David Lynch: Climbing the 'Peaks'
The cult-cinema director looks back on his landmark ''Twin Peaks'':
How ABC ruined it, why he'd never work in TV again, and what,
exactly, Agent Cooper is doing today.
By Jeff Jensen | Oct 26, 2007
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20154190,00.html
DAVID LYNCH ''The question of what happened to Laura Palmer was
the goose that laid the golden egg. Then ABC asked us to snip the…
Image credit: Everett Collection
DAVID LYNCH ''The question of what happened to Laura Palmer was
the goose that laid the golden egg. Then ABC asked us to snip the
goose's head off, and it killed the goose''
''She's dead...wrapped in plastic...''
With these creepy words — intoned by the late Jack Nance — Blue
Velvet director David Lynch and producer Mark Frost launched their
deeply beloved, greatly irritating, and widely influential cult-classic
TV series Twin Peaks in the spring of 1989. It was a smashing
success...for a few weeks or so. Initially, the show became an
international phenomenon thanks to its engrossing, aggressively
marketed ''Who Killed Laura Palmer?'' mystery, quirky-cool hero
(Kyle MacLachlan's pie-loving, coffee-swilling FBI agent Dale
Cooper), and Lynch's auteur celebrity and distinctive brand of
oddball wit, rich imagery, and atmospheric dread. But soon, viewers
began tuning out in droves, alienated by the cryptically-plotted
murder investigation, a deep dive into what the hell?! mysticism, and
the general appearance of aimlessness. Following an erratically
scheduled second season, the bizarre boomtown of Twin Peaks went
bust in 1991.
Now, after years of delays, due to wrangling over rights to the show's
two-hour Lynch-directed pilot (which itself remains one of great
artistic achievements in TV history), Paramount is bringing the entire
Twin Peaks experience — the pilot, plus the first and second seasons
— to DVD. Dubbed Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition (see
the EW review), the 10-disc set is loaded with extras, including
deleted scenes (a rarity for a Lynch-authorized DVD), the rarely-seen
and truly spooky alternate ending to the pilot (created for a featurefilm version that was released abroad), cast and writer episodic
commentaries, and documentaries tracking the creation of the series
and the unique phenomenon it sparked. Once again, Twin Peaks lives
— and it's wrapped in plastic, no less. An excited Lynch recently
spoke with EW.com about Twin Peaks from Milan, where he was
exhibiting a collection of his paintings.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You know this is a dream come true for
Peaks freaks, don't you?
DAVID LYNCH: Well, yeah, it's kind of a dream come true for me, too,
because the pilot has never been included with the series [on DVD],
and now it is.
When I interviewed you a couple years ago about the history of Twin
Peaks, you told me at that time that you love the whole notion of an
ongoing, never-ending story, and that's really what you had hoped to
achieve with Twin Peaks.
A continuing story, right.
Why is that a ''beautiful thing,'' to use one of your favorite
expressions?
Because you can go deeper and deeper into a world and discover
more and more things. A feature film has an ending. A continuing
story doesn't. Eventually it could, but it can just go and go and go, and
if the ideas keep flowing, it can be pretty thrilling.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: In your imagination, is the Twin Peaks
story still going?
DAVID LYNCH: Well, yes and no. Obviously, there is a lot more. And
there are clues, not only in the series, but in the feature film, Twin
Peaks: Fire Walk With Me [the poorly received 1992 prequel], that
indicate something more, but I've never had a chance to go there.
Is there a chance that we could go there again?
I don't think so. On the Internet, maybe, but it's a big deal. It's a
hungry medium, and it would take 100% focus to go there.
In your imagination, what's Agent Cooper doing right now?
[Pauses] I'd rather not say. [Laughs]
I know ABC asked you and co-creator Mark Frost to wrap up the
Laura Palmer murder mystery much sooner than you wanted—
About 10 years sooner! [In a previous interview with EW, Lynch
revealed that his original plan was to resolve the Laura Palmer
murder mystery at the very end of the series. The idea was that the
ongoing investigation into Palmer's murder would reveal mysteries
within mysteries to be solved, crimes within crimes to bring to
justice.]
In your mind, does that tarnish the way you personally feel about the
Twin Peaks experience?
For sure. Like I was saying before, the question of what happened to
Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) was the goose that laid the golden egg.
Then ABC asked us to snip the goose's head off, and it killed the
goose. And there went everything. It was never meant to be — there
was so much more to the mystery....
This DVD has many extras — deleted scenes, commentaries, a
conversation with you, Kyle Maclachlan and Madchen Amick (who
played Shelly the waitress on the show) about the series. But in
general, are you an extras kind of guy? Do you like to put that kind of
stuff on your DVDs?
I believe that a film or a series stands on its own — I believe in the
work the most. On the sidelines, extras can be very good. But it's a
tricky business. Extras could possibly taint what's most important.
But stories about the show or movie, or some deleted scenes — all of
that can be good, okay. The conversation I had with Kyle and
Madchen — they put us together in a kind of a Twin Peaks setting,
and we had some pie together and talked. It was real nice. The cast of
Twin Peaks was sensational. And there I was, after a long time, with
Kyle and Madchen, and it was nice to go back in time and talk about
things.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Twin Peaks introduced the world to
your ''fondness'' for many things, including coffee. Last year, you
launched your own line of coffee, David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee.
How's the business treating you?
DAVID LYNCH: It's going good. Every business is tricky. The coffee is
very, very good tasting. I drink it every day. I'm looking forward to
getting it out into stores. A lot of cinemas are starting to take it, and
that's cool — it's becoming like a cinema coffee. And it's fitting,
because part of the profits goes to the American Film Institute, which
helped put me on the map. So there are ideas in every bean, and
great, great taste.
Nice tagline! Twin Peaks is an incredibly influential show, and
inspired a lot of the great TV that's on today, including shows like
Lost. Do you watch much TV? Have you kept track of what's out
there?
No, I don't watch TV too much. Except when I travel. I haven't seen
Lost.
You tried to return to TV a few years back with a pilot for a drama set
in LA. When ABC passed on it, you famously salvaged the pilot and
turned it into one of your most acclaimed movies, Mulholland Drive,
which earned you an Oscar nomination for directing. Would you ever
be tempted to work in TV again?
No. I'd go onto the Internet, because Internet is the new TV. [You can
find some of Lynch's experiments in digital filmmaking and
storytelling at his website, davidlynch.com.]
One last question: did you know that Ray Wise — who played Laura
Palmer's demon-possessed father on Twin Peaks — is now playing
the devil himself on a show called Reaper?
Didn't know that! Ray can play the very, very good side and the very,
very bad side of people. I'm glad he's working away — but I hope it
doesn't take him down playing the devil.
WELCOME TO TWIN PEAKS
Serious Soap
Text DAVID TOOP
.. where the cherry pie is good and the scenery is beautiful, but where
there´s an occult evil in the woods, a brothel across the river, and a
drug cartel operating from the local roadhouse. Everyone in this
American smalltown has something to hide - a retarded son, a secret
society, a violent husband, an adulterous affair, a drug habit or a
business intrigue. But when the body of a schoolgirl is found on the
lakeshore, the deceptions start to unravel. A marriage of two Blues Hill Street and Velvet - the first series of this radical soap had 35
million Americans glued to their screens and ended with a cliffhanger
more tense than the shooting of J.R. Ewing...
... Now it´s your time to watch
"I feel a little bit strange," says David Lynch. The beginning of a
sentence, not a particularly strange sentence in itself, but it captures
the moment.
We are sitting in a large, L-shaped room. One wall, vast as a drive-in
movie screen, is glass; behind it lies the vegetal mystery and
darkness of the Hollywood hills at night. Lynch lost his dog to this
darkness - eaten by coyotes, he maintains. The room echoes with
voices and explosive snaps from a log fire, spearing the cold air,
ricocheting off the walls and ceiling. Three items of Fifties furniture
occupy the broad expense of the floor, megalithic in their hapless,
solitary engagement. Lynch may well have deliberately placed these
few chairs at shouting distance from each other in order to make
relaxation and intimacy as difficult as possible.
"I don´t do too many things deliberately," he says, slopping around
his disquieting home on a Sunday night wearing baggy trousers and
soft shoes. "That´s strange in a way," he continue. "I sort of know how
things should be, for myself. I´m also the victim of many happy
accidents. Freddie Francis used to call me Lucky Lynch."
It was a happy accident that led him to a collaboration with writer
Mark Frost on a television soap called Twin Peaks. The waves of
excitement, profligate praise, dismay and skepticism that greete first
the content of the series and then its US audience ratings, have been
rippling across the Atlantic since the first cherry pie, doughnuts and
coffee cult began to emerge.
Lynch met Hill Street Blues writer Mark Frost through a packaging
project - initiated by the agency they both share. The project - a story
about Marilyn Monroe - came to nothing, but Lynch and Frost clicked.
"Although this thing about Marilyn Monroe was not a comedy," says
Lynch, "I sensed that he had a kind of comic side. I had an idea for
this thing called One Saliva Bubble and asked him if he wanted to
write it. We put that together and we had a blast doing it. It´s a wacko
comedy. It didn´t get made either."
Despite this sequence of non-events, their agent, Tony Krantz,
pestered them to work on something for television. "Then one day,"
says Lynch, "we started getting these ideas fro this thing that later
became Twin Peaks. It started drawing us in. Then it didn´t matter
what it was for. We just wanted to do it. At first, I liked the story and I
also liked the idea that it would continue and that it could be like a
thing where you could explore this world and keep it going. But at
the same time I didn´t really think that it would continue. But every
single time we turned around we were getting a green light."
Initially, the response to Twin Peaks from ABC-TV, the
commissioning network, was cautious but enthusiastic. "They don´t
trust themselves," says Lynch. "In TV you can´t trust anything and
they learn that the hard way." The pilot of Twin Peaks directed by
Lynch, has been available on video since last December, and the
series will begin transmission on BBC2 in October.
In true Blue Velvet style, it is a story of festering, perplexing,
resolutely secret secrets set in small-town America. FBI agent Dale
Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, arrives in the rural logging town
of Twin Peaks to investigate the murder of a teenage girl. To most of
the 51,201 residents of Twin Peaks, the killing makes no sense, but
clues begin to emerge which suggest pornography, drugs, dark
rituals, torture and serial murder. Agent Cooper operates with an
unsettling blend of robotic charm, Tibetan mysticism and social
brutalism; his attention is divided equally between appreciation of
"damn fine coffee", the native cherry pie and wildlife, or his talent for
inspired, perhaps psychic deduction. "You know why I´m whittling?"
agent Cooper asks local sheriff Harry S. Truman as they sit together
on a stakeout. "Cos that´s what you do in a town where a yellow light
means slow down and not speed up."
"I love a small town," says Lynch. "It has to be a certain size small
town. It can´t be too small. It has to be big enough so that you don´t
know everybody and yet there´s these pleasant places and then
strange secrets and sickness there as well." Growing up in Montana,
Idaho and Washington, Lynch found his occasional childhood trips to
Brooklyn had a disturbing, contradictory effect. "It was like plugging
yourself into the electricity outlet. I couldn´t believe what I was
feeling and what I was seeing and it kinda got worse and worse...
more fearful and more violence and the air. Now, it´s just thick in the
air. It was a very powerful, fearful thing. It was not pleasant but sort
of thrilling. I wanted to know about it, but at a safe distance."
Did you feel that the places you grew up in were innocent?
"Not really," he says. "I know there was just the same sickness. The
proportions were the same but the numbers were smaller."
As soaps go, Twin Peaks is less bizarre, less remote, than Dallas,
Dynasty, or any of their cheaper derivates, yet it is more selfconsciously skewed and disturbing. Lynch ahs received the lion´s
share of the credit for this, but Mark Frost´s contribution is evident if
we remember the original impact of Hill Street Blues, with its
interwoven, open-ended narratives, eccentric characters and moods
that veered sharply between pathos and bathos.
Some critics have suggested that the whole exercise is a cynical
intellectual jibe at popular television. Perhaps it is more to the point
to say that Twin Peaks is an elaborate form of pop art which takes the
soap opera genre as a subject, rather than the more basic stimuli of
early Sixties pop art - comic strip frames, hamburgers, newspaper
small ads. "I really like soap operas," says Lynch. "I got hooked when
I was printing engravings at art school. This lady I was printing with
was just completely addicted to two particular soap operas - Another
World and The Edge Of Night - so I got hooked as well. I dug them.
The frustrating thing about them is that they draw the smallest
torments out forever. It works, but it´s frustrating. It think ours will
be a hair less frustrating. We´ll see. We may fall into the same thing."
Six other directors have worked on the first series of Twin Peaks,
with Frost as the constant factor to keep the original idea on the rails.
Lynch´s two-hour pilot, the episode that kicks off the series, has
already been released here on home video, though the otherworldly
`red curtain´ ending is lopped off for the TV version and reappears
later in the series as a dream sequence. In this scene, agent Cooper
appears to be in communion with alien beings or embodied spirits.
Lynch filmed the whole episode in reverse, with two of the actors
speaking their lines backwards and running through their moves
from back to front. The mood is as convincingly dissociated from
human experience as anything Lynch, or anybody else, has ever shot.
Moods are important to Lynch, and he treasures them. "In a day you
experience so many little different bits of moods," he says. "I guess
what´s kind of strange is that it may just be just a half a second but
you get a very strong mood and it makes a big impression on you.
You remember it. It´s sort of the way ideas are to me. They hit you,
but very quickly. They don´t last long, but they hit you, very hard. If
you can remember those moods and stay true to them, you can share
those moods with others."
Are there specific moods you remember and attempt to reproduce? "I
don´t do it specifially," he says. "In Blue Velvet I remember I always
was thinking about like a ... not necessarily summer night - it coud
have been a fall or winter night. A certain kind of neighborhood and a
certain kind of thing where you could maybe just a little bit hear
what was going on inside of some houses. I just kept seeing this
woman with red lips. Then I kinda put that together with Bobby
Vinton´s song and something started happening. I didn´t exactly have
tht night in my past, but somewhere the mood cam about from the
past. Little pieces here and there had all got together and there was
something in my head."
Are you interested in dreams, then`?
"Not really. I´m interested in some of the strange moods that they
instil in me. I´ve had some strange feelings in dreams."
Speaking of strange feelings, some of the strangest in a David Lynch
creation come from his capacity to generate a sense of dread. It is
surprising how rare, almost obsolete, a quality dread has become in
contemporary film and television. Dread is not the same emotion or
reaction as horror, fright, shock, cardiac arrest, nausea, hypertension
or deafness, all of which are adequately catered for by current
cinema (though none of them by the ever-diminishing emotional
spectrum of TV). Dread is a feeling of real fear that begins in the pit of
your stomach and spreads to your bones, your skin, your hair.
There are moments in Twin Peaks when dread permeates the
banality and oddness: the animal howls of humans in emotional
torment; the depiction of a serial murder´s paraphernalia - the
evocation of what Lynch calls the tradtion and intelligence of evil; the
eidetic mental image of an intruder, dredged from its surpressed
place in memory. There are the small, chilling stabs of ice that have
more in common with television of the Fifties than the present. Lynch
describes his own episodes as "a hair more fearful, and a little bit
stranger" than others, and agrees that television has lost its desire for
fear. "Some shows were much closer to movies," he says, "and there
were things that they did that were very fearful, especially to kids.
They´ve stopped doing it now. It´s all kinda plastic and strange. I
don´t know. You can get killed on TV. There´s just hundreds of
murders on television, but they´re completely bloodless and painless
and I don´t know what this kind of thing does to people."
The powerfully ambiguous moods that Lynch is so skilled at
deploying were at the root of his musical collaboration with
composer Angelo Badalamenti. During the filming of Blue Velvet,
producer Fred Caruso suggested Badalamenti (a musician who has
written songs for Nancy Wilson, George Benson, country star Jerry
Wallace and, more recently, orchestrated for the Pet Shop Boys and
Dusty Springfield) as an arranger and vocal coach for Isabella
Rossellini. Lynch also wanted Caruso to clear the rights to a song.
"Fred was having a horrible time getting this song so he came to me
with this wacko idea," says Lynch. "He said, `David, you´re always
writing these strange things down on paper. Why don´t you call them
lyrics and send some to Angelo? Tell him the feeling that you want
and he´ll write the song.` I said, `Look, Fred, quit trying to save
money, Angelo´s not a magician. He´s a musician.` And Fred said, `I´m
gonna get you the song that you want but in the meantime, do
yourself a favor. Give it a try.`
Lynch claims he sent Badalamenti a column of 40 words, written on
an envelope. Badalamenti recalls this incident during a telephone
conversation some months after my meeting with Lynch: "He sent me
a lyric called `Mysteries Of Love`. It was like six lines of poetry. I
called him and asked him, `What do you want me to do with this?
What kind of music?`He said, `Make it like the waves in the ocean.
Make the music like a beautiful wind and like the song chanting
through time. And cosmic.`So I said, `Oh, I´m glad you told me.`"
Lynch asked Badalamenti to find him a singer with an angelic voice.
Julee Cruise was singing in the chorus of an off-Broadway country
musical. Despite being a `belter` with a show voice, she took on the
required angelic characteristics. Following this, the curious
partnership came up with 40 songs and co-produced the remarkable
score for Twin Peaks, "Floating Into The Night", which is, like the
score for Twin Peaks, an eerie mix of cool jazz, ice-cream chords,
brooding drones and the heavy twang of a "hair more fearful" bass on
guitar. If Nino Rota had orchestrated "Pipeline" by the Chantays on
opium then it might have come out sounding like this.
Badalamenti describes the collaboration with Lynch as "an
unbelievable marriage, my second best in the world. We just tune in
to each other." Since Twin Peaks and "Floating Into The Night" they
have worked together on Wild at Heart, a performance piece entitled
"Industrial Symphony #1" and perfume commercials for Calvin Klein
and Yves St. Laurent.
In David Lynch´s house, another log from the fire goes off like a
grenade. Lynch has to rise early in the morning to shoot. "Cinema is a
thing where you have to use youre reasoned mind a lot," he says. "But
you also have to go into intuition and the subconscious mind too,
because cinema can work with those things so nicely." Earlier in the
evening he justified the so-called sickness of his work: "The
uncomfortable, stranger or sicker aspects should be done in a way
that is cinematically thrilling. Then I think that people can see it as a
cinematic, magical thing and enjoy all the different elements of the
film. If it was just sick for sickness´ sake it wouldn´t be right."
The cover image of the Julee Cruise album is a pink doll, maybe a
baby or an inflatable sex doll, floating in blackness. Cover designer
Tom Recchion recalls having been given the doll by Lynch, who had
mutilated it into something quite horrible. As I wait for a cab to take
me back into West Hollywood, Lynch says, "You should have a
chickenshit." He hands me a poster he has designed. Late at night I
unwrap it. It is a photograph of a chicken, a spineless chicken,
moulded from chicken shit. "This is a real spineless chicken shit," the
poster reads, "moving sullenly through its own desolate
environment." I grow a hair less fearful.
People, September 3, 1990, p-79-84
The brooding filmmaker behind TV´s Twin Peaks lives simply, but
he´s wild at art
By Jim Jerome
It takes David Lynch´s limousine just 30 minutes to get from his
Hollywood Hills home to the mysterious Pacific Northwest world of
Twin Peaks (as re-created on a Van Nuys, Calif. soundstage), and
sharing his early morning commute is just about the only way to
get the 44-year-old filmmaker alone these days. Lynch is spending
the summer filming the TV series` two-hour season premiere,
which airs Sept. 30, and the set has been closed tight since a
tabloid hit the streets claiming to reveal who killed Laura Palmer.
Though show spokesmen insisted the tab was off target, a memo
was promptly circulated, ordering all cast and crew members to
shred their script pages at day´s end in order to prevent future
Peaks leaks to "newshounds and fanatics" sifting through
Dumpsters, and the elusive director virtually dropped out of sight.
Lynch must be caught on the fly it at all. The other is that the
brazenly offbeat soap Twin Peaks, with its 14 Emmy nominations,
has helped turn one of Hollywood´s least-ready-for-prime-time
players, the avantgarde director of films like Eraserhead and Blue
Velvet, into the hottest, busiest property on town. Lynch´s new
movie, Wild at Heart, opened Aug. 17, and he is about to launch a
multimedia assault on the American mainstream. In the works are a
new series for the Fox network and a slew of Peaks-inspired
products (cherry pies and ties like those worn by Dr. Jacoby, the
series´ weird shrink, were discussed as possibilities). A series sound
track and a home video of his macabre Industrial Symphony No.1
performance piece (both composed with Peaks´ Angelo
Badalamenti) will soon be released as well.
"Working at this speed is unusually intense, but I really like it," says
Lynch, setling back for the daily drive to Van Nuys. "It gets kind of
crazy."
And kind of crazy is what David Lynch does best. Since his first
feature-length film, Eraserhead, a nearly silent black-and-white
tragicomedy about a hapless father trapped in a room with his
wailing, mutant newborn, Lynch has been serving up celluloid
worlds in which the bizarre lurks just below the surface of the
mundane. Blue Velvet, voted 1986´s best film by the National
Society of Film Critics, was a surrealistic murder mystery that was
set in motion with the arresting sight of a severed ear in a field.
Lynch´s disquieting dreamlike style was less pronounced in The
Elephant Man, 1980 (which earned eight Oscar nominations) and
Dune (his only directorial flop, in 1984). But Wild at Heart, loosely
adapted from a novella by Barry Gifford and starring Laura Dern
and Nicolas Cage, may be Lynch´s weirdest offering yet. A "violent
comedy, a love story in a twisted world" (by Lynch´s description)
that includes freak-show cameos and a fatal head bashing to heavy
metal music, it won the Palme d`Or at Cannes this spring.
"There are certain things you can do in films that you can´t do on
TV, obviously," says Lynch. "Wild at Heart goes to extremes - it´s
not a film for everybody. But as shocking as some things in it are,
they´re based on the truth of human nature, and there´s a lot of
humor and love wrapped up in that." Domestic critical response to
the movie has been mixed, but whether it´s a Palme or a bomb,
Wild at Heart is sure to add to Lynch´s mystique as the cinema´s
reigning Wizard of Odd.
Not that he looks the part. A Montana native, born in Missoula,
Lynch was an Eagle Scout at the Kennedy inaugural in 1961, and he
still exudes a disarming heartland earnestness. He has yet to
outgrow his upbeat boyish lingo ("you betcha", "neat", "cool"). He
dresses like an overgrown schoolboy, in khakis, cap and longsleeved shirts buttoned to the neck - a look that almost never
varies, even though by 9 A.M. it´s nearly 100 [degrees] F in the
San Fernando Valley. ("I have an eerie kind of feeling about my
collarbone," he once said, explaining the buttoned-up look. "Just a
breeze on it is sometimes too much for me."
Lynch values constancy in other aspects of his life as well. He prides
himself, for example, on having consumed, at one point in his life, a
chocolate shake and multiple cups of coffee every day at precisely
2:30 P.M. at the local Bob´s Big Boy. Says Mark Frost, Lynch´s
Twin Peaks co-creator: "David seems to have fewer moving parts
than the rest of us. But they´re from a high-quality watch factory,
maybe from off the planet somewhere."
At first meeting, Lynch reveals himself as a cagey mix of modesty,
well-timed humor - and calculated impenetrability. He knows what
you want - cluse to his disturbing, unhinged artistic vision - and
finds myriad ways not to surrender them. "I never talk about
themes," he snaps. "No way. A film should stand on its own. People
talk way too much about a film up front, and that diminishes it."
He will admit to reading Kafka for inspiration. He will also muse
about how meditation, which he practices once or twice daily, helps
give him access to his subconscious. "It expands the container and
allows you to sink down and grab those big ideas as they swim by,"
he says. "An idea goes in a little pop like a spark. Everything is
there in the spark. It´s kind of a fantastic process."
Actors delight in sharing that process, letting Lynch guide them to
new psychic limits before his lingering, voyeuristic camera. He is,
says Kyle MacLachlan (star of Dune, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks),
"a sound, mood and rhythm director. David hasn´t forgotten the
images, fears and desires you have when you´re 10 or 18 or 25.
They´re so pure, these images, that they have a lot of impact."
Says Laura Dern, who played girl-next-door Sandy in Blue Velvet
and in Wild plays the gum-snapping sex-bunny Lula: "All he´d say
to me was 'More bubble gum, more wind,' and wind came to mean
more mysterious, more eerie. David´s greates gift is that he sees
making a movie like a trip to Disneyland."
Lynch´s 22-year-old daughter, Jennifer, who was written a Twin
Peaks companion book entitled The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer
and is a budding director herself, offers further insights. "My father
makes films about what he knows with certainty," she says. "He
knows feeling lost, he knows the white picket fence with strange
things behind the door, he knows passion, and he knows extremes
of light and dark. Not Amityville Horror satanic dark, just darkness
in the purest sense."
He learned it all, somehow, growing up around Spokane, Wash. and
Boise, Idaho. His father, Donald Lynch, was a forest research
scientist with the Department of Agriculture; his mother, Sunny,
was a housewife. David spent childhood summers hunting rabbits in
the Idaho sagebrush and playing in western woods full of the same
mystery that seems to linger in the fog around Twin Peaks. He
found schoolwork uninspiring and retreated to imaginary worlds
through his drawing. When he was in his teens, he, his parents and
his brother and sister relocated to Alexandria, Va. There, Lynch had
"a kind of happy persona," but discovered that "all the thrilling
things just happened just after school or between classes. It added
up to some sort of pitiful joke - so constricting it would drive you
nuts. It inspired me to try to break rules. Behind it all, I was getting
it together to be a painter."
It was while studying art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine
Arts in Philadelphia that Lynch began experimenting with film,
animation and kinetic sculpture. The urban decay around him
served as inspiration. "I loved Philadelphia," he says. "The most
corrupt, fear-ridden city I´ve ever seen. It´s one of my major film
influences." In 1967, he married fellow art student Peggy Reavey;
daughter Jennifer came along the next year.
In 1970, a 35-minute live-action-animated feature called The
Grandmother - about a lonely, abused boy whose deceased
grandmother sprouts back to life from a seed planted in his bed earned Lynch a place at the American Film Institute´s Center for
Advanced Film Studies in L.A. He spent the next five years making
Eraserhead - five years of guerilla filmmaking at its hungry,
resourceful best. He supported himself and his young family with
such odd jobs as a paper route: "$9.80 a night was not a thrilling
rate, so I was pretty depressed," he says. "But I worked it to where
I was shooting the route in one hour, almost to the second - a
totally efficient hour. You learn to fold, bag and drive at the same
time."
Lynch persisted with his filmmaking, but his marriage ended
amicably in 1974. (Reavey, remarried, lives in the L.A. area and is a
teacher and writer.) Says Jennifer, who will soon direct her own first
feature, Boxing Helena: "It was easier for David to handle having a
child that could be his buddy rather than a responsibility, because I
don´t think he was ready to teach anything to anyone. We grew up
and matured together. Now it´s far more best friends than father
and daughter. To David, marriage and children have absolutely no
place in the art life."
For a while Lynch wondered whether he had any place there either.
"I got an awful lot of pressure to abandon Eraserhead and do
something worthwile," he says, "I just couldn´t. It was frustrating,
but also beautiful." The movie was released in 1977 to discouraging
reviews. But it quickly found a passionate cult following and also
caught the eye of Mel Brooks, who wanted to produce the story of
John Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man, and needed a writerdirector. Lynch accepted, the movie was a hit, and his career was
on its way.
Today, Lynch lives in a posh section of Hollywood Hills, in a
spacious, uncluttered home built by Llyod Wright, son of Frank. He
doesn´t so much entertain at home, says Dern, as "blast you back
into whatever space he wants to put you in" with his Bang &
Olufsen stereo. Favorite selections range from Elvis to opera to
Muddy Waters. Lynch´s taste in interior decor runs to homemade
artworks like "the bee board - real bees pinned to a board with
names under them like Hugh, Bart, Sam, Mack and Jim," says
Jennifer. "He gets them dead from a bug store."
As a father, Lynch has, fortunately, fared better than his Eraserhead
alter ego. "I´ve always loved palling around with Jennifer," he says.
"We´ve been close since she was born. I heard when she was very
young that you´re supposed to put moving colorful objects near
[children´s] eyes. It stimulates their brains. I glued all these things
onto a matchbook and bent little red matchsticks out and had a
little thread, and I´d dangle that in front of her. It seemed to
work."
Jennifer recalls offbeat adventures with Dad - hanging out at Bob´s
Big Boy listening to ZZ Top, building a mud pile with tunnels and
clay figures on her mother´s oak kitchen table, crawling inside the
wood and plaster "palaces" Lynch built for her, and trekking off to
film locations. "He was not your normal dad," she says. "But he´s
been the best dad he could be, and we´ve never had a blast."
Lynch was married a second time, in 1977, to Mary Fisk, sister of
his longtime friend Jack Fisk (a director who is married to Sissy
Spacek). David and Mary split some years later, and have a son,
Austin, 7, who lives in Virginia with his mother.
"Austin´s kind of quiet with a real dry sense of humor," Lynch says.
"He´s now using Warren Beatty as his idol - he wants to direct and
act."
Lynch won´t say much more than that about his private life.
Responding to the inevitable questions about Isabella Rossellini,
whom he directed in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and has dated
for four years, he throws up his hands to deflect curiosity. "She´s
one of the people David comes to life around," says Jennifer. "His
wit sharpens. They smile constantly. I´ve never seen two people
have more fun together. But David enjoys his independence.
Isabella live in New York, and the distance is probably the most
painful part, but it also keeps them wanting each other."
The two get together regularly, often at Rossellini´s country home,
where Lynch enjoys running his 1942 motorboat on Long Island
Sound. It is one of his few relaxations. "Happiness is doing what
you really enjoy," he says. "What I do is called work, but I love
working in all these mediums."
He hasn´t committed to another film yet. But with his directing fee
in the million-plus range, he doesn´t have to worry about running
out of cash. Not that he would. He recently sold his beloved,
perpetually overheated ´58 Packard and now drives a ´71 Mercedes
and an old pickup. "I´m not afraid of not having money," he says,
and in fact one of the few drawbacks of his current success s the
complication it has brought to his life. "I really liked living the way I
did during Eraserhead," Lynch says. "I had a TV, a shop with
enough wood to build things, a radio, a house, a washing machine.
No dryer - the sun dried my clothes, which was amazing. Now I go
onto a set with 60 people, and it´s just not the same. It´s harder to
feel the mood and settle into it."
He will manage, of course. For he still has plenty of skewed
fantasies he wants to unleash on the world. "I like things that go
into hidden, mysterious places, places I want to explore that are
very disturbing," he says. "In that disturbing thing, there is
sometimes tremendous poetry and truth."