John O’Mahony meets director David Lynch
Not far from Mulholland Drive, the Los Angeles thoroughfare that gives David Lynch’s latest film its title, and practically in the shadow of the infamous Hollywood sign, sits the complex of buildings where the director lives and works. The most striking is the huge pink bunker designed by the son of Frank Lloyd Wright where Lynch and his partner Mary Sweeney live. A little further up is Lynch’s company, Asymmetrical Productions, its office interiors decorated by Lynch himself in a curious, greyish stucco. Above that again is an impressive modernist villa crowned with metallic angles, cones and arcs and crammed with the latest sound and film editing facilities.
Perched at the very top is Lynch’s studio, a simple wood and glass construction that looks like a cockpit: ”It is pretty much an outdoor painting studio,” he says, negotiating a path through the clutter and out on to the veranda. ”A lot of things I work with have a toxic side and there is sometimes fire involved, so I can’t paint indoors even if I want to.”
An artist before he became a film director, Lynch still spends as much time as he can in the studio, daubing, gouging and hacking away at canvases. Against the wall is a gigantic painting with what looks like a rib-cage protruding through the front. Elsewhere there are works that look as if they are covered in scar tissue, and depictions of figures with skulls instead of heads.
”Every time I come up here I just start getting ideas for paintings,” he says. ”It is just like you are walking around the corner and something will happen and next thing you know it’s part of the film. Sometimes you are sitting in a chair daydreaming. That is how most things come for me anyway. You go down deep and something pops into your head. They are everywhere, these ideas.”
Lynch, one of the most mercurial and idiosyncratic talents in cinema today, is a director whose work combines the garish radiance of American popular culture with the courage and vision of the European masters. Dino de Laurentiis, producer of Fellini’s La Strada and Antonioni’s Three Faces of a Woman, says: ”Uniquely among American directors, he is an auteur. He won’t just do any old movie written by somebody else. He has to be in full control, to write as well as direct, to be in charge of every element. He has to conceive the whole movie. In that respect he’s similar to many of the great directors I’ve worked with in the past.”
De Laurentiis, whose company was behind Lynch’s Dune and Blue Velvet, thinks he could certainly rank ”up there with the great directors”.
From Lynch’s earliest work in particular his first feature, Eraserhead, a post-industrial Gothic love story set in a grainy, subterranean dream-world to the violent mystery story Blue Velvet, he has created not just a remarkable oeuvre but a cinematic universe.
In Lynchworld, the surface is as tidy and neatly manicured as the model, mid-American towns where he grew up, but the underlying mood is always one of simmering violence; it is a place where any oddity, from dancing dreamscape dwarves to log-hugging ladies, seems perversely normal.
”I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of great directors,” says Fred Elmes, Lynch’s cinematographer on Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, ”and two of my favourites are John Cassavetes and Lynch, because they couldn’t do it any way but their way.”
Aspects of Lynch’s vision, particularly the intensity of the violence, have consistently caused offence. Blue Velvet was ”an ugly, brutal, naive movie. One cut above a snuff film. A kind of academic porn,” wrote Barry Gifford, who nevertheless collaborated with Lynch on Wild at Heart and Lost Highway. ”For Lynch, wickedness is, in visual terms, all goblins and demons,” complained the Los Angeles Times, ”and there’s something peculiarly child-like and limiting about that vision.”
However, Lynch is determined to show that he is much more than just the ”Czar of the Bizarre”. He has also had acclaimed exhibitions of painting, photography and furniture. The startling range of his talent could not have been more graphically illustrated than by The Straight Story, a low-key, un-Lynchian account of a septuagenarian’s odyssey across middle America on a motorised lawnmower. This was one of Lynch’s ”most artistically and emotionally satisfying movies”, according to Time Out.
”There are more sides to David than everyone knows,” says Mary Sweeney, who produced and co-wrote the film and who has been the editor on most of his film projects since Blue Velvet.
”I am always looking for material that he would want to make his own and which touches that other side of him. He can be very soulful and poetic. It is not all darkness and confusion.”
In person, Lynch could not be more disarmingly normal. In a trademark touch, his shirt is buttoned uncomfortably right to the top. And his greying hair is still gathered in a magnificent, swirling quiff. Famously described by Mel Brooks as ”Jimmy Stewart from Mars”, his vocabulary is peppered with quaint exclamations: ”By George”, ”Jeez”, ”golly gosh” and ”peachy”.
On the set this very normality makes Lynch an effective filmmaker. ”He is a very calming influence,” says Justin Theroux, who features in Mulholland Drive. ”The atmosphere on set is so good that you feel you are making a Disney movie or an after-school special, but when you see it and they have added everything, it becomes something entirely different.”
Lynch’s darker side is never far from the surface. He keeps a preserved uterus on his desk for inspiration. He says cheerfully: ”In 1986 Raffaella de Laurentiis, Dino’s daughter, had her uterus taken out. She knew how much I would want that uterus, and got the doctor to put it in a jar.”
Then there is his phobia about cooking smells, a fixation that is supposed to have instigated his break-up with the actress Isabella Rossellini. ”I don’t think a kitchen should be in a home,” he says. ”It should be a separate thing. Sometimes an odour will travel to a place far from a kitchen and catch there and that is not a good thing.”
During filming of the violent, sado-masochistic sex scene at the beginning of Blue Velvet, Lynch is reported to have broken down in uncontrollable fits of laughter. ”Luckily David is able to vent everything through his art,” says his best friend, the artist Jack Fisk, ”because otherwise somebody might be dead.”
Lynch was born on January 20 1946 in Missoula, Montana, just the kind of tidy, mid-western, United States-heartlands lumber town that would later fuel his cinematic imagination. His father, Donald, was a research scientist with the US forestry commission, a job that forced a peripatetic existence on the family. They moved five times before David was 14.
Lynch, nevertheless, has described his upbringing as idyllic: ”It was a dream world of droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees.”
Yet, as with most aspects of life in Lynchworld, this isn’t quite the complete picture: ”It was so stable that it almost bothered David … he became intrigued by the opposite,” says his brother John.
Despite what his brother describes as an ”outgoing demeanour”, as well as popularity at high school and his success in the Boy Scouts, Lynch considered himself an outsider. Always lurking behind the perfect picket-fences, he could detect a sense of menace: ”On this cherry tree would be pitch oozing out, some of it black, some of it yellow, and there were millions of red ants racing all over the sticky pitch, all over the tree. So you see, there’s this beautiful world and you just look a little bit closer and there are always red ants underneath.”
It seems only fitting that it was in one of these perfectly manicured suburban settings in Alexandria, Virginia, that the 14-year-old Lynch took his first definitive step to becoming an artist. ”It happened in the front yard of my girlfriend Linda Styles’s house in 1961,” Lynch says. ”There was a guy there named Toby Keeler. He said: ‘My father is a painter’: that changed everything. I was always drawing and painting but I thought it was something kids did. But at that moment I realised you could actually be a painter.”
Lynch devoted himself to paint- ing and soon developed a distinctly Gothic style that incorporated unusual methods and materials: ”One day he brought in a painting, all greens and blacks and thick with oil,” says Fisk, ”and then this moth flew in and got stuck in the thick oil. It started flapping around and it made this big spiral, the death of the moth. From then he put little bugs and stuff in his paintings.”
After high school, Lynch went to study art at thellllll Boston Mu-lllll seum School in 1964, moving on the next year tol the Pennsylvanial Academy of Fine Art where he met Peggy Reavey. They married in 1967 after she fell pregnant with their daughter Jennifer. Parenthood came as a shock for Lynch, whom Reavey describes as a ”reluctant but loving father”. This was exacerbated by Lynch’s intense dislike of Philadelphia and the crime-ridden area where they lived.
”Deep down, he wanted to live in a nice, clean, happy place,” says Reavey, ”and instead he found himself in a war zone. For him it was more comfortable that the darkness was in his imagination, not on the outside.”
During this period, however, Lynch’s work underwent a transformation. Driven to ”make a painting move” in 1967 he created a minute-long animated film and projected it on a loop on to a sculptured screen made from three plaster casts of his head. Entitled Six Men Getting Sick, and shot on a budget of $200 with a 16mm wind-up camera, it involved a cast of cartoonl figureslllll beingllll propelled through a series of grotesque permutations before finally vomiting down the screen.
When a fellow student stumped up $1000 for a similar work, he diverted the funds into a short film called The Alphabet that, in turn, led to a $5000 grant from the American Film Institute to make The Grandmother, a 30-minute rush of freakish imagery, including a sci-fi pod that disgorges the main characters and a boy with a tongue like a tentacle.
In 1970 Lynch took an irrevocable step away from fine art by moving to Los Angeles to take up a place at the American Film Institute. The following year he began work on his first feature, Eraserhead, which was shot in a dilapidated stable.
”We would start in the evenings and work till about 11.30 or so,” remembers Fred Elmes. ”David was supporting himself at the time by delivering The Wall Street Journal. So, at this point he would have to go off and do his paper route. When he was finished, he’d come back and we’d shoot through the rest of the night.”
Frequently interrupted by funding crises, the filming of Eraserhead took five years to complete. ”There was one shot,” Lynch recalls of the nightmarish continuity problems this caused, ”where the main character Henry walks down the hall and turns the doorknob. A year and a half later, he comes through the door.”
The film remains Lynch’s strangest and most esoteric work. Accompanied by a soundtrack of droning electricity generators, its jolting narrative appears to travel through parallel universes existing in an ordinary household radiator before climaxing in the scene where Henry’s head is ground down into pencil erasers.
Most of the film deals with the birth of a mutant baby, a theme that Jennifer Lynch, who was born with club feet, feels may have had its origins in her father’s domestic situation: ”There is no doubt in my mind that there is something there that correlates to the baby in the film.” In fact, the lllextended filming lllmay have been instrumental in bringing this domesticity to an end, as Lynch’s marriage to Reavey broke down 18 months into the shoot.
On its release in 1976, Eraserhead met a largely baffled reaction: ”A sickening bad-taste exercise,” said Variety Magazine. However, among its small but influential circle of admirers were critic Pauline Kael, who felt Lynch had ”reinvented the experimental film movement”, and a young producer named Stuart Cornfeld, who called Lynch at the American Film Institute. Cornfeld was developing a screenplay called The Elephant Man, about the life of John Merrick, and suggested that Lynch might be perfect for the job.
After an audience with Mel Brooks, whose Brooksfilms company produced the movie, the young, inexperienced director found himself en route to London, presiding over a budget of $5-million and overseeing a cast that included some of Britain’s greatest actors: John Gielgud, Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt, some of whom sensed his terror. ”I used to attack directors,” Hopkins would say later. ”David Lynch was very unsure of himself and I always went for the jugular with people like that.”
However, Lynch had an invaluable ally in veteran cinematographer Freddie Francis: ”I held David’s hand quite a lot on that movie,” Francis recalls. ”In fact, we held hands so much it was a bit like we were girlfriends. He had done a picture before, but it really wasn’t a picture and he didn’t know his way around the studio.”
The resulting film, released in 1980, trod a fine line between sentiment and the grotesque to produce a moving portrait of a man’s struggle to be recognised as human. It picked up eight Oscar nominations, transforming Lynch into a star director almost instantaneously: ”It was like going from zero to 60 in no time,” he says. ”In the US, they all thought I was British.”
After The Elephant Man, Lynch chose unwisely in Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune, for which De Laurentiis had lined up a $52-million budget. The released version retained Lynch’s sumptuous visual textures, but the producers hacked the original down to near-incomprehensibility and it earned back just more than half its budget. On a personal level the film also took its toll, as Lynch’s second marriage, to Mary Fisk, capsized in 1982 while he was filming in Mexico.
The fiasco of Dune did, though, have its unexpected beneficial side effects. Thanks to a two-picture deal with De Laurentiis, it allowed Lynch to begin work on Blue Velvet, a film still considered the most perfect realisation of his vision.
Set in the fictional mid-Western town of Lumberton, it is a chilling exploration of the violence wriggling beneath the calm of everyday American existence. The central character Jeffrey, played by Kyle MacLachlan, witnesses a scene of brutal sexual role-play between masochistic cabaret singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and the brutal, oxygen-sucking villain of the piece, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper): ”I started with the idea of front yards at night and Bobby Vinton’s song Blue Velvet playing from a distance,” says Lynch, ”then I always had this fantasy of sneaking into a girl’s room and hiding through the night. It was a strange angle to come at a murder mystery from.”
Even before its release, the film was generating controversy, and the London premiere was picketed by protestors objecting to the violence. However, the dissenters were more than drowned out by those who hailed the film as a masterpiece: ”The seamless blending of beauty and horror is remarkable,” enthused Time Out, ”the sheer wealth of imagination virtually unequalled in recent cinema.”
Blue Velvet also marked the beginning of Lynch’s four-year relationship with Rossellini, whom he met at an informal dinner during casting. According to some reports, the relationship broke down because Rossellini could no longer cope with Lynch’s cooking phobias. But in her autobiography, Rossellini says it was Lynch who left her. Since the early 1990s Lynch has been living with Sweeney, with whom he has a nine-year-old son, Riley.
After Blue Velvet, Lynch was invited, with writer Mark Frost, to pitch an idea for a TV series to the ABC network: ”We went in thinking, ‘this will be sort of fun, we’ll just see how they’ll react’,” remembers Frost, ”and then there was a writers’ strike, which shut down the whole town for six months, and when that ended, they called us back. Of course, we couldn’t even remember what we had told them.”
Twin Peaks was conceived as a twisted, noir soap opera, in which the central murder mystery is spun out indefinitely, which was aided by the fact that the writers couldn’t make up their minds as to whodunnit: ”All through the first season, we ourselves didn’t know who killed Laura Palmer,” says Frost. ”We were feeling our way. We actually made up our minds at the beginning of the second year.”
A milestone in the history of TV drama, Twin Peaks, which ran from 1990 to 1991, paved the way for a whole generation of genre-busting shows, including The X-Files and Northern Exposure. However, pressure from the network in the second series to wrap up the mystery led to its eventual demise. By this time Lynch was once again focusing on cinema and had completed his next feature, Wild at Heart, an offbeat road movie with overtones of The Wizard of Oz.
It won the Palme D’Or at Cannes but disappointed critics: ”Lynch works better with constraints like network standards and practices that require him to be sly and inventive,” concluded New York Magazine. ”Given complete freedom, he gives way to his obsessions. It becomes a procession of freaks, which is now getting grotesque.”
Lynch’s ”prequel” to Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me, released in 1992, also faced hostile reviews and miserable box-office returns. By 1997, and Lost Highway a limp psycho-thriller in which the central character, played by Bill Pullman and Baltha- zar Getty, changes identity half way through it really looked like Lynch was getting tired: ”Lost Highway isn’t refuse,” concluded Time Magazine, ”but it ain’t revelation either. What is missing is the shock of the new.”
Which is precisely why The Straight Story in 1999 was such a refreshing departure a disarmingly simple, true story about a 73-year-old man named Alvin Straight who makes a 507km trip across Iowa on a motorised lawnmower: ”I had spotted an article about it in The New York Times,” says Sweeney, ”and then it was a four-year process for me to nail the rights down. I would tell David about this project that I was doing as a producer and then as a writer. He was always encouraging and hadn’t the slightest interest in the material for himself, but he read the script and loved it and that was that.”
Described by one critic as ”ranking among the greatest achievements in cinema,” the film earned Oscar nominations for both Lynch and the late Richard Farnsworth, who played Alvin.
Lynch’s new film, Mulholland Drive, a dark and brooding mystery-cum-love-story, is a return to the dark recesses of Lynchworld, but with a creative energy and a freshness absent in recent excursions. Originally intended as the pilot for a prospective TV series, it was rejected outright by the networks: ”They hated everything about it,” Lynch says. ”The guy from ABC said he had to watch it standing up to stop himself falling asleep.” There could perhaps be no better endorsement. Since winning Lynch the prize for best director at Cannes last year, Mulholland Drive has been harvesting plaudits and awards.
Not that any of this makes much difference to Lynch: ”I’m not really a ‘hot’ director,” he says, when the subject of Hollywood comes up. ”I have faith that I can make the pictures I want to make and have them near the main centre but still be different in ways that are important to me.”
At the moment he has no idea what his next project will be, and is concentrating on working away at the canvases in his studio and waiting for inspiration: ”I always feel positive,” he says. ”Maybe it’s pie in the sky, but still, it’s not a bad way to feel. There is a certain amount of frustration, wondering when that next idea is going to come. I’m always waiting for that moment when I’ll fall in love with an idea.”
Mulholland Drive opens on April 19