by David Lynch
The first draft of the script was considerably longer than the final shooting script, dated August 8th, 1991, and entire characters were cut from the story, as were the flourishes of humor that balanced out the grislier aspects of the television show. Fire Walk with Me is essentially a story of incest, and it’s hard to put a cheerful spin on that.
Filming began in Washington on September 5th, 1991, and principal photography was completed in a little over three months. On set in Seattle as unit publicist was Gaye Pope, a widely loved figure who went on to be Lynch’s personal assistant and a trusted confidante. She worked with him until April of 2003, when she died of cancer. Deepak Nayar was there, too, this time as first assistant director. “Instead of me driving David to work, I rode with him, and Kyle’s brother [Craig MacLachlan] drove us,” said Nayar. “[DP] Ron Garcia and the script supervisor, Cori Glazer, were usually there, too, and we’d ride together and discuss the day’s work.
“We were on nights—one thing you can be sure of with David’s films is that you’ll be shooting nights at least thirty percent of the time—and one day David said, ‘So tell me, Hotshot, what time do you think we’ll finish on Saturday? We’re gonna finish before midnight.’ I told him that was impossible because we wouldn’t wrap the Friday night shoot until Saturday morning and couldn’t do that fast a turnaround. Nonetheless, at two on Saturday afternoon I get a call from David and he says, ‘Where are you? I’m waiting for you at the lunch table! You’re wasting time on purpose!’ I said, ‘Nobody’s going to be at the set but the teamsters,’ and he said, ‘See! You’re always sabotaging!’ At that point we made a twenty-dollar bet about when we would finish. I arrived on set that afternoon and I was right—nobody was there but four crew members, and when the first teamster arrived he had a look on his face like, Am I late? Word begins to get around about this bet David and I have, and the crew gets to work. At one point Sheryl needed to leave the set to change clothes and David says, ‘Nonsense! You’re wasting time! Bring her clothes here. You guys form a circle facing outward and Sheryl can change in the middle!’ Finally, at two minutes to midnight he looks at me and says, ‘Do you want to call it a wrap or should I?’ I said, ‘David, you deserve it, you call it.’ I gave him twenty dollars, then turned around and took a hundred dollars from a producer. I’d bet against myself and he was so angry! He said, ‘You’re buying drinks for everybody,’ and he made me spend the money I made on drinks.
“One day we were driving home from the set,” Nayar continued, “and David said, ‘Stop the car, Craig!’ Then he said, ‘See that woman over there on the street? Get her telephone number.’ I said, ‘What for?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know, just get her number.’ So I did and the matter was forgotten. A few days later he says, ‘Remember when I told you to get that woman’s telephone number? She’s in the next scene with Harry Dean.’ She played the old woman who lives in the trailer park and says to Harry Dean, ‘Where’s my hot water?’ David enjoyed throwing curveballs then watching people scurry around.”
Sweeney accompanied Lynch to Seattle, and by the time they returned to L.A. to start post-production she was pregnant. While Lynch began working on music for the film with Badalamenti, Sweeney got to work editing. “Mary tuned in to David in a way probably no other editor could have,” said Ray Wise, who co-starred in Fire Walk with Me. “They had a kind of unspoken language between them.”
Lynch and Badalamenti had one, too, and the score for Fire Walk with Me was the most comprehensive collaboration they’d ever attempted. With songs by Lynch and Badalamenti, instrumentals by Lynch and David Slusser, and instrumentals by Badalamenti, the soundtrack is unique for a Lynch film in that it includes no pop recordings by other artists. Lynch and Badalamenti had fun building a score from the ground up.
“We were recording a song called ‘A Real Indication,’ and David was in the recording booth,” Badalamenti recalled. “He’d written this lyric that called for some kind of vocal improvisation, and I thought, I don’t give a damn, I’m gonna go for it and do something that’s really not me, I’m going to be outrageous. I ran the gamut of nuttiness, yelling and ad-libbing, and David was laughing so hard he got a hernia and wound up needing surgery.”
Having rounded up many of the principals from Twin Peaks, Lynch recruited a few of them to star in three television commercials he shot for Georgia Coffee that aired in Japan. And, in May of 1992, Lynch’s first European museum exhibition opened at Sala Parpalló in Valencia, Spain, just as Lynch and Sweeney headed to Paris, where they spent several weeks on final preparations for the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me premiere at Cannes. A party featuring performances by Julee Cruise and Michael J. Anderson was thrown in honor of Francis Bouygues, who was thrilled to be at Cannes with a new David Lynch film.
The powers that be were not on Lynch’s side at that point, though, and the reception the film received was less than generous. Fire Walk with Me is a complex, challenging work, and Ray Wise and Sheryl Lee—who essentially carry the film—both give searing performances. Wise is nothing short of terrifying and Lee is at turns sultry, baffled, and devastated. Nonetheless, audience members hissed and booed while it screened, and at a press conference that followed Lynch encountered open hostility. Accompanied by Robert Engels, Angelo Badalamenti, Michael J. Anderson, and Ciby 2000 producer Jean-Claude Fleury, Lynch was asked by a French reporter if his return to the world of Twin Peaks was the result of “a lack of inspiration.” Another reporter declared, “Many would define you as a very perverse director: Would you agree?” Quentin Tarantino was on hand and made the observation, “[He’s] disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie.”
Sheryl Lee feels lucky she missed it. “I couldn’t go to Cannes, because I was doing a play in New York and I was really bummed, but when I heard about the reaction the film got, it’s probably a blessing that I wasn’t there,” she said. “I don’t know if my skin would’ve been thick enough to deal with it.
“It’s not a comfortable film to sit through, and sometimes when an audience sees a film that makes them uncomfortable they get angry at the director,” continued Lee, who’s in nearly every frame of the second two-thirds of the film. “I think there was some of that going on. I don’t think it’s David’s intention to provoke people, but rarely do people see anything of his and say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ His work always has complexity and depth and layers of meaning, and it can be upsetting for people if they feel like they’re supposed to understand a film but they can’t distill it down into a simple story.”
In Sweeney’s view, the rough ride the film was given at Cannes came down to the fact that “people were addicted to Twin Peaks and wanted more of it, and they got a David Lynch film instead. Fire Walk with Me is dark and unrelenting and it made people angry.”
Ray Wise feels the film requires no explanation or apology. “Fire Walk with Me is David’s masterpiece,” he said. “Every aspect of his work is embodied in that film, and the fact that it was a prequel to a television series? Only in the mind of David Lynch could something like that happen, and he executed it beautifully.
“There’s a scene in the film where I’m in a convertible with Laura, and I think that’s some of the best work I’ve ever done,” Wise continued. “It was very hot the day we shot that scene, and there were lots of different takes and we were all kind of short-tempered, but we used that tension and channeled it into the work. And the last twenty minutes of the film are almost like a religious experience. People were hard on Fire Walk with Me when it came out, but I think the film has been reassessed and will be around for a long time.” Wise is right about this. In September of 2017, The Guardian’s Martyn Conterio wrote, “A quarter of a century on, the film is being rightly rediscovered by fans and critics as Lynch’s unsung masterwork.”
Fire Walk with Me opened in Japan on May 16th, directly on the heels of Cannes, and it did well there. The Japanes
e are rabid Lynch fans. Things didn’t go as well when it opened in America on August 28th, 1992. New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote, “It’s not the worst film ever made. It just seems like it.” Jennifer Lynch recalled that “Fire Walk with Me was really important to Dad, and I remember his terrible confusion at how it was misunderstood. He started to have a lot of trouble with Hollywood bullshit around that time.”
Sweeney was in the final days of her pregnancy at Cannes, and on May 22nd, just a few days after the film screened, Riley Lynch was born in Paris. “As soon as we got back from Cannes, we spent five weeks in Wisconsin with my mom in her house on Lake Mendota, and we started looking for property there,” Sweeney recalled. “Madison is a very enlightened, idealized Midwestern place, and the people there are friendly. David could go to the hardware store and gab with the guys, and he loved my mom and my big Irish Catholic family. By the end of that first summer we’d found a place, and we spent several months there in 1993 and 1994. I remember David watching the O.J. trial there, all day every day, while he thought about Lost Highway.”
Montgomery remembered visiting the couple in Wisconsin and said, “That’s something David never would’ve done if it weren’t for Mary—she got him out of his world. They bought a house there and he had a vintage wooden speedboat he loved and he seemed real relaxed.”
Lynch began turning inward at that point and embarked on an extensive series of modifications to his house in Los Angeles. It was then that he hired Alfredo Ponce, an ingenious jack-of-all-trades who’s been working for him ever since. “I was doing landscaping for one of David’s neighbors and he saw me over the fence and said hi—that’s how we started,” recalled Ponce, who was born in Mexico in 1951 and moved to Los Angeles in 1973. “He kept saying hi and then he asked me if I wanted to do some cleaning in his yard, and I wound up working on his pool house, and one project led to the next.” Over the years Ponce has done plumbing, landscaping, electrical wiring, mechanical repairs, created an irrigation system for Lynch’s property, and carved out the pathways that traverse the land. He knows how to pour a foundation, frame a house, and build furniture, and has built sets for film experiments Lynch has done at home. “Peggy Reavey once said, ‘There’s no way David could run an ad in the classifieds to find a person like you,’ ” Ponce said. “David’s a hard worker who always has ideas for things he wants to build and I like working with him because he just tells me what to do then lets me figure out how to do it. When he was working on INLAND EMPIRE he needed a set and he took a stick and drew what he wanted in the dirt and said, ‘Can you make this?’ That’s kind of the way we do things.”3
Ponce has been at Lynch’s place full time, five days a week, for years, and he sees everything. “People see me here cleaning or raking leaves and they think nothing—they don’t know how much I know,” he said. “I can smell things from far away, and I can see it immediately when someone comes up here who doesn’t have David’s best interest at heart. The negative energy—I can see that, and I’ve seen a lot of people come and go. David’s an easygoing, nice person and he can be taken advantage of, so I try to protect him. Anybody who works here has to be somebody I trust.”
Sweeney remembers their early years together as creatively fruitful ones for Lynch. “During those years David painted nonstop, he got a kiln and was doing pottery for a while, and he designed and built furniture in his shop. He did lots of photography and had several exhibitions in the United States and abroad. He never gets tired and has lots of energy, although he doesn’t physically exert energy. I was always after him to get some exercise and stop smoking [he took it up again in 1992 after quitting in 1973], but no luck there. He’s like a teenager about smoking.”
Robert Engels’s wife, Jill, had become pregnant at the same time as Sweeney, and after the two women gave birth to their babies just a week apart, the Engels family became regular guests at Lynch’s house. They’d visit on Saturday nights with their baby, and Lynch and Sweeney would order takeout. Mostly, though, they didn’t have much company. “David’s a hermit,” said Sweeney.
Lynch’s nesting instinct is strong, and when his next-door neighbor died in 1992 he acquired her house, then built a pool house designed by Lloyd Wright above the Pink House. Slowly, his house was becoming a compound. “We had a beautiful setup,” said Sweeney. “We both had painting studios, I had an editing suite, David had a woodworking shop, and then he built a mixing stage. We loved working and being home.”
Lynch and Frost then embarked on a television series called On the Air. Lynch is a fan of broad comedy, and as is the case with his unproduced scripts One Saliva Bubble and The Dream of the Bovine—which Lynch describes as “the story of two guys in the San Fernando Valley who are cows but don’t know it”—On the Air was a vehicle for sight gags, pratfalls, and unbridled silliness; all three of these projects reflect his admiration for the French comic genius Jacques Tati. Starring Twin Peaks alumnus Ian Buchanan, and set in 1957 at the New York headquarters of the Zoblotnick Broadcasting Corporation, the show chronicles the endless disasters that befall The Lester Guy Show, a variety program that’s televised live.
ABC responded well to the pitch for On the Air and ordered six episodes in addition to the pilot, which Lynch co-wrote with Frost and directed himself. Various friends then pitched in: Robert Engels wrote three episodes, Jack Fisk directed two, and Badalamenti did music. Although the show got good marks when it was screened for test audiences, ABC shelved the completed episodes for more than a year. They finally aired the pilot on Saturday, June 20th, 1992, and it did not do well. Even the late David Foster Wallace, a self-described “Lynch fanatic,” dismissed the show as “bottomlessly horrid.” It didn’t have many supporters.
“ABC just hated the show, and I think it only aired three times before they yanked it,” Frost recalled. “It was goofy and too off the wall for network television, but I think it was just ahead of its time. David and I looked at some of it recently, and it still makes both of us laugh and has some really funny stuff in it. After On the Air was canceled, David and I went our separate ways for a while. It had been an intense six-year period and I wanted to go write a novel.”
Tony Krantz, who helped get the show on the air, was mystified by the response it got. “On the Air was the lowest-rated show on TV at the time, but I loved it and thought it was great. Maybe it was too quirky or the bloom was off the David Lynch/Mark Frost rose—I honestly don’t know why, but it failed miserably.”
Lynch was immediately onto the next thing, of course, which in that case was the television project Hotel Room. A trilogy of teleplays set over several decades in the same room at New York City’s Railroad Hotel, the show was based on an idea of Monty Montgomery’s and developed by Lynch with Barry Gifford. Gifford wrote two episodes, which Lynch directed, and Jay McInerney wrote a third before the project was canceled. Shot late in 1992, Lynch’s two episodes—“Tricks,” set in 1969, and “Blackout,” set in 1936—are arguably the most actor-driven works he’s produced. The writing is quite spare, each episode was shot in a single day in extraordinarily long takes, and Crispin Glover, Alicia Witt, Harry Dean Stanton, Freddie Jones, and Glenne Headly turn in bravura performances.
“There was one day when David was rehearsing with the actors all morning through lunch and people were starting to panic because nothing was being shot,” recalled production coordinator Sabrina Sutherland. Born in Massachusetts, Sutherland studied film at UC San Diego, then got a job as a tour guide at Paramount Studios. By the mid-eighties she was working regularly as a production coordinator, and landed that job with Lynch on the second season of Twin Peaks. She’s worked with him regularly ever since, and produced Twin Peaks: The Return. “After lunch, people are just freaking out, then suddenly David started shooting these ten-minute takes, one after another. It was the weirdest day, but if what he envisions in his head isn’t happening with the actors, he keeps working with them until they get w
here he wants them to be—and that’s one of the things I admire about him. He’ll never settle for something or say, Okay, that’s good enough; let’s go forward. He won’t do that.”4
HBO aired the pilot, comprising all three episodes, on January 8th, 1993. Although the Los Angeles Times hailed the show as “marvelously absorbing,” The New York Times dismissed it as a “setbound omnibus drama” that “plays like a listless visit to a Lynch-style Twilight Zone where stories go nowhere.” “We shot three episodes and HBO hated them,” said Montgomery. “They were just too weird for them.
“David and I were always trying to cook something up,” continued Montgomery, who oversaw production for the music videos created for Michael Jackson’s 1991 album Dangerous. When it came time to produce a commercial teaser in 1993 announcing the release of the collection of short films made in conjunction with the album, Montgomery suggested Lynch, and Jackson thought it was a great idea.
“David’s a star, but Michael Jackson? That’s a whole other can of worms,” Montgomery said. “This was the type of deal where Donatella Versace herself came over to deliver two vans of clothes for Michael—and he was only going to be shot from the neck up!
“I don’t think Michael understood what David wanted to do, but the plan was to shoot Michael’s face in an extreme close-up with a high-speed camera. Finally, after much ado in the trailer, Michael came on set and goes over to David, and they’re having a conversation about The Elephant Man and getting to know each other. Then David said, ‘Let’s do it,’ so Michael gets in front of the camera, and he has to be really close to the lens, and as soon as the camera stopped, Michael ran into his trailer. Maybe forty-five minutes go by and David started getting impatient, so I knocked on Michael’s trailer door and said, ‘What’s going on?’ When you’re that close to the camera in the kind of lighting he was in, it’s as if you’re looking in the worst mirror at a truck stop, and what Michael saw freaked him out. Another hour went by and I finally got him back on set, but David was pretty fed up by then.”
