Suburban Spaceman

From Blue Velvet to Wild at Heart, David Lynch´s profane visions of smalltown America have enraged and enthralled in their blank pursuit of death, desire and deceit. But there is more to the man than the movies. Dylan Jones caught up with him in Cannes

Of all the aliens produced by Hollywood these past few years, none has been stranger than David Lynch. Mel Brooks, who produced The Elephant Man, Lynch´s second movie, called him "Jimmy Stewart from Mars", and the plaudits since have been equally bizarre. David Lynch is the benevolent spaceman who landed in Smalltown, the inter-galactic renaissance man disguised in an unassuming suburban bumpkin.

On French TV during the Cannes Film Festival this year, Lynch looked exactly like that - an alien who had just landed on a strange planet. At a press conference to publicize his new movie, Wild at Heart (which went on to win the Palme d´Or), Lynch stood surrounded by a flock of paparazzi, stammering and stuttering, looking increasingly uncomfortable as the cameras whirred and the lights whipped his eyes. He looked confused, shy, and even a little scared. For such a wild-mannered and strangely fastidious man as Lynch, this was an indignity too much to bear.

The director is not what you´d call demonstrative. He´s a stereotypical contradiction - the monosyllabic and lethargic sports manager, the even-tempered oddball, the schizoid recordproducer or kind-hearted killer. He´s a man who uses plain language to describe the bizarre - the nightmare visions he captures in his movies.

"There´s always the danger that I´ll be forever labelled resolutely odd," he says a few days after the press conference, sipping tea and furrowing his brow in the penthouse restaurant in Cannes´ s Carlton Hotel. "Because these days there is no time for shading in people, and you´re put in a little box. I´m always put in the category of strange, which I find a little odd. I´m a little different from that, I think."

Ever since Eraserhead, questions have been raised about Lynch´s fantasies and obsessions, about whether these twisted 3-D dreams are his own, or the product of an over-indulgent mind. When the shocking Blue Velvet hit US screens in 1986, Lynch received the kind of press once reserved for the likes of Roman Polanski and Russ Meyer. At the time, Lynch was adamant that Blue Velvet and all the sado-masochistic elements within it weren´t just an exercise in perversity. "The only thing to say about all the controversy is, did I make all that up, or are there examples in real life? And there are countless examples like that in real life. So why do they get upset when you put something like this in a film? People get into all sorts of strange situations, and you can´t believe they´re enjoying it, but they are. There are lots of reasons for it. It gets you into psychiatry." And, turning the question on its head, Lynch would then add: "Blue Velvet is a love story."

Wild at Heart, which he also describes as a love story, although a more straightforward one, follows a couple on the run through a maze of violence and disturbing perversion. Twenty-three-year-old ex-con Sailor Ripley (Nicholas Cage) and his devoted 20-year-old lover, Lula (Laura Dern), career through the margins of America´s Deep South, pursued by Lula´s crazed mother (played by Laura Dern´s real-life mother, Diane Ladd), who´s intent on ending their relationship. This is a story of two innocents on a trip through hell, held together (sometimes almost fused together) by their unconditional love and the furious passion with which they display it. It´s almost a Bonnie & Clyde for the Nineties.

You wouldn´t imagine that David Lynch´s imagination needs kick-starting, but this is what happened when he read Barry Gifford´s picaresque novel, Wild at Heart, The Story of Lula and Sailor, in the summer of 1989. Gifford had given a proof of the book to the producer Monty Montgomery that spring, and as soon as Montgomery read it, he passed it to Lynch and optioned the film rights.

"My next film after Blue Velvet could have been anything, but it turned out to be this. ["Whenever I ask where his ideas come from," Isabella Rossellini said recently, "he says it´s like going fishing. He never knows what he´s going to catch."] Something about Barry´s book thrilled me enough to want to spend a year living in this little world. The book is very different from the film, but it had these two characters, Sailor and Lula, who had this kind of inner strength which carried them through adversity. I realized I could take them through hell and they´d still come out of things OK."

A modern American road movie, Wild at Heart is a vivid exploration of innocence and depravity, of right and wrong, and the motives for, and the implications of, extreme violence. It´s a maze of psychological turmoil, but also a film of beauty.

Stylistically, it´s quite similar in feel to Blue Velvet, with a kaleidoscope of camera tricks, ironic refrains and visual hiccoughs. But although it´s his most explicitly violent film to date, some of the lighter passages verge on John Waters territory. While certainly not camp - it´s unlikely that Lynch could ever make a knowingly camp film - the humour definitely takes the edge off some of the more harrowing scenes. He continually describes the film as a "violent comedy".

David Lynch´s life has been public ever since the release of Eraserhead, the surreal story of a couple and their mutant baby, in 1976. Born in Montana in 1946, Lynch went to Europe after dropping out of the Boston Museum School to study with the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoshka, before entering the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he decided to pursue film. And while his film career has been dedicated to the pursuit of the bizarre and the disturbing - treading the thin line between the unknown and the unmentionable - these obsessions stem from an upbringing firmly rooted in smalltown America. This is where he was brought up, in the netherworlds of Idaho, Washington and Virginia, and this is where he points when he wants to illustrate the dark and the desperate in modern.day America.

The director hasn´t used the cinema as his research material - unlike most of today´s auteurs, Lynch has never been besotted with the movies - he´s used his own experiences, however normal and unremarkable these might have been.

After making two shorts - The Alphabet and The Grandmother - Lynch was accepted by the American Film Institute´s Center for Advanced Film Studies in 1970, and began work on Eraserhead, a project that would consume him for the next six years. Released to extraordinary critical acclaim in 1976, Lynch was quickly acknowledged as a major force in filmmaking. He then continued on his obscure, obsessive course with The Elephant Man (1980), the story of the pathetically deformed John Merrick; Dune (1983), the $40 million Dino De Laurentiis disaster based on Frank Herbert´s sci-fi epic; and then Blue Velvet (1986), described by the director as "Norman Rockwell meets Hieronymous Bosch" - a tale of murder, violence and sexual degradation in bucolic smalltown America.

"I´ve no way of knowing how influential I am," he says, "disingenuously."It´s amazing how isolated you become in the film business. I don´t know anything about it. When you´re in the middle of a movie, you just can´t go out and see other people´s - it ruins your concentration. Especially for me, because I immerse myself in my own little world, one in which I´m completely happy."

As well as carving himself a niche as a maverick filmmaker, Lynch is also being recognized as a modern American renaissance man. Apart from making the extraordinarily successful TV mystery-soap Twin Peaks, he´s also produced and written the lyrics for Floating Into The Night, an LP by singer Julee Cruise. Last November he helped stage a performance of his "Industrial Symphony No.1" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a theatrical work he wrote and directed with the composer Angelo Badalamenti. He recently had an exhibition of his paintings at the Leo Castelli gallery in New York; is publishing a coffee-table book of his paintings and photographs; and every week he supplies the copy for a cartoon strip called "The Angriest Dog in the World" in the LA Reader. Lynch also recently made an appearance in a whimsical movie called Zelly and Me, playing an apparently eccentric millionaire in generic American suburbia.

His private life - which became public property when he began dating Isabella Rossellini, whom he cast both in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart - has been as turbulent as his movies. In 1967 he married a fellow art student, with whom he had a daughter, Jennifer. Jennifer Lynch is about to make her debut as a director with the film Boxing Helena, a film she wrote herself about a girl whose boyfriend cuts off her arms and legs and keeps her in a box. He married again in 1977 (this time to Mary Fisk, the sister of director Jack Fisk), and had a son, Austin, in 1982. A two-time divorce, he has been Rossellini´s companion since 1985. He was introduced to her at a restaurant by a mutual friend when he was casting Blue Velvet. Astonished by her beauty, he said, "You could be Ingrid Bergman´s daughter." "You idiot," the friend said, "she is Ingrid Bergman´s daughter."

Wild at Heart is a rollercoaster ride through the undergrowth of the heartland, where "disturbances" occur at preordained moments; nothing is left to chance here, all the odds are stacked against Sailor and Lula from the start. This is a transient world of dread and expectation.

Lynch, a master of the understatement, has a knack of playing down the many subtexts in his films. "In Wild at Heart I wanted this wild, violent, twisted world, and I wanted this love story bang in the middle of it." He scratches his head, and adopts the kind of goofy, confused look often brought to the screen by Jimmy Stewart, most notably in his portrayal of Elwood P. Dowd, the batty but amiable character who befriends a 6´4" rabbit called Harvey. He tends to communicate like a character from a Jim Jarmusch movie, in short, enigmatic, self-deprecating bursts. He stops and starts, stammering in an endearing way, leaving huge gaps between words. He´ll stonewall and prevaricate and go to great lengths to try and convince you he´s being completely straight with you. The perversity he presents in his movies is not particularly out of the ordinary, he´ll say, he´s just scratching the surface, that´s all.

In 1986, talking about Blue Velvet, he said: "There´s always the surface of something and something altogether different going on beneath the surface. Just like electrons busily moving about, but we can´t see them. That´s one of the things films do, show you that conflict."

"Wild at Heart is a road movie," he says now, "in as much as the characters bump into these horrible people as you would going down a road in reality. It was a very difficult structure, you know, to have the film move forward, and still be able to go off at tangents. It was a struggle. This kind of structure is something I´ve never attempted before, so I look on it as some kind of achievement. It allows seemingly unrelated things to happen."

Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern are convincingly cast as the misfit lovers, overflowing with passion, vitality, and a God-given naivety. Looking at life through adolescent eyes, they´re relentlessly upbeat in a down-at-heel, downcast kind of a world. "They´re really in love with one another," says Lynch, "and they treat each other extremely well. Sailor doesn´t even talk down to Lula, but treats her as an equal, and that is a modern relationship. They live in a world that´s pretty tough, but they´re very tender with each other."

Lynch has always had a penchant for seemingly banal dialogue, and this is something he again uses to good effect in Wild at Heart. Sailor and Lula swap dreary, monosyllabic lines, as the tension builds up around them. They´re lost in their own little world, a world protected by long bouts of sex and short, stubborn sentences.

The director has never quite come to terms with the critical bashing he took for the explicit sex in Blue Velvet, where Isabella Rossellini, as a fading nightclub singer, submits herself to violent, sadistic acts, carried out by a pervert, played with unnerving conviction by Dennis Hopper. The sex in Wild at Heart is less one-sided. "The sex is such happy sex. You feel good for Sailor and Lula that they´re digging it so much - and it´s like a healthy thing."

The violence, as usual, is another thing altogether. There is one scene where Sailor beats a character called Bob Ray Lemon to death, pummeling his head against a marble floor. As you see and hear (and seem to feel and touch, too) Lemon´s head smashing against the tiles, you think this is probably what it does sound like. The sounds are so effective - amplified to full effect, like they were in Scorsese´s Raging Bull - that you´re left in no doubt about the seriousness of the crime. Lynch denies this, claiming the violence in Wild at Heart is only "cinematic". "That scene is almost a celebration of violence. I don´t want to be misinterpreted when I say that, but it´s powerful in a movie way. Film is such a powerful medium, and you have the possibility to exaggerate things ... so you do."

There are other acts of violence which Lynch dropped from the movie. Lynch´s contract for Wild at Heart required that he hold at least two test screenings, and at both of these nearly 100 people walked out at a point in the film where Willem Dafoe - playing Bobby Peru, a hitman sent to kill Sailor - is graphically mutilated. Seeing the audience´s disgust, Lynch cut this scene from the film.

"I didn´t realize it when I signed the contract," he says, "but I was required to be there at the screenings, to see what really went down. I wasn´t a great believer of tests before this, but I learned something very valuable, and I now believe in them wholeheartedly. What I´d done was just far too strong. If I´d had 15 test screenings for Dune [instead of one], I might have been able to save that movie." (Blue Velvet, incidentally, had one of the worst test screenings in Hollywood history; shown to an audience who had come to see Top Gun in a cinema in the San Fernando Valley, almost the entire crowd voted it a disaster.)

Described by the New York Times as "Peyton Place meets Naked Lunch", Twin Peaks is an unnervingly sinister soap opera set in a picturesque lumber town (the Twin Peaks of the title) in Washington State near the Canadian border - the most inventive network TV show in years. A murder mystery with more than dirt under its fingernails, Lynch´s television debut is an unsettling melodrama that uses smalltown America and its volatile undercurrents as a microcosm of modern-day morals in much the same way as Blue Velvet. Behind the rural facade there is as much sex, drugs and motiveless violence as there is in any large American city.

Created by Lynch and Mark Frost, a former Hill Street Blues script editor, it contains some typically surreal humour. Kyle MacLachlan (who also starred in Blue Velvet), an FBI special agent assigned to solve a bizarre murder in Twin Peaks, holds a meeting at the local hall to dissuade the locals from taking the law into their own hands. As a woman walks into the hall carrying a small log, MacLachlan turns to the local sheriff (called Harry S. Truman, and played by Michael Ontkean) and asks, "Who´s the lady with the log?" "We call her the log lady," counters Truman.

In America this spring Twin Peaks went out on the ABC network on Thursday nights opposite Cheers, the number-one-rated network show. Unbelievably, almost from the first episode it was being watched by over 35 million viewers. Such is the programme´s success that US critics are already talking about the possibility of Twin Peaks heralding a stylistic volte-face in American television. "It´s a mini-phenomenon right now," says Lynch, "which I´m still not quite sure about. For some reason it just clicked. There´s something magical about its success."

The pilot has been available on video in Britain since the end of last year, and BBC2 will be showing the entire eight episodes of the first series in the autumn. A second series is planned for the winter.

Not only has Lynch produced a magnificent piece of television full of top-quality performances, chilling cinematography and generally high-production values, he´s actually created a kind of TV never seen before. Superbly off-kilter, purposefully ironic and deceptively scary - with Lynch cunningly subverting the accepted notions of the Capra-esque smalltown, ruthlessly exploited by Steven Spielberg - Twin Peaks has already inspired its imitators, as television executives suddenly realize that the decade of Dallas and Dynasty is finally over.

As for the future, Lynch has more than one project up his deliberately unassuming Comme des Garcons sleeve. With Mark Frost he is developing a series of TV documentary-poems about modern America. He hopes to collaborate with Dennis Potter on a film of D.M. Thomas´s The White Hotel: and wants to start work on Ronnie Rocket, "an absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence" (it´s about electricity) which he´s been trying to film for ten years. He´s also working on One Saliva Bubble, a "whacko comedy" he wrote with Mark Frost. This is another `switching movie`, in the style of Big and Vice Versa.

"It´s kinda frightening to make a film and say right from the beginning that it´s a comedy, because, as we all know, comedy is like mathematics," says the director, gently stroking his chin, gazing into his tea cup. "You either get a laugh or you don´t. There´s no in between. Although it´s another `switching movie`, it´s a little more complicated. Because there was a glut of them I shied away from the idea for a while, but hell, funny is funny. It certainly won´t be anything like Wild at Heart."

As devoted and incorruptible lovers, Sailor and Lula look set to become the Romeo and Juliet of their generation, two free spirits in a deep, dark, dank and highly corruptible world. "I see Sailor and Lula as innocents, but then I see most people as innocents," says the director before he leaves. "We live in a dark, confusing world, and we´re all trying to get it together and make sense of it. There are various degrees of innocence, for sure, but I think most people are kinda confused these days, which is kinda scary. Don´tcha think?"

Wild at Heart opens on August 24