Total Film, February 2002, Issue 61, p.113

Creator of tunes to capture both demented psychosis and exquisite beauty, David Lynch´s musical partner never shies away from a challenge...

From the whispery warblings of Blue Velvet, via Twin Peaks´ hugely popular bass thrum, to the jazzy broodings of this month´s Mulholland Drive, 64-year-old composer Angelo Badalamenti has provided the melody to David Lynch´s madness for over a decade. Total Film quizzed the Brooklyn-born tunesmith on one of cinema´s most compelling helmer/scorer collaborations.

You´ve worked very closely with David Lynch for 15 years now. How did you first meet?

We met at the time of Blue Velvet in 1986. David was shooting the last scene in North Carolina, where Isabella Rossellini sings in a bar, but she was having trouble with her singing. So I got a call from a mutual producer friend suggesting I help coach her. I said, "All right, Isabella´s half-Italian and everybody knows if you´re even half Italian you can learn to sing." So I worked with her for about three or four hours and took the first recording to the set, where I met David for the first time. He listened to it and said:" This is incredible. I can take this and put it int he movie exactly as it is!" Since then we´ve had a beautiful collaboration.

How do you work together?

He says just a few words to me, and I´m able to translate that. Basically, he talks and it turns into music. It sounds a bit corny but it´s not.

Is it true that sometimes you start writing before he´s even finished shooting?

Oh, there´s so much of that. David often uses my music to play on the set, getting the actors to move and speak to the tempo. With Mulholland Drive, I´d see a few scenes, but certainly not the whole film, and get an improvising thing going with him. I´d sit at a keyboard and say, "Okay, David, talk to me about a mood." And he´ll say, "I need a theme for Betty - she´s like a little girl who comes to Hollywood and she´s got stars in her eyes..." And as he´s talking we record it, you know, put it right to DAT [tape]. And, bang, that´s it!

Lynch also has you acting in Mulholland Drive, as scary, espresso-obsessed mobster Luigi Castigliane - your first role since the piano player in Blue Velvet. How did it come about?

He just said, "I have a little cameo role that you´re perfect for," and I thought he was joshing. But he´d remembered a story I´d told him years ago about one lady singer I knew as a young man who had a very strange, dark, quiet husband and - although I didn´t realise it at the time - was one of those, you know, goodfella guys. So David, without me knowing, had based the character on him with me in mind to play him.

So you are planning to do any more acting, or was that strictly a one-off?

I don´t know. One always like to do something totally different. I´m waiting for Martin Scorsese to call me for his next movie. Or maybe Tony Soprano will need a stand-in...

Dan Jolin