by David Lynch
Dern had particularly fond memories of Glover’s character and recalled, “I love the scene where I’m talking about my cousin Dell. We got the giggles when we shot that scene and when I say ‘we’ I mean the entire crew. We worked on that scene for hours and we kept having to start over because someone was always laughing. David had to wear a bandana across his face so we couldn’t see him laughing, and he put bandanas on some crew members, too. We finally got through a take without anyone cracking up and that’s the take that’s in the film.”
The filming of Wild at Heart began on August 9th, 1989, in New Orleans, and then moved on to Texas and Los Angeles. Budgeted at ten million dollars, the film was produced by Golin and Sighvatsson, along with Montgomery, who was on set throughout the shoot. “Before the shoot David and I went scouting in New Orleans, and I remember going to Galatoire’s Restaurant one night with Patty Norris,” said Montgomery. “We were walking home through the French Quarter where all the strip clubs are, and we passed this place with a sign that read, ‘Live Sex Acts.’ David said, ‘Let’s check this out.’ This was research for him, and what was in there was what the sign said. He was absolutely interested, too, in the way a doctor is interested in a body he’s just cut open. David sort of approaches everything that way.”
A fascination with the intricacies of the human body is a key part of Lynch’s sensibility; it’s central to Eraserhead, of course, and is embedded to varying degrees in all of his paintings and films. It’s definitely part of Wild at Heart. “I was on the set the day they shot the scene when Bob Ray Lemon gets killed, and Nic Cage throws this guy downstairs and he’s supposed to be bleeding,” remembered Barry Gifford. “They finish the shot and David says, ‘The blood isn’t black enough! I want it black! It’s got to be blacker!’ They fiddled with the fake blood for a minute, and he says, ‘No! Blacker! Blacker!’ David had a very specific idea about the blood and was absolutely in control on set.”4
Montgomery said, “Yes, David is a very efficient director, but he can get sidetracked. You can have all the elements in place to shoot something, the actors and the key people are there, and you know exactly what you have to do. Then you go for a coffee and by the time you get back David might be doing something completely different, or focusing on some bit of minutia like a bug crawling across the floor. There was a scene in Wild at Heart where David wanted a shadow on the ground of an eagle flying overhead. That would’ve been a second-unit thing for most directors, but we spent a good bit of a day shooting that shadow while the actors stood around waiting. Of course, these touches are what give David’s movies their flair, so he must go with his instincts and I rarely interfered.”
The freedom Lynch insists on is crucial for him, and everything—props, lines of dialogue, characters—must remain fluid in order for him to do his thing. “He used to hate production meetings,” Deepak Nayar recalled. “I remember he would arrive and say, ‘Okay, I’m here, but you see this script?’ Then he’d throw the script in a garbage can.”
Because he has such a unique approach to filmmaking, Lynch tends to surprise the people he works with. “I remember being on set the day David shot the scene in the bathroom with Nic and Diane Ladd and thinking, This is so fucking weird, what are we doing,” recalled Sighvatsson. “Then I saw the dailies and it was remarkable. David didn’t go off script and he shot exactly what was on the page, but what I saw onscreen was nothing like what was on the page, and I’ve never experienced that with another director. He’s unique in another way, too. Many directors thrive on conflict, but David doesn’t tolerate any conflict on his set, and if there’s somebody around that he thinks isn’t sending a good vibe, they’re not there the next day.”
The tale of Sailor and Lula seems to be dictated by fate, and at a certain point in the story an ill wind blows and their luck changes. The stars are suddenly aligned against them and everything begins to go wrong. Notions of fate and luck are an essential part of Lynch’s worldview, as those close to him can attest. “I lived down the road from David then, so we drove to the Wild at Heart set together every day when we were shooting in L.A.,” said Montgomery. “We couldn’t go to the set until David had done his numerology with license plates and seen his initials on license plates. Sometimes we’d have to keep driving around for a while until we were able to find that ‘DKL’ on a plate. On the rare occasion that the letters were in sequence, it was a particularly good omen.”
Lynch says he’s been “looking at license plates” since before he made Eraserhead and that his lucky number is seven. “Ceremonies and rituals are important to Dad,” said Jennifer Lynch, “and part of the way his brain works is that things should be a certain way and there are little miracles. Like his thing with license plates, and the dime lands heads up and you work the dime—all those things are strategies he uses to do something magical that will change things. He’s always been that way.”
The Wild at Heart shoot wrapped just as Twin Peaks was getting into high gear and Dunham was completing his direction of episode one. “When I started the episode I asked David for advice, and he said, ‘Don’t ask me—you’re the director, so do it the way you want to do it,’ ” Dunham recalled. “Then he explained things to me. He said, ‘First, clear the set so there’s nobody there except you and the actors. Start rehearsing and staging and blocking with the actors, and then when you kind of have it rough, bring the DP in and the two of you fine-tune from there. When you and the DP got it, bring the cast in and do your last rehearsal and make any adjustments you need. Then you turn the set over to the crew, actors go for hair and makeup, then they come back and you shoot it.’
“We both finished shooting on the same day,” Dunham continued, “then David went off and directed the second episode of Twin Peaks. So we’ve got my episode of the show, Wild at Heart, and David’s episode of Twin Peaks stacked up in the editing room and more episodes funneling in all the time. We had buckets of film everywhere and cards on the walls and it was so fun. We were working at Todd AO in West L.A., and every day at around three o’clock Monty Montgomery would walk in with cappuccinos and bags of peanut M&M’s for everybody.
“We were working madly on everything, then David said, ‘I want to take Wild at Heart to Cannes. Can we make it?’ I told him it would be really tight, but we decided to go for it,” Dunham said. “David was up at Skywalker mixing the film before I’d even finished editing it—I’d give him the first half of a reel of film to mix while I finished editing the second half. Alan Splet wasn’t around much, so David was doing the mix and adding all kinds of things to it. Whenever he asked me to listen to a playback, I’d leave the room thinking, That guy is nuts.
“Editing Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks at the same time was crazy, and nobody in their right mind would do it,” Dunham continued. “The first cut of Wild at Heart came in at four hours, and the first time we screened it for a few people David played the music way too loud—but, wow, it made your fingernails rise! It was the creepiest, coolest thing. It was rambling and all over the place, though, so we had a big board covered with index cards and we started moving things around. In the first cut, the fight scene in Cape Fear was deep in the story, and when we moved it to the beginning of the movie it made a big difference.
“The first time we ran the final cut of the film was at midnight at Skywalker, and the speakers blew out,” he said. “We had an eight A.M. flight to L.A. the next morning and that afternoon we were flying to Cannes, and we didn’t know if the problem was in the speakers or in the print, so all we could do was take the master print with us to screen at Cannes. We got on the plane, both of us carrying cans of film, and went to Paris to subtitle, then two days later my assistant arrived with a new print. So we’ve got a print and we’ve subtitled it, but we’ve never actually seen it.
“We got to Cannes on a Friday, and each movie in competition was allotted twenty minutes to do a sound and picture check. Ours was scheduled for midnight
because we were the closing movie, so we went out to David Bowie’s yacht for a party, then it was time to get in the dinghy and go watch our twenty minutes. I was still cutting stuff into the titles the day it was screening, and we still haven’t seen it! So when we went in, David told the projectionist, ‘We’ve never seen this movie, and we’re gonna watch the whole thing.’ The guy hemmed and hawed and David said, ‘Look, that’s just what we’re doing.’ We left there at three in the morning, the film premiered the following night, it got a great reception, and it won the Palme d’Or. It was very exciting.” When jury president Bernardo Bertolucci announced it as the winner, there were boos as well as cheers, but it still took the prize.
By the time Wild at Heart got to Cannes, Lynch’s relationship with Rossellini was in trouble and soon to end. “Mary Sweeney was an assistant editor on Blue Velvet, so she was there from the beginning and was one of the many people who hovered and worked on David’s films,” recalled Rossellini of the breakup. “I don’t know when that story started, or if it was parallel to me all the time, but at the beginning it probably wasn’t. I remember vaguely some tension on the set of Wild at Heart, and there was another thing that caught my attention. I once arrived late at night to work and was given a room, and I expected David to be there but he wasn’t. I just figured he needed to sleep. When I went in the morning to do makeup, I heard on the walkie-talkie that David had arrived but he didn’t come to say hello to me. Two hours later he came and said, ‘Oh, how are you,’ with fake enthusiasm, and I remember thinking, What’s going on? Then, when David and I were in Cannes for Wild at Heart, he suddenly said, ‘Let’s go to the airport to pick up Mary.’ I said, ‘Mary? Mary’s coming?’ He said, ‘Yes, she worked so hard.’ I thought, How sweet of David to invite an assistant editor. I didn’t read it then. [Sweeney was the script supervisor on Wild at Heart.]
“David has this incredible sweetness, but shortly after that he completely cut me out of his life and left me with a phone call telling me he never wanted to see me again,” Rossellini said. “I didn’t see it coming and it was shocking. There might be something I did or something he saw in me, or he may’ve just lost interest in knowing me. Sometimes I wonder if the fact that I wasn’t meditating was one of the reasons he left me. I tried for a while but I never could do it. I’m Italian, and in Italy we’re tormented by Catholicism—the Vatican made me allergic to anything spiritual. It was really tough when he left me, though, and it took me years to get back on my feet. I was so angry with myself, because I had a daughter and a beautiful career, and I couldn’t believe I could be so demolished by a boyfriend. But I loved David immensely and thought he loved me, so it was devastating. I saw there was some unhappiness, but I thought it was due to his work. In fact, he’d fallen in love with another woman.”
Jennifer Lynch observed that “Isabella is elegant, joyful, and social, and everybody recognized her and wanted to speak to her, which she found lovely. Dad is a very kind person, but he’d really rather not have a lot of public conversations, and it became challenging for him to be out with her. For a while it was great, then it became hard.” The breakup came as no surprise to Sighvatsson, who said, “I remember David saying to me, ‘Joni, it’s a full-time job being Isabella Rossellini’s boyfriend.’ I was there when it all began with Mary, too, and I saw her sneaking into David’s room while we were mixing Wild at Heart up at Lucasfilm. I like Mary a lot, by the way, and think she was great for David. She started limiting access to him, and he needed that.”
Wild at Heart won at Cannes but had yet to be released in the United States, and its distributor, the Samuel Goldwyn Company, spent the next eight weeks gearing up for a late-summer opening. Lynch had never liked test screenings, but with Wild at Heart he conceded the value of seeing a film with a non-industry audience after a specific scene triggered a mass exodus at two test screenings for several hundred people. “Harry Dean Stanton gets shot in the head and his brains splatter against the wall,” Dunham recalled, “then the two characters who kill him laugh manically over the stump of the neck, stick their heads down into it, then come up and do this frantic, wild kissing. The second that scene went up on the screen, a hundred twenty-five people walked out of the theater. We went outside and the people from Goldwyn and Propaganda were crazed, and we said, ‘Hey, this is a Disney crowd—we need a David Lynch crowd.’ We talked them into letting us do another screening a few days later for a different kind of audience. This audience was glued to the screen, but when that scene popped up, a hundred twenty-five people got up and left, and this crowd turned violent. People started yelling, ‘This guy is sick! He should be put in jail and never allowed to make another movie!’ ”
“People ran out of that screening like they were evacuating from a disaster,” said Montgomery. “If David had his choice he wouldn’t have cut that scene—he would’ve made it longer! But it had to go because it went too far.”
That scene wasn’t the only roadblock the film encountered. “Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., David, Steve, Joni, and I went to lunch at Muse,” continued Montgomery, “and Samuel said, ‘I like the film, I want to do it, but I can’t deal with the ending’—and the original ending really was not pretty. Everybody was kind of depressed by the end of lunch, then on the way home David said, ‘I’ll give you a fucking happy ending,’ and that’s what he did. He crafted an emphatically happy ending and he did it pretty ingeniously.”
What Lynch did was bring in Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz and have her hover in the sky, singing the praises of true love. “I was up there sixty feet above the ground and it was terrifying,” remembered Sheryl Lee, who played Glinda. “I’m ashamed to admit it, but I lied to get that part. I was in Colorado visiting my family and David called and asked, ‘How do you feel about heights?’ I’m terrified of heights, but I said, ‘I feel fine about heights!’ He said, ‘Good, because I’m going to hang you from a crane by piano wire,’ and I said, ‘Oh, that’s fine!’ When I got to the set they had the stunt team, the airbags, the whole deal, and I was floating so high up there that David had to direct me through a megaphone because I could barely hear him. I remember floating up there feeling terrified and at peace and grateful at the same time. David can get you to do things you wouldn’t do under any other circumstances. Hang from fish wire in service of telling David’s story and bringing his vision to life? I’m there one hundred percent.”
The film opened on August 17th to modest commercial success, and Lynch finally took a night off. “When Wild at Heart opened in L.A., we planned this big evening with Nic, David, Steve Golin, myself, and I think [executive producer] Michael Kuhn,” remembered Montgomery. “We went to Il Giardino in Beverly Hills, a restaurant David loved because when we walked in they’d play the theme from Twin Peaks. It was summer and we were sitting outside in the garden and everybody got thoroughly intoxicated. Fortunately none of us were driving—we had a car service—and after dinner Nic, David, and I decided to go to this bar in Los Feliz called the Dresden Room, where an elderly couple performed standards on an electric piano. After we’d had a few drinks one of them said, ‘We’ve got Nicolas Cage and David Lynch in the audience tonight! Why don’t they come up and sing a song?’ David was wearing Elvis-type sunglasses, and he and Nic got onstage and sang an Elvis Presley song.”
It’s a law of nature that what goes up must come down, and right around then Lynch began sensing the beginnings of a backlash targeting him and his work. He knew he was powerless to stop it, too. The critics were very tough on Wild at Heart; Lynch was accused of drifting into self-parody, and although the film has been reassessed over the years and is now regarded as a valuable part of Lynch’s canon, that wasn’t the case when it came out.
It’s never been without champions, though, and among them is Montgomery, who concluded, “Wild at Heart won at Cannes because it’s a strong movie and it just kicked some ass that year at the festival. David opens new frontiers for people, and alt
hough many filmmakers might not want to acknowledge it, they were highly influenced by that film.”
The film has held up for many people, too. “Neither David or I had seen Wild at Heart since we made it, and when we started work on INLAND EMPIRE we watched it together and it was an amazing experience for both of us,” said Dern. “When it ended we felt really moved. It was like looking through a scrapbook and all the memories came flooding back. I love the bed scenes the most. I love working with David when we’re in a car or a bed and there are isolated characters and everything else sort of stops in a way that only happens with David.”
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE way Twin Peaks became like a TV show rather than a film, and when it stopped being just Mark and me I kind of lost interest. And then I read Wild at Heart and really liked the characters. The way that happened was Monty came to me and said, “David, I read this book called Wild at Heart and I want to direct it. Would you consider being executive producer?” I said, “Let me read the book,” and then as a joke I said, “Monty, what if I really love this book and want to direct it?” and Monty said, “Then you’ll direct it, David”—and that’s what happened.
It was the perfect time to read that book, because the world was coming unglued then. There were drugs on Hollywood Boulevard and it was scary to go down there at night; there were gangs out in the Valley and you’d hear gunshots every night—the world was going insane and I saw this as a love story in the middle of hellish insanity.
