Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  “David’s very specific about what he wants,” said assistant location manager Jeremy Alter, who was raised in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and came to L.A. in 1989 to study film at UCLA. “I spent almost the entire shoot looking for the house where Balthazar Getty’s character lives. David said, ‘I want a house with views into adjacent yards, a garage on the left side, a big living room, a serving area in the kitchen, a backyard without a pool, a hallway off of the main area, and a bedroom big enough for a motorcycle. I must’ve looked at a hundred and fifty houses.”4

  After two weeks of rehearsal with Pullman, Getty, Arquette, and Loggia—“Robert Blake required no rehearsal,” said Lynch—the shoot commenced at Lynch’s house on November 29th with Peter Deming manning the camera. A graduate of the AFI’s cinematography program, Deming entered Lynch’s orbit in 1992 when he shot six episodes of On the Air and all three episodes of Hotel Room. Lost Highway was the first feature they made together, and Deming has worked steadily with Lynch ever since.

  “I read the script, and the first day of shooting was a daytime scene in the Madison house,” Deming recalled. “I set up the lights, but once I saw the first rehearsal I turned to the crew and said, ‘We’ve got to start over.’ You don’t get what’s going on in that scene from the words on the page. Although the dialogue in that scene is banal, there’s a huge amount of tension in it. Less is always more with David, and he can do so much with so little in terms of dialogue and where he has people pause; we were shooting a simple conversation where nothing much is said, but the mood between the two characters is incredibly intense.”5

  A key part of Deming’s learning curve with Lynch involved lighting, which is a crucial element of Lynch’s visual style. “David wanted some of the night scenes so dark—even the interiors—that it became a joke between us and we created a scale of darkness,” said Deming. “He’d say things like, ‘This is next door to dark.’ There’s a scene where Balthazar’s character is heading out for the night and he passes his parents in the living room and they say, ‘Sit down, we need to talk to you.’ There were two lamps in the living room, and when David came on set he said, ‘Why are those lamps on?’ I said, ‘They’re sitting in the living room. You don’t want them sitting in the dark, do you?’ Which was a stupid question to ask David Lynch. He said, ‘No, but there shouldn’t be lights on in here. The room should be lit from the porch light outside.’ So we ripped everything out and relit it with one light out in front of the house.”

  The film was produced by Sweeney, Tom Sternberg, and Deepak Nayar, who had a vivid memory of a night shoot in the Southern California city of Downey. “We’d taken over a big street and we had cars and there was a stunt sequence and everything was outside,” he recalled. “At six o’clock on the evening of the shoot, I get a call from Peter Deming saying that it’s raining. We’d already shot the scenes that preceded and followed the scene we were shooting that night, and it wasn’t raining in them, so I called David and said, ‘This is one of our biggest days, the cost of running this thing is huge, and we need to carry on shooting tonight. Can we shoot this indoors?’ He immediately said, ‘Nope. We’re gonna shoot outside. Get me two hoses, two good-looking boys, two good-looking girls, and have them there when I get to the set.’ David came up with the brilliant idea of having these four kids playing with hoses and getting each other wet, so the water in the scene looked like it was coming from the hoses rather than from the sky.”

  As is probably clear by now, everyone who works with Lynch marvels at his ability to think on his feet, including Deming, who recalled, “The last night of shooting was a desert scene involving a dilapidated shack, and we’d actually wrapped when David turned to Patty Norris and said, ‘What’s gonna happen to the shack?’ She said, ‘The art department will take it apart tomorrow,’ and David said, ‘Can we blow it up?’ She laughed and David said, ‘Seriously, can we blow it up?’ Then he called Gary D’Amico over and said, ‘You got any gasoline, Gary?’ Gary said, ‘Gee, David, I wish you’d told me about this—I’m not sure I have what I need to do it.’ Gary then set out to find what he needed, and shortly after that he was planting gasoline charges in the shack.”

  D’Amico concurred: “David pulls lots of stuff out of his hat. When we blew up the shack I expected a huge explosion, but the wind was blowing so intensely that it was hard to get anything to blow outward, so the building kind of went up like the Hindenburg. It wasn’t what I planned, but the second I pressed the button David said, ‘That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ ”

  Filming continued through February 22nd of the following year, making it a relatively long shoot. “Typically you can’t wait for a shoot like that to end, because it’s exhausting,” said Deming, “but everybody was sad when we wrapped because it’s such a fun adventure working with David. There’s an element of surprise every day and he challenges you to come up with stuff.”

  “David’s never happier than when he’s shooting,” said Sweeney, “because it’s like he’s got this big machine helping him realize the vision in his head.” Lynch was able to take his time with Lost Highway, too, and after wrapping principal photography, the film was in post-production for months. “Those were the glorious old days of gestation,” said Sweeney, “and the post on Lost Highway lasted for six months, which is unheard of today. The second house turned into a hive, and the top floor was taken over by benches and assistants running around.

  “There was a stretch of four or five months during post when we had Friday night cocktail parties,” she continued. “Marilyn Manson came, Monty Montgomery, sales agents from Ciby—word got around, and people who came regularly would bring other people. Late nights, lots of red wine, cigarettes, and David regaling everyone with stories.”

  In 1995, Lynch’s family expanded with the birth of his only grandchild, Syd Lynch. “Dad’s been extremely generous to me in many ways, and he’s the reason I was able to have my daughter,” said Jennifer Lynch. “I got pregnant and didn’t know what the fuck I was gonna do, and I didn’t have a good enough reason not to have the baby, and Dad said he would help. And he did.” Lynch is something of an absentee father—you aren’t likely to see him at a high school play—but he shows up for his children when they really need him.

  Lynch lost a family member of sorts on December 30th, 1996, when Jack Nance died under mysterious circumstances at the age of fifty-three. An alcoholic who’d been sober throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Nance’s life took a dark turn in 1991 when his wife of six months, Kelly Jean Van Dyke-Nance, committed suicide. Nance himself died of a head injury following an altercation with two men outside an L.A. donut shop, and although his death was investigated as a homicide, no arrests were ever made. His presence is a pungent seasoning in Lynch’s work from Eraserhead through Lost Highway—with the exception of The Elephant Man he appears in all of Lynch’s films—and his premature death was a significant loss for Lynch.

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  Distributed by October Films, Lost Highway opened in the United States on February 21st, 1997, and didn’t do well at the box office. And as is usually the case with Lynch’s work, critics were split regarding the merits of the film. “Lynch has forgotten how boring it is listening to someone else’s dream,” said Newsweek’s Jack Kroll, while Film Threat hailed Lost Highway as a “wholly fascinating look into the psychoses of the human mind,” and Rolling Stone summarized it as “the best movie David Lynch has ever made.” Nobody is neutral on the subject of Lynch.

  And you’ve got to hand it to him. He was on probation with the critics when he decided to make Lost Highway, but he charged forward anyway and turned out one of the most inscrutable, difficult pictures of his career. With a running time of two hours fifteen minutes, this is not a user-friendly movie. Unrelentingly dark, with a fractured, nonlinear plot that defies easy explanation, and sex scenes that opened him to accusations of misogyny, Lost Highway is a kin
d of declaration of independence. Critics didn’t like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, but with Lost Highway Lynch reminded the film community that he wasn’t making movies for them and was answering to the higher authority of his own imagination. When writer David Foster Wallace did a location piece on Lost Highway for Premiere magazine he raised the question of whether David Lynch “really gives a shit about whether his reputation is rehabilitated or not….This attitude—like Lynch himself, like his work—seems to me to be both grandly admirable and sort of nuts.”6

  As usual, Lynch had a lot more than a movie going on; in 1996 he had art exhibitions at four venues in Japan, and the following year there was an exhibition at Galerie Piltzer in Paris, a city that was to become a kind of second home for him. The paintings he was producing during this period are potent and disturbing. In Rock with Seven Eyes, from 1996, a black ellipse with seven randomly placed eyes hovers in a mustard-colored field; it could be read as a portrait of consciousness, a UFO, or a black hole. In My Head is Disconnected, from 1994–1996, a male figure waves to the viewer as his head drifts away encased in a cube. The bluebirds of happiness that occasionally turn up in Lynch’s films rarely make an appearance in his visual art.

  In April of 1997 the Salone del Mobile, in Milan, Italy, presented a collection of Lynch’s furniture that had been produced in a small edition by the Swiss company Casanostra. Selling for between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars, and drawing on various sources of inspiration including the Bauhaus, Pierre Chareau, Richard Neutra, and Charles Eames, Lynch’s pieces tend to be more sculptural than utilitarian. He thinks most tables are too big, too high, and cause “unpleasant mental activity,” and his Espresso Table (designed in 1992) and Steel Block Table feature small surfaces best suited to a coffee cup or an ashtray.

  By the time Lynch’s furniture made it to that Italian showroom, his deal with Ciby 2000 had totally unraveled. “That was an unusual deal for David to make, because it was a little restrictive,” recalled Sweeney. “They were guaranteeing total creative control, but there were all these markers on the path to a green light that we had to meet, and we worked vigilantly with our lawyers to make sure we hit all those marks. But things still went south after Francis Bouygues died between Fire Walk with Me and Lost Highway.

  “David had a pay-or-play three-picture deal, but he’d only made one film when Francis died, and by 1997 they were saying we were in breach of meeting the terms of the contract—terms we’d been careful to satisfy to the letter,” Sweeney continued. “They claimed they didn’t have to pay millions of dollars that David was owed for pictures two and three, but we had a paper trail documenting everything that transpired. The case started in Los Angeles, then they managed to get it in the jurisdiction of France, and David’s brilliant lawyer, George Hedges, got the French courts to freeze the assets of the company until this was resolved, and they were forced to settle the case.”

  Movie business skirmishes of this sort remind Lynch of the way he really likes to work: Given his druthers, he’d rather be alone in a studio, building every part of an artwork—be it a film or a painting—by himself. At that point he decided to stay home for a while and make records instead.

  Lynch’s home recording studio was operational by the end of 1997, and musician and engineer John Neff had come on board to run it. On August 25th, 1998, Lynch released Lux Vivens (Living Light), a collaboration with British musician Jocelyn West. Lynch had met West—who was married to Monty Montgomery at the time and went by the name Jocelyn Montgomery—two years earlier, when he was working in a New York recording studio with Badalamenti and she stopped by to meet him. She wound up spending the next seven hours recording a vocal for “And Still,” a song Lynch wrote with studio owner Artie Polhemus’s wife, Estelle Levitt. Lynch and West worked well together, and once the studio was completed he invited her to work with him. The music on Lux Vivens is based on verses by Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century German artist, musician, and visionary Benedictine abbess whose compositions are largely comprised of single melodic lines.

  Shortly after winding things up with Montgomery, Lynch met another singer who inspired him. Born in Texas in 1978, Chrysta Bell was lead vocalist for the gypsy swing band 8½ Souvenirs as a teenager, and by the time she was nineteen was a solo act managed by Bud Prager, the powerful music-industry figure who gave the world Foreigner. Prager landed a meeting with Brian Loucks, who listened to Chrysta Bell’s demo and said that she and Lynch might work well together.

  “Several weeks later I met David in his studio,” Chrysta Bell said. “We knock on the door and David opens it, and he has a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and the hair, and the white shirt half tucked in, and the khaki pants splattered with paint, and he gave me a hug and said, ‘Chrysta Bell!’ I wasn’t expecting that warmth—he was really helping me out.

  “That first meeting lasted for hours. I played David the demo for a song called ‘I Want Someone Badly,’ and he said, ‘I love your voice,’ then he played some tracks he’d done and went downstairs and brought back lyrics he’d written. David had tracks and lyrics, and my job was to bring melodies that would tie those things together. We recorded a song that day called ‘Right Down to You,’ and at the end of the day David said, ‘I’m thinking of starting a record label, and I’d like to make more music with you.’ I told him I was signed to RCA, and it seemed like that was the end of things.”7

  As it turns out, that wasn’t the end of things for Chrysta Bell and Lynch, but it took a while to get their partnership on track. Lynch was about to get insanely busy with other things.

  WHEN I’M NOT working on a film, I never feel anxiety like, Oh, I should be working on a film. No. You make something when you get fired up and you have a desire, but if nothing’s coming along, or you don’t have any ideas for something, or you’re in the idea pool for painting, then that’s what you do. It was a while before I caught another movie idea. For many years I didn’t have an idea for a film, and during that period I saw the cinema world changing before my eyes. The transition to digital was happening, people weren’t interested in cinema, and the art houses were dying like the plague. Eventually there will be no theaters and the majority of people will see films on their computers or their phones.

  A lot of different stuff was going on then, and I got talked into a lot of things in those days. People would come and ask about something and I’d say okay, even though it wasn’t something I was trying to get going, and they just wanted me to be involved in their thing. I don’t know that I’ve learned to stop doing that, but I think I have. I’m not a company and I say no to a lot of things.

  In 1995 Lumière and Company called and said that forty directors from all over the world were being asked to make short films using the original Lumière Brothers camera made out of wood, glass, and brass. It’s a hand-cranked camera with a little wooden magazine that holds fifty-five seconds of film, and I thought it sounded cool, but I had no ideas. Then I was in the woodshop and I got this idea of a person who’s been killed—I still have the original drawing I made when I got the idea—and we got working on it pretty fast. We built a hundred-foot dolly track in Gary D’Amico’s yard and [special effects engineer] Big Phil [Sloan] was running it, and another Phil who worked with Gary made this big box that went over the camera, and when you pulled this wire these doors in the box would fly open and you could shoot. Then you’d pull it again and the doors would bang shut for a tiny instant while the camera moved on the dolly from one set to the next. There was a shot of a body in a field, a woman on a couch, two women dressed in white with a deer, a huge tank Gary built with a nude woman in it, and some men walking around carrying these stick-like things. Then you move through smoke to a sheet of paper that explodes into fire and reveals the final set. You couldn’t miss a single mark, and you only had fifty-five seconds to make all these changes, and it was thrilling. They had a Frenchman cranking the camera—he went everywhere with
it—and we had six or seven people on the dolly, and there were like a hundred people there and everybody had a thing to do. The woman in the tank was named Dawn Salcedo, and she did a great job. She could only hold her breath for so long, but everything had to happen at a precise time and she had to be in the tank holding her breath when we arrived at the tank. At the beginning of the film there’s a woman sitting on a couch who’s having a premonition, and as soon as we got that shot, these guys had to get in there and move the couch to the last set. It was so much fun.

  During that period after Fire Walk with Me, I was trying to get this film going called Love in Vain, based on a script I read a long time ago by this fellow from Brooklyn named Alan Greenberg. It came out later, in 2012, as a book called Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson, but he wrote it as a script first. This Jewish guy from New York wrote the blackest story and I wrote to him and told him I really liked his script and he came around with producers a few times over the years, but it never happened. It’s Robert Johnson’s crossroads story, and it would be an abstract period film set in the South. The feeling in the script was that there are the blacks and their world and there’s no way a white person could ever know what that is. It’s a thing, and music comes out of it, sex comes out of it, Sterno, rabbit’s foot, piney woods, juke joint, milling around, and people calling out. It doesn’t matter if you spent the day picking cotton. It’s what happens after you finish picking cotton, and it’s beautiful, all the little sheds, these women and the way they communicate without talking, and the magic of this music. The myth is that Robert Johnson couldn’t play guitar until he met the devil at the crossroads, and after that he could play like crazy. He was asked to play at a party at a man’s house, so the party is going on and the man’s wife is getting drinks for Robert while he plays. When she took the drinks to him she was rubbing herself on him, and Robert’s getting drunk. The husband sees what his wife is doing and puts poison in Robert’s drink, and Robert Johnson dies crawling in the grass in agony.