Something Really Wild

Tidbit Goes to Jupiter

Maybe Laura Dern was destined to become David Lynch's Grace Kelly. When she was five, she saw Hush. . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte on TV and watched in horror as Bette Davis opened a hatbox at the top of a flight of stairs and her father's head rolled out. (Laura's mom had to call Bruce Dern on a set and have him talk her down.)

Lynch's casting director Johanna Ray brought Dern to the director's attention after a long search for Blue Velvet's Sandy. "David told me he wanted 'the most beautiful, popular girl in high school,' " says Ray. "So I brought in a lot of top, interesting, beautiful actresses, and he didn't respond to any of them. Finally he picked up the photo of one actress who was not so conventionally beautiful, who was more human and less unattainable, and he said she looked interesting. Then I knew he would respond to Laura, and the first time he saw her, that was it."

Dern and Lynch have been close friends ever since Blue Velvet. "He has a giant heart," she says of him. "He's Disneyland for me." He calls her Tidbit. "David trusts me," she says. "Laura trusts me," he says. Lynch never considered anyone else for the role of Lula: "I saw her 100% and a lot of people didn't. They knew I was friends with her and they respected her work, but they didn't see her as Lula. It was many things--whether someone is as bankable as somebody else, whether they've ever done anything like it before." If the doubters feared that Laura--so demure as Sandy-- would never be able to steam up Wild at Heart, they just didn't yet know the kind of eroticism Lynch wanted on screen. It's quite unlike anything we've seen--very graphic (at least in the early screening version I saw well before the film went on to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes last May), but healthy and full of feeling. As invented by Dern and Lynch, Lula embodies the most self-possessed, realistically feminine sexiness any American movie has ever presented. Not fuzzy, romanticized pap and not centerfold, wet-dream stuff either. "One idea of sexuality is that the woman's the vixen," says Dern, "and then there's Sandy in Blue Velvet, the Madonna you may want to marry but not sleep with. I've seen those two so much in films it drives me nuts. I realized Lula would give me the opportunity to be sexual yet pure at the same time. She's so turned on, but there's an innocence."

Dern's transformation into Lula didn't come easily. "Laura read the book and loved it and I thought we were there," says Lynch. "But when we started rehearsing we both realized we had a long way to go. Laura went to work. I'd tell her something, and she'd say, 'OK, I understand,' and she'd come back and a whole giant old barrier would have come down and Lula would come closer to being. Three or four giant things had to be removed from inside her, and then Bingo! Man-oh-man, it was coming out."

Lynch's erotic vision definitely banked on the trust he knew Dern had in him. When Dern realized Lynch and cinematographer Fred Elmes were going for a close-up of her naked breasts, she protested, "David, do you know what's going to happen when the boy in the eighth grade that I never liked goes to the Cinerama Dome to see this movie? Do you understand?" But as she got into the role of Lula, Dem took the lead. In one scene that never made it into the film, she decided, with the camera rolling, to simulate an orgasm as Lula relates to Sailor her dream of being ripped open by a wild animal. For another, genuinely inspired moment that was cut from the film after the screening I saw, Dem had Lula hover over Sailor alluringly, and when the scene was being shot she spontaneously lowered her thinly body-stockinged self onto Cage's face, purring, "Take a bite out of Lula." Believe me, it would have made cinema history.

"A couple of people working on the film saw that scene and said they had to hide their eyes!" exclaims Dern. "And one of them said to me, 'what a nasty scene!' And I thought, 'nasty' is oral sex? People out there beat each other to get turned on, and this is nasty?"

"Lula should be a definition in the dictionary now for 'bird-brain genius,' " Dern says of her character. "That's what she is, an airhead wisewoman. She's the coolest thing. I love her. She's the ultimate person. She's definitely on Jupiter, as I have been since I did the film. I don't think I'll ever come back. I might visit Pluto or Saturn, but Earth is not a possibility for me anymore."

Elvis With Tears

One of the keys to the ineffable, netherworldly feel of Lynch's movies is the weird "rightness" of the actors he chooses. Unlike the vast majority of filmmakers, Lynch doesn't ask actors to read for the parts he's casting; he thinks that's humiliating. "All I do is ask them goofball questions," he says, "just so I can see their mouth moving and a gleam in their eye or something."

"He's able to extract incredibly interesting information about actors' lives," says Johanna Ray. "It usually has nothing to do with acting, nothing to do with the film and nothing to do with the business. He has this amazing power of drawing out information that people haven't talked about with anyone. Even when I talk to him on the phone sometimes, I find myself telling him things and thinking, why am I telling him this?"

Lynch hit his customary bullseye in choosing Nicolas Cage to play Sailor Ripley, even without his usual casting procedure. Where had he seen Cage that this actor came so quickly to mind for the role of Sailor? You figure the answer might be Peggy Sue Got Married, or Birdy, or The Cotton Club, or Moonstruck, or Vampire's Kiss. "At Thrifty Drugs," says Lynch. Cage remembers the incident: "He said 'hi,' and I saw this man who looked like James Stewart and I knew I recognized him from somewhere but I wasn't sure. And he said 'hi' again and I said 'hi' and he said, 'We're supposed to say hi when we see each other, right?' and I said, 'Yeah, right, hi.' "

Once you see Cage as Sailor Ripley, it's impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. He's got eyes that are perfect windows to Sailor's combination of a flawed character, a good heart, and a simple mind. But he also has a certain period feel to him, which is probably why he's been cast in films like Racing With the Moon and Peggy Sue, and it's certainly an important part of what appealed to Lynch. Like Blue Velvet and "Twin Peaks," Wild at Heart takes place in a "present" that's really a reimagined '50s, an era for which Lynch obviously feels a powerful affinity. (Just how Lynch re-imagines the '50s is rather interesting. He gives expression to all the darkness that the post-War generation swept forcibly outside their white picket fences, and in so doing allows the solid values of that time to shine without the tarnish of repression.) Lynch cast Kyle MacLachlan for his '50s smalltown boy quality in Blue Velvet. In Wild at Heart, he was looking for the "cool" '50s and he went straight for the Elvis he saw in Nicolas Cage.

"Elvis had this innocence about him that was endearing," says Cage, who got what Lynch was after to a tee, spontaneously contributing to his character a snakeskin jacket he'd once bought second-hand on Melrose knowing it would fit into some role some time. "The way Elvis said 'sugar' or 'baby,' he really meant it. He had a simplicity about him, a likability thing. Like Elvis, Sailor isn't sexually innocent, but his love is innocent. There's nothing tainted about it. He's an open book."

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5