Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  In July of 2007 Stofle accompanied Lynch to Paris for the opening of an exhibition of work by Lynch and Christian Louboutin; the French designer produced a series of fetish shoes, which Lynch photographed. During their time in Paris Stofle got to know Louboutin, who offered her a job organizing events at his L.A. boutique, and she worked for him for the next five years. The hours were flexible, which was a necessity for her. “David and I traveled a lot in 2007,” she said, “and David needs a lot of care when he travels. He doesn’t like to call and order his own coffee, he doesn’t want to be there when room service comes—that sort of thing. He’s a happy person but he also has a lot of anxiety.”

  Returning to L.A., Lynch met a new staff member, Mindy Ramaker, who was to become an integral part of his operation. Ramaker moved to L.A. in June of 2007 from Madison, where she’d studied screenwriting with J. J. Murphy, who’d been one of Jay Aaseng’s professors. When Lynch had a position open, Aaseng asked Murphy for suggestions, and Ramaker started in late July. At approximately the same time Lynch purchased a twenty-four-acre parcel of land outside of Łódź, Poland, which he’s yet to develop. “It’s really good land,” said Lynch. “My parcel abuts a woods that’s state property so it can never be developed, so it’s private and beautiful with loamy earth that gently slopes to the east.”

  At the end of the year, Donald Lynch died in a Riverside hospital with Lynch and Levacy in attendance, then, on February 5th, 2008, Maharishi died. “The only time I’ve ever seen David cry was the day Maharishi died,” Skarbek said. “He didn’t talk about it but the tears said it all, and it was a side of him I’d never seen before. He was really moved by it.”

  After jumping through hoops to obtain the necessary visa, Lynch boarded a plane and attended the funeral in India, a country he was seeing for the first time. “In India, people drive really fast and come right at you, then they swerve off at the last second,” said Bob Roth. “You really think you’re going to die at any moment, and as we were driving along I looked at David and could see he was completely shocked by the way people drove.

  “I remember watching David watch the funeral pyre as it passed, and there was such a softness on his face,” Roth continued. “David has a huge heart, and he was really grateful to this person for what he’d given him. Other than Maharishi, David is the most authentic person I’ve ever met, and he’s fearless. I’ll watch a movie and there are parts when I have to look away, but David never looks away. He appreciates the whole of creation and is as enchanted watching a little hamster grow up to maturity as he is watching the body decay after it dies. He finds delight in all of life, including the dark parts, and I admire that in him.”

  After returning from India, Lynch said goodbye to Aaseng, who was leaving his post after seven years. “David helps you realize parts of yourself you hadn’t previously been aware of,” said Aaseng, who gives a memorable performance as a bloodied drunk being held in the Twin Peaks jail in Twin Peaks: The Return. “The day I left everybody got together for lunch and I gave a speech. I went around the table and said something about each person, and everybody got emotional. Afterward, David said, ‘Jay, you need to do acting! After what I saw you do there, man, that’s the thing for you!’ Acting was the furthest thing from my mind when I started working for David, but now I do some acting.”

  Early that spring, the music Lynch had been creating with Zebrowski for four years finally became available to the public when he released Polish Night Music, a recording of four extended improvisations largely inspired by the city of Łódź; he put it out on his own label, the David Lynch Music Company. By that point, Lynch’s relationship with Stofle was into its fifth year and she was ready to move forward. “Early that year I told David I wanted to get married and have kids and that if that wasn’t something he was interested in he needed to let me know, and in May of that year we got engaged,” she recalled. “We were at Les Deux Magots in Paris and he started drawing rings on a drink coaster, then he said, ‘I’m asking you to marry me.’ We went back to the hotel and he called my parents and asked for their blessing.

  “David and I had a great time during our first few years together,” she continued. “I learned to cook when I moved in, and I think he enjoyed that. I cooked without giving any thought to fattening ingredients and just made things that tasted delicious, and we both gained a bunch of weight. It was fun. There were all sorts of things he was working on, too, and he’d ask me to organize actors for different projects. Whether it was for a job or simply to explore an idea, all the projects were of equal importance—it was about seeing the idea through and making it real. He once made a video for a film festival that was honoring him, and he wanted to shoot it backward like the Red Room sequences in Twin Peaks. He asked me to get some girls for this and I asked my friends Ariana Delawari and Jenna Green, who often worked on these things with us. We nicknamed these projects ‘high school skit night’ because they had a kind of homegrown vibe. We all adored David and looked up to him so much. David asked me to find showgirl costumes for this particular film, so I rented beautiful satin leotards, I bought patent-leather heels and fishnet hose, and David painted dove bird props that we held while we danced backward.”

  Noriko Miyakawa was working for Lynch full-time by the time the high school skits were being hatched, and she had a hand in many of these projects. “It’s tricky to say I edit with David, because it’s always his vision entirely,” Miyakawa pointed out. “We work well together because I understand that. David’s not looking for a collaborator, because he doesn’t need one, and if he could do everything himself without asking for anybody’s help he would. The people who work for him have to be skilled, but basically we’re like his brushes.”

  Shortly after Aaseng left, Michael Barile arrived. Born in 1985 and raised in Florida, he landed a job as an unpaid intern at Lynch’s office in April of 2008 and wound up running the office. “David was entirely focused on painting when I started working for him, and he’d just go from his house to his painting studio every morning,” Barile recalled. “I worked for him for a month before I even met him.”2

  Lynch’s career as a visual artist was indeed barreling along by then, and he had seven exhibitions in 2009. He and Stofle made it official that year, too, and got married at the Beverly Hills Hotel on February 26th. “It wasn’t a big wedding—there were maybe a hundred people there—and when an Elvis impersonator who happened to be at the hotel saw that David was getting married, he hopped in and started singing,” recalled Skarbek. “I think he did ‘You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog.’ ” Chrysta Bell, who was among the guests at the wedding, said, “Emily and David are amazing together. Emily is a force of nature and he loves her and she gets it. There are kites and there are kite holders, and she’s happy to be the kite holder and let her partner soar.”

  Two months after marrying, the Lynches traveled to Moscow for the opening of The Air is on Fire. “It wasn’t the honeymoon I envisioned, but David just works, always,” Emily Stofle observed. After Russia, Lynch stopped off in Iceland, which had just suffered a systemic banking collapse that left its economy in free fall. “For years David said he was going to open a meditation center in Iceland,” recalled Joni Sighvatsson, “and in May of 2009 we were talking on the phone and he said, ‘Joni, we’ve gotta do something for Iceland. I’m going to Russia in five days and I’ll stop by on my way home.’ Iceland is small, and in five days you can let the entire country know somebody’s coming, and thousands of people showed up for David’s lecture in a university auditorium. Then David’s foundation put up two hundred thousand dollars, I put up one hundred thousand, and we opened a meditation center in Reykjavik, which is still going.”

  Later that year Lynch began working on a documentary about Maharishi that he’s yet to finish. Accompanied by Bob Roth, [assistant producer] Rob Wilson, and actor Richard Beymer, he went to India and traveled the same route Maharishi took from the Himalayas to t
he southern tip of India following the death of his teacher, Guru Dev, in 1953; the footage shot on Lynch’s trip was to serve as one of the foundations of his documentary. It took Maharishi from 1955 to 1957 to complete the pilgrimage Lynch and company made in just over a week, and their travels are chronicled in It’s a Beautiful World, a documentary directed by Beymer that was released in 2014.

  Beymer began meditating in 1967 after seeing Maharishi speak at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Los Angeles, then spent two years on staff with him in Switzerland. When Maharishi died, Beymer attended the funeral and filmed it, unaware that Lynch was there, too. “David heard about my film and asked to see it and he really liked it,” Beymer said. “Several months later when he decided to go to India to begin his film about Maharishi, he asked me to go along.”

  Lynch arrived in India from Shanghai, where he’d just shot a short film, and when his plane landed he was exhausted and sick with a bad cold. The trip was a bit of a struggle for him, but Lynch isn’t a person who cancels things, and he rose to the occasion. “We were there for ten days and we went everywhere,” Beymer said. “We drove, we flew in helicopters and planes, and we were out all day every day and had a lot of fun. I was usually in the front seat of the car filming David, who would be in the back with various people. If David’s just looking out a window, he pulls you in—even when he’s doing nothing, he’s fascinating. Odd little things about India delighted him, too. One day we were driving somewhere and he looked out the window and spotted a monkey in the distance, and suddenly it was as if he was eight years old. ‘Look! Look at the monkey!’ He was so excited! He couldn’t believe a monkey was out there just running around loose in the world.”

  In December of 2009 there was a grand unveiling of the Gehry plans for the Camerimage Film Festival center in Łódź, which had been in the works since 2005. Gehry and Lynch attended the ceremony, and spirits were high. “Then, two months later, the mayor of the city, Jerzy Kropiwnicki—a great, forward-thinking man David nicknamed ‘Old Boy’—was recalled, and a new government came in and destroyed the project,” Zebrowski recalled. “During that same period David and Marek [Żydowicz] had developed the EC1, an abandoned power plant they’d bought from the city in 2005 and transformed into a post-production studio. The building won all kinds of architectural prizes, then in the summer of 2012 that same new mayor visited David in L.A. and said, ‘Mr. Lynch, you can come to Łódź anytime, we’d love to have you, but the property is ours. You can be our guest.’ David—who’d put his own money into this—just looked at her and said, ‘How do you dare? If I don’t own it, I’m not coming.’ Marek filed several lawsuits in Poland, but you can’t fight city hall. So David and Marek built this place, then the government expropriated it and simply took it away from them.” In 2010 the Camerimage Festival relocated to Bydgoszcz, a small town two hundred miles from Łódź. EC1 continues to be referred to as the David Lynch Studio.

  Shortly after the unveiling of the Gehry plans, Lynch collaborated with John Chalfant on an installation titled Diamonds, Gold, and Dreams for the Fondation Cartier Pavilion at the international fair Art Basel Miami. A seven-minute digital film projected onto the ceiling of a domed tent, it depicted shimmering diamonds floating across a night sky.

  Obviously, Lynch had no shortage of things to do, and filmmaking seemed to be a remote aspect of his life at that point. “When I first started working for David, it seemed like he was in a funk about movies,” said Barile. “He hadn’t made anything for a long time, and the last thing he’d made was INLAND EMPIRE, which got mixed reviews. Then, in 2010 he wrote an incredible script called Antelope Don’t Run No More, and he shopped it around but nobody offered him the funding he felt he needed to make it. When he couldn’t get it financed I don’t think he was horribly upset, though. David believes that if a thing is meant to be it will happen.” Set mostly in Los Angeles, Antelope Don’t Run No More braids threads from Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE into a narrative fantasia that incorporates space aliens, talking animals, and a beleaguered musician named Pinky; it’s impressed everyone who’s read it as one of the best scripts Lynch has ever written.

  On July 12th, 2010, Capitol Records released Dark Night of the Soul, a collaboration between Danger Mouse (Brian Burton) and Sparklehorse that was accompanied by a limited-edition book of one hundred photographs Lynch took in response to the music. It was the final recording by Sparklehorse, whose lead singer and songwriter Mark Linkous committed suicide on March 6th of that year, and the record included guest vocals by numerous musicians, including Iggy Pop and Suzanne Vega. Lynch handled the vocals on two songs, including the title track. That same year saw the presentation of Marilyn Manson and David Lynch: Genealogies of Pain, a two-person exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna. He returned to television in 2010, too, voicing the character of Gus the bartender on The Cleveland Show, an animated sitcom that premiered on Fox in the fall of 2009 and ran for four seasons.

  On New Year’s Day of 2010 Lynch had stopped smoking—a very big deal for him—then began editing “Lady Blue Shanghai,” a sixteen-minute Internet promotion for a Dior handbag that was released in June of that year and stars French actress Marion Cotillard. Lynch loves the French, and in August of 2011 he and his staff traveled to Paris for the opening of Silencio, a nightclub inspired by the club of the same name that serves as the setting for a scene in Mulholland Drive. Created in collaboration with designer Raphael Navot, architectural firm Enia, and lighting designer Thierry Dreyfus, the club is described by Skarbek as “almost like a bunker. It’s six floors underground and very small and dark and beautiful. It’s like a little jewel box inside.”

  That fall, the album Lynch had been working on with Chrysta Bell since 1998, This Train, was completed. “It took us years to make that album, and it seemed like it was never going to happen,” she said. “I felt ridiculous for even thinking it could happen, but I learned so much every time I got to be with David that I felt I shouldn’t ask for more.

  “The way we work is, David talks, then I start feeling melodies and singing, and he guides me by explaining where he sees the song going,” she continued. “We did a song called ‘Real Love,’ for instance, and I remember David saying, ‘Okay, you’re Elvis and it’s late and you’re driving a car fast and your lover’s done something bad and there’s a gun in the glove box and you don’t know what you’re gonna do, but you know something is fucked.’ I never get what David wants right off the bat—it’s sculpted, for sure. If he feels like I’m really in the moment, he’ll do a couple of takes of the whole song, then he might go back to a particular part of a take and say, ‘Chrysta Bell, listen to this. Feel that mood there? You’re delicate but you’re strong—feel more of that,’ and I’ll go into that place. I can tell sometimes he’s frustrated when I’m not getting it, but he knows how to bring me back in without hurting my feelings. David knows exactly what he’s looking for, but he doesn’t bark orders. He creates a space where what he wants to happen can happen.”

  On completing the record, Chrysta Bell shopped it to several labels but was unable to generate much interest. So she launched her own label, La Rose Noire, paid to have the record pressed, released it on September 29th, then assembled a band and booked a tour. She did all the heavy lifting at that point because she felt that Lynch had already made his contribution to the record. “David is like a steward for ideas, and he’s set his life up in a way that allows him to receive and develop them,” she observed. “If he gets an idea at four in the morning, he’s going to get out of bed and write it down, and he doesn’t take a single idea for granted. It’s like, hey, you came to the right person!”

  It was a big music year for Lynch, and on November 8th he released his first solo album, Crazy Clown Time, made in collaboration with Dean Hurley. Concurrent with its release, a video for the title track was shot at the home of Gary D’Amico, who said, “We completely trashed my backyard with set dressing, and afte
r we yelled, ‘Wrap,’ the first one out there picking up trash was David.”

  Recalling the making of the album, Hurley said, “We started working on it in 2009, but we didn’t set out to make an album. David never puts the cart before the horse, and it’s always just about having fun doing the work and seeing what comes together organically. After working with David for so long my brain has sort of aligned with his, and the work we’ve done together is a collaboration, but it’s David’s vision, and the overarching statement is always his. I’m fine with being the behind-the-scenes guy helping him realize his vision, too, and I prepare for anything when he comes in to work. I have lots of stuff permanently ready to go, so if he wanders around the room and starts tinkling on something, I can open that channel and start rolling. He doesn’t take no for an answer when he has an idea he wants to develop, either, and if you tell him no he’ll persist until he finds a way to express what he wants to express. He doesn’t really play guitar, for instance, but he said, ‘There’s got to be a thing that lets you play guitar without actually knowing how to play it,’ and we figured out how to use a Roland pedal so we can program chords into his guitar and he can move through the vibe of a song.”

  Included on the album is a guest vocal by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on the song “Pinky’s Dream,” which came to pass courtesy of Brian Loucks. “David had a fantastic instrumental track he’d written with Dean, and I told him he should put a vocal on it and suggested Karen O,” Loucks said. “David said, ‘You mean that skinny girl you brought over who drank beer?’ So David wrote some amazing lyrics and Karen came in and sang them and she was incredible.

  “David’s gone different places in his collaborations with people and learned something from all of them, and he’s developed as a musician over the time I’ve known him,” Loucks continued. “He can think musically and has the ability to reimagine and transpose things. There’s a duo called the Muddy Magnolias who have a great version of ‘American Woman,’ and when Dean played it for David he said, ‘Play that song at half speed,’ and he wound up using it that way in Twin Peaks: The Return. He’s able to take artists to places they haven’t been before, too. Dave Alvin was once in his studio with a band, and David was explaining how he wanted them to play and saying things like, ‘A hot Georgia night and the asphalt’s melting…’ Afterward, Dave commented on how good David was at conveying what he wanted.”