, and there was a point at the party when everybody gathered around him while he opened cards, and he opened one with a picture of a naked woman surrounded by a bunch of guys. He turned to me and said, ‘Hey, Russ, wouldn’t you like to be this guy?’ That was an opening and I said, ‘David, what I’d really like is to work with you,’ and he said, ‘Next project.’

  “People say lots of things in Hollywood without meaning them, but David’s not like that,” Tamblyn continued. “Two years passed, and then when he was casting Twin Peaks he got in touch. I’ll never forget the first words out of his mouth after we sat down. He said, ‘Russ, the part I want you to play is so and so…’ All I could think about was that he didn’t say he wanted me to read for the part; he said he wanted me to play it.”14

  Tamblyn, of course, shot to stardom in 1961 with a lead role in the classic musical West Side Story. Starring opposite him in that film was Richard Beymer, who, purely coincidentally, also made his way to Twin Peaks. “My first impression of David was that he was available,” recalled Beymer of his meeting with Lynch at Propaganda. “It wasn’t the usual kind of meeting where you go in to meet a director. It was relaxed. I left and a few hours later Johanna Ray called and said, ‘He wants you to play a character called Dr. Jacoby,’ then she called again and said, ‘No, he wants you to play a businessman named Ben Horne.’ I thought, shit, Jacoby sounded so much more fun, but I actually got the fun role.”15

  Canadian actor Michael Ontkean, who began performing on television as a child and went on to co-star with Paul Newman in the 1977 film Slap Shot, has a vivid memory of meeting Lynch. “His hair stood thick, tall, and post-modern rockabilly, and I was walking tall with the recent birth of my second daughter,” he recalled. “Twilight time, late fall, indoors in smog-filled L.A., but it felt like we were outdoors somewhere in Maine or Oregon. David had on a meta-cool fishing jacket, and I kept looking around for the open box of tackle and a big bucket full of river trout.”16

  The casting of the show went smoothly, and Lynch continued to tend to other things. “David went to New York to work on music with Angelo, and this Twin Peaks thing is moving,” recalled Montgomery. “They’d hired a production manager in Seattle who was putting the budget, schedule, and locations together, and I’d check on things periodically, and one day I told David, ‘I don’t think pre-production is being handled properly.’ He asked me to look into it, and after getting into it deeper we realized this was a big train wreck waiting to happen. I gave David the prognosis and he said, ‘I want you to be a producer.’

  “So I was in the trenches with him the whole damn shoot, even to the point where a few times he sent me off to actually film something, which is unheard of with him,” Montgomery continued. “He didn’t want to do it but there was no alternative. We were there in rain, sleet, fog, and snow, and it was round the clock, sleeping in your expedition gear. It was an ambitious, demanding shoot, and David did a wonderful job with it.”

  Completed in twenty-two-and-a-half days on a budget of four million dollars, the pilot was primarily shot in Snoqualmie, North Bend, and Fall City, Washington. “They put the whole cast and crew in a Red Lion hotel and we filled the entire place,” said Amick. “It was like being in a college dorm, with people running around and visiting each other’s rooms.”

  Cast as Lucy Moran, the eccentric secretary at the Twin Peaks Sheriff�
��s Department, Kimmy Robertson recalled the shooting of the pilot as “heaven. It was pure fun, and there were silly things with David that were magical to me. If I asked him nicely, he let me run my fingers through his hair. The hair that grows on top of that head and what’s inside that head—you can feel that in his hair. David’s hair does something and it has a function and the function has to do with God.”17

  Exterior scenes for the pilot were also shot in wooded areas of Malibu, and interiors were mostly done in a warehouse in the San Fernando Valley. Scenes for the soap opera within the show, Invitation to Love, were shot in Frank Lloyd Wright’s historic Ennis House in Los Angeles. It was in Washington, though, that the cast proved its mettle.

  “I remember it being a very long day,” says Lee of shooting Twin Peaks’ memorable opening scene, when her nude body is found wrapped in plastic. “I kind of went into a meditative state, and I remember thinking, This is my first set and I’m lying here very quietly and I get to be like a sponge. I’m hearing everything and learning what all the different departments do—it was a great way to learn, playing a corpse.”

  Lynch doesn’t confine people to the box they’re in when he finds them and often sees things in people they themselves aren’t aware of. A case in point is Deepak Nayar, who was newly arrived in the United States in the late eighties, having come from India, where he’d worked for the Merchant Ivory franchise. Nayar had experience in filmmaking, but the only position available to him on Twin Peaks was the job as Lynch’s driver. He took it.

  “I remember sitting in an office waiting and he walked in, a man full of energy, and he stuck out his hand and said, ‘Nice to meet you, Deepak,’ ” recalled Nayar, who worked with Lynch in various capacities over the next decade and co-produced his 1997 film, Lost Highway. “We talked about meditation and me being Indian and that was that. I got hired as a PA and driver and it was great.

  “He called me Hotshot, and we used to have one-dollar bets all the time,” Nayar continued. “One day a bunch of us were standing around waiting while we shot a scene by some train tracks, and David was throwing stones. I said, ‘One dollar, David, that you can’t hit that pole over there.’ He missed the pole, then said, ‘Double or nothing you can’t do it, either,’ and I hit it. He accused me of picking up a bigger stone! He was so much fun and such a great director on set. He never loses his temper, never raises his voice, and, more importantly, never leaves the set. Some of the amazing things that happened on Twin Peaks happened because he was there on the set and could respond creatively to unforeseen things that came up.”18

  A central part of Lynch’s gift is the fluidity of his imagination: He builds on what’s around him as opposed to looking for what isn’t there, and it’s something everyone who works with him comments on. “One of the most important things David’s taught me is to be really present,” said Sheryl Lee. “He pays attention to everything and can adapt to whatever is happening around him and transform it into art because he’s not attached to what’s supposed to be. That’s part of what makes it so thrilling to be on set with him and why it’s so alive.”

  Richard Beymer recalled that “David took the script seriously, and of course we were expected to learn our lines, but he often made twists and turns that came to him spontaneously. I came in one day while they were shooting and I was standing in the back waiting, wearing a new pair of shoes that were kind of stiff. As a kid I’d learned to tap dance, so I was doing a little of that to loosen up the shoes, and he sees me and comes over and says, ‘Do you dance?’ I said, ‘I used to dance a little,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t you dance in the next scene?’ I said, ‘David, in the next scene I’m talking about murdering someone,’ and he says, ‘It will be great! In fact, you should dance on your desk.’ ”

  Lynch did accord great respect to the Twin Peaks script, but at the same time the show operated as a work in progress and characters took on added depth along the way. “David doesn’t tell you who the character you’re playing is,” said Mädchen Amick. “He let me find Shelly and watched how I started to crawl into her skin, then he responded to that.”

  Several parts were expanded beyond their original conception, usually because Lynch liked what the actor brought to the character. “I think I know why David gave Nadine more to do,” said Wendy Robie. “There’s a scene where a camera was set up across the street, looking at the picture window in the Hurley house, and I was inside opening and closing the drapes. There was no dialogue—you just see this figure in the window working these drapes back and forth, and while we were shooting I could hear David laughing on the walkie-talkie a PA had in the room. David kept the camera running and continued laughing, so I kept it up to the point that my hands were bleeding.”

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  Amick describes Lynch’s style on set as “very hands on. There’s a scene where I’m riding in a car with my boyfriend, Bobby, and David was on the floorboard of the car while we were shooting, saying things like, ‘Okay, nuzzle up to him now.’ There was another scene where I was on the phone and David suddenly says to me, ‘Mädchen, I want you to very slowly drift your eyes up to the ceiling. Just slowly drift them up there, keep drifting, drift, drift’—then ‘Cut!’ I said, ‘David, what’s my motivation with this?’ And he said, ‘It just looks good.’

  “It’s kind of magical the way he gets what he needs from actors,” Amick continued. “I remember shooting a scene where Shelly shares some painful things with her boss, Norma Jennings, and David knew I needed to get to this deep place. We did a few takes, then he came up to me, put his hand on my arm, and looked at me, then he sighed and walked away, and it was as if he’d infused me with the emotion the scene called for. Without saying a word, he gave me what I needed.”

  Tamblyn was struck by the fact that “David sits as close as he can get when he directs. There’s a scene where Dr. Jacoby is in the hospital talking to Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman about hearing Jacques Renault being murdered in a nearby bed, and David gave me the strangest direction for it. We did a take and David said, ‘Russ, let’s do it again, and this time don’t think about the words you’re saying or what they mean. Just think about ghosts.’ That was typical of the way he directed and it really worked for the scene.”

  “David established the mood and the tone for what was to occur,” said Ray Wise, “and he had the uncanny ability to say just the right thing that pointed you in the right direction. The characters were all, in their own way, raw wounds that had to be expressed, and there were no limits on the expression. He opened us up and allowed us to give a thousand percent, and you see that in all his work. Look at the performance he got out of Dennis Hopper! He allows actors to go all the way.”

  He’s willing to wait until they get there, too. “David is the only director in forty years who ever requested that I slow down and take more time with something,” said Michael Ontkean. “Hours past midnight Sheriff Truman is keeping a vigil staring into the daunting abyss that is the Black Lodge, hoping, praying, to find some sign of his buddy Cooper. Five or six increasingly slow takes come and go, and the only sound after each take is David’s clear, spooky whisper suggesting that Harry take even more time. Eternity is not too long to wait.”

  Remembering her time on set, Kimmy Robertson said, “David has this whole process when he directs. He sits you down and makes a cone of silence around the two of you with his energy, then he sets the scene. The first scene I shot was the one where Lucy transfers a phone call to Sheriff Truman, and David said, ‘An important phone call has come in. Lucy is efficient, meticulous, she cares about everyone in the room, she wants to make sure nobody misunderstands, and she’s got her finger on the pulse of the town. How would Lucy say, The phone is for you?’ ”

  Amick has particularly fond memories of the day her character is kissed by FBI agent Gordon Cole, a part played by Lynch himself. “I felt so honored to be the one he kissed! All
the girls were a little jealous, and it became a thing like, oh, teacher’s pet.” As for the kiss? “It was adorable and very soft.” Kimmy Robertson confessed that she, too, kissed Lynch. “It was at a wrap party a long, long time ago. I think it was the one day in his life that he wasn’t with anybody, and we danced to a song about kissing and I kissed him and then skipped off.”

  The terms of the ABC deal stipulated that Lynch shoot a closed alternate ending that would allow the pilot to be released as a feature in Europe. This requirement led to the series’ final scene in the Red Room, a mysterious kind of bardo where riddles are presented and secrets are revealed. Those in the Red Room speak in reverse, an idea that had been percolating in Lynch’s head since 1971, when he had Alan Splet record him saying “I want pencils” backward for a scene in Eraserhead that was never shot. An extended version of Twin Peaks that concluded with the scene in the Red Room was released as a straight-to-video film in the U.K. five months before the pilot aired in the United States.

  “The minute David steps on set he knows exactly how everything is supposed to be, down to where a glass is sitting on a table,” said Sighvatsson. “He just knows it, and when he arrived on set the day we built the Red Room he went crazy because the door was on the right-hand side rather than the left. I said, ‘David, who fucking cares?’ He cared, and he insisted it be rebuilt because he’d already seen the scene in his head, and what he shoots has to match what he sees in his mind.”

  Industry insiders who saw the pilot were impressed. “The pilot is really still and quiet, and the first half hour is almost entirely people grieving and getting bad news,” said Frost. “It has an air of reality and a pace people weren’t used to—it takes its time, and although it tells an intricate story, it doesn’t do it in a flashy way. It has touches of the mythical that take it into another realm, but it remains grounded. David’s spiritual beliefs are a big part of the power of the show, and it has a kind of solemn purity that’s comparable to Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest.”