by David Lynch
The character of Agent Cooper came from a lot of different things. For instance, Uma Thurman’s father is tight with the Dalai Lama, and she had a thing for him at her house that I went to, and I met him and that’s what led to Agent Cooper being for the Tibetan people and the rock-throwing scene. It was nice meeting the Dalai Lama. He doesn’t give a meditation technique but he’s for peace.
The Log Lady was a character I’d been thinking about for Catherine Coulson since 1973. The Log Lady originally lived where Jack and Catherine lived, which was on the second floor of a Spanish-style apartment building off Beachwood Drive in L.A. I pictured the Log Lady’s stories starting in that room, and the fireplace would be boarded up, her husband having died in a forest fire. His ashes were in an urn on the mantel along with his pipes that he smoked. She always carried a log and she had a little son, maybe five or so, and she starred in I’ll Test My Log with Every Branch of Knowledge, which was kind of a learning show. She doesn’t drive, so they always take cabs. If they go to the dentist she carries the log, and the dentist would put the log in the chair and put a little bib around the log, and then look for cavities, talking all the time so the kid would understand something about dentistry. He would talk about decay, and how they fill a cavity and what they use to fill it, and the importance of brushing your teeth and keeping the oral cavity clean.
For some episodes they’d go to a certain diner and they’d sit together, her carrying the log, and the little boy next to her, and they’d order something and sit there. In my mind the diner held possibilities for side stories that could be interesting. So Catherine and I would occasionally talk about this idea.
Years later we’re shooting the Twin Peaks pilot and we’re about to shoot a scene in the city hall, where Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman are going to talk to the people about this murder that’s occurred. I thought, Okay, this is an opportunity, so I call Catherine and tell her, “You’re going to be carrying the log, and your job is to flip the light switch on and off to get everybody’s attention that it’s time to start this talk.” Catherine said, “Great,” and she flew up and we got her the log and she did the scene and one thing led to another. The log has this quality, and people started wondering what her story was. She doesn’t make any sense, but she makes sense, and there are people like this in every town and they’re just accepted. She’s a special Twin Peaks person.
Gordon Cole, who I play, came when we were shooting a scene where Agent Cooper needs to call his unnamed boss in Philadelphia. I decided to do the voice just to make it more real, never thinking it would actually end up in the show. I was talking quite loud so Kyle could hear me, and that was when that character was born. The name Gordon Cole comes from Sunset Boulevard—in the film he’s the man from Paramount Studios who starts calling Norma Desmond about renting her car. People come up with names in different ways, and when I was thinking about Gordon Cole I said to myself, Wait a minute. Driving to Paramount, Billy Wilder passes Gordon Street and he passes Cole Street, and I’m sure that’s where he got the name. So the character I play in Twin Peaks is named in honor of Hollywood and Billy Wilder.
The character of Bob wasn’t originally in the pilot script, and he came while we were shooting in Everett, Washington, in the Palmer house. I’m on the second floor on my hands and knees for some reason, underneath the fan, and from behind me I hear a woman’s voice say, “Frank, don’t lock yourself in that room.” Frank Silva was the set dresser, and while he was moving things around in the room he slid a set of dresser drawers in front of the doorway. She said that to him as a kind of joke, but in my head I see Frank locked in Laura Palmer’s room and I just had a feeling. I said, “Frank, are you an actor?” He said, “Why, yes, David, I am,” and I said, “Okay, you’re gonna be in this scene.”
We’re shooting a slow pan in Laura Palmer’s room, and we do three takes with no Frank. Then I say, “Frank, go down to the foot of the bed and crouch down as if you’re hiding, grip the bars in the bed frame, and look right at the camera.” So Frank gets in there and we do another pan with Frank in it and I have zero idea why I did that. Later that night we’re shooting a scene in the living room of the Palmer house and there’s Sarah Palmer, devastated; her daughter’s been found murdered. She’s lying on the couch in torment and she suddenly sees something in her mind’s eye that frightens her, and she sits bolt upright and screams. And that’s the shot. The camera operator is a British guy named Sean Doyle, and we do the shot then I say, “Cut!” Grace Zabriskie is one of the all-time great actresses, and I say, “Perfect!” Then Sean says, “No, David, not perfect—someone was reflected in the mirror.” I said, “Who was it?” He said, “Frank was reflected in the mirror,” and at that second Bob was born. And that’s the way ideas come in. Where do they come from? They’re all gifts. Frank was a good guy and people who knew him told me he wasn’t like Bob at all, but he got Bob. His face, his hair—his whole being was perfect for Bob, and he understood Bob.
In the beginning Twin Peaks was huge, but ABC never really loved the show, and when people started writing in and asking, “When are we going to find out who killed Laura Palmer?” they forced us to tell and then people stopped watching. I told them if they revealed the killer it would be the end of it, and it was the end of it. And there was something else going on. There was a time when a continuing story was accepted and people stayed with it, but then the advertisers started saying, “People miss a couple episodes, then they can’t get back into the show and they stop watching, so we’ve got to do closed endings,” and that changed the feeling of the show, too. I think it’s all run by money. By the time Bob Iger came to us and said, “You gotta solve this mystery,” I was sort of fed up, anyway.
When I came back from Wild at Heart I didn’t know what was going on with the show. All I remember feeling is that it was a runaway train and you had to commit to it 24-7 to keep it on track. I think if it had been Mark and me writing together on every episode we would’ve been okay, but we didn’t do that and other people came in. This is nothing against any of them, but they didn’t know my Twin Peaks and it just ceased to be anything I recognized. When I came back to do an episode I’d try to change things and make it what I wanted, but then it would go off again on other stupid fuckin’ things. It just wasn’t fun anymore. Then the show got moved from Thursday to Saturday night and that wasn’t a good thing, either. I have no idea why it got moved.
I guess you could say I got more famous from Twin Peaks, but everything’s relative. What is famous? Elvis was famous. And really, the whole thing is just ridiculous. If Mel Brooks walked down the street today, anybody under twenty-five probably wouldn’t even know who he is, and that kills me. All the people who really knew what he did and how great he is are dead now. You see what I mean? When you get old nobody’s around that remembers what you did.
Around ten years ago I went to the Egyptian Theatre with Emily Stofle, who I married in 2009. A friend of hers was showing her film there. At one point, I went outside to take a smoke and I’m standing there smoking and this woman—I think she was a prostitute—comes up and starts going on and on about INLAND EMPIRE! She knew everything about that film. Fame, or whatever you want to call it, is weird.
In the late nineties I was suing a production company because they wanted to renege on a contract, so I go with Mary Sweeney, who lived with me at that time, and these high-powered, sharp young lawyers, George Hedges and Tom Hansen, down to city hall, where the courtrooms are. These courtrooms are so beautiful, from the twenties and thirties—these are the old real deal ones. We went in and waited to see this judge because Mary Sweeney was going to be deposed, then we were told we could go and we all wandered out front. We’re standing there talking about strategy and stuff, because it’s the first time we’ve been together for a while, and way in the distance is this bag lady, pushing a cart just loaded with shit. She’s wearing purple and she’s pushing this cart and coming closer
and closer and closer. Finally she’s passing right in front of us and she looks over at me and says, “Love your films!” We were laughing until the cows came home. That’s like perfect fame. It was so fantastic. I loved that bag lady.
The massive success of Twin Peaks didn’t mean anything to me. I always say failure’s not all bad because there’s nowhere to go but up, so you have a sense of freedom from failure. Success can screw you because you start worrying about falling and you can’t ever stay in the same place. That’s just the way it is. You should be thankful for successes, because people really loved something you did, but it’s all about the work.
People eventually stopped loving Twin Peaks, but at least it ended in a good way, because that’s when the Red Room came. I can’t talk about what the Red Room is, but I remember when the idea came and how thrilling it was to me. That opened up a thing in Twin Peaks and led to many things. So it’s the pilot and the Red Room and where they led—put those things together and you’ve got the real Twin Peaks. It’s a beautiful, delicate thing, and there’s more going on than meets the eye, and there’s mystery in the air.
Most people’s lives are filled with mystery, but things move super fast nowadays and there’s not much time to sit and daydream and notice the mystery. There are fewer and fewer places in the world now where you can see the stars in the night sky, and you’ve got to go a long way out of L.A., to the dry lake beds, to see them now. One time we were out there shooting a commercial and at two in the morning we turned off the lights and lay down on the desert floor and just looked up. Trillions of stars. Trillions. It’s so powerful. And because we’re not seeing those stars we’re forgetting how grand the whole show is.
In 1989, while Twin Peaks was in production, Steve Golin and Joni Sighvatsson hired Lynch to write an adaptation of a 1940s noir crime novel. At approximately the same time Monty Montgomery acquired a manuscript for Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula. “Barry was the editor at Black Lizard Press, which was republishing old pulp noir novels, and one day he just sent me his book, which hadn’t been published yet,” Montgomery recalled. “I read it and called Barry and said, ‘I’d like to option this and try to direct it.’ ”
Montgomery then approached Lynch and asked if he’d consider executive-producing the film. When Lynch expressed an interest in directing an adaptation of the book himself, Montgomery passed the project on to him, and he and Golin provided funds for Lynch to write a script. “It seemed like everybody wanted the film to take off, and it had momentum,” recalled Montgomery. “David was having rehearsals before we knew it and Polygram put up the financing.”
This sudden turn of events came as a surprise to Twin Peaks editor Duwayne Dunham, who thought he’d already been given his marching orders. “We were finishing the pilot for Twin Peaks and David said he was going to take a break,” said Dunham, “then a week later he walked into the room and told me he was going to direct Wild at Heart and wanted me to edit it. This was the middle of May, and he told me he planned to start shooting in July even though he didn’t even have a script yet. I told him I’d taken another job and couldn’t do it, and David asked, ‘What would it take for you to edit Wild at Heart?’ I told him if I had an opportunity to direct I’d do it, and he said, ‘Okay, we just got picked up for seven episodes of Twin Peaks, and you can direct the first one and a few more. Now will you edit Wild at Heart?’ I said, ‘You’re on.’ ”
Lynch completed a draft of a script in just a week but felt that what he’d produced was downbeat and charmless, so he wrote a second draft that incorporated significant changes. He shifted the sequence of events, sprinkled allusions to The Wizard of Oz throughout the story, and added characters. The final result is a kind of tone poem about the immensity of young love, how consuming and vast it can be. Starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as a couple on the run, the film pivots on an unbridled sexuality and is simultaneously a violent road picture, a comedy, and a love story that pushes things just beyond the realm of realism. Set in a world in the process of imploding, it’s the most pop film Lynch has made. The colors are electric, and fire is a recurring motif; the opening titles unspool against a raging wall of fire—Lynch finally got to shoot that opening image he wanted for Ronnie Rocket.
“David felt I’d never played a role that really captured my sexuality and he was excited about the prospect of doing that with the character of Lula,” recalled Laura Dern. “I remember sitting with him in a conference room at Propaganda talking about Sailor and Lula and suddenly he said ‘I need bubble gum,’ and at that point the character completely fell into place. He also had the feeling that Nic and I were the perfect match, and he was right—the minute we got together Sailor and Lula really started to come alive.”1
Music plays a crucial role in the film, and the soundtrack features big-band swing, speed metal, classic rock ’n’ roll, the heavy dub of African Head Charge, and “Im Abendrot,” one of the final compositions by Richard Strauss. Cage’s character is loosely inspired by Elvis Presley, and Cage delivers convincing renditions of two Presley classics in the film, while blues great KoKo Taylor performs the Lynch-Badalamenti composition “Up in Flames.” The music is mixed at a very high volume.
The characters in Wild at Heart are extreme and the creeps are extra creepy. Cast as Lula’s mother, Diane Ladd gives a histrionic performance evocative of Shelley Winters’s work in Lolita, and it netted her an Academy Award nomination. Grace Zabriskie plays a sinister hired killer who speaks in a Cajun drawl, and a character called Mr. Reindeer, played by W. Morgan Sheppard, sits on a toilet while ordering an execution.
Isabella Rossellini plays the evil tramp, Perdita Durango, and explained that her take on the character went back a ways. “Years before he made Wild at Heart, David and I were in a bookstore and I saw a book on Frida Kahlo. This was before she’d been discovered by pop culture, and I called David over and said, ‘Look at this woman.’ She’s appealing and repellent at the same time. Sometimes she portrays herself with visible wounds; other times she has a mustache and eyebrows that grow together. She had an incredible aesthetic, and I said it would be wonderful to create a character like her. Years later David said, ‘I think I have that character.’ Perdita Durango was based a little bit on Kahlo—the eyebrows are definitely an homage to her.”
Also appearing in the film is Willem Dafoe, who plays a psychotic Vietnam vet who’s among the most memorable characters Lynch has created. “When David was casting Blue Velvet, I met with him in Dino De Laurentiis’s office in the Gulf and Western Building in Manhattan,” Dafoe said, “and like most people, I was quite taken by his manner. His sweet, golly-gee, boyish excitement is really disarming, and we had a good meeting. After I left I thought, If he doesn’t use me now, he’s going to use me sometime, and a few years later he got in touch and said, ‘You wanna do this?’ I said, ‘Fantastic.’ They didn’t have to persuade me to take the part, because the writing was brilliant and I love David.
“Because David is so good and his set was so much fun, Wild at Heart was the least stressful movie I’ve ever made,” Dafoe continued. “I was doing my fantasy of a cracker criminal psycho, and I knew how this guy’s hair should be and had the idea of his little mustache. But the key thing with the character was the teeth. It says very specifically in the screenplay that he has these funky, stumpy teeth, and I just assumed they’d put some shit on my teeth. Then in one of my first conversations with David about the character, he said, ‘So, you gonna go to the dentist?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘To get the teeth!’ This had never occurred to me. I wound up getting an entire set of teeth that fit over my own teeth, and they became the crucial trigger for the character. They were a little oversized and forced my mouth to always be a little bit open in a kind of lascivious way, and they gave him a stupid, slack-jawed look that was key to the character. The teeth were David’s idea.”2
Cast as Cousin Dell, an
emotionally unstable loner obsessed with bizarre rituals, was Crispin Glover, who’d met Lynch the year before, during the casting of One Saliva Bubble. “I’ve worked with David twice,” Glover recalled. “The first time was in Wild at Heart and the second was in Hotel Room, and the directing style was different in each piece. In Wild at Heart the direction was probably the most precise I’ve ever had. There’s a scene where the character I play is making a sandwich, and the timing of it was exactingly specified by David.”
Prior to meeting Lynch, Glover had vivid memories of seeing the trailer for Eraserhead when he was a fourteen-year-old student at a private school that visited the Nuart as part of a cinema program. “I didn’t know what the movie was, but I said to myself that as soon as I could drive I’d go see it. Luckily, it was still playing at the Nuart when I turned sixteen, and I drove to see Eraserhead at least twelve times over the next few years. There weren’t many people in the audience at the midnight screenings at the Nuart in 1980, and I remember people would get mad and shout things at the screen and leave the theater. At other times the audience would get very quiet and concentrated. Seeing a thirty-five-millimeter print of Eraserhead projected in a theater was experiential, and it’s been an important film to me. David’s been truly supportive to me throughout the years, too,” said Glover of Lynch, who executive-produced Glover’s directorial debut feature, What Is It? “It’s difficult to express how grateful I am to have someone I admire so much be so helpful to me.”3
