Room to Dream

by David Lynch

Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie,

“At some point I went home to Alexandria and found David working in an art store, sweeping—David’s a great sweeper,” said Fisk. “He still likes to sweep, and takes great pride in it,

I wasn’t that wild, but I did get really drunk a few times, and one time it was on gin. I was drinking gin and telling these girls it was water and I ended up in Russell Kefauver’s front yard. I woke up and saw this wooden post with a number on it, and I kept looking at this number, then I realized I was in a yard on my back and that I was at Russell’s house.

I knew how to behave at home, and it was different from how I behaved at the fraternity, and that was different from how I was at the studio. I had a lot of tension and nervousness about living all of these separate lives.

Paul had white hair and glasses and wore a tie, and he always talked to David about his television. He talked about shopping for it and what a good one he’d gotten, and he’d always wind up this conversation about his TV by saying, with great solemnity, ‘And, Dave…I am blessed with good reception.’

we spent the night sitting on our blue velvet couch—which David still pines for—with

I must’ve changed and gotten kind of dirty during that period. Judy Westerman was at the University of Pennsylvania then and I think she was in a sorority, and one time Jack and I got a job driving some paintings up there. I thought, Great, I can see Judy. So we go up there and deliver this stuff, then I go to her dormitory and walk in and this place was so clean, and I was in art school being a bum, and all the girls are giving me weird looks. They sent word to Judy that I was there, and I think I embarrassed her. I think they were saying “Who the hell is that bum over there?” But she came down and we had a really nice talk. She was used to that part of me, but they weren’t. That was the last time I ever saw Judy.

we did go to Woodstock. It was in the winter and we went up there because we’d heard about this hermit who lived there, and I wanted to see this hermit. Nobody could ever see him. He built this kind of mound place out of earth and rocks and twigs with little streamers on them, and when we went there it was covered with snow. He lived in there, and I think he had places he could peek out to see if someone was coming near him, but you couldn’t see him. We didn’t see him, but we felt him being there.

I always say that filmmaking is just common sense. Once you figure out how you want it to look, you kind of know how to do it.

It was a moonless night and we went down into these bushes to sleep. It was real quiet, then suddenly there was a whooshing sound and we saw a horse tied to one of the bushes.

They’re driving along at night on a two-lane highway with Herb driving, and Herb starts talking. As he’s talking, his voice starts to go up in pitch and he starts going off the road. Al says, “Herb!” Herb gets back on the highway. He keeps talking and his voice is going up even higher and he’s going off the road again, then he goes off the road completely and his voice is super high. Al is screaming at him, “Herb!” Finally Herb comes out of it and gets back on the road and he’s okay. Who knows what that was about.

they’re waiting for Herb and he’s not showing up. They call his room and there’s no answer, so they call the manager of his hotel and ask him to check Herb’s room, and they go up there and Herb is dead in the bed. They did an autopsy in London and find no cause of death. His mother has a funeral home in North Carolina and they did an autopsy, too, but they couldn’t find a cause of death, either. That was Herb.

I built the planet so it would break in a certain place, and I wanted to build a catapult that would shoot a chunk of the planet backed with lead or steel so when it hit the planet it would explode. Al had a completely different catapult idea, and I said, “That won’t work,” and he said, “No, yours won’t work,” so we built both of them and neither of them worked.

Brooks said he loved Eraserhead “because it’s all symbols, but it’s real,”

‘In life you don’t know everything. You enter a room and people are sitting there and there’s an atmosphere, and you immediately know if you have to be careful about what you say, or if you have to be loud, or silent, or subdued—you immediately know it. The thing you don’t know is what’s next. In life we don’t know where the story is going or even where a conversation is going to go in the next minute.’ David’s awareness of this is central to his films. He’s very sensitive to the mystery that surrounds everything.”

“David, I can’t work on this film anymore. I can’t stand this film. I can’t stand Frank Booth and I can’t do it. It’s making me sick.” I said, “Jeez, Alan, holy smokes,” but that was it.

‘I’ve got this idea about a secure research facility in the fictional city of Newtonville, Kansas, and two cretinous guys who work there. One of them laughs and a bubble floats out of his mouth and goes down a hallway, around a corner, and into a room where it lodges in the housing of a sensitive piece of equipment and shorts it out. Then you cut to outer space and see a satellite deploy a kind of ray-gun weapon that fires, and then a countdown starts.’ That was all David had when he first came in, and we started spinning it into this comic phantasmagoria called One Saliva Bubble.

I saw the pilot as the same thing as a feature film, and as far as I’m concerned the only thing in the entire first two seasons that’s really Twin Peaks is the pilot.

Quentin Tarantino was on hand and made the observation, “[He’s] disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie.”

Kreten.

a musician named Yoshiki, who’s in a band called X Japan, asked me to make a music video for him. I said, “Okay, let me hear some music and I’ll see if I get any ideas.” So they sent one piece of music over that was basically just talking with some kind of music in the background, like a poem. I said, “I don’t have any ideas,” and turned it down, and they called back in a giant panic and said, “We’ve already announced it!” They offered me more money, so I did this thing for a song called “Longing” that wound up being really fun.

Another time I’m in the living room in L.A. and my phone rings and there’s Michael Jackson on the phone, telling me he wants me to do some kind of trailer for his album Dangerous. I said, “I don’t know if I can do it; I don’t have any ideas for it,” but as soon as I hung up and started walking toward the hall, all these ideas came up. I called back and said, “I got some ideas,” and I worked on that with John Dykstra in his studio.

In 1995 Lumière and Company called and said that forty directors from all over the world were being asked to make short films using the original Lumière Brothers camera made out of wood, glass, and brass. It’s a hand-cranked camera with a little wooden magazine that holds fifty-five seconds of film, and I thought it sounded cool, but I had no ideas. Then I was in the woodshop and I got this idea of a person who’s been killed—I still have the original drawing I made when I got the idea—and we got working on it pretty fast.

I don’t believe all highways are lost, but there are plenty of places to get lost, and there’s some kind of pleasure in getting lost—like Chet Baker said, let’s get lost. And look what happened to him. He fell out of a window.

There are so many good things about drugs that it’s a hard sell telling people not to take them, but you pay a price for taking them that’s worse than the good feeling they give you.

It’s not necessarily true that I don’t know what the film is until I get in there and shoot it. If that were true, then you wouldn’t be able to trust a person like me. You have a script and a definite idea of what you want, but sometimes when you get there you see things and possibilities and things can grow. Or because it’s not exactly what was in your head, you adapt and something even better appears. There’s the essence of the scene, you’ve got to get that, but different things can trigger ideas, and that’s why shooting on location is great. If you build a set based on your mind, then that’s what it will be, but when you go on location all kinds of stuff can happen.

I used to think I liked the desert in Southern California, but I really hate the desert. I had a large piece of beef for dinner in the desert. I never eat red meat but that’s what they served on this particular night, and I slept in someone else’s bed that night and had a dream that was so horrible and diabolical that the whole next day I had to mentally fight a thing that was going on. I don’t remember what the dream was, but I remember the feeling, and I couldn’t talk to anybody and had to be alone to fight it mentally. It was only when I got back to L.A. that it lifted. That ended the desert for me. There are places with bad vibes and places with good vibes, and I slept and ate in a bad place.

Tony’s right that the entertainment industry is “a collaborative community,” but I can’t stand that way of thinking. It’s not a collaborative thing at all. Yes, you work with people who help you, and you can ask a hundred people their opinion, but in the end all decisions have to be made by the director.

I was at this party once and Spielberg was there and I said to him, “You’re so lucky because the things you love millions of people love, and the things I love thousands of people love.” He said, “David, we’re getting to the point where just as many people will have seen Eraserhead as have seen Jaws.” I don’t know about that. All I know is that there are lots of films out there and I don’t know if anybody cares.

Another time I had to go to a meeting with the president of the Producers Guild or the Directors Guild or something, and Erik Crary is driving me and I’m dressed sort of like a bum. Erik drops me off and drives off to park and I finish a smoke then go into the lobby. There are these big policemen-type guys at the desk and they’re seeing me there. Fine. Then Erik comes in and I march over and slap the desk and say, “I’m here to see the president!” They look at me and say, “Oh yeah?” I say “Yeah! He’s on the sixth floor.” They say, “That’s interesting. This building only has five floors, buddy.” We were in the wrong place and they sure didn’t know who I was, and they were on the verge of calling somebody—like the police or the men in white coats.