Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  I can’t remember when Richard Farnsworth’s name came up, but once it did he immediately became the guy. Richard was born to play Alvin Straight, and every single word he spoke had the ring of truth. Richard had innocence, and that’s part of what made me fall in love with him for the part. Alvin Straight was like James Dean except that he was old—other than that, he was a rebel who did things his own way, and Richard was that way, too. People really don’t have an age, because the self that we talk to doesn’t age—that self is ageless. The body gets old but that’s all that changes.

  Richard’s been in a lot of movies, and every time I’ve seen him I’ve felt like, I like that person. I don’t know why he wasn’t a superstar, but I don’t know if he even wanted that. In a way he didn’t consider himself an actor, because he came to acting from rodeos and stunt work, but Richard was the perfect Alvin Straight and we were thrilled when he said he’d do it. Richard doesn’t like negotiating, and he said, “This is my fee,” and it was reasonable, but he didn’t even want to talk about it. So we said peachy-keen, fine. Then, lo and behold, he said he couldn’t do it. He didn’t say why but it could’ve been his health, because Richard had cancer then. We said, Oh no, this is horrible—horrible for Richard and horrible for us. That’s when I thought of my dear friend the great actor John Hurt. He’s so good that I thought he might be able to do this character, and I talked to John and he said he’d do it.

  Every year Richard came to L.A. from New Mexico where his ranch was, and met with his manager/agent and they had lunch. It was a tradition for them. So he came in after he’d turned down the part, and when they met for lunch she said, “Richard, you look really good,” and he says, “I’m feeling really good.” She said, “You know, Richard, maybe you should do The Straight Story,” and he said, “You know, I think I should and I can and I will.” So he called and then I had to call John Hurt, who totally understood, and we had Richard. We were so thankful and he did everything so well and was always cheerful, always Richard.

  Richard was seventy-eight and Freddie Francis was nearly eighty-one when we shot the film, but they were more than keeping up with everybody—Freddie and Richard were setting the pace. Freddie’s health wasn’t so good, either, and although he lived for eight more years, The Straight Story was the last film he shot. It was dangerous for Richard to drive that thing, too. It wasn’t the safest rig, but he’d broken lots of bones as a stunt guy and Richard was brave as can be, and he got younger as we went along. It was impressive what Richard did. No one realized how much pain he was in throughout the shoot—he kept that to himself. He was a cowboy.

  I love Sissy and I’ve known her for a long time. Jack brought her around when he started going with her when I was working on Eraserhead, and for a while she was my sister-in-law. Her agent was Rick Nicita and he became my agent, and they were there all along, sort of setting the stage for different things. Jack and Sissy gave money to Eraserhead, and they’re family. I always wanted to work with Sissy and she was the perfect person to play Rose. Other than Sissy and Richard and Harry Dean, the actors in the film are all from that part of the country, so they had a feel for the way people live and talk there.

  That film came together very fast. We started shooting in late summer, and we had to work fast because that part of the country gets really cold early in the fall and most of the picture is set outdoors. Because we traveled the same route Alvin Straight actually took, it made sense to shoot in sequence, so that’s what we did.

  My favorite scene in the film is the ending. What Richard and Harry Dean did together is just incredible. Jack built Lyle’s house, which was a beautiful house, and it was up high and was surrounded by mountains and there was sort of a dip in the mountains where it sat. So Richard is going down this incline toward the house with the heavy weight of the trailer behind him, and he turns into Lyle’s and the thing stops. Richard gets off and walks partway to the house and he calls out to Lyle. The light was just beautiful and the sun was right on him and he calls out to Lyle and the second after he did that the sun goes behind the mountain. If we’d been seconds later we would’ve missed that completely. We were so lucky to get that. Then, when Richard spoke to Lyle he had this little choke in his throat, and that little choke of the heart is incredible. Harry Dean and Richard Farnsworth? The word “natural” is them. Harry is as pure as can be and Richard’s that way, too, and you can feel that in that scene.

  I also love the scene in the barroom when Richard is talking to Verlyn [actor Wiley Harker] about World War II. That scene is completely about what’s inside Richard and Wiley, and the only thing I did was keep everything quiet and let them sit with each other and set up two cameras on them, both in close-up. There was no rehearsal and that scene was shot in one take.

  Everything is relative. The Straight Story is a peaceful story, but there’s violence in it, too. When Alvin’s lawnmower threatens to go out of control, that’s very violent for Alvin, but it’s balanced—there has to be balance in a film. Once you start down a path you’ve got rules, and you have to obey the rules of the path you’re on, and you can’t go down two roads at the same time. Maybe the people in this story seem saintly, but we’re seeing only a part of them in one specific circumstance, and this doesn’t mean The Straight Story is the truth about the Midwest, or that Dorothy Vallens is the truth about all women. It’s a slice of something. A slice can ring true, but it’s not the whole truth.

  I’ve always said that The Straight Story is the most experimental film I’ve made, and it is pretty different from movies I’d made before, but really, everything is an experiment. You gather pieces you think are correct, but you never know if they’re right until you actually combine them. You’ve got to have image, sound, music, and dialogue going in a really delicate balance to get the emotion. How the music comes in, how loud it gets, how it goes away—these things have to be perfect, and the music Angelo wrote for that movie was so important to it.

  The Straight Story was in competition at Cannes, so a whole bunch of the crew and cast went over and we had a great screening. It was such a good feeling in the room; it was just beautiful. Mira Sorvino was sitting in a row ahead of me, and when it was over she turned around and looked at me and touched her hand to her heart and she was just sobbing. She felt what was happening in the film. It was a real emotional screening, and that’s the night Harry Dean told the story.

  After the screening we all ended up at the Petit Bar at the Hotel Carlton. Angelo and Pierre and Harry Dean and I and a couple of other people were sitting at one end of the bar where it was kind of quiet and we ordered drinks, and we’re sitting there and Harry Dean said a sentence. None of us can remember exactly what it was—something about chocolate bunnies and a dream Harry Dean had—but he said this sentence and we laughed, then he said a second sentence and we laughed twice as hard. We’re thinking that’s the end of it, but then he said a third sentence, and a fourth sentence, and each sentence topped the previous one, so we were really laughing, and he went on for eighteen more sentences! You know how they shoot compressed air in your mouth and your cheeks expand? That’s how my head felt by the ninth sentence. I was dying laughing and my tear ducts were dry from crying-laughing. He just kept topping himself, and nobody can do that! Something will break it! But the delivery, the timing, the words, the sequence of words, it was fucking flawless, unbelievable—I’ve never seen a stand-up comic do anything like what Harry Dean did. We could hardly stand it we were laughing so hard, and by the end of this we were dead. We still talk about this thing. If Angelo and I are together for more than fifteen or twenty minutes we always get back to that night, but neither of us can remember what Harry Dean was talking about. Harry Dean is so pure, pure self, pure Harry Dean.

  Richard Farnsworth was in Cannes with us, then after the dust settled on The Straight Story he went back to his ranch. Maybe a year later he went. He figured, When it’s beginning to look like tomorrow I won�
��t be able to move my arms, then I have to do it, and that’s what he did. He shot himself. It’s a cowboy story, really.

  David Cronenberg was the head of the jury at Cannes that year, and The Straight Story was definitely not his cup of tea. He probably thought it was total bullshit. It’s the luck of the draw who’s the head of the jury, and that’s the person who sets the tone of the festival that year. We thought this film could reach a broad audience because it was tender and heartfelt, and the people in it were so good and the themes of brotherly love and forgiveness were so beautiful. And when the ratings people called and said the picture had a G rating, I said to the guy, “You have to tell me that again!” It was a weird time, though. The Christian fundamentalists didn’t embrace the film, because it had the word “hell” in it, and although Disney put it out, I don’t know what they really thought of the film. Whatever they did to promote it, it just didn’t catch. I guess it’s partly my destiny, but it didn’t catch. I was at this party once and Spielberg was there and I said to him, “You’re so lucky because the things you love millions of people love, and the things I love thousands of people love.” He said, “David, we’re getting to the point where just as many people will have seen Eraserhead as have seen Jaws.” I don’t know about that. All I know is that there are lots of films out there and I don’t know if anybody cares.

  We shot that film in the late nineties. You know how you pass a cornfield and normally you’d see corn and maybe a fence around the field? When we were shooting The Straight Story I saw these signs in front of different rows of corn and I thought, What is this? What it was is they were experimenting with GMOs, and I’m pretty sure all those farms I saw are GMO farms now and there’s no more Mother Nature corn. In the old days there were many little family farms. Then the bigger farms—the rich people—started buying the little farms and now there are just a few giant farms, so there are fewer farmers and all the little communities are completely gone. You know, you meet somebody, Farmer Bill’s daughter, and you fall in love, and you stay in that area and have a farm and you do your work. That’s gone now. All the little schoolhouses are gone and there are rows and rows of GMO soybeans and corn.

  It used to be that a farmer would save a portion of his seeds for planting next season and he’d give them to collectors, who stored them in silos. These seed collectors are sobbing now, and all the farmers they had relationships with are under pressure to be GMOs, and you’ve got to buy your seeds from Monsanto next year. Those seeds only last one year and they’re packed with insecticides and herbicides. If the farmer next door doesn’t want those seeds, some of them still might blow onto his land, and if they do Monsanto sues that farmer, saying “You stole this; we have a patent on this.” They pit one farmer against another, the seed guy’s sobbing, his kids are sobbing, and the neighborliness of that world is gone. They probably say the food is fine and we have to feed such a big population, how else are you going to feed them? You’ve got to get scientific to feed so many people. Maybe. But Mother Nature has been crushed and all of this happened because of money.

  After the frenzy of activity surrounding The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive, Lynch embarked on a kind of return to his first principles. He began to simplify and staffed his office with energetic young people eager to devote the kind of time and commitment to his work that Eraserhead required. He doesn’t like it when things get too big and unwieldy, and he wants to be left in peace to make whatever it is he’s decided to make; it’s never been about fame or money for him, and that became increasingly apparent as he moved into the twenty-first century.

  “The most challenging thing about representing David was trying to get his work into even the edges of the movie mainstream, and I failed to do that,” said Rick Nicita. “Although Twin Peaks got him to the very center of television and popular culture, his movies were always marginalized. But he didn’t want to be in the center, and while that was initially frustrating to me, I began to savor it after a while. I don’t think David’s ever had the intention of doing a lot of movies. He could’ve played the game and pushed it harder, but I don’t think he was interested in that, because he had other things to think about. And he’s always been happy within the world he’s created for himself.”

  By the end of 2001, movies had become a low priority for Lynch, who was already deep into his next creative adventure. “David was one of the first people I knew who got involved with the Internet, and when he started doing programming it was like he was starting his own TV station,” said Neal Edelstein. “He got bored after a while because the technology couldn’t stay far enough ahead of him, but at the beginning he was really fired up about it.”

  Among those with a front row seat for this was Erik Crary. Raised in Lodi, Wisconsin, Crary moved to L.A. in January of 2000 and began working for Lynch in September of that year. “It was surreal going from a job stuffing envelopes at a management company to sitting across a table from David Lynch,” Crary recalled. “It was completely crazy to have that opportunity.

  “David’s daily life is very busy even when there’s not a film going on,” Crary continued. “He’s shooting photos, painting, writing, building things—he does a lot—and when I arrived they were focused on the launch of the website. We’d meet with David in the morning to go over what would be happening that day, and somehow that meeting morphed into what we called a ‘power walk.’ We’d have the same meeting only we’d be walking up this steep hill and around a big block. It took half an hour and it would be David, Jay Aaseng, me, and sometimes Austin.”1

  When you launch a website there’s got to be something on it, and Lynch devoted a good deal of time during this period to creating content for his site. “I was mostly assisting David with what he called experiments, shooting in the backyard or around L.A. One thing that excited him about the Internet is that it introduced technology that allowed you to do a lot with a little, so if he had an idea he could say, ‘We’re going to build a set in the backyard and light it and there will be these props, then we’ll shoot,’ ” recalled Crary of Lynch, who has no trouble keeping up with assistants decades younger than him. “Some days were crazy because we’d have a normal day of doing assistant stuff, then we’d shoot all night. David was putting those hours in, too, and I have no idea how he maintains the energy level he has.

  “Initially I think David thought the Internet could be a source of revenue,” Crary speculated of the site, which charged ten dollars a month for membership. “The idea was that subscribers would generate money so David could shoot more things for the site, and it would be kind of like a mini-studio. Everybody was launching websites then, and nobody knew what the model was capable of.”

  Edelstein was in on the ground floor of Lynch’s website but was gone from the office by the time it launched. “I hit the ceiling at my job with David, but I stayed in touch with him after I left,” Edelstein said. “I still have so much love for him. He’s a great person and I’ve never seen him do anything bad to anybody. He gave me my career, he’s loyal, he believes in people, and he practices what he preaches in terms of meditation.”

  * * *

  —

  The website launched with considerable fanfare that began with an email blast:

  THIS IS THE DAVIDLYNCH.COM NOTIFICATION!!!!!­!!!!!­!!! ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2001, AT 9:45 AM PACIFIC STANDARD TIME, DAVIDLYNCH.COM WILL LAUNCH ITS MAIN SITE….THIS WILL BE FOLLOWED SHORTLY BY THE LAUNCH OF “NEW SERIES” EXCLUSIVELY FOR THE NET, AND IN TURN, THEY WILL BE FOLLOWED BY THE OPENING OF THE STORE….THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN DAVIDLYNCH.COM….I LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU THERE!!!!!!

  DAVID LYNCH

  “It was a pretty big morning up there,” said Crary. “Alfredo built a big light box we switched on in the studio at the exact time the site went live. We also held a ‘Lunch with Lynch at Bob’s Big Boy Raffle’ that all subscribers were eligible for. The winner was a girl from England, who came over with a
friend.”

  The content for the website expanded throughout 2002 and was created almost entirely by Lynch. He provided a daily weather report—he simply looked out his studio window and shared his thoughts on how he expected the day to shape up—and produced a series of shorts. There were three episodes of Out Yonder, which feature Lynch and his son Austin conversing in a bizarre dialect that combines moronic babbling with flashes of insight. DumbLand, a series of eight crudely animated shorts, also completed in 2002, chronicles the misadventures of a belligerent half-wit named Randy, his son Sparky, and his long-suffering wife. Emanating from the same realm as The Angriest Dog in the World, DumbLand is an explosively violent symphony of gross, puerile humor; there’s lots of farting and belching. An online store sold Eraserhead posters, caps, film stills, pins, coffee cups, and T-shirts, DumbLand coffee cups, Angriest Dog in the World T-shirts, and various short films.

  The most widely known of the shorts Lynch produced during this period is Rabbits, which premiered on June 7th, 2002, and was later incorporated into his tenth film, INLAND EMPIRE. Comprising nine episodes set in a middle-class living room furnished with an ironing board, among other things, Rabbits features three rabbits speaking in mannered haikus occasionally punctuated with a sitcom laugh track or the distant whistle of a passing train. They’re among the most inscrutable works Lynch has produced. Starring as the rabbits—and hidden in life-size rabbit suits—were Scott Coffey, Laura Harring, and Naomi Watts.

  “I feel an incredible debt to David, and anything he asks me to do I have to do,” said Watts. “I owe him a lot and it’s always fantastic to spend time with him. Wear a bunny suit you can’t breathe in that’s seven thousand degrees inside? I don’t care; I’ll do it for David. Those suits were really heavy, though, and once you put the head on you couldn’t see anything. I’d hear him saying, ‘Okay, Naomi, finish your ironing and go out of the room.’ I’d start walking and bump into a wall and he’d say through his bullhorn, ‘Not that way, Naomi, turn right; go to your right, Naomi.’ I said, ‘David, I can do this voice later and you can get one of your assistants to actually wear the suit in the scene,’ and he said, ‘No, it has to be you in there.’ ” Harring, who’s claustrophobic, said, “I had to close my eyes and just breathe. It was intense and David never explained to us what we were doing. We just followed his instructions.”