Der Spiegel 22.11. 1999

"There´s lots of gentle folks out there"

SPIEGEL: Mr. Lynch, you might have heard this over and over again: "The Straight Story" is not the David-Lynch-movie, one would have expected. Are you surprised yourself?

Lynch: Yes, indeed. I still don`t know exactly what to answer. You have to fall in love completely with a story, otherwise it won`t work. This time, it was this small story which caused these great emotions. It`s true that I didn`t try so hard  to focus all the affection on a single character before.

SPIEGEL: It`s the almost visionary perspective on the subliminal horror, the abyssmal and the destructive forces beneath the surface of the everyday set in rural places which made you a famous director. Movies like "Blue Velvet" or your tv-series "Twin Peaks" were almost lessons in anxiety and the hypocracy of  harmony.

Lynch: Do you want me to contradict?

Spiegel: And now you`re surprising us with a movie filled with unaffected faith in harmony. It`s like a revocation. There is not a single evil character in  "The Straight Story". Aren`t you surprised yourself? Will this be a permanent change of direction?

Lynch: What am I to answer? I guess I just don`t know. I use to make all essential decisions - like what to do next - irrationally, completely by intuition. I really don`t know what my next movie will be about, I`ll only know it for sure, when I fall in love with a story so passionately that I simply have to do it. It might be a totally dark movie.

SPIEGEL: You don`t think of the gentleness and sweetnees of  "The Straight Story" as special?

Lynch: In the life of Alvin Straight, there are dark and terrible experiences as well, and the film doesn`t simply omit them: his nightmarish wartime experiences or the  fate of his daughter. But I`m telling a story set taking place mainly in Wisconsin, and you can`t imagine how nice everyone is there. There`s lots of gentle folks out there. I hardly could imagine myself when I went there eight years ago with my companion Mary Sweeney, who is from this place; I was almost alarmed by the gentleness and suspected the people were kidding me. Noone means to do Alvin Straight any harm, and to stay faithful to the story you have to stay faithful to this aspect as well. Of course, terrible things occur in Wisconin like in the rest of the world, but not in this story. No story can encompass the whole truth about a place or a person.

SPIEGEL: Who introduced you to this story? Was it  Mary Sweeney, your companion, who`s has been the editor of your movies for a long time, and now also co-authored the screenplay for your latest film together with John Roach?

Lynch: Of course it had been Mary. She`s from Wisconsin, the place Alvin Straight crossed; she was already fascinated by the story when she first heard about it five years ago; she collected all the newspaper articles and thought it would be a good story for a movie. But it took a long time untill she obtained the film rights. Then she started the research with John Roach, a friend of her since their time in school. I wasn`t involved then, because I didn`t think it would be the right story for me. But when I read the script, it was a different thing, I was enthusiastic at once.

SPIEGEL: To what extent does the movie keep to the true journey of Alvin Straight, just the basic facts or also his life experiences and the single episodes?

Lynch: I`d say that about 50 percent is absolutely authentic. The rest of the stories are from this place as well, but not all of them really happened to Alvin.

SPIEGEL: Some details still bear  the striking absurdly-funny  David-Lynch-touch.

Lynch: That wasn`t done on purpose. Take the scene  for example when Alvin descends the mountains, rolling towards this place and sees a burning house right in front of him, because the firefighters have a training there - that´s 100 percent authentic. We really tried to depict Alvin´s journey from place to place as faithful as possible, from  Laurens, Iowa to Mount Zion,  Wisconsin. It was right and necessary to follow the route and order of time, because Alvin`s beard is constanly growing, and it took us about six weeks, from late summer until fall, to shoot, not much longer than he needed for his trip four years before.

SPIEGEL: Weren´t you scared when troubles occured with your protagonist being almost 80 years old and your director of photography being slightly older than 80 years?

Lynch: Heaven smiled down upon us.

SPIEGEL: Didn`t anyone urge you to cast a star as the lead before shooting had begun?

Lynch: But I do have a star! Could you imagine anyone better than him?

SPIEGEL: It`s hard to imagine someone else in this role after watching the film. He´s great.. but wouldn`t it have been more attractive to a broader audience to cast a Hollywood-legend for this "off"-project?

Lynch: We considered a lot of actors, including very famous ones, but in the end, I felt so certain that I didn`t even have test shootings made. Richard Farnsworth, who spent half his Hollywood-career as a stuntman on horseback, still claims today, that he isn`t an actor at all. In my opinion, an actor is capable to make a character credible from the inside, and Richard has that gift in an extraordinary way.

SPIEGEL: You seem to have been in a mood for reconciliation last year:  You recorded "Lux Vivens" together with the young singer Jocelyn Montgomery, an album with songs written by St. Hildegard von Bingen that moves in truly heavenly harmonies, that would make it the perfect christmas present. How did that happen?

Lynch: Jocelyn is a wonderful singer, and she simply overwhelmed me with her enthusiasm for this old music. Unlike her, I didn`t undertake some sort of pilgrimage to Bingen. Jocelyn married my friend  Monty Montgomery then, the producer of my film "Wild at Heart", and I finally had my own recording studio built at my house, and this is where  "Lux Vivens" turned out to be our first production.

Spiegel: So you contributed the arrangement, but don`t you contribute different kinds of instruments and percussions  as well?

Lynch: The term "arrangement" sounds too important, what I created  one might call a  "soundscape", backing Jocelyn voice.

SPIEGEL: You`re said to having been a talented trumpeter.

Lynch: Well, I capitulated when I listened to Chet Baker for the first time.

SPIEGEL: You claim to choose stories and means of artistic expression completely by intuition. Yet you`re considered to work methodically, rationally and to the point.

Lynch: I think you need to do both. You can`t just fool around and act crazy, then you won`t get anything done.  Working with discipline and method is the basis to being creative, then you can fool around as much as you want.

SPIEGEL: This is a painter`s reply, not a filmmaker`s one.

Lynch: It doesn`t make a difference to me.

SPIEGEL: But you must be aware of the fact that  95 percent of all directors in Hollywood love to complain about being unable to get their wonderful ideas financed and being forced to compromise all the time. Don`t you?

Lynch: No, at least not anymore. Filming "Dune", I made regrettable compromises for I was young and innocent and I have been punished for it, but that`s almost 20 years ago.

SPIEGEL: Didn`t you have to abandon wish-projects you weren`t able to get financed?

Lynch: Not really. I was always lucky to realize the projects I really wanted to. But I`m aware that this luck is quite rare in film-business.

.... and his television-series "Twin Peaks" (1990): "You can fool around as much as you want"

SPIEGEL: Does it happen that you`re offered projects by major studios?

Lynch: It does happen, but I don`t think I`m on the so-called "A-list", which means I`m not first choice. I`m only offered projects others have rejected before. I`m not waiting to be approached by the major studios so I don`t even have an agent anymore.

SPIEGEL: Nevertheless, you hesitatingly agreed to do a highly commcercial project at the beginning of this year. You have developped a television series around a young woman who suffers from amnesia after a car accident, which resulted in a quite expensive pilot for the series "Mulholland Drive". It is said  that it ended up in a disaster.

Lynch: In the beginning, it wasn`t disastrous at all, the shooting was real fun. I felt that the pilot had to have a running time of two hours, and I structured it accordingly, but then they urged me to cut it down to 88 minutes, and that was a true massacre. The producers weren`t pleased with this version, neither was the audience of a test screening, and the guys from the guys of the advertising agencies were pleased the least. And it`s their opinion that matters.

SPIEGEL: What will happen with it?

Lynch: The idea of developping a series is done, of course.  But you`re obliged to shoot an alternative ending, when you`re making an open-ended expensive pilot in case the project is dropped. So was I. The producers from "ABC" will show it as a feature film on television some day while Disney, who own the rights, will try to market it abroad. This is what it`s like to struggle for survival in Hollywood. Of course I´m sad about a missed opportunity.

SPIEGEL: Do you have loads of secret dream-projects back in store?

Lynch: There are projects I`d love to do, but it´s got to be the right moment. It´s hard to tell when that is. That`s why I`m constantly looking for the stories.

SPIEGEL: According to a book [Filmmakers in Conversation], you`d love to adapt Kafka`s "The Metamorphosis" for the screen. Is there a finished script?

Lynch: Yes, there is a script. I love this story, it`s wonderfully simple, ambiguous, funny, absurd and desperate. But I`m not sure if it would be the right atmosphere now. You have to sense it, and not knowing it for sure troubles me. Imagine Fellini releasing "Otto e mezzo" these days - maybe noone would like to watch it. The world has changed.

SPIEGEL: Thank you for this interview, Mr. Lynch.