WILD THING

Tony Crawley

Isabella Rossellini and David Lynch are the cult couple of the moment. She´s Lancome´s star model, still flying high on her role in Lynch´s Blue Velvet, and his latest controversial film, Wild at Heart, is the Cannes winner. Together they make weirdness glamourous.

David Lynch´s right shoelace was undone - he´d not tied it for three months. He´s a creature of such habits: he wears baseball caps with extra-long sun-visors and has been ordering the same chocolate shake (in a silver goblet, never a glass) for seven years at Bob´s Big Boy, until finding a new joint and menu to suit. Now he delights in turkey sandwiches or tuna melts on Swiss cheese, "golden brown" French fries, and cherry or blueberry pie. Post-lunch, that is. Lunchtime has been reserved for meditation - for the last 17 years.

So, when noticing his lace was untied "after a particularly good day, I kept it as a good luck thing." Obviously.

With his shoelace flailing the Croisette in Cannes, he came, saw and, much to his surprise, conquered - at his first attempt, with Wild at Heart, a typically surreal slice of Americana: hot sex, hefty violence, heavy rock, and a human flotsam and hard-asses, con merchants, loonies and cockroaches in underwear. "Yes," Lynch nods, "violent comedy sorta described it... somewhat."

A Lynch Mob, on set (left to right: Rossellini, Lynch, Grace Zabriskie and Glenn Walker Harris Jnr.
Photograph by Sygma.

He loves the ´50s. Or loves transposing his ´50s into his present: Eraserhead in 1976; Blue Velvet in 1985; his rave TV series, Twin Peaks in 1989. And Wild at Heart (Sailor et Lula in French), despite its ´50s icons, is the first truly ´90s film, featuring a killer-hero modelling himself on Elvis, wearing a snakeskin jacket like Brando in The Fugitive Kind, and rutting his gal at a motel named after Mitchum´s movie, Cape Fear.

Lynch still uses ´50s expressions: "For sure", "Whacko", "Like". And goes right into his gosh-awmighty-Jimmy Stewart when trying to describe the impact of his lover, Isabella Rossellini, playing what she calls a "hairy blonde" called Perdita Durango. "I thought it was, y´know like, er, I think, er, the problem... or, y´know... is like... er... [Finally, he gets there] Perdita is like so radiantly beautiful it almost stops the movie for me right there."

Despite the build-up, Lynch only occasionally comes over as a space-oddity. Like when he´s talking about a new album he´s producing: "I asked Grady Tate to do the entire Second World War on drums." Or when explaining in a French TV portrait his theory that a good film was like a good duck. "Oh yes," he says, "Wild at Heart is a mallard. A good film would have to obey certain laws that a duck has to obey. A lot of times you can get the bill, the body and the legs all right, but this eye of the duck is a certain key scene in the picture - and has to be perfectly placed."

As you will have gathered, Lynch is a cult film-maker. "That means there´s a small group of people that really dig you. But you´re broke and you can still go on living. In some dignity. [Pause] These labels are kinda strange, y´know. I just like to make films. In between everything else."

Blasphemy! So film´s not the be all and end all? "Well, it is the most important thing. I also like to paint, work on the television series, produce albums... and I´ve gotten some ideas for stop-motion animation things I´d like to do - probably in my basement."

Triumph for the golden couple at Cannes - happiness is a Palme d´Or.
Photograph by AFP

In short: in the film when Laura Dern tells Nicolas Cage, "The world´s wild at heart and weird on top," she´s into Lynch´s mantra.

HUNGRY FOR VIOLENCE

Isabella Rossellini arrives, Model and actres, daughter (with twin sister Ingrid) of a star and a movie director, Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, and now Lynch´s lover, she´s a radiant 38. Starting out working for her father as a dresser, she later moved into publicity, and landed a small role alongside her mother in Vincente Minelli´s Nona of ´76. The Taviani brothers cast her in ´79´s intelligent and low-key Il Prato, Taylor Hackford in his gallumphing, balletic East-West parable White Nights in ´85, and Norman Mailer in his disconnected thriller Tough Guys Don´t Dance. But this portfolio barely sketches a credible career, and she´d still be better known as Martin Scorsese´s erstwhile wife had she not hit the screen with such force in ´86 in Lynch´s virulent Blue Velvet. In it she played the tormented Dorothy, psychopathically hungry for violence and way over her head in a terrifying sadomasochistic relationship with Dennis Hopper´s mobster Frank. This remarkable film, almost without equal or precedent in contemporary cinema, launched both director and actress onto a different plane, a collaborative weirdness confirmed by Lynch´s latest. There´s a temptation to see self-mythologising in some of the stranger angles: Lynch´s fascination with rigor mortis (as a student he used to dress up as a mourner in order to visit neighbouring morgues, or would photograph "amusing" arrangements of chicken entrails); or his attachment, during the filming of Twin Peaks, to a sliced ear he carried around in his pocket; or his need, during the filming of Rossellini´s rape scene in Blue Velvet, to keep away from the cameras in order to stifle his laughter.

Though Rossellini´s the most photographed star of the Cannes Festival - and the most photogenic - she only has a tiny role in the film. "There wasn´t anything else for Isa," says Lynch. "But everyone plays their part." "I have a very little scene," she avers. "I´m here solely to support David. And I did the film because I adore that world of excess, of surrealism."

Wild, based on Barry Gifford´s novel, follows Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern, who also appeared in Blue Velvet) on the run from her mother Marietta. Mom sets private dick Harry Dean Stanton on the lover´s trail, charged with dragging Lula back. During their flight they collide with many oddballs, from the merely strange to the murderously dangerous, including Willem Dafoe´s killer Bobby Peru and his mistress Perdita Durango (Rossellini). Rossellini might also be slated for a follow-up, because Gifford´s new novel takes Perdita Durango as its heroine, and inevitably one envisions Lynch directing the film version.

For this movie she suggested her Perdita look, based on a photo of the painter Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera´s companion. (She´s never seeen Madonna?) "She had eyebrows close together. Quite appealing. But very wild. I thought it would be interesting to play an attractive woman who is also very hairy. A year later, David calls me: 'I have a small part where you can have those eyebrows - but I also want you to have a blond wig.' And they´re right. Blondes do have more fun.

"I wanted to be a nasty, savage, hairy woman, like the women of the South who exhude an animal sensuality." And all this from Lancome´s star model, who not only wanted eyebrows you could knit from but also a moustache to perche above her perfect lips. "I finally gave up on the moustache. It was too much."

"With David, you play such strange characters you don´t get offered by others. All his characters are overdone in make-up, wigs and clothes. Just part of his style. It´s a lot of fun, changing yourself."

Two´s company: X-rated actress and director pretend butter wouldn´t melt.
Photograph by AFP

And she has explored reinvention, or maybe transmutation, through the lenses of the world´s greatest photographers - Norman Parkinson, Eve Arnold and Robert Mapplethorpe included. As she says in the preface to Lancome´s portfolio Isabella Rossellini - Portrait d´une femme: "I was 28 years old when Bruce Weber took my first photo as a model for British Vogue. Two weeks later I was working with Bill King for American Vogue and soon after I was in Richard Avedon´s studio. It was a lucky beginning, to say the least, and I couldn´t help falling in love with modelling... I do think that the photos reveal more of the photographers´ personalities than they do mine, even though it is my face that is shown. They are more their portraits than mine."

She seems at ease with herself, and with her men. She remains buddies with Scorsese and was seen around Cannes with him before Lynch arrived to claim her attention. And the relationship with Lynch clearly allows for space. Apparently neither has any intention of ceasing their globe-trotting, he with his films, she with her photo sessions. "David lives in Los Angeles and I live in New York - each to their own job and preoccupations. It´s the life we have chosen," she explains, as if that explained all.

BRANDED X CERTIFICATE

Lynch knocked off the script in six weeks. "Well, you never get all the visuals first time, but it was a complete script. I wrote it once, very fast. I sat with my assistant and dictated. It wasn´t so hot, so I did it again. The second one, we shot. I stuck to it... in a way.

"Scripts, to me, are super-important. But not the final word, for sure. This went through more changes than any other film. However, when studios approve a script, they expect to see it, y´know, done that way. I´m sure they´d send police guards out on a set pretty quick if they saw too many changes in the dailies. But if you´ve got somewhat of a foundation, you get ideas and start changing bits during the shooting. So many things are discovered when all the elements are in front of you and you´re rehearsing. That´s half the fun of it."

He has no preferences for this film´s writing, shooting or editing; just loves the perfect way they´re laid out. "You to pay attention otherwise it will get away from you. By the time you come to the end of one stage, you´re ready to stop and you´re looking forward to, like, the editing and by the time you finish editing, you´re looking forward to... "The censorship battle, in this case.

At Cannes, Lynch vowed his cut was the version for Europe. He was not so "for sure" about America. "We´re having a few problems." The morning after leaving his midnight Cannes party early ("So crowded - you can only take so much of that"), he´d learned the worst. His film was branded X. For violence more than sex.

Lynch´s aim is true. Photograph by Sygma

"The beginning scene..." Where Nicolas Cage simply beats somebody to death. "And the robbery at the end is the one scene they have a problem with." Not too surprising; that´s where Willem Dafoe as Bobby Peru literally loses his head.

"There´s only one or two shots in the sex scenes where, strangely, they think that Sailor and Lula are... well, er, y´know, they call it... rear-entry? They are somewhat upset by that.

"I don´t know why there would be a reason to cut for Europe. But if there was a rule in a country, I´d try and fight it. If I lost I´d have to make some changes. This is the version that we hopefully will see released in Europe. As for the death of Bobby Peru, that will have to stay!"

Bobby Peru ("like the country") dies so fast, there´s no way to know if it´s accidental or purpose. "Oh, that´s an accident," says Lynch. "A bad accident." For sure... Peru blows his own head off! Although Rossellini insists he´s no monster, Lynch admits he identifies most with Bobby Peru. After Peru´s bank raid, one of his victims is searching for his shotgun-severed hand - "They could maybe sew it back on."

CUT to a dog running out of a side-door. With the hand in its mouth. "Humour is the most abstract thing," comments Lynch. "Nobody has ever been able to figure it out. I like absurd things. Basically. Alle these ideas come along - the darker ones, the lighter ones, the humorous part, the sad part. For one reason or another, they hook themselves together and become thrilling. I try to be as true as I can to those ideas and get them on film.

"Mostly, I like mood and a sense of place. All the films I´ve really loved are films I want to go back into and feel that mood and be with those people again. A lot of them take place in America, in a specific area. What makes a sense of place is details. If they´re wrong, they throw you out of the mood. Sound, music, colour, shape, texture, if they´re correct and if a woman looks a certain way with a certain lighting and says the right word, you´re gone... you´re in Heaven.

"Feelings, intuitive things are also most important to me. Film has a fantastic way of portraying abstactions. That is what´s so magical about it. When you put pictures with sounds you can get fantastic, magical feelings, especially when time is involved and a story. Music gives you a powerful sense of mood. To articulate things into words is sort of a drag and I think you can stay too much on the surface that way."

Lynch has shot a lot of footage for this film - 4.5 hours becoming 2 hours and four minutes. "Editing is a very tricky process and this film, more than any I ever worked on, went through a lot of changes. Although there wasn´t that much changed. I had the best editor in the world - Duwayne Dunham. Unlike other pictures, this has a lot of strange editing, lots of contrasts in sounds and, I hope, a definite edge to it."

He seemed happier with Isabella by his side. But was he comfortable only with small-town America, could he manage an ensemble someplace in Europe?

"Well, I could... And it´d be kinda interesting, not knowing about the place, spending a month or two there - feeling it. It may be a wrong feeling for the people living there, but it´d be an interesting one. Maybe. But there are things about the places you know that, I guess, you feel more comfortable with. Where you get a lotta ideas." Do you see the US as a big tribe with wild animals, rock´n´roll instead of tom-toms? "Yes, I do." He has enough to keep him home. All the projects he´s been talking about since Dune. Though he´s not sure when he can rescue One Saliva Bubble, his "just... whacko!" Steve Martin comedy that sank with Dino De Laurentiis.

Four more of The Lynch Mob arrive. For two of the women, this film´s their second Lynch experience and the film also features the Twin Peaks murder victim, Cheryl Lee, Freddie Jones from Dune and Eraserhead´s Jack Nance.

Lynch loves working with friends. "Number one, they´re great actors and when you get to know them you see what new directions they might be interested in going. You develop a shorthand dialogue, great friendship, so it´s just fantastic when a part comes up for someone you like so much. It´s just a good thing to do."

The actors talk of great fun of playful sets, liberating experiences. "He´s full of surprises," says Nicolas Cage. "I can be 4am and really cold, but he´ll come on the set saying: 'Ready for some more fun?' You´re not really sure what you´re gonna do. But when you get there it all seems to work."

Willem Dafoe says the work was liberating because the actor´s psychological logic is jettisoned. "You don´t draw that logic necessarily from life, either. Your behaviour seems very true and very specific - to the story´s own logic." Lynch looks on, meek and mild. "I don´t know what´s so special about my sets. The whole idea is to feel safe and protected - unafraid to make wrong choices. I just sit down, have a cup of coffee, take it easy."

"Hah!" snorts Laura Dern. "Working with David is Disneyland! A complete amusement park ride from beginning to end. His films are dreams: all his characters are dreamlike, in a dream world or they love dreams. I´ve never had as much trust and faith in a director in my life nor received so much trust back. He always has me play people with a vision, an idealism I share - that things can get better. David recognises that I´m constantly searching for that, personally."

For Laura´s real and screen mother, Diane Ladd, filming was less fun and more one of life´s great experiences. She has no problem with Laura´s uninhibited sex scenes. "In art there is an infinite line between license and liberty. David is an artist. We cannot tie Michelangelo´s hand when he´s painting."

Nor his shoelace.

Wild at Heart opens in Paris on October 24.