My association with David dates back to Blue Velvet.
I cut Blue Velvet for him,
and then we did some commercials together after that,
and he and Mark wrote the script for Twin Peaks,
which at that time was called Northwest Passage.
David sent me the script.
I read it. I thought it was terrific.
After he refused to tell me who did kill Laura Palmer, he said:
"Look, ABC is gonna give us $4 million to go make this movie.
They'll probably never show it.
Let's just go have some fun and make this movie."
So off we went and made the movie, Twin Peaks.
I directed episode one
and I owe my directing career to David for that
because that was my first directing assignment.
I also think I was a good choice for episode one
because I had edited the pilot episode.
And David was prepping and getting ready
for shooting Wild at Heart
when episode one stages were being built
and the crew was coming together
and we were about ready to commence.
And probably outside of David and Mark,
I knew the characters better than anybody else.
And after a long absence between shooting the pilot
and starting the series with episode one,
I was probably best suited to help the actors refine that character
that they had manufactured
or that they had developed in the pilot itself.
I remember filming a terrific scene in episode 18
with Richard Beymer, who plays Ben.
And he's watching himself as a young child,
with his father and his brother,
digging for the future site of the Great Northern Hotel.
We put the projector screen up and had this old projector,
and Richard just got carried away, and he's smoking his cigar and sitting.
And I let him have the freedom to be a child again and watch it
and make his own personal commentary on what he was watching,
which was new to him.
And then at the end, it's just a brilliant piece on his part,
where the film runs through the projector and goes:
And it's a white screen. And Richard comes back.
He got a tear to come,
trying to touch those images on the screen.
It was really... It was beautiful.
And he came back and he sat on that desk
and went right to being a child
and doing shadow figures on that screen.
When you look at it, you say, what a wacko guy this is.
You know, he's lost his mind. But there's a lot of pathos.
You see this guy, that he's on the edge of cracking.
And he goes... I just thought it was beautiful.
And I think Richard did a beautiful job with that scene.
It's hard to say why Twin Peaks endures
in the consciousness of people
or even, is it fresh today?
Prior to this interview, I watched the episodes
and had my 19- and 17-year-old kids in the room, and it held up.
There's something captivating about Twin Peaks.
And there's this layer of mystery.
Again, it's who killed Laura Palmer?
But even if you didn't know that
and you just kind of watched an episode with that,
you would find really interesting characters.
And when characters talk to one another, it was heavy.
It was like, you know, the weight of the world
was in this dialogue, in these situations.
And I think it's just unusual filmmaking
and I think you can credit that to:
One, a really great pilot episode script.
But, two, David Lynch
is one of the great working directors of cinema.