by David Lynch
I do love Sunset Boulevard and I got to meet Billy Wilder several times. I was at Spago once when he was there with his wife, Audrey Young, and he came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders and said, “David, I love Blue Velvet.” Then we had breakfast together at some restaurant and I asked him tons of questions about Sunset Boulevard. I also love The Apartment—those are two incredible films—and I was a lucky guy to meet him.
It’s true that Los Angeles is kind of a character in the film. A sense of place is so important. The thing I love about Los Angeles is the light and the fact that it’s spread out. It’s not a claustrophobic place. Some people love New York, but I get claustrophobic there. It’s too much.
I used to think I liked the desert in Southern California, but I really hate the desert. I had a large piece of beef for dinner in the desert. I never eat red meat but that’s what they served on this particular night, and I slept in someone else’s bed that night and had a dream that was so horrible and diabolical that the whole next day I had to mentally fight a thing that was going on. I don’t remember what the dream was, but I remember the feeling, and I couldn’t talk to anybody and had to be alone to fight it mentally. It was only when I got back to L.A. that it lifted. That ended the desert for me. There are places with bad vibes and places with good vibes, and I slept and ate in a bad place.
There are weird things in L.A., too, for sure. I remember the Sunday I went to the Copper Penny with Jennifer and had a Grand Slam. Jen and I were sitting in the booth and behind me I heard people talking and they were fantastic. It was Sunday and they were having a discussion about God and many passages in the Bible. They seemed intelligent and nice. I thought, It’s great that people are talking like that on a sunny Sunday morning. Then we get up and walk out and Jen said, “Do you know who that was sitting behind us?” It was the head of the satanic church.
* * *
—
I loved making the Mulholland Drive pilot but ABC hated it, and even though we cut something together and sent that over to them, I had a bad feeling. I remember thinking, I’m in with the wrong bunch. The way some people think is they think money, and all of their decisions are based on the fear of not making money. It’s not about anything else. Their jobs are at stake and they have to make money, and they think people won’t like this, we won’t have a hit, we won’t make money, and I’ll lose my job. It’s the wrong way to think, but that’s what happens.
The first cut I sent to ABC was too slow, but because we had a deadline there wasn’t time to finesse anything, and the second cut lost a lot of texture, big scenes, and story lines. But when I look back on it now I can see that it was fate, and what happened with Mulholland Drive was the most beautiful thing. This film took a strange route to become what it became, and it needed to do that apparently. I don’t know how come it went like that but it went like that and now it’s there and it was meant to be this way.
Pierre Edelman was in L.A. and he came up to the painting studio and I told him about what happened with Mulholland Drive. I told him it was dead, but in my head…I’m not saying I knew it wasn’t dead, but I knew it wasn’t finished, so always there’s possibilities. Pierre saw it and really liked it, so we discussed turning it into a feature and he went to work. As Mary Sweeney used to say, “Pierre is the straw that stirs the drink.” He connects people, but he’s not running a studio so he can only do so much, and it took a year from Pierre coming to my studio for the negotiating to be done. A year. And I’ll tell you what it is—it’s the middlemen. If you’re the one who’s going to give money to me, wouldn’t it make sense for you and me to sit and talk? In a couple of hours we could work it out. How come it took a year? Because so-and-so over in France is busy, and they call someone over here, and this person says, I’ll get back to you, and some days go by and finally they call back and talk, and that person is now on vacation, then they call and say, Let’s make a time when we can talk about this on a conference call, then it’s a week later, and then so-and-so is sick so we better wait, and so on. See, these people aren’t that excited about your thing, because they’ve got a lot of things going, and one thing leads to another and months go by. That whole deal could’ve been done in six minutes.
A year later I got a call saying it’s green-lit, we can do it, then I called to find out about the sets, the props, and the wardrobe. I was told that the wardrobe had “gone back into the stream.” I asked the guy, “What does that mean?” He said, “It means that stuff wasn’t saved for you.” Who knows where it is? Sally may be wearing the same damn thing we’re looking for in some show right now, and you’ll never get it back. Then I found out that all the props had gone back into the stream, too, and that the sets had been improperly stored and were in bad repair, and it wasn’t Jack’s fault. On top of all that, I had no ideas for how to finish this thing when the green light came.
Just about that time I tell Tony, “I don’t think it’s possible to go back into this world because everything’s gone.” He said, “If you don’t do this I’ll sue you,” and the way he said it ended any friendship or good feeling about that person. I couldn’t believe he’d say that, and I saw a side of him that made me think, That’s not for me. I never got a call from Disney about them suing me—Tony said that to me on the phone. People are themselves, and Tony was the one who got me to work on Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive and that’s a good thing. At the same time, there are things that ruin a friendship, and although I forgive Tony, I don’t want to work with him again. Tony’s right that the entertainment industry is “a collaborative community,” but I can’t stand that way of thinking. It’s not a collaborative thing at all. Yes, you work with people who help you, and you can ask a hundred people their opinion, but in the end all decisions have to be made by the director.
The same night Tony said that to me I sit down to meditate, and like a string of pearls, one idea after another came along, and when I finished meditating I knew exactly how to finish the film. Then I worked with Gaye and fleshed out my ideas, and there were the eighteen pages I needed.
There was some sex in those eighteen pages, and Laura and Naomi were great about it. I did promise Laura I would airbrush out parts of her body in the nude scene, and there’s one place in the scene where she’s standing and that had to be taken care of. They’ll freeze that frame, make a still of it, and it will be in every magazine, so you have to do that.
I didn’t do lots of takes of Naomi’s masturbation scene because I wanted her to be in a particular frame of mind for that scene. I don’t do that. We kept doing takes because she wasn’t getting it, and you keep going until you get it. This girl is doing this because she’s hurt and angry and desperate, and a whole bunch of emotions are swimming and swirling inside her and it has to be a certain way. There’s a certain thing the scene has to do, and Naomi got all those things in there.
The night we were shooting the dinner party at the end of Mulholland Drive, we got shut down for something. Angelo was set to fly back to New Jersey that night and that was our only chance to shoot him, so all these people are around shutting us down and I went over and talked to Angelo, then I went over to Pete and said, “You’ve gotta be careful, but put the camera on Angelo and focus that puppy—that’s good right there, that’s nice, Pete,” and I signal Angelo, and he did what I’d told him to do, and we stole that shot while these people are running us out of there.
So we finished the film and it was exactly what it was supposed to be and we went to Cannes. It went well in the world but it never made a lot of money, but nothing I do ever really does. We’re all just working for the man now. We get a shot of white lightning and a chick and that’s about it.
Lynch loves working free of the strictures of Hollywood, and The Straight Story was as close to an in-house family affair as he could get it. Sweeney co-produced, edited, and co-wrote the script; Jack Fisk did production design; Harry Dean Stanton and Sissy Spacek w
ere in the cast; Angelo Badalamenti did the music; and Freddie Francis was the DP. The budget was small, Lynch had final cut, and he produced a quiet masterpiece.
“In early summer of 1998 David told me Mary Sweeney had written a script called The Straight Story and he wanted to make the film,” recalled Pierre Edelman, who was a producer on the film. “At the time I was a consultant for Canal Plus which was a subsidiary of StudioCanal, and everyone in France was away on vacation, so I was alone in the offices when I began negotiations with David. But I managed to finalize a deal for a budget of around seven million dollars, and in late September he started shooting.”
Sweeney gives Edelman a lot of credit for getting the project off the ground. “Tony Krantz, Rick Nicita, and CAA were gone by the time we did The Straight Story, and along comes Pierre,” she said of the film, which was a co-production of Picture Factory and Canal Plus. “It was the end of June and the entire country of France is on vacation, and Pierre is tracking down people in the south of France. We had a bidding war because it was a low budget and people weren’t afraid of it the way they’re always afraid of David’s projects. Even people who can’t handle his work love David himself, and they were delirious at the thought of what he was going to do with that material and thrilled to work with him.”
Produced by Sweeney and Neal Edelstein, and executive-produced by Edelman and Michael Polaire, The Straight Story initially included Deepak Nayar as part of the producing team, but he reluctantly left the project, and Lynch’s life, following a budgetary dispute. “David changed my life and career,” Nayar reflected. “He gave me the spark I needed, but more important than that was the love and affection he gave me. I came from India not knowing a soul in Los Angeles, but it didn’t matter to him that I was just a driver. He treated me with dignity and respect and gave me the opportunity to do more. I have my own company now and have lots of projects going on, but my fondest memories of my entire career are of working with David. He single-handedly made me what I am today, and I can never thank him enough for giving me a break.”
Starring in the film and carrying almost every scene is the late Richard Farnsworth. After answering a casting call in 1937 for five hundred Mongolian horsemen needed for The Adventures of Marco Polo, Farnsworth drove a chariot for Cecil B. DeMille in The Ten Commandments, had his first speaking role in 1976 in The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, and was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for his work in Alan J. Pakula’s 1978 Western, Comes a Horseman.
It’s hard to imagine anyone else in the part of Alvin Straight; Farnsworth’s wise, beatific face is a movie. “The minute I read the script I identified with this old character and I fell in love with the story,” said the actor, who was seventy-eight years old when the film was shot. “Alvin is an example of fortitude and guts.”1 Farnsworth had retired in 1997 but decided to go back to work when he read the script for The Straight Story.
Sissy Spacek played Rose, a character based on Straight’s daughter, and recalled, “David, Jack, and I had been talking about different projects we could do together for years, and The Straight Story fit us all. I think David thought it would be great to be up there with Jack, you know, ‘We can bust out a wall with sledgehammers if we need to, like in the old days.’ They’ve been busting out walls with sledgehammers together for fifty years.
“The character I play speaks with an unusual stutter, so I had to wear an elaborate dental prosthetic and didn’t know if I’d be able to do it,” Spacek continued. “David believed in me, though, so I thought, Maybe I can do this, and it was a great experience. He was as lovely on set as he is in real life and was delightful to work with. Funny, kind, knew what he wanted—it’s easy working with David. One day, one of the actors who was up in years had a lot to do in a scene and he kept moving at the wrong time and messing up the shot, and he started getting really upset with himself. David was so patient and sweet. He said, ‘I’m just gonna tie a little string to your belt loop, and every time I want you to move I’m gonna give that string a little tug and you’ll know what to do.’
“People have said, ‘Oh, The Straight Story is so different for David, it doesn’t really belong in his world,’ ” Spacek added, “but if you know David you know it’s also part of who he is.”
Harry Dean Stanton, who plays Lyle Straight, had already appeared in four Lynch films prior to The Straight Story and was always happy to work with him. “David’s sets are very relaxed and he never yells at anybody—he’s not a yeller—and he gives me the freedom to improvise as long as I don’t mess with his plot,” said Stanton. “We always have a good time working together.
“I’m only in one scene in The Straight Story, and I needed to cry in it,” Stanton continued. “A while back Sean Penn gave me a copy of a speech by Chief Seattle, who was the first Indian to be put on a reservation, and I always cry when I read it, so David had me read some lines from the poem prior to shooting my scene. And it worked.”
Lynch’s colleague from The Elephant Man, cinematographer Freddie Francis, captured a Midwestern America that barely exists anymore. Shot along the two-hundred-forty-mile route Straight traveled in 1994, from Laurens, Iowa, to Mount Zion, Wisconsin, the film has an elegiac grandeur. Punctuated with images of the weathered red paint on the exterior of a small-town bar, stray dogs running down an empty main street, and aerial shots of the sleepy Mississippi River, it’s a beautifully paced film with a bittersweet mood that’s enhanced by exquisitely deployed periods of silence, along with Badalamenti’s wistful version of American roots music.
Jack Fisk is particularly good at films involving vast landscapes—he’s done most of Terrence Malick’s films, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, and was nominated for an Oscar for Alejandro Iñárritu’s 2015 film, The Revenant—and The Straight Story was a natural fit for him. “From back in the days when we were sharing studios, David and I had always been a little competitive, so it was better that we didn’t work together,” said Fisk. “But by the late nineties I realized, I’m working with other directors, trying to make their visions real, and I miss David and want to spend time with him. We had a blast on The Straight Story.”
Reflecting on the enduring bond between Lynch and Fisk, Spacek said, “David and Jack were first for each other. They were two young people in Virginia who both wanted to be artists and live that life, and from the moment they met they supported that in each other. That made it real for them, and they went to art school and traveled in Europe, then they went out into the world together and realized this dream they’d shared. Their friendship goes really deep and I think that’s why.”
Gary D’Amico, who was also in Iowa for the shoot, recalled The Straight Story as “the most fun project I ever did with David. And I got a SAG card out of it! I had a nice mountain bike with me on location, and David said, ‘I like that bike and want to put it in the movie, and I want you to ride it.’ Then he said, ‘Hey, let’s give Gary a line! How about “On your left, thank you.” ’ ”
As for his effects work on the film, D’Amico said, “There’s a scene where a semi passes Alvin as he’s going down the highway and it blows his hat off. The camera was shooting him from behind and David said, ‘I want that hat to come right at the lens,’ and I said, ‘David, a passing truck would blow his hat forward, not backward.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but this is my movie and I want it to blow backward,’ so I said, ‘Backward it is.’ The hat had to travel around fifty feet, so I rigged a system with eight pulleys, and each one pulled the hat around eight feet. The AD said, ‘David, we don’t have time to do this, and it’s not even going to make the movie,’ and David said, ‘How do you spell horseshit? Gary spent a lot of time rigging this and we’re gonna shoot it.’ And it did make the movie.”
Lynch completed post-production on The Straight Story while the Mulholland Drive drama was playing out, and the series had been scrapped by the time he took The Straight Story to Cannes in spring o
f 1999. The film did well there and was an audience favorite, but was passed over as far as prizes. “I organized a party for the losers at the Carlton after the Palme d’Or ceremony,” said Edelman, “and David was there with Pedro Almodóvar and some other people. It was a fantastic party and David was happy and he forgot about the awards.”
“The audience at Cannes loved the film,” said Sweeney, “and the screening there was a moving experience. It was the first time everybody in the film had seen it, and Richard, Sissy, and Jack were there, and it was so fun. We came out of the Grand Palais and Angelo’s music was playing through outdoor speakers, that Italian soul Angelo’s got with a trace of yearning country twang added to it—we were all so happy. It was the last time Freddie Francis worked, and the last time Richard Farnsworth worked, and it was just a beautiful major chord.”
IT TOOK MARY and John Roach a long time to write the script for The Straight Story, and I kept hearing about it but I had zero interest, and then they asked me to read it. Reading something is like catching ideas—you picture it in your mind and your heart, and I felt all this emotion coming out of the characters in this script and I thought, I want to make this. In the years leading up to that movie I’d been spending time in Wisconsin and getting a feeling for the kind of people who live in that part of the country, and that probably helped me love the script.
