That was really my film school,
working on "Eraserhead".
I loved that...
and I thought that's how everybody made movies.
Then I went on and worked with John Cassavetes for a while
and I saw there was some similarity,
but then I went on to the big Hollywood movies
and I'd show up and find out that it wasn't anything like "Eraserhead".
I mean, in the rest of the world, one guy didn't do everything.
I think that for David, making the transition into big-time directing,
was one of the things that was hard for him:
He couldn't stir the chickens on "Dune",
somebody else had to do it, and he learnt to let go and still stay in control.
What David missed after a while was not being able to make the pudding
that filled the drawer that you put the peas on top of
for Henry Spencer to get the vaporiser out of in "Eraserhead".
But David didn't do the pudding any more, somebody else did it.
Although, I have to say, I did make the pudding on "Eraserhead".
Figuring out how many boxes of vanilla instant pudding it would take
to fill a dresser drawer was one of the challenges I got to undertake
along with Doreen Small, who worked on the film.
We called ourselves handmaidens to genius!
I'll make our cappuccino.
If you believe his interviews,
he had the idea for the red room.
It was just an image
and he says he couldn't sleep that night, he was so excited.
For him, it's how to get the image into the film,
rather than the other way around.
Most narrative film-makers begin with the story and then illustrate it.
I think he begins with an image.
The story is secondary, it's not primary.
If you're asking the narrative question with David Lynch
or, what does this mean?
I say, maybe that's the wrong question.
Maybe you should go back
to the Dadaist appreciation
of the image as image and ask those questions first.
It seems to me you're going to get a lot more out of Lynch
if you appreciate the image and the primacy of the image.
One thing about David is that he doesn't want to over-analyse,
which is why he doesn't enjoy doing extensive interviews.
Because something comes out of a place in his mind that's indescribable
and I don't think he likes to analyse the process.
Much of the success of his work
has been because he just creates something
and puts it out there and doesn't analyse it.
Lots of other people have, of course, but he just is.
I think Lynch is one of those artists
that doesn't put a lot of filters between him and what he does.
What he wants to do is what he does.
He doesn't question it, he doesn't kind of censor himself,
he doesn't go through a political correctness filter.
What he comes up with is what ends up on the screen.
I think when you're operating at that kind of vulnerable, raw, intuitive level...
and all you're trying to go by is what excites you aesthetically,
there's the danger that you will repeat yourself
and that someone may tire of it.
On the other hand, what is your responsibility as an artist?
Is your responsibility to be worrying about,
is this a repetition, what I'm doing,
or should I just be responding artistically to the world around me?
I think one of the things I learnt from him
is how completely open to every moment he is.
I remember a number of times
where he was directing a scene in the hospital,
where the Sheriff and Cooper
were going to see Ronnette Pulaski, who was in a coma.
Ontkean came in, and they were going through the dialogue
and the stool that David had asked him to sit on
was really shaky, so he lifted up the stool and he was trying to fix it.
Of course, that became part of the scene.
It was wonderful to me, because I was a fairly young director then,
to observe that, to see how life comes in and you incorporate it.
I think that's what makes David's work so alive and it felt so real.
It's how much he's open to that.
Here's the story as I have heard it.
Frank was the prop guy on the show.
They were doing the POV of Grace Zabriskie looking at
her daughter's empty room and her made bed
indicating that she had not come home the previous night.
And... He calls, "Roll!", they get the shot and he says, "Cut!"
He asked the operator how it was
and the operator said, "David, come here!"
"Nobody move!"
He said, "Look through the camera. In the corner of the mirror on the dresser,"
"you can see Frank hiding against the thing,"
"just the top of his head peering out behind a chair."
David saw that and just said, "Perfect!"
That sensibility is basically saying that there are no mistakes.
Everything is just a possible opportunity
or a new image I couldn't have thought up any other way.
I was at the production company one day,
or some place, the production studio,
where they were cutting together "Twin Peaks" or "Fire Walk with Me".
He and Mary were in there cutting
and I just... wandered over by the door.
I was just listening in.
He was talking to Mary, saying, "Play that again!"
He played it again: "Hey! You know, I bet that's what I meant by that!"
Meaning that he had already shot it and it was in the editing room,
and now he was deciding what maybe he had meant by that!
That's staggering!
The kind of courage and belief in self that that would require is...
Boy, it's just staggering!
In David's best work, you can really see it.
You can see the connection, like you were saying.
Even starting back with "Eraserhead",
or a little movie, like "Elephant Man"...
and seeing his use of some of the visuals
that he goes back to time and again - fire, you know, always...
...insects, usually.
You can really...
David's work is very identifiable: That's David Lynch.
You watch David's stuff and it's all framed pictures.
Stuff happens inside that frame.
And it works beautifully for David.
He can focus one's...
attention so well,
to the smallest little detail.
That's his genius.
He makes the ordinary extraordinary.
If you watch it for narrative, you can almost see what's going on.
He'll give you a patch of exposition or a patch of narrative or a new character
to build it to the next step it needs to get to.
Then it's almost like, "OK, we've done that.
"Now I can do some images and strange stuff,
"now I can do some the-darkness-beneath stuff.
"I can do that for a while
"and then I'll need another patch of narrative or exposition."
It's almost segmented in that way.
"I'll do that because that's what I need to hang this other stuff on."
I didn't know all the places I was going to go.
One of the wonderful things about working with David is that...
Even if you have the script and you know what you're doing that day,
you get to the set and you... The layers...
You go so much deeper than where you think you're going to go.
I had a feeling every time I went on the set
that something magical was going to happen, every single time.
When you're an actor, you know who you're supposed to be
and why you're doing this or that.
You're doing it "as if this" or "like that", "because of this".
We didn't know those things.
"What am I? Why am I doing any of these things?"
He took pains to make sure I didn't know.
There was a time... I said to him one time,
I tried from a lot of different angles,
I can't remember what I theorised, but I said, "You know what?
"I think maybe this is what I am.
"Maybe this is the reason I'm doing what I'm doing."
And he turns to me and says, "No. That's not it at all.
"Are you ready? Action!"
David can be cryptic, but it's best just to go along for the ride.
That's really what David wants you to do.
He expects you to enjoy it
and doesn't want to have to explain what he's thinking.
Maybe sometimes he's not even sure, he just has a feeling.
So if you want an explanation, you won't get it, and probably shouldn't.
He lets you find your own way.
If you're way off, he'll bring you back, but he wants it to come from you.
He wants you to go into the unconscious, like he does, I think.
Other times, I said, "David, what's the context of this scene?
"How do I know where I'm going?
"What happened before and what happened after?"
He turned to me and said, "Mike, this scene doesn't have any context.
"There's nothing that happens before this scene
"and there's nothing that happens after."
It made me angry, a little bit, because...
"You're lying to me!
"There's no such thing as a scene that doesn't have a context!"
The strange thing is, when I saw the finished piece,
there it was: It had no context.
It was a disembodied scene with nothing before or after.
He was telling me the truth. I just couldn't quite swallow it.
I just remember him saying, "Sheryl Lee..."
- I can't do it! - What did he say?
He asked me how I would feel about being wrapped in plastic
and being thrown into freezing cold water.
I said, "Fine." That was within the first ten minutes of meeting him.
That was great.
I'd never had someone say,
"I want to wrap you in plastic...
"and put you in freezing cold water."
That's as much as I'm going to do!
I know I'm going to get a phone call from David Lynch!
There was a scene early on with David...
Which episode did I eat the brie sandwich?
Episode two.
Episode two, and I still hadn't a real handle on the character yet.
He hadn't done enough. I knew he was a wealthy guy and so forth,
but I didn't know he was so off the wall and outrageous
and humorous, also.
I'm sitting with my wife, my son,
who's got a few oars out of the water and has an Indian outfit on,
and my brother's just come back from Paris
and he brought these brie sandwiches.
They're huge things.
We're having this very formal dinner.
At one point, when my brother hands me this, he says,
"You've got to try this. It's delicious."
So I try it. It says in the script:
"Ben eats the brie sandwich and says, 'Oh, this is terrific!"'
I munch into it, still talking to my brother... What am I saying?
While you're eating?
"You know what this reminds us of?
"Ginny and Jenny's, down by the river."
Right, right.
Do we have that bread in there? That brie?
May I have a piece of brie and I'll show you what he had me do.
We're having fun now.
David will come in and say, "OK, Kale..."
because he calls me Kale, a nickname from a long time ago.
He'll say, "I need a wind..."
"and a little more like Elvis." I say, "No problem."
So I go back and translate that... And that's how it's formed.
David says, "Eat the sandwich and talk."
I think I'm this wealthy guy, I've got my Armani suit on,
I'm supposed to be dignified.
So my brother hands me this and I take a bite.
"That's very nice." And I continue my lines: "I see... Uh-huh..."
"Cut! Cut, cut! OK...
"What I'd like you to do," David says,
"is really bite into that and get a good mouthful."
And I'm still thinking, "What's the line here between being
"stupid, out of character and, you know...
"and doing what he wants?"
I'm caught in this actor thing, you know.
So..."Take two." So I take a bigger bite.
"I see. Well, that's very interesting."
He says, "Cut, cut, cut! No!
"I want you to take a really big, big bite."
He's kind of getting a little frosty here, and I'm not getting it.
OK, here we go again.
I say, "OK, I'll take a bigger bite. It's out of character..."
And I say, "OK, I understand..." And he says, "Cut! Cut, cut! No!"
He says, "Look, I want you to take a bite so big
"you can't even understand what you're saying."
So now, I'm... We've done this more times than I've just suggested.
We were now way over...
We're up to nine or ten takes and I haven't done enough.
I feel the character's off the wall, I don't know who he is.
I think, "OK", so we do it again
and this time...
And we cut...
And he says, "Thank you very much.
"That's what I wanted."
That's what happened.
I remember David telling me how to say "bear claw".
But he didn't tell me how to say it, he didn't give me a line reading,
but it was a feeling that I had
of the insult of being told...
that I had stuck my pitch gum under the counter,
and the kind of roiling anger that the Log Lady was constantly sitting on,
because she really had no use for a lot of people because they were silly.
And his way of telling me
about how I wanted to order that bear claw
got to some place deep in that character.
I wish I could remember what he said,
but maybe if I did remember, I wouldn't tell you.
It was always great fun working with David,
because you never knew what would happen next.
You know, in some ways, working with David can really spoil you
because you get to go to places creatively that...
It's just so juicy. You get to stretch and be challenged...
and feel excited and grow and play.
It's very playful and fun.
You can get very spoilt with that.
On the surface, he's so nice-looking and he wears his khakis,
and he's, kind of, "Gee, gosh! That's great, Peg!" That kind of thing.
But, yeah, I feel a part of him.
Probably every actor working with him does.
Once I was in the car with him and Mary
and we were going down Laurel Canyon.
Some guy came up behind us and was honking.
It was rude, and everything.
He pulled over, let this guy drive past us
and then continued down the road.
I said to him, "David, you're a nicer guy than I am."
And he turned around and said, "No. No, I'm not!
"I really want to destroy that fellow up there,
"but I just don't have time."
And then a little later, when we saw "Lost Highway"...
the same thing happened: The car came up behind Mr Eddy
and we saw Mr Eddy pull over, let the guy by and then run up behind him!
This is David vicariously doing what he really...
what he had time for!
If I was sending somebody to see a David Lynch film,
I would tell them, "Fasten your seatbelts, you're in for a bumpy ride.
"It's going to be provocative,
"it's going to be disturbing, it's going to be probably violent
"and sexually disturbing in some ways.
"On the other hand,
"you're going to get images probably like you've never seen before
"that will stick with you because they are that unique and special."
Also the combination of ingredients that I've talked about,
the combination that you get with Lynch, that it's about images,
that it's about the dark underside, about this strangeness
that is part of life that you can't account for.
There is this kind of absurdist take on it.
And also the humanism. I think at the bottom of all of this,
there is some humanism attached.
That combination is unique in film history.
You boil it all the way down and "Twin Peaks" is about an abusive father.
In a way, it's showing you why Laura Palmer had to die:
She was being abused.
That becomes a very tragic tale and a very human tale,
so that's quite a package that he puts together,
but it's a unique one, I think.