Original subtitles

Hey, you wanna go for a ride?

No, thanks.

"No, thanks"? What does that mean?

- I don't wanna go. - Go where?

For a ride.

Yes, that's a human ear, all right.

I don't know if you're a detective or a pervert.

I like to sing "Blue Velvet".

Do you wanna do bad things?

Anything.

Anything.

Now it's dark.

It started with Bobby Vinton's song, "Blue Velvet", which came out in 1964.

I started getting these ideas from the song

of a mystery that would take place in a small city in quiet neighbourhoods.

Then I had this desire to sneak into a girl's room and watch her through a night,

and possibly, while watching, I'd see a clue to a mystery.

And then I got this idea for finding an ear in a field.

This ear would be an opening into another world.

And then I got a lot of other ideas like this, but fragments,

that finally hooked themselves together and formed enough of a story

so that I could add in the missing pieces.

But this took a long time. I'd written four drafts of the script over several years

before I finally got it together to film it.

David and I met for Dune.

I can tell you exactly where it was.

It was at Universal, at the Universal Studios.

He was working with Raffaella De Laurentiis at the time

to try and bring this monster book to the screen.

Frank Herbert's Dune.

He was just coming back from his daily lunch jaunt to Bob's Big Boy.

I was sitting in the office and he came in.

He was wearing his classic Lynch uniform,

which is a khaki pant, white shirt, black jacket, like a sport coat,

and black shoes,

with tousled brunette hair going every which way.

I really knew nothing about the man. I knew that he had done Eraserhead,

which I promptly went out to see before I went for the meeting,

which confused me even more. I didn't know what to expect when I met David.

And he was so friendly and so available, which really took me aback a little bit.

Because Dune was not such a big success, and things went badly,

Dino and I were ready to part company. But then he came back and said:

"What is this Blue Velvet"?

And I said "Dino, you know about this thing. I told you about it before."

He said "I must read it again."

And I said "You can read the first half of it, cos I like the first half of it."

He read it, he liked it,

and I said "Let me fix the second half and we'll do it." And that's how it started.

He had me in mind for Jeffrey the moment he met me.

I think he's a very fine actor.

And I like him because, for Jeffrey, he's got kind of an innocent quality.

He's curious.

He's innocent but he can traverse from one world to another.

He gave me the script to look at. And...

Dune was the first screenplay I'd ever read,

and Blue Velvet was the second screenplay I'd ever read.

I didn't know what to make of it,

but I thought it was incredibly charged. Very erotic, I thought.

Frightening.

Kind of amazing in an overpowering way.

And frightened me and also filled me with this desire to go into that world.

We were meant to start Blue Velvet in January of '85.

I remember getting the call. I was in my dad's office in Yakima, Washington.

It was David saying they're not gonna do the movie.

Dino always believed in David and always believed in the movie,

but couldn't spend the $10 million that was part of an original budget.

In August of '85, Dino, according to David, called him up

and said "I have a crazy idea."

He said if I cut my salary and cut the budget for Blue Velvet,

I could have total artistic control.

During the negotiations David said "Dino, I have to have final cut of this movie."

And Dino said "I can't give you final cut of this movie."

"I can't put it in the contract."

"Then every other director will want final cut of their movies, and I can't do that."

"But I'll shake your hand, and you have my word."

And Dino never goes back on his word.

And David Lynch had final cut.

David always wanted Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Kyle MacLachlan,

and Laura Dern.

They read the script and, to work with David Lynch, they agreed to do it.

And got paid literally nothing. I mean, a little bit above scale,

but literally nothing to do it, because they believed in it and wanted to do it.

Yes? What is it?

Pest control. I gotta do your apartment.

That stuff stinks.

Isabella is fantastic.

I feel extremely lucky to have found her for Dorothy

because in my mind now she is the only possible Dorothy.

I was having dinner with a friend of mine in a restaurant in New York,

and David was having dinner with a friend of his in the same restaurant.

Our friends knew each other,

and so my friend Camilla and I sat at David's table.

David started to talk about being in New York to do some casting.

He wanted Helen Mirren for Dorothy Vallens,

and I had just finished a film with Helen Mirren.

He said "Can you talk to her about playing this part? I want her to play this part."

I didn't know Helen that well, so I said "I don't know that I can do that."

And so we talked a little bit. I knew he was there casting.

I don't know what we talked about.

And then the next day, or two days after, there was a note from David saying:

"I thought maybe you'd like to read the script, to test for the role."

The things that struck me about her in the beginning was...

I wanted Dorothy to be beautiful but have a mysterious quality.

And a vulnerable quality within the mystery.

I was a model. I didn't really have an acting career.

I had done one film in America prior to Blue Velvet,

which was called White Nights,

a film about dancing, where I had a secondary role.

It was really only White Nights, my first American film,

that I thought I was gonna try to be an actress.

So Blue Velvet was my second experience as an actress.

I'll be sweet.

Mommy loves you.

When I read the script I thought it was very original, very powerful.

I loved Dorothy Vallens,

and I knew that it was going to be a role that was difficult to play.

And so I asked David Lynch if we could do a really thorough test.

Not ten minutes.

And if I could also test with Kyle MacLachlan, who was cast as the lead.

We went, Kyle and I, and we played all the scenes. We improvised.

Some of it I knew the dialogue. Some of it I didn't remember.

But at least I could show David what was my interpretation of Dorothy Vallens,

and if he agreed with it.

In the beginning, it's sort of all over the place.

The early rehearsals are very rough.

And they're sort of frightening

because you wonder if it's ever going to fit what you have in your mind.

I was 18. I don't know that David had ever seen me in a movie.

How did you know?

I was sitting on the floor waiting for him to come in,

and he walked out, and it was like "I gotta take a pee!", and disappeared.

That was the first thing he ever said to me.

And then we started talking about meditation.

I was a meditator too and we talked for an hour about meditation and...

I don't know - everything from astrology to grafting peach trees with pear trees...

It was one of those conversations, and we were a match made in heaven.

He didn't ask me to read. He said he knew I was perfect.

All directors ask you to read.

And he said "I don't believe in reading. You know the person's right or you don't."

Which is wonderful and amazing.

He wanted me to do it,

but he wanted to make sure that Kyle MacLachlan and I could hit it off,

and it felt right to him to see us together.

So he asked me to meet them at Bob's Big Boy.

And the three of us had our Bob's Big Boy meeting.

And the rest is history.

Let's fuck!

I'll fuck anything that moves!

Dennis has got a reputation.

Dennis used to take a lot of drugs and drink a lot of alcohol.

Well, I just came out of rehab

for drugs and alcohol.

So I didn't really have a career.

I was trying to get started again, so the first three films that I made after I got out

was Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, and River's Edge,

and I made them all back-to-back.

I was advised not to do the part because it was not a redeemable character.

I said "I realise that, but it's being directed by David Lynch."

"David Lynch is a very important director,

and I think everybody in Hollywood will see this film."

"And I wanna do the part."

I don't know what David's knowledge of my prior work was.

I don't know how I got the part. I know I really wanted the part badly.

I'd never talked to David on the telephone,

except the one time I called him after I got the part.

So I don't know what the process was of how I got it.

Dennis truly understood Frank.

I called him when I heard that I got the part.

He was having lunch with Isabella Rossellini and Kyle MacLachlan

and Laura Dern.

And I told him that I was Frank Booth.

He said "That's great, that's terrific. We'll have a really good shoot."

He went back to the table and said "I just talked to Dennis Hopper."

"He said he was Frank Booth."

"It's great for the picture but I don't know how we'll ever have lunch with him."

It's Daddy, you shithead! Where's my bourbon?

I came into films through painting.

And I came in really knowing nothing about film.

I mean, I saw films, but I saw films not from a movie-buff point of view.

But I wanted to be a painter.

David Lynch studied art. David Lynch came out of Philadelphia,

the university there, out of art school.

And is a painter, so...

I think it's a natural assumption to think that he deals with surrealism,

in his own way.

Certainly it's not Salvador Dali, but it's what I call American surrealism.

From the fire engine to the picket fence with the roses on it,

to the man having a heart attack with the dog, and the water,

and the insects under the soil,

and the very phoney robin...

with the... you know, the robins have come back...

This mechanical...

I mean, it's surrealism to me. American surrealism.

The only Bu�uel film I saw is Un Chien andalou, and that was with Dali.

But many people say that there's similarities.

I went to Salzburg to study with Kokoschka.

I was gonna go to school there.

I was planning to stay for three years, but it was all so beautiful and so clean

that I became very worried

because I didn't feel like it was giving me something for painting.

I went back and went, almost immediately, to Philadelphia.

Philadelphia was exactly what I needed.

It was almost the opposite of Salzburg.

It was one of the worst cities in the world, but it was thrilling to me.

It opened up some little doors and made it all start happening.

I met David Lynch at the American Film Institute.

One of the instructors, one of my mentors there, Tony Vellani,

introduced us and said "Fred, here's a filmmaker that I think you're gonna like."

"He's one of a kind. I think you'll get along with him."

And he introduced me and we got to work on Eraserhead together.

David is an artist, in many senses.

He paints and he draws.

They're very beautiful drawings, paintings.

He loves sound, he loves music.

You know, he does that as well.

And he makes these brilliant films.

So, on all those levels, I enjoyed watching his work.

And I enjoyed watching the art progress.

Lynch is so identifiable in how he creates and ties things together.

And yes, it is odd, and yes, it is strange,

and yet it has a certain form

and a certain logic to it.

He definitely wants to create a world where you never know where you are.

That's the world he exists in. It's the world we all exist in.

He creates out of a really interesting place, and is consistent,

and has a vision that's purely his. You can tell his movies from anybody else's.

Even if you looked at Elephant Man and some of the straighter films,

you can still see it's him.

He is, I think, in the true sense of the word, a visionary.

And he follows his own vision.

And it is unique and it belongs to him.

And I think his painting, as well as his writing and his filmmaking,

all come from that same source.

I think it's like an unconscious or a subconscious... trust.

He trusts his subconscious and his unconscious.

So while everyone else around him is going "I don't know",

David's like... he may think "I don't know either,

but this came from me. I'm gonna trust that it's right."

It's a strange world, isn't it?

Yeah.

He finds interest sometimes in things that most of us think are fairly commonplace.

David would come in on a Monday with Polaroids that he took with his son.

They would go to the grocery store and get a whole chicken and take a Polaroid.

Then they'd cut up the chicken and move the parts around

so the wing was where the leg, the leg was where the wing,

and the head was up the ass,

and he'd take all these Polaroids with his kid.

You can be shooting the inside of a dead cow in close-up,

and if you didn't know it was the inside of a dead cow,

and you enlarged the photo and put it in a room,

people could say "This is just so beautiful."

David Lynch has this mind that goes into the darkest depths of civilisation

in his mind, but yet...

on the outside, as a person, he's Jimmy Stewart.

He is a true eagle scout.

I'm not so much of an intellectual.

I am more of an intuitive sort of person.

David is not very verbal.

When he talks he might say things very funny, but he's very expressive.

So you always know what he likes, what he doesn't like.

He exudes what he thinks rather than articulate what he thinks.

I came into film without having to really speak,

or ever articulate certain feelings in words,

so I like thinking somewhere beneath the surface.

His films are much darker to me than David is in person.

David in person seems a much more serene, happy, adjusted person

than he is in film.

A lot of people think of him as extremely eccentric or dangerous.

Sometimes people have asked me "Does he take drugs?"

"Does he have hallucinations?"

And instead David is a very sweet, calm, and happy - born happy - person.

I've never met anybody who's so serene and luminous as he is.

I like things that are different.

And I like distortions because I see so many distortions

either inside of people or on the surface.

I see this kind of confusion and darkness, and distortions,

and it's sort of fascinating to me.

We filmed the movie in Wilmington because that's where the studio was,

and we knew that we could do it for the price.

We hired all local people, other than the people we brought in from the outside.

And it so happened that Lumberton was the name of a town in North Carolina.

It's about an hour and a half, or two hours, outside of Wilmington.

And I didn't realise that it was a real town.

I had said to David "Where did you get the name of Lumberton?"

He kinda said that he made it up, and he kinda said that he didn't make it up,

until we found it was the name of a real town.

Lumberton is a great name

because it makes a picture in your mind.

I called the Chamber of Commerce to inform them and the mayor's office

that we were making this movie and we were calling our town Lumberton,

which was a fictitious name, nothing to do with their town,

and did we have the right to use their name?

The town had some very old neighbourhoods.

They didn't look Southern, cos it's in the South...

And so I was very happy, cos in my mind this town is a little bit more Northern.

The atmosphere and the mood was so good, the sidewalks were so beautiful,

and I realised - I didn't know it before - shooting on location is fantastic

because, when you go into someone's real house,

you can't believe it, what they've got in these houses.

And it gives you so many ideas.

We all felt like castaways in this little studio in Wilmington, North Carolina,

which suited us just fine. I know David was never happier.

Dune I think was such a difficult slog really.

He was down in Mexico for a year and a half

trying to manage this lumbering beast of a gigantic film.

And I think it really, really worked on him.

And Blue Velvet was just really streamlined and perfect,

and David was right back in his element.

It reinvigorated him and reminded him of what it is that he loves to do.

Why he loves filmmaking so much is because of this.

Blue Velvet is a whole new ball game.

I'm back into a place where I feel so good about film and about a way of working.

The challenging part of the movie is the crew asking questions,

and not having an answer because David hadn't told us yet.

We had a little budget,

and sometimes there were economic limitations.

Running late, shooting long, long hours, sometimes 18, 19 hours per day.

Come closer.

It was nerve-racking, it really was, for any number of reasons.

First of all, I'm standing there with my shorts off, with camera crews around,

and Isabella Rossellini is in front of me with a knife.

If that scene's not enough to make you wake up in the morning with butterflies,

I don't know what is.

- Hello, baby. - Shut up!

It's Daddy, you shithead! Where's my bourbon?

I didn't know Dennis.

It was his first film after a long, long time of healing from his drug abuse.

And I was obviously a bit frightened of him.

I had asked if I could have breakfast with him,

because the first scene that I shot with Dennis

was the scene of him doing this ritualistic rape.

I remember going to breakfast with him. I joined him at the hotel where he was,

and he seemed very bored. "What do you want? You wanna know me? Here I am."

So I said "How am I gonna do this one?"

But he was right, because then on the set Dennis was very, um...

I remember that...

I had to open my legs, and he kind of kneels in front of me...

- Mommy... - Mommy loves you...

Baby wants to fuck!

She was naked, and I wasn't told.

I assume that they knew, but I didn't know.

Now show it to me.

I tried to do the scene with underwear,

but we couldn't because at a certain angle you would see the underwear.

In one angle I had to take the underwear off.

Not that you would see it with the camera, but you would see the strap.

And that embarrassed me.

Dennis was the only person who was going to see my vagina up close like this.

It was embarrassing because I didn't know him.

It was the first day. I'd never met Isabella and suddenly she's nude in front of me.

I said "I'm sorry to do this, it really is hard."

And he said "Agh! I've seen it before."

And in his rude way he made me very comfortable.

I said "Oh, that's right. You've seen it all. I won't worry about you."

It was certainly an act of faith on her part and David's part

to expose themselves that way.

There was a lot of laughing, probably as a counterpoint to what you see on film.

I remember David laughing so hard at that scene. Laughing so hard.

I remember stopping the scene. I said "What is there to laugh at?"

"This is a rape. What is there to laugh at?"

And he said "I don't know. It just makes me laugh."

And then years later, 15 years after, the film was on television

and I looked at the film, and remembering David laughing

made me laugh, belly-laugh, like David.

I still don't understand what made him laugh.

David was wonderful. He was like a boy scout leader.

He'd say "Peachy-keen! Solid gold! Let's do one more."

He would say "When you say that word..." I'd say "That word's 'fuck', David."

He says "Yes, I know, but when you say that word..."

All right, get ready to fuck! You fucker's fucker! You fucker!

Don't you fuckin' look at me!

A great director to me is somebody who steps back

and allows the actors to do their thing.

And David is very much in that school of understanding that.

You fix something when it's not working, you know?

And you encourage people to go with what's working.

And a lot of that is not an intellectual dialogue...

"This is your character and you should do this..." It's not that.

It's just trust.

He will often direct with a word, or a phrase.

It's so amazing, because you immediately know what he's talking about.

A lot of times he'd say "Give it a little more mystery, a little more wind."

And I remember it for that entrance: "It needs to feel like a wind."

"Just come in like a wind."

And he had the music playing, and it was a slightly breezy night...

He played Shostakovich over loudspeakers for us on the street.

He felt that we needed to walk to the music,

and the mood should feel like that piece of music.

It's so exciting. He is so impassioned and he takes such time. He's so meticulous.

With David I always felt I could be completely free,

because later on I could always re-discuss,

or at that moment say "This disturbs me",

or maybe "This just embarrasses me."

"As a human being I'm too embarrassed to be shown naked like this."

Feel me.

Sometimes there were some close-ups

where David was very very close to me, very close to the camera.

And I almost felt he directed me like an orchestra director would direct a violinist,

saying "Bring that up. No, no, no. Bring it down."

Though he didn't talk to me,

I could sense his presence where, if I would go very languid,

he'd encourage me to go in that direction. Then, as I was going too far,

I would feel his body tense, so I would stop a little bit, and go sad...

And maybe he didn't like me to go sad. I could sense his presence.

I thought maybe that's the way it works in an orchestra,

with the orchestra director not only giving the timing but also giving the feeling,

so that every concert, even if it is the same piece of music, might be different.

And sometimes David directed like that, especially on close-up.

Oftentimes we would do a take and he would stop,

and he'd walk from behind the camera, clasp his hands like this, furrow his brow,

and I'd be there and I'd be sort of... I'd mimic him, probably unconsciously.

We'd be standing there, thinking and thinking. Nothing would be said.

And then he'd say "OK, let's try it again."

And I'd be like "OK, yeah, good."

And it was like an eerie, non-spoken, and yet so much communicated...

And I couldn't even tell you what it was. But we'd go back and we'd do it again.

The similarities between Jeffrey and David, I think, are there.

I used to know a kid that lived there.

Had the biggest tongue in the world.

Doesn't Kyle look like David? And doesn't David look like Kyle?

I would imagine that Jeffrey was always a little eccentric, growing up.

And probably a loner, I think.

And, for whatever reason, this was his uniform, his outfit he felt comfortable in.

And he doesn't veer away from it much.

Maybe just a change of tie. I think that was the extent of it.

The story catches him on the cusp of something.

Sort of a transition from boyhood to manhood, sort of.

He sort of... not willingly all the time, but he does go through the journey,

and then once he gets close...

It's like that image of being grabbed by fate, whatever, and pulled along,

you've sort of gone too far,

particularly when he meets Dennis.

- Who is this fuck? - A friend. He's from the neighbourhood.

We were just talking.

And Jeffrey is a voyeur.

And does not remain clean.

He's certainly exploring his perversions.

He's fascinated by the self-destructive chanteuse,

this beautiful, voluptuous...

And I think it's a mixture of both wanting to take care of as well as desecrating.

He has the same impulses.

And may be thinking, by caring for her, she will be his

and somehow he'll be able to devour her,

you know, at the same time being devoured by her.

Is that you, Jeffrey?

Yeah. It's me.

Oh, Jeffrey...

Sandy is the girl that gets Jeffrey involved with this whole thing in the first place.

Sandy is also very interested in voyeurism.

She listens to certain things. She gathers information.

She's a detective.

- My room is above my father's office so... - Above your father's office?

So I heard a few things about the ear.

She's seemingly the all-American girl next door, the high-school sweetheart.

She's the light. She's, you know...

the positive side.

These were all the descriptions he gave me for the movie.

Some of them are tangible, and some of them are abstract

in terms of the light and the dark,

and, you know, this seeming perfect world

and the underbelly of it.

You know anything?

I don't know much but bits and pieces.

She inspires Jeffrey to go deeper into this mystery.

I can't believe what you're finding out.

Are you gonna continue with this?

Yeah.

He wanted me to have a fascination with the dark side,

with the mystery involved in the story,

so that you have the taste of the darkness within the lighter side of the story.

And for the longest time there was just this darkness.

And all of a sudden

thousands of robins were set free.

And they flew down and brought this blinding light of love.

And it seemed like that love

would be the only thing that would make any difference,

and it did.

In that scene I am the most hope-filled believer

in that which is divine.

So I guess it means...

there is trouble till the robins come.

And really being confused, as is Jeffrey, in our lost innocence,

that there are people like Frank.

"Why is there so much trouble in this world?"

"Why are there people like Frank?" That's the question we're all asking now, man.

"Why are there people like Frank?"

Don't say please, fuckhead!

I think that when you commit to a work, you have to commit to the script.

You have to commit to the work.

You can't commit always to improving your self-image

as a politician will improve their self-image to become more popular.

My duty as a model was to portray glamour,

and I tried to do that as best I could.

When we did Blue Velvet,

it was very important that Dorothy Vallens, the character,

might have been glamorous, might have had glamour.

But now she was broken.

I always imagined her as a broken doll,

one of these beautiful dolls with the ruffles and the hair completely done.

But something had happened, and the hair's all down, the make-up is falling off,

that was the idea of a broken doll.

So the glamour - some of it was there and some of it was erased.

Some of it was being raped - broken - violently.

- Dorothy, no. Stop it. - Hit me.

Hit me.

Hit me!

I think that she is a great actress

because she somehow understands the human condition.

And, no matter what kind of strange situations, she is able to find these things

and portray them.

That's all you need.

You've got to find them and make them real.

I knew in the case of Blue Velvet that it was important

not only to be David's decision but also to be my decision.

And it was not very clear in the script how far he wanted to take this character.

Was Dorothy only a sexy sex symbol?

I wouldn't have wanted to play it like that. It would've been too embarrassing for me.

But if there was this other shading of this desperation, complete helplessness,

and madness... and David liked it.

He had always imagined her with hair like a country-western singer,

cos she was singing.

And we tried a wig, and, because the wig looked wiggy,

and we were afraid that people thought we didn't do a good wig,

we decided to do a scene where I take it off.

For me it was perfect because it added to the fact that she was hiding.

I wanted to hide behind my make-up, behind my clothing, behind my hair.

Dorothy wanted to pretend everything was all right - she was in control.

In fact, she was completely devastated,

so I made the make-up the traditional black eyeliner, black eyelashes,

blue, red lips, smile, perfect hair.

Clothes perfect.

Almost like a fa�ade that would hide the tempest and the torment

and the fact that she couldn't make any sense.

But she brings this fa�ade like a little doll.

So I loved wearing the wig. It was part of the camouflage,

her madness.

The nudity was purposely not appealing

because this was a woman who was abused, regularly raped, beaten...

What I had in mind...

You know the butcher's shop where you see carcasses of cows

cut in the middle and open.

It was the sort of images that you have in Francis Bacon.

You have these images of cows and flesh that you think of human beings.

And that's what I wanted to portray, but there was such a tradition in films

of nudity as a titillating nudity.

It was more a Francis Bacon painting that I was trying to convey.

I think the scene that is most offensive, the nude scene that is most offensive,

the one where I walk down the street completely naked,

David Lynch has told me that when he was a little boy

and was going home with his brother,

they saw a naked lady walking in the streets.

They didn't say "Oh! Naked lady!"

They started to cry.

They understood that something violent or frightening was happening.

And he wanted to convey that idea, and that was David's direction.

When David was talking about it,

I had in mind the photo by Nick Ut, of the girl in Vietnam being burned by napalm.

She's walking on the street naked. It is a gesture of helplessness.

Dorothy at that moment had to be broken.

Had to hit bottom.

And if I would come out covering myself, she still had a sense of self,

she still had a sense of protecting herself, or dignity.

Anything that I would've done... nothing else came to mind.

I really didn't want to offend people.

And I thought and thought and thought a lot about what else I could do.

But I think the power of that picture censored any other solutions,

so at the end I decided just to come out like this toward Jeffrey.

Just as the last desperate cry for help.

Don't you look at me, fuck!

I shoot when I see the whites of the eyes.

Frank deals with any kind of thing with violence

as a way to shock people into reality.

They'd better give him what he wants or they're gonna lose something.

Here's to Ben.

- Here's to Ben. - Be polite!

I'd used drugs and alcohol so long as an acting device

that I was really sort of terrified of acting again.

But I went back to basically Strasberg,

and it worked much better than anything I'd been doing before.

Don't you fuckin' look at me.

There was no improvisation, no dialogue improvisation at all, in my performance.

There was a lot of physical things I did with my hands.

This came from, like, taking acid and seeing rings around your hands,

and various things that came out of my physical being.

And the thing of using amyl nitrate as a sense memory...

Baby wants blue velvet.

David had it as helium, and he had helium on the set.

Helium doesn't disorientate your mind, doesn't get you high.

It just makes you sound like Donald Duck.

So I tried to use it, and I was listening to my voice. I just thought it was terrible.

I said I thought of this as amyl nitrate or nitric oxide,

and David said "What's that?"

And I said "It's something that disorients your mind for a few minutes

and it's used generally sexually and so on, for deviates."

Mommy...

I thought what a great contribution that was.

A couple of years ago I was sitting thinking

what a great contribution that was,

and then I suddenly thought how weird David Lynch really is.

How strange it would've been if he had just settled down

and actually used that mask just to change your voice,

and not to do anything emotional or disorient your mind or anything,

what a strange, sinister character that would've been.

I thought of him as a rock star. I walked like a peacock, sort of,

and sort of stood like... I thought of Frank that way.

And then when we started filming together he was just unrelenting.

I didn't do much but just react to what he was doing.

You're from the neighbourhood.

Yeah.

You're a neighbour.

And he was funny. He was funny, and I remember thinking to myself

"God, does he realise how funny he is?"

Heineken? Fuck that shit!

Pabst Blue Ribbon!

Should I laugh? Not laugh? Which David is so famous for,

which Dennis was capturing perfectly.

Where's the glasses? That beer's gonna get warm.

One thing I can't fuckin' stand is warm beer! It makes me fuckin' puke!

I think heavies are good guys,

and I think that everybody who's a heavy thinks they're a good guy.

So I start out with the premise that this is a love story

and that his love is so intense that he'll kidnap her husband,

he'll cut off the husband's ear, he'll take the child,

he'll do whatever he has to, to keep the love and the respect of this woman.

Frank is a person totally in love, but he doesn't know quite how to show it

in a normal way. But he knows all about love.

He's desperately in love.

I didn't know what Dennis Hopper was going to do.

I was singing the scene, and then the camera was on him

and I sang for him so he could react to me.

I saw that he was crying, I remember,

and I thought "Oh, what a splendid actor he is."

You know, to have made that leap,

that in that moment he is in love with her.

And he's crying, longing for her, wanting to be good or whatever.

He was broken-hearted.

David's a painter. He paints with the camera, he paints with his pen,

he paints with his hands. He is very much hands-on.

I know the first time I saw David on the set

he was in Dorothy's apartment.

I walked in the door, and there's the camera and the camera crew,

and everybody was there,

and I said "Where's David?"

And they pointed over in the corner and there was David on his hands and knees,

and he was placing what he called "dust bunnies" under the wall radiator.

Chances are the camera would never catch that,

but, in David's world, that made it more real.

He is constantly at work and constantly creating.

A light breaks on a set and he realises he needs light,

and he wants it coming from this area, so...

"They're gonna see that, so it needs to be a lamp."

"We don't have a lamp - we've gotta shoot - I'll make a lamp!"

And next thing I know, he's literally - we were doing this one scene -

he wired a piece of wood and put a shade on it that he found from somewhere else.

All of a sudden there was this insane lamp

with a piece of wood and antlers stuck in the corner.

There were scenes with logs in the background,

and there's a lot of lumber around the place, and wood and what have you.

David was very careful in choosing background actors and wardrobe,

what they were gonna look like, and so for extras and cameo speaking parts

David interviewed and hand-picked each one.

He had a very precise idea of how the set should look.

And every person had a house that was very distinctive.

Definitely as an extension of who we were.

And Dorothy had dark, deep red walls,

like a womb, or a cave.

David as a painter has these images in his head.

And we were - Patty Norris and I - we were there to kind of support that

and to find the way to get that on film.

The colour of Dorothy's apartment was very particular, very important.

We knew we'd be there for a while. We needed that colour to be particular.

We didn't want that colour to be in other parts of the film.

That was that space, so we chose carefully.

It's great to be able to build a set like that

because you get to put everything where it belongs.

You make these areas through the apartment where different things happen.

David was very specific because he had written the story.

He knew that Dennis and Isabella are in this area here.

There's a very dark corner over here where Isabella goes,

and Isabella takes Jeffrey's character over there.

The kitchen is bright, and that's off to the side.

There's a bathroom down the hall. She's there, but we can't see what she's doing.

The slats that are in the closet door were very specific,

and we made tests to see how the light came through and what looked best.

Much of the film is dark and mysterious.

There is this undertone to the dark part of the world.

All the car rides, all those things, are pretty shadowy.

Frank's here.

That scene is so incredible. We walked in,

and David had cast all these fat women, these obese women,

sitting on the couch in a strange...

This is David creating things.

I don't need to know what I did before I came in the door.

I just gotta deal with being inside there.

Darling, could you bring some glasses? And we'll have a beer with Frank.

Thank you.

I think Dean Stockwell is an amazing actor.

And he's wonderful in that scene.

And he put a cast on his arm, as if his arm had been broken or whatever.

This stuff he just did in the make-up trailer.

I don't know whether he'd talked to David about it, but it worked good.

David said "There is this song..."

A candy-coloured clown they call the Sandman

Tiptoes to my room every night

David grabbed this work-light, and he sort of...

was sort of showing me what he would do with the thing as a microphone.

I close my eyes

Then I drift away

And it just stuck. We just kept that as an image.

It makes the scene just sort of transcend to some new level of strangeness.

In dreams I walk

With you

We found this giant warehouse building where we were filming,

and David said "It's dark, very moody. It's the bad side of town."

"There shouldn't be too much light. Just kinda keep it down a little bit."

So I masterfully lit this giant warehouse and David came by and looked at it.

He said "It's too bright. There wouldn't be all this light out there in the factory."

"It's night. There's nothing happening here. No people."

And there was no sense of this mystery,

and so I said "What shall we do?"

And he said "Turn it off."

You turn it off and it's very dark.

But then we started to construct this machine to make this shadow.

We took the one big light that we had,

and then, with cardboard cutouts and all sorts of things,

made this factory shape to project on the side of the building.

David said "There's nothing happening. There needs to be some movement."

One by one, all the crew members were out there with various things,

making big pistons go up in front of the light,

making levers go through here, and we would blow smoke through the scene.

So all of a sudden we'd created this whole different feeling about the place.

I had never done a film before that was widescreen.

And it's great. It's just so beautiful.

It's just the most beautiful shape to compose in.

It gives you so many options,

because you can use it all.

You can sort of lop off part of it and just use the little bit at the end.

You can make it very narrow and just use a little sliver in the middle.

It's very good for people lying down on beds

because they kind of fill the frame.

It's good for two people sitting in a car because you can actually frame them,

especially a big old American car. They fit better.

It's a fun shape, it's a neat shape to use.

The idea for Blue Velvet came about from Bobby Vinton's song.

She wore blue velvet

- Blue velvet? - Yes.

It's a song, and it's a texture.

Softer than satin was the light

From the stars

The producers did not wanna pay for the Bobby Vinton record.

David loved the authentic flavour of it.

They came to me and they said "If we can get Bobby Vinton now,

could you do an arrangement that sounds like the original record?"

I said I could make it sound like a '50s record by using those instruments,

and I can certainly emulate that kind of orchestration.

We'd have to get Bobby Vinton to sing it.

So David acquiesced to this. He said "Great."

"If we can get Bobby Vinton and we just do it over again, it will be great."

The only trouble was that this was, like, 20 years after Bobby Vinton had this,

so the first thing he had to do was drop the key,

like two and a half steps.

So you no longer had that little pure boy-like sound.

And though the track was very authentic in the sound,

and David loved the track,

when we went into the studio with Bobby we both looked at each other and said,

even though he did a nice job,

"This is not really gonna be the authentic thing."

And David said "I have to have the original recording."

She

Wore

Blue

Velvet

When it was time to prerecord Isabella singing "Blue Velvet",

and we had the rights to the song, she couldn't do it. She's not a singer.

The piano player couldn't get it in the right key,

and the drummer and the guitar player... it just didn't work at all.

I called a friend of mine, Angelo Badalamenti,

who's a composer from New York City that I had worked with in the past.

I said "Angelo, you gotta do me a favour."

"Please come to Wilmington for a couple of days

and help me, with Isabella, do 'Blue Velvet'."

Isabella and I just sat alone and we worked on the song "Blue Velvet".

We worked for maybe three hours or so,

and we got a really very, very nice interpretation

of her singing "Blue Velvet" with just me playing piano and Isabella singing.

It didn't matter that Dorothy had a beautiful voice.

It was more a dramatic interpretation that counted.

Actually, maybe the fact that she had a poor voice

was added to the fact that she wasn't much of a singer,

that she didn't have a career that might have liberated her from that.

She wore blue velvet

The tone of the song was "Somewhere Over The Rainbow", Judy Garland,

that sort of longing,

and that was the tone that I adopted.

My name was Dorothy, so I thought maybe that was a sign

that that was the right way to go.

Isabella came in at David's behest to work with me

and do the final track for the song "Blue Velvet".

And the night before, she had done that scene where it was raining on her.

She had that nude scene, she comes out of the bushes,

and she was up till three, four in the morning, rain all over her.

She comes into the studio where I'm now prepared to do her vocal.

I had the track all ready which I did.

And she said "Angelo, I can't sing."

"I had a rough night last night."

"I'm cold."

"I have a cold, my sinuses are bad,

and I just can't do it."

I was a little tender to Isabella. I said to Isabella "OK."

"Let's just take it a step at a time. Let's get some hot tea with lemon."

"Yeah. OK."

"Let's get a blanket, put it on you, because you're cold."

"But I'm not gonna sing." "OK."

And, after a while, with some tea, and some talk,

I said "Let's just experiment with the microphone."

"Let's just do one or two lines, just the first phrase, and see how it goes."

And Isabella agreed to that.

And we started out, and we would do a phrase.

"That really sounds nice. Let's do this phrase over." Before you know it,

two or three hours later, we'd got just a beautiful recording. And it worked.

Angelo must've done the biggest editing job ever,

where he took a sigh here, a word there,

and put together my voice so I can hold a tune.

At least I had to do something, cos I just don't have a voice.

But singing is like acting. It's all about emotions.

Fred Caruso once said:

"Angelo, David wants to use this 'Song to the Siren' in his film."

"He loves it. It's his favourite record and vocal of all time."

But Dino said "This is gonna cost so much money."

"Can't you write something like that?"

I said "Well, you know, I'm not a lyricist, so I would need a lyric."

So I just said to Fred:

"Have David, who's lived with this movie and knows what he wants to say,

write some lyrics."

So David, as I found out, reluctantly agreed to do this

and he writes a lyric called "Mysteries of Love".

Isabella comes to New York and I'm working with Isabella, recording her,

and she brings me a little piece of paper, and on it it says "Mysteries of Love".

And I'm looking at the lyric

and I'm saying "Sometimes a wind blows and you and I float in love

and kiss forever in a darkness", and it just had this kind of spaciness,

and I'm saying "My goodness, this is not a lyric that I'm used to."

"This is just a bit of poetry, it's not really a song",

so I was a bit disappointed, to be perfectly honest, in the lyric.

And David said "Oh, just make it float through time."

"Make it like the wind, make it like the sea, make it endless, make it cosmic."

I said "Oh, I see."

I wrote the melody to his lyric. David heard it, fell in love with it,

and then he said "Now we gotta get a singer that sings like an angel."

Then Julee Cruise came into the picture.

She was a singer that worked in a show that I had written,

actually a workshop in downtown Manhattan.

And Julee sang like an angel,

and then David heard that, fell in love,

so that was the start of our relationship.

Alan Splet was the sound designer on Blue Velvet.

He definitely is or was a sound designer.

He designed sound that made that world come alive.

He gave a signature to that sound, and it had a meaning.

Most of the time it's the pictures first,

and the pictures dictate what kinda sounds we're looking for.

They, when added to the picture, become extremely magical.

It's fun working with industrial environments.

You have a lot of leeway in what you can do with the sounds.

Alan Splet and David go way back. Way before I met them.

They'd done little films together,

and Alan was certainly involved with the conception of Eraserhead.

He was a genius in finding, creating sounds,

and he would do anything to get the sound.

I mean, he was out there, recording bits and pieces every day.

He created this whole undercurrent to the film,

and if you listen to it carefully you hear it change gears.

One of the highlights of filmmaking

is the first times you hear all the sounds and the music together.

And sometimes, even before we get down to subtle levels,

we just open up all the pots and just let everything run,

and it takes you to another place. It's fantastic.

I did go to a screening, the first screening that David had, for Dino De Laurentiis.

And the lights went up, and everybody looked at each other,

and everybody looked at each other,

and somebody said "So what are you gonna do with this movie, Dino?"

And Dino said "David, I have to start my own distribution company

in order to release this picture,

because I don't know anyone who wants to buy this picture."

And we didn't even really know what we had. No one knew.

We were just making this interesting little movie. No expectation at all.

And the movie came out and became Blue Velvet.

The public reaction to the initial release of Blue Velvet

I think on the whole was rather negative.

The film was not well-received and just languished for a while

until Pauline Kael said "This is a good film. You should take a second look."

And people began to look at it again.

I think it just sort of rode a wave of, you know, "this is a great film".

"Everyone should see it, at some point in your life."

When they loved the film they praised it at length.

When they didn't like the film they just tried to figure out why they didn't like it,

and it always seemed they would pick on me.

It's not how Isabella Rossellini reacts

to standing there nude and humiliated on the lawn with lots of people watching,

it's how I react. And that's painful to me to see a woman treated like that,

and I wanna know that if I'm feeling that pain

it's for a reason that the movie has, other than simply to cause pain to her.

I really thought it was my fault,

because I really thought David had proven himself as a director in other films,

and maybe he should have had Helen Mirren, his first choice for the role,

and there wouldn't have been any doubt.

I came with the baggage - from my family, from my modelling career,

and maybe also inexperience,

because it was my second American film and my third film in my career.

And so maybe there was a lack of experience

and I couldn't convey clearly this idea.

So for a long time I suffered for it,

because I attributed it to my lack, or my inability, as an actress,

and also I thought I'd damaged David, and I was really sorry for that,

because I really thought he was a great artist.

If he could just have his actress, he didn't have to deal with my background

and my images, and my ghosts, and his film would have been more appreciated.

This did for me what Psycho did:

Eyes open and "Oh, my God, we're really getting in over our heads."

And that's an experience which is challenging, shocking,

but mesmerising. I like the picture.

Reviewers kept talking about it,

and you had to go see the movie again.

You either love it and think it's brilliant,

or you have the opposite reaction and you hate it,

but they're honest feelings that make you think that way.

And I think that Blue Velvet was something that...

it took a while for it to find its audience.

Whether they liked the movie or were disturbed by the movie,

they appreciated that someone was daring to truly be a filmmaker.

I'd won two Golden Globe nominations out of five.

I had one for Hoosiers and one for Blue Velvet,

and the National critic said give 'em to me for both.

I thought, if I was gonna win a nomination,

an Academy Award nomination would be for Blue Velvet, not Hoosiers.

It shows the make-up of the Academy.

It works on so many levels.

And unexpectedly I think, which I think the best films sort of do.

They sort of surprise you.

Get back and stay down.

It started by not having a good reputation and ended up having a better reputation.

But it's still hard for me to define.

There are still some people that are very offended by the film.

Others think the film is great. Others think the film is comical.

Others think that the film is very scary.

People react to it differently.

You certainly feel like you've been through something.

And probably thankful that it was somebody you were watching on screen,

and not yourself.

We look on Blue Velvet now as being a movie that really affected people deeply.

Upon subsequent viewings, you come back in touch with those feelings,

and that's the mark of a good movie. It'll stand the test of time that way.

You're never through discovering things.

I personally love films that create a mood,

but can be seen more than one time

and it's always a bit of a discovery again and again.

Subtitles by Visiontext Diane Buck

EN