‘I told them: There’s no way I can improve Blue Velvet’
Paul Schrader, director
David couldn’t get Blue Velvet made. Dino De Laurentiis told David he’d pay me to rewrite the script and David gave it to me. It was one of the best scripts I’d ever read. I told Dino there was no way I could improve it. David thanked me and Dino financed the film. The rest is film history. The only thing to add is this: smoking kills.
‘Can we imagine his funeral? Pallbearers dressed as rabbits’
Mark Cousins, director
The Edinburgh film festival in the mid-90s. I am to talk to David via satellite. He’ll be in LA, I’ll be in a cinema in front of 600 people. I arrive early. No audience yet. The live feed shows a table and empty chair where, in an hour, David will appear. But within minutes he sits down with a coffee, very early too. It’s just him and me, no PRs. I’ll never forget how easy it felt, what calmness he had. Like the two guys at the end of The Straight Story looking up at the stars, we just sat for a while, 5,000 miles apart.
Years later, we’re in the same room. An interview for my BBC Scene by Scene programme, with lots of lights, cables, cameras and people. The room I’ve chosen is in front of the shark tank of the London Aquarium. We raise our velvet sofa on to a platform so that the cameras can film the sharks swimming behind his head. By this stage, David was talking about creativity as a deep dive, going downwards, a kind of fishing.
He is more hesitant this time. At one point we just sit as he smokes. He isn’t interested in themes so much as the feel of places, atmospheres. He tells me he’d give a room with loud wallpaper and a roaring fire a score of 8/10 perhaps, for its intensity. That calm-wild scale again, that introvert-extrovert scale again. You can watch his films just by scoring his rooms.
I had never – have never – heard someone talk about form with such power, with the sense that it is like a kid’s drawing. He called the key scene in any movie the eye of the duck scene. Have you ever noticed that the eye of the duck is always in the right place? I always look for the eye of the duck in films ever since.
Can we imagine David’s funeral? Maybe in a dark forest of sequoia trees, late at night. Pallbearers dressed as rabbits. They carry the coffin slowly, then Roy Orbison’s In Dreams begins to play. At its climax, 1,000 mourners, synced like a Busby Berkeley film, each take out a single cigarette and smoke it. The smoke makes the scene like a Caspar David Friedrich painting. The pallbearers walk on, then the song I’m Deranged by another David – Bowie – starts. Lynch used it in Lost Highway. The song is kinetic. The rabbits start to run.
On an allocated day and time, can cinemas all around the world play In Dreams or I’m Deranged? David was both. Or can they show that shot in The Elephant Man where the camera tracks in on Anthony Hopkins’ face and he drops a single tear?
‘His films were thick with secrets, with the unexplained’
Coralie Fargeat, director
His films opened gates towards imagination. Towards an endless mental space where each could project its own inner world. We could wander in his films. Go back to them again and again. They were thick with secrets, with the unexplained. They were full of the unnecessary.
That was so essential. It requires a lot of strength: the deliberate act of creating worlds with no boundaries. To create paths where our mind can follow its own way. Carpets. Back yards. Heavy rooms. Roads. A whole unseen world was infusing behind each of those spaces. They were becoming open spaces for our imagination. I loved his work for that.
‘They found him with a clothes hanger and a dog bowl’
Abel Ferrara, director
A friend of mine worked on the set of the original Dune and when they went looking for David between setups they found him with a 16mm camera in one hand and a metal clothes hanger in the other, filming shadows in a doggy dish full of water. I saw Eraserhead in a theatre in downtown NY and 50 years later I was at the screening for the new Twin Peaks at Cannes.
Strange is not a word you hear often to describe a movie, lately almost never. For me that’s the highest compliment. I heard him speak once at a large charity event advocating meditation for children. Like with the movies, I thought: “I want what he’s got.”
‘He looked worried and said there had been a mistake’
Stephen Woolley, programmer and producer
Before early 1979, all I knew of David were the scant reviews of his extraordinary debut film, Eraserhead. It was an elusive film in the UK, playing exclusively at midnight screenings in US arthouse cinemas alongside underground classics like The Harder They Come and Pink Flamingos. When I finally caught up with it, I was so mesmerised and besotted with its beautiful design, disturbing imagery and surreal humour that I programmed it for two months exclusively at the Scala cinema in London. It was one of the most important films I had ever seen and still is.
He came for the opening. After a press event, we were alone together in the Scala bar – he was then 32 and I was 10 years younger. The cinema was in great condition having been custom-built a few years earlier and the 35mm projection was perfect.
But, looking at the programme, he appeared suddenly alarmed (his expressions usually vacillated between open-faced exuberance and intense curiosity). I asked what was wrong. He apologetically explained in what can only be described as a Jimmy Stewart drawl that there was a mistake: it said the film was playing during the day. He went on to explain: nobody watched it in daylight; it was a midnight movie; it would flop at 3pm.
Ironically, Lynch liked to describe Eraserhead as his Philadelphia Story – not the charming romcom with Stewart, Hepburn and Grant, but a tale inspired by his time living in the most violent and crime-ridden neighbourhoods in the city. He had lived all over the US, after being born in Montana, but kept that adorable, sing-song midwest accent throughout his life.
I told him there was no mistake – and happily David was wrong. The film was a success both day and night and emblematic of what the Scala later became famous for. Eraserhead is a transgressive and pleasurable enigma, existing alongside movies like Tod Browning’s Freaks, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and Jodorowsky’s El Topo – as a masterpiece of grotesquery as beauty – like a Francis Bacon painting or a Louise Bourgeois sculpture.
In 1986, I found myself in San Francisco, in the same dubbing theatre as Lynch, who was editing Blue Velvet. I wandered into this darkened, uninviting space and there on the big screen were Dennis Hopper wearing an oxygen mask embracing Isabella Rossellini, and David excitedly creating sounds like whales or elephants communicating across a great distance. I had never seen or heard anything like it.
We went to lunch and David talked animatedly about the film, and this other script he had wanted to make, called Ronnie Rocket, about two crazy scientists. I remember him vividly describing one scene of a three-legged-dog slipping on an oil slick. It never did get made.
I tried to buy Blue Velvet for UK distribution. Preview screenings had produced test cards which were reputedly some of the worst in Hollywood history, so the financiers were going to dump it. But as my enthusiasm grew, so did De Laurentiis’s confidence – and 20th Century Fox released it in the UK.
Luckily, a few years after that, David made another glorious film that we could release. The Cannes premiere of Wild at Heart was a wonderful moment for Lynch – they had rejected Eraserhead years before – and the film winning the Palme d’Or was a fitting tribute to a man who never lost his dignity, his meditative sense of calm or his sense of humour.
His hilarious and generous performance as John Ford at the end of Spielberg’s The Fabelmans illustrates this perfectly. As Ford, David seems to remind us of the power of the 35mm moving image, the breathing heartbeat of a 20th-century art form, now lost for ever – or, at best, transformed.
‘I kidded myself I could live in Eraserhead’s inner world. In fact I just bought the poster’
Peter Strickland, director
I first saw Eraserhead at the Scala cinema on Saturday 10 February 1990 and to say it was an influence is an understatement. It pointed to an aesthetic pathway hitherto hidden from view, and most tellingly, as with many altering experiences, it revealed something within me that was probably always latent, but required unveiling.
At one point I fell asleep. But my dream state was porous enough to allow in fragments from the film, such as the Lady in the Radiator song, which made the whole experience even more indelible.
For all the genuinely repellent scenes in Eraserhead, the film’s ignition is in its confoundingly wayward tonality and how Lynch saw and heard the world. It was the first time I considered sound as something expressive rather than illustrative and considered film as something impressionistic rather than representative. The film functioned as an environment more than anything. I kidded myself that I could live in that inner world, though my only concession to that was in purchasing the film’s poster from a shop in Reading called But Is it Art?.
1990 was a David Lynch year; not just personally, but also nationally. The Twin Peaks pilot became available to rent on video in the early part of the year, the David Lynch, Julee Cruise, Angelo Badalamenti album Floating into the Night came out around the same time (several months after its US release), Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or and the actual series of Twin Peaks aired in the autumn. I was 16 or 17 that year, and full of the wonder needed to absorb and steal Lynch’s askew perspective. I even copied Lynch’s Cannes habit of walking around with his shoelaces undone, which was his version of a good luck charm for the Palme d’Or. That soon ended when I tripped over running for a bus.
Part of the appeal of Eraserhead was the contrast of Lynch’s industrial netherworld with my suburban, middle-class upbringing. Despite or because of that, he became my first cinema love. Eraserhead was my epiphany and it exerted itself on me to such a degree that I was suffering from what some would call an “anxiety of influence”. Everything I wrote in the early 90s harked back to Eraserhead, whether intentionally or not. To learn of his death is to make me immensely grateful for that influence, even if I was sometimes desperate to escape it.
‘He returned my desire to make films’
Carol Morley, director
It’s hard to believe Lynch has gone, but incredible to contemplate all that he did, and just how his avant garde art bravely made it out into the big wide world and continues to thrive. His film-making turned everything upside down and inside out and he did it with such originality it was breathtaking. He didn’t analyse. He felt, he had dreams and he tried to catch something in the air. In the book Lynch on Lynch, he said: “There are things that cinema can do that are very difficult to talk about.” He understood the mystery and magic like nobody else.
The best thing in the world for him was to have an idea. And he inspired me to stay true to my own ideas even when navigating the tricky and sometimes suffocating parts of film-making that are essentially commerce above art. Over the years I’ve watched and read interviews with him, and once spent a morning in bed reading his insights into life and creativity in his alternative self-help book, Catching the Big Fish. I’d begun the day never wanting to get up again and certainly never wanting to make a film again, but he returned my desire to do both. And through this, he taught me to hang on to the personal, to always return to the beginning of a process – to remember what you fell in love with when you had the initial thoughts and to never let go of that feeling and to keep going deep.
Lynch dreamed up his films – literally. The ending of Blue Velvet came to him in a dream. He inspired me to connect with my unconscious, to pay it respect. I loved how he explored the unmentionables in life, shone light into darkness, created monsters and outsiders, how he reconciled opposites such as the innocence and horror of small-town America, how he looked at “the weird on top” (as Laura Dern’s character in Wild at Heart says) and then took us underground.
The original Blue Velvet trailer says: “It will open your eyes to a world you’ve never seen before.” That pretty much sums up all of Lynch’s oeuvre. There’s a familiarity, but then again … I was around when Twin Peaks aired on TV in 1990 and my friends and I couldn’t stop talking about it. We began to see things differently. Life became Lynchian. I swear he altered the structure of our brains.
His work has always been a great challenge for the mind, but it’s the emotion in his films that has kept me returning for clues. As inventive as he was with performance, image, sound and music, nothing he did was embellishment for the sake of style, everything Lynch did was in service to the story. And It’s clear how much he loved his actors, how he gave them a safe and freeing space to do the very delicate and personal work actors have to do.
‘He made his dialogue “more comfortable”’
John C Lynch, director
David could only offer us two days of his time in 2016, when we were filming Lucky. He was cutting Twin Peaks: The Return, so after waiting for a bit, we scheduled his scenes on two days of the Fourth of July weekend. His participation was one of the elements that allowed the film to be made. Without him, it wouldn’t have happened and he did it entirely for Harry Dean Stanton, who starred. You could feel the love between them from across a room.
I was grateful to feel no trepidation when we met. He worked on being present his entire life, and that’s what he was when we met: fully present. As an actor, he came as prepared as I imagine he would have wanted his actors to be. He had made the dialogue “more comfortable” and asked if that was OK. We went through the words with Drago and Logan (the screenwriters) and they sounded great. We all agreed to the small changes.
Then, on the set, Harry was struggling with an exchange with another actor and asked me what it meant. I told him what I thought and, unsatisfied, he turned to David and said: “Do you understand this?” David said: “Yes, I do Harry.” Harry said: “What does it mean?” David looked at me. I nodded and said: “Jump on in.” But David said: “It’s not my place to say, Harry.” How many thousands of times had he been in my position, with actors pleading for allies among their fellow actors? And he provided the answer that he wished actors would provide: “It’s not my place.” Pure class. By the way, Harry was right and we cut the exchange.
‘He showed us monsters without being a monster’
Alice Lowe, director
Many remember the first time they encountered Lynch’s indelible images, heard his sound and music for the first time. To me, he’s just always been there. And that’s when a cultural loss feels hard: when you’ve not met someone, but their work feels personal to you, part of your psyche.
But what’s strange is how many feel that way. The strangeness and intimacy of his work is counterintuitive to its popularity, its sheer power to force its way into culture collectively. His work spoke its own language, but a language that was strangely universal. In a time when the very nature of film as an individual’s perspective and the human auteurship of art is in question, it feels seismic to have lost him.
He reminded us that genius can be coupled with kindness and humanity. To me his greatest collaboration was with his audience. The generosity to allow people to project their own interpretation upon his work, forging powerful bonds with it.
For me it is the power of colour within his work; the soul-shifting nature of the sound design; his unforgettable characters: Bob crawling over the sofa, Diane Ladd covering herself with lipstick, Nicolas Cage’s sweetness in Wild at Heart, the log lady, the lady in the radiator, The Elephant Man choosing to die. He deftly mixed tones – nigh impossible. Humour and darkness and horror and sadness and wonder. All human experience contained.
He was the best magician. His spell was to dispel accusations of elitism or pretension with the sheer primality of his incantations. It is happening again. You may not be able to explain it, but deep down, you understand it. Universal. He showed us monsters without being a monster. And his showmanship was filled with empathy.
I’m going try to find something in the wreckage of this loss: a promise to be creative, to trust in art, in humanity, that there is a collectivity to our experience, and it’s worth sharing it. I hope his family are comforted by the love pouring out for this wonderful human.
