Catching the Big Fish (5 page)

 

We did a pan shot of the room, twice without Frank and then one time with Frank frozen at the base of the bed. But I didn’t know what it was for or what it meant.

That evening, we went downstairs and we were shooting Laura Palmer’s mother on the couch. She was lying there in sadness and torment. Suddenly she sees something in her mind’s eye and bolts upright, screaming. Sean, the camera operator, had to turn the wheels and follow her face as she bolted up. And it looked to me like he did a perfect job. So I said, “Cut—perfect, beautiful!” And Sean said, “No, no, no. It’s not.”

“What is it?”

“There was someone reflected in the mirror.”

 

“Who was reflected in the mirror?”

“Frank was reflected in the mirror.”

 

So things like this happen and make you start dreaming. And one thing leads to another, and if you let it, a whole other thing opens up.

THE CONTINUING STORY

 

 

 

I love going into another world, and I love mysteries. So I don’t really like to know very much ahead of time. I like the feeling of discovery. I think that’s one of the great things about a continuing story: that you can go in, and go deeper and deeper and deeper. You begin to feel the mystery, and things start coming.

 

The popularity of continuing stories on TV goes in waves. Periodically, the networks do these polls. And they come up with different things—at one time they had determined that people don’t watch every single week. People may watch two times a month and, so the reasoning went, they lose their way in a continuing story and drop away from the show. Obviously, the networks don’t want people to drop away, so for a certain period of time they soured on a continuing story and wanted closed endings.

 

I don’t know quite how the network decided to let
Twin Peaks
become a pilot. But just because they let something become a pilot, it doesn’t mean they’re going to make it into a series. So it got that far. And even then, they didn’t really know what to do with it. They send these things to a place; I think it’s in Philadelphia. And they have people watch the shows and grade them. Somehow, it got a fairly good score, but not spectacular. I don’t know what happened between that time and the time it aired, but it just got a huge, huge share that opening night. So that was a very lucky thing.

THE RED ROOM

 

 

 

One summer day, I was at a laboratory called Consolidated Film Industries in Los Angeles.We were editing the pilot for
Twin Peaks
and had finished for the day. It was around six-thirty in the evening and we had gone outside.There were cars in the parking lot. I leaned my hands on the roof of one car, and it was very, very warm—not hot, but nicely warm. I was leaning there and
—ssssst!—
the Red Room appeared. And the backward thing appeared, and then some of the dialogue.

 

So I had this idea, these fragments. And I fell in love with them.

That’s how it starts.The idea tells you to build this Red Room. So you think about it. “Wait a minute,” you say, “the walls are red, but they’re not hard walls.” Then you think some more. “They’re curtains. And they’re not opaque; they’re translucent.” Then you put these curtains there. “But the floor . . . it needs something.” And you go back to the idea and there was something on the floor—it was all there. So you do this thing on the floor. And you start to remember the idea more. You try some things and you make mistakes, but you rearrange, add other stuff, and then it feels the way that idea felt.

ASK THE IDEA

UPANISHADS

 

 

 

The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know, really. You just keep working to make it look like that idea looked, feel like it felt, sound like it sounded, and be the way it was. And it’s weird, because when you veer off, you sort of
know
it. You know when you’re doing something that is not correct because it
feels
incorrect. It says, “No, no; this isn’t like the idea said it was.” And when you’re getting into it the correct way, it feels correct. It’s an intuition: You feel-think your way through. You start one place, and as you go, it gets more and more finely tuned. But all along it’s the idea talking. At some point, it feels correct to you. And you hope that it feels somewhat correct to others.

Sometimes, I’ll go into a set that was built based on an idea, and for a moment or so, I think I am right in that idea. It’s fantastic. But a lot of times, you don’t build the set; you find a location that feels correct, based on that idea. And the location can be changed in many ways to get closer to the idea.The props and the light can be altered. The light can play a huge role in this. And you just keep working and working until the thing feels correct, based on the idea. If you pay attention to all the elements swimming together, then lo and behold, at the very end, it’s surprising how close it all is to that original spark.

New ideas can come along during the process, too. And a film isn’t finished until it’s finished, so you’re always on guard. Sometimes those happy accidents occur. They may even be the last pieces of the puzzle that allow it all to come together. And you feel so thankful:
How in the world did this happen?

During
Blue Velvet
, we were shooting a scene in the apartment of the character Ben, who is played by Dean Stockwell. At a certain point, Dean was going to sing “In Dreams” by Roy Orbison. He was going to lip-sync to that and sing it to Dennis Hopper. In the script, he was supposed to pick up a small lamp from a table and use it as a microphone.

But right in front of him on the set—and Patricia Norris, the production designer, said she did not put it there—was this work lamp. It had a long cord and its bulb was hidden from the audience, but illuminated Dean’s face. And Dean just snatched this up. He thought it was placed there for him. There’s so many of these things that come along.

 

Sometimes accidents happen that aren’t happy, but you have to work with those as well. You adapt. You throw out this thing, and throw out that thing, and throw out another thing. But if you pay attention to the original idea—stay true to that—it’s surprising how, at the end, even the things that were accidents are honest.They’re true to the idea.

TEST AUDIENCE

 

 

 

Although you can’t make a film with the audience in mind, at a certain point, before it’s finished, you need to experience the film with a group. Sometimes you lose your objectivity a little, and you need to get a feel for what’s working and what isn’t. That can be the worst screening—very close to hell on earth. But, again, the film’s not finished until it’s finished.

 

After you screen it for that group, for the sake of the whole, certain things may have to be cut down or some things may need to be added. They’re not exactly mistakes. Some of the scenes that are removed from a film are kind of nice scenes on their own. But to let the whole thing work, they have to go. It’s part of the process—it always happens to some degree.

GENERALIZATIONS

 

 

 

It’s dangerous, I think, to say that a woman in a film represents all women, or a man in a film represents all men. Some critics love generalizations. But it’s
that
particular character in
this
particular story going down
that
particular road. Those specific things make their own world. And sometimes it’s a world that we’d like to go into and experience.

DARKNESS

 

 

 

People have asked me why—if meditation is so great and gives you so much bliss—are my films so dark, and there’s so much violence?

There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world now, and most films reflect the world in which we live.They’re stories. Stories are always going to have conflict. They’re going to have highs and lows, and good and bad.

I fall in love with certain ideas. And I am where I am. Now, if I told you I was enlightened, and this is enlightened filmmaking, that would be another story. But I’m just a guy from Missoula, Montana, doing my thing, going down the road like everybody else.

 

We all reflect the world we live in. Even if you make a period film, it will reflect your times. You can see the way period films differ, depending on when they were made. It’s a sensibility—how they talk, certain themes—and those things change as the world changes.

And so, even though I’m from Missoula, Montana, which is not the surrealistic capital of the world, you could be anywhere and see a kind of strangeness in how the world is these days, or have a certain way of looking at things.

SUFFERING

 

 

 

It’s good for the artist to understand conflict and stress.Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won’t be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will just get in the way of your creativity. You can understand conflict, but you don’t have to live in it.

 

In stories, in the worlds that we can go into, there’s suffering, confusion, darkness, tension, and anger. There are murders; there’s all kinds of stuff. But the filmmaker doesn’t have to
be
suffering to
show
suffering. You can show it, show the human condition, show conflicts and contrasts, but you don’t have to go through that yourself. You are the orchestrator of it, but you’re not in it. Let your characters do the suffering.

It’s common sense: The more the artist is suffering, the less creative he is going to be. It’s less likely that he is going to enjoy his work and less likely that he will be able to do really good work.

Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of—or because of—his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great—I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.

Some artists believe that anger, depression, or these negative things give them an edge.They think they need to hold on to that anger and fear so they can put it in their work. And they don’t like the idea of getting happy—it makes them want to puke. They think it would make them lose their edge or their power.

But you will not lose your edge if you meditate. You will not lose your creativity. And you will not lose your power. In fact, the more you meditate and transcend, the more those things will grow, and you’ll know it. You will gain far more understanding of all aspects of life when you dive within. In that way, understanding grows, appreciation grows, the bigger picture forms, and the human condition becomes more and more visible.

If you’re an artist, you’ve got to
know
about anger without being restricted by it. In order to create, you’ve got to have energy; you’ve got to have clarity. You’ve got to be able to catch ideas. You’ve got to be strong enough to fight unbelievable pressure and stress in this world. So it just makes sense to nurture the place where that strength and clarity and energy come from—to dive in and enliven that. It’s a strange thing, but it’s true in my experience: Bliss is like a flak jacket. It’s a protecting thing. If you have enough bliss, it’s invincibility. And when those negative things start lifting, you can catch more ideas and see them with greater understanding. You can get fired up more easily. You’ve got more energy, more clarity. Then you can really go to work and translate those ideas into one medium or another.

LIGHT OF THE SELF

UPANISHADS

 

 

 

Negativity is like darkness. So what is darkness? You look at darkness, and you see that it’s really nothing: It’s the absence of something. You turn on the light, and darkness goes.

But sunlight, for instance, doesn’t get rid of negativity. It gets rid of darkness, but not negativity. So what light can you turn on that removes negativity the way sunlight removes darkness? It’s the light of pure consciousness, the Self—the light of unity.

Don’t fight the darkness. Don’t even worry about the darkness. Turn on the light and the darkness goes.Turn up that light of pure consciousness: Negativity goes.

 

Now you say, “That sounds so sweet.” It sounds
too
sweet. But it’s a real thing.

A TOWER OF GOLD

UPANISHADS

 

 

 

How does meditation get rid of negativity?

Picture it this way: You are the Empire State Building. You’ve got hundreds of rooms. And in those rooms, there’s a lot of junk. And
you
put all that junk there. Now you take this elevator, which is going to be the dive within. And you go down below the building; you go to the Unified Field beneath the building—pure consciousness. And it’s like electric gold. You experience that. And that electric gold activates these little cleaning robots. They start going, and they start cleaning the rooms. They put in gold where the dirt and junk and garbage were. These stresses that were in there like coils of barbed wire can unwind. They evaporate, they come out. You’re cleaning and infusing simultaneously. You’re on the road to a beautiful state of enlightenment.