Coming up next we invite you to meet
filmmaker David Lynch in the exclusive
IFC series Independent Focus, produced in
conjunction with the Independent Feature Project/West.
Next, on IFC.
Now the words that come to mind when you think of an Eagle Scout—like loyal, trustworthy, or courteous—
are probably not the words that come to mind when you think of movies like Wild at Heart, or Lost Highway, or Eraserhead, or Blue Velvet.
But they're movies made by an Eagle Scout, David Lynch. And on Independent Focus,
we're going to get to the heart of the contradictions in this man.
[theme music]
[applause]
My first job in Los Angeles was here at this
museum.
I made $5 an hour selling tickets here— which I may be doing after this is over— but that's another conversation.
But I know a job you had—we were just talking about it backstage—was you were making,
or just getting started filmmaking.
You delivered The Wall Street Journal,
and had worked up this really interesting
route where you'd deliver the paper.
DAVID: Right, I was working on Eraserhead
and I was... well I had a home and then
I got divorced and I was then living in
the stables of this mansion in Beverly Hills.
It doesn't sound like a hardship case, but my ex-wife phoned and said that there was...
...this little bungalow that I
could get for $80 a month and I said,
"That's too much money" and she said, "No
it's an unbelievable deal and you've got
to get this place." And so I figured I had
to get a job, and I started delivering
The Wall Street Journal and it was... it
was a great job because it was one hour
a day and I made 48 dollars and two
cents a week, so it paid the rent and
everything was great. ELVIS: Now it must have been a very interesting period for you...
...doing that and then working out Eraserhead, which took you how long to finish?
Five years, but we kept running out of money. We shot for a year straight, and then...
...we ran out of money. That's about the time I got the paper route. And we would...
...we would get geared up with some money and then shoot a scene...
... and then you know, kind of break down again for a while.
ELVIS: But what was that like for you?
It must have given you a chance to really live the film, as you were making it in a way.
DAVID: It was a beautiful thing. Now, people have...
...I have more money to work with,
but there's a speed that you
have to take.
And so you don't sink down into a film, or into a mood. ELVIS: How do you mean?
When you go slow and you're living in the set and...
...in that world, it just becomes part of
you—it's a beautiful experience,
and ideas... more ideas come out of that.
ELVIS: So, Eraserhead must have taken...
...almost a kind of improvisation qualities you were.. DAVID: No, no no! Not improvisational.
It was very specific but it took a long time to get it right. ELVIS: It's interesting because it's...
...your movies almost all are textural
first, it seems like.
It's sort of a sound tapestry, but also this really interesting use of space, and I wonder if...
...in something like let's say, Eraserhead,
how a movie like that comes to you.
I mean obviously it was sort of
cooking around for a while.
Well, I don't know if know anybody knows exactly where ideas come from, but...
...it's... everyone probably for sure has had the experience of getting an idea,
and it's... it's strange, because one minute it's not there, and then... then it's there.
[LAUGHTER, THEN APPLAUSE]
DAVID: And so films are built... some ideas are just little fragments. You might get a fragment...
...that is very important to you
and it becomes like a magnet that...
...pulls other ideas and so it's really a
beautiful thing...
...to get one of those ideas ELVIS: But a lot of your ideas seem like that. They seem to be...
... you can look at any of these movies as
fragments, but there is some sort of... DAVID: No, no, no, the movies aren't fragments.
The ideas... the beginning. And then it's like one piece of a puzzle.
And then the next one comes,
and the next one comes.
You can't tell when they're going to come, that's the problem.
You just have to sit quietly and hope that they come along.
What does that do for work habits then...
...as you're waiting for ideas to come along? DAVID: Well, it's a problem!
[laughter]
DAVID: There's a lot of sitting in a comfortable chair... is what I like to, you know, to do.
And it's a lot like... it's a lot like
fishing.
ELVIS: And a lot of fishing isn't about catching a fish, but just going there.
DAVID: No, you want to catch a fish... but everybody who's fished knows that you can only do so much.
You bait your hook and you lower it
into the water. ELVIS: And you don't always catch a fish, either.
DAVID: And then you take what you, you know, get. But um...
But a lot of your movies kind of work like almost classic mystery stories...
...something that needs to be solved, or pieces that need to be put together.
And is that one of the things too...
...you don't want to offer too many solutions to the clues that are up there?
No, the clues are there, and I like... you know, I love mysteries like a book...
...but I don't like it when it ends and everything is sewn up 100%.
So I think some threads have to be... have to remain open.
How do you mean?
Well, just so it's not a kind of a spoon-fed solution.
It's... it's... it's there. The pieces are
there and they feel correct...
...and then it's up to all of us to, you know, to feel our own way.
Actually we're going to talk about really seeing—and I'll get into this a little bit—is The Elephant Man,
which—I grew up in Detroit—and I saw it downtown Detroit, with an all-black crowd.
And just the level of empathy that went to
that movie was kind of astonishing to me.
I wish you could have seen that
movie with that kind of crowd DAVID: That's beautiful, uh-huh.
But it must have been a surprise to people that it would play with what are considered to be inner-city audiences.
Not really.
That struck a chord. It's a human being, and it struck a chord with people,
you know... fortunately everywhere. And I don't know why that film came to me...
...but I'm very glad that it did. ELVIS: It came as a result partially, Mel Brooks seeing...?
No, no, it came from a man named Stuart Cornfeld
and I'd been trying to... after Eraserhead I wrote a script called Ronnie Rocket and I was...
...trying to get that made. And he was an
assistant—Mel Brooks' assistant. ELVIS: And he had seen Eraserhead at the Nuart.
Yeah, he had seen it at the Nuart. So I called Stuart and I said, "Do you know anything that I could, you know, direct?"
He said, "I know four things." I said, Stuart "What are these four things?"
And he said, "Well the first one is a thing called The Elephant Man."
And an explosion, really, went off in my head. And I said, "That's it!"
[laughter] So that's...
ELVIS: So you never heard the other three...
DAVID: No, never, never. It may have been great. I don't know.
What went off in your head though? What do you think will you hear something like that?
It was the only time it ever happened, but it was just a knowing... a knowingness. With a... with a sound!
[laughter]
When Mel finally did read this
script, he said "Okay the writers are in...
...Jonathan [Sanger], you're in, Stuart—you can be involved—but who is this David Lynch?"
Jonathan said, "Well, you know, you've got
to see his film Eraserhead."
And Mel said "Fine." And so he called me up and said, "Mel wants to see Eraserhead."
And I said, "What do you mean?" and he said, "Well he said, you know, he wants to see the film."
And so I said, "Jonathan, it's
been great, you know, but I'm out, you know, once he sees this picture!"
[laughter]
So Jonathan says, "Oh, settle down," you know, and...
... Mel had a screening over at 20th Century Fox—in the screening room there—and for some reason...
...Jonathan made me come over, and I
was pacing out in front of the doors to the theater...
...and suddenly the doors fly
open and Mel is racing toward me with open arms...
...and hugs me and says, "You're a
madman, I love you!"
[laughter, then applause]
Now as you were making Elephant Man, was it almost kind of like automatic writing for you in that way...
...that it was this thing you obviously connected with when you heard the title of it...
...but did you find that was the case in the making of it as well?
No, well it was a baptism of fire because it was the first...
...Eraserhead was very personal and a very
small crew and it took five years.
Now it was going to England and doing a
Victorian drama, with a lot of big names.
And I didn't... I didn't really... I
felt it, but when I got there...
...all I really knew were pictures of Victorian
England. And it happened one day...
... I was in a place called the East London
Hospital, which was a derelict hospital...
...but it still had beds in the wards and
it had... it was just about a foot of dust in the place.
I was walking in that hospital, and, like a wind, blew into me...
...and I was, I knew what it felt like to be in that time.
After that I felt like I owned it and
it was all right. ELVIS: That sounds almost spiritual, you know, the way this movie...
DAVID: Well, it's a spiritual picture.
John Hurt said that he'd sit for eight hours getting made up, and during those eight hours...
...when he came out, he WAS John Merrick. It came over him during those hours, each time.
ELVIS: Now how did you find John Hurt. you must looked around a lot of people...
...before you got to him. DAVID: Yeah, John Hurt had a hairless left arm. ELVIS: Okay...
That was a secondary reason. The primary
reason was that John Hurt maybe is...
...one of the finest actors in the world. You
know John Hurt had a kind of a... such a...
...a chameleon-like ability to change. He
had a kind of an aura of greatness to him.
It was... there wasn't a lot of other choices it seems. ELVIS: Now tell me what it was like for you to move now from Elephant Man...
... you must have had your choice of things.  Were you still trying to get Ronnie Rocket going at that point?
After every film, I try to get Ronnie Rocket made.
[laughter, then applause]
What's it about?
I don't... I always say the same thing. It's about...
...a man who's three and a half feet tall
with red hair...
...and 60 cycle alternating current electricity.
And then, you couldn't get Ronnie Rocket made, so...
I started actually writing Blue Velvet
after The Elephant Man...
...and I wrote two drafts and they were really bad.
Why do you say that?
Well, the head of the studio called me up and started screaming at me. [laughter]
But he was right, in some ways, and I got, you know...
What did he object to? I mean, what was the problem?
I forget. He said very bad things to me, but in a...
...in a short amount of time. So I can't
remember.
One thing led to another, and I began, you know, working on Dune.
Was it you saw in Dune that made you think that you could...
Oh, there were many things. There was a lot of... it was a... it was a kind of like a poem to me.
But there's so much detail in it. I'm just wondering what sort of spoke to you in a way that other stuff didn't. In Dune.
I honestly can't remember. I really
blocked out a lot of that. ELVIS: Because, I mean...
Oh, it was a pain... very painful experience.
But that's where you found Kyle MacLachlan.
Kyle, that's when I first you know, met
and worked with Kyle.
So you get done with it and that's a year of your life...
Well, three years. Three years.
ELVIS: From start to finish?
From start to finish.
You worked on Blue Velvet during uh...
After I finished Dune, we went to see Dino (my agent and I) and...
ELVIS: Dino De Laurentiis.
Dino De Laurentiis. And he says, "David, what do you want to do next?"
I said, "I want to do this picture Blue Velvet," and he says, "You... own?" and I said yes...
...but I didn't realize that I didn't own it.
That, while I was working on Dune...
...it went in to turn around, and then no
one picked it up, so it went back to Warner Brothers.
And they owned it. Well anyway, Dino got on the phone and the story is that he was talking to the president, I guess...
...and a girl was running down the hall to stop him from selling it...
...and before she got to the office, he'd sold it to Dino.
Is it kind of a like a world that you felt like you knew, in some ways, too?
I knew it and I didn't know it. It's
partly based on impressions from my life,
but a lot of it is coming from someplace
else.
ELVIS: Did you know Kyle will be the guy for
that too?
Yes, but Kyle didn't want to do this film for awhile. I can't remember exactly why.
I think he was a bit afraid of it and then
something happened and he, you know, went for it.
It's another unsettling movie that seemed kind of an interesting thing to go into the mainstream...
...because there was certainly nothing else like it at the time.
I just wonder, as you were working on it, if you felt that it was such a departure from things that were around...
No, no, no. you never do something just to
do something different. You can't figure...
...what the world would be like a year or a
year and a half after you start.
You can't worry about those things. Sometimes it's surprisingly good (the reception), and sometimes it's surprisingly bad.
When you first heard the song Blue Velvet, what did it do to you?
It didn't conjure up this film. [laughter]
But you know there was something about it, this blue, and a texture...
...and somewhere along the line it came to be two other colors: it was black, red lips...
...green lawn, and this, you know, blue velvet.
It's also one of these movies where the textures come at you first...
...that whole, long opening shot that introduces us to this world that's like worlds unto worlds unto worlds.
DAVID: Well I told you the first things that came. The next thing that came was someone finding an ear. In the field.
That ear, to me, became a ticket to some other...
...it started the trip to some other
world.
And as you were making Blue Velvet, do you have any idea what you want to do next?
I had no idea, and it was four years before... well four years before I finished the film.
Why so long a lag time?
Well you need to get an idea that you
fall in love with...
...and these ideas are not around every corner, so you don't know when they're going to happen. It was...
...one day my friend Monty [Montgomery] calls me up and asked me to read a book called Wild at Heart...
...and I read it and that was it!
That's what I wanted to do then. So that's how it happens... it's either a book or an idea.
But what did you see in the book that
made you want to do it?
DAVID: I saw a love story in a violent and insane world...
...and the feeling in the air was like that to me then, so...
...and I saw a love story where the man and the woman were equal.
But it's a powerful and very violent
movie; it got a lot of, sort of, outraged responses to it. Were you surprised at that?
Well I feel that films for the most part don't start violence, they mirror violence...
...they mirror, you know, what's happening. So, that was Wild at Heart.
ELVIS: Which seems odd because every move you've made has been different from the one that's come before.
Well again, it's the ideas you know. You don't repeat yourself.
You're waiting for that next thing.
And the next for you is television.
Well that, yeah. That was Twin Peaks.
[applause]
Now how did that come about?
I had met [clears throat] Mark Frost [clears throat] Excuse me.
I'm a smoker... I would really love to have a smoke right now.
ELVIS: Go ahead.
DAVID: Is it okay?
Man, that would be beautiful. Thank you very much!
ELVIS: Have some water too. DAVID: Okay.
ELVIS: I was waiting for you to light up up here.
DAVID: Anyway, we got together
and strangely the idea started flowing.
We worked at Mark's house and...sometimes things just unfold in a really beautiful way.
I remember when we finished the pilot script—it was late at night and I drove back and I stayed up and read it.
And I called up Mark and I said, "you know this thing is really good! It really feels, really good!"
and he said, "it does!" and we were surprised.
It was pretty much the script that you
wrote that you shot? DAVID: Exactly.
ELVIS: The network didn't ask for a lot of changes at all?
DAVID: No, the network stayed, very, you know much out of it...
...and were very supportive in the beginning. [laughter]
ELVIS: In the beginning. DAVID: Yeah.
ELVIS: So that changed.
Well it was our idea that Laura Palmer's killer would not be found for a long time...
...and that would move to a more background story.
But it needed to be there, always as the prime, you know, mystery.
Once you solved that, we felt we'd be, you know, finished. And it was true.
So you finished with television and you decide to do...
What did I decide to do? ELVIS: I'm asking you.
[laughter] I... um... I did. Oh no, I did um, Fire Walk with Me.
[applause]
DAVID: Thank you.
There's some sequences in that film that deeply thrill me...
...but that went over very badly. And during the year or a year and a half that it took to make that...
...the world changed in a way that it was
extremely, you know, poorly received.
So that was a... when you make something that you really love and you get bad reviews...
...and you know, bad box-office, it's not as
painful as...
...like with Dune, I knew I'd done things wrong and then it still turned out poorly.
So it's a double negative.
ELVIS: So then then you...
DAVID: Then I waited until 1995, when Barry [Gifford] and I started writing Lost Highway.
And how is it you decided to write with him?
He wrote a book called Night People and in it was a phrase called Lost Highway...
...it was mentioned. So the two girls are talking about going down the Lost Highway...
...and something about those words struck me and started a dream going and...
...those words connected with an idea that came also—one other night—and I told Barry...
...about that idea and he said
about Lost Highway: "Let's write something."
So those two things united and started us going.
How do you come to find music for the movies, 'cuz that's a very important part of the texture.
A lot of the music is found upfront and you get, kind of gather together music and I then I work with Angelo Badalamenti.
[applause]
We sit and I talk to Angelo, and then he starts, you know, working...
...and then I talk to him some more and he starts working over here...
...and then little by little something
forms that feels right.
So I go into shooting with a lot of, either existing music and Angelo's music...
...and play these things while we're shooting, through the headphones...
...so I can hear the dialogue and the music at the same time. Sometimes we play it out loud.
You know, it helps you verify a mood and a pace, and then a lot of music comes later too...
...but the more you have up front, you know,
the better off you are. The many ideas...
...come out of music. A picture starts
forming in your head... or characters come, or both.
Just out of the music, and
it's... every time I work with Angelo...
...something like that happens.
I think what it's time to do now is to go to the audience with some questions.
>> Hi, I was wondering... I have an early draft of Blue Velvet...
DAVID: Yeah? >> With an alternate ending that has Dorothy jumping off the roof of her apartment building...
...and I was just curious if that was actually filmed...
...and when the idea came about to switch the ending to the park scene.
Well, something isn't finished until it's finished.
And along the way—of any project—one, lots of times gets bad ideas.
Hopefully, you catch them and get rid of them.
So every draft, every early draft, they should be destroyed.
[laughter]
The script is only a way to get a kind of structure, and certain things right.
Then the film is is what it's aimed toward...
...and so a script is not a thing
really that really means anything.
After the film is finished.
>> Hi, I was wondering what it is that you see, that you want your audience to understand...
...when you show doppelgangers and opposites and the dark side of life versus the light side?
You know these ideas that come along,
they sort of thrill you...
...and they inspire you to translate those to film. The whole process is kind of beautiful...
...and they feel a certain way when they arrive, and you try and get that feeling even more in the final thing.
If it feels correct to you, you think, "Well maybe it will feel that way for others."
And you know it won't feel that way for everyone.
We have one last question, I guess, here.
>> Hi David, I wanted to ask you... when you get to the filming process do you
have every single frame inside your head...
...or is it something that's continually developing when you get to editing?
For instance, the scene in Lost Highway when you burn the cabin...
...it's burning at the very beginning of the film. Is that something that...
DAVID: That's a good question. There's certain things that you discover along the way.
That burning cabin was never in the script.
There's a special effects guy I love to work with named Gary D'Amico...
...and I was out in the desert... we were shooting in the desert...
...and something struck me
and I asked Gary if he had any explosives...
[laughter]
He said, "Yeah I've got some
things. How big an explosion do you want?"
And I said, "Really, really big!" And he
couldn't get all the stuff that he wanted to get...
...and in a strange way that
worked out... you know the explosion is...
...it's many colors it's not quite
powerful, it just sort of floats the stuff out.
Whereas a larger explosion
would just obliterate the cabin.
So it turned out so beautiful because he
didn't have the right things, and he wasn't prepared.
That's just a happy accident. Once you have something like that, it could feed its way into someplace else.
ELVIS: Well, I think that's all the time we have. Let's thank David Lynch for being here. DAVID: Thank you very much.
[applause]
DAVID: Thank you, Elvis.
ELVIS: I hope that wasn't too painful for you.
[theme music]
You're watching "The Lynch Who Stole
Christmas," a full day of David Lynch.
Only on the Independent Film Channel.
