Something Really Wild

Nicolas Cage himself is by no means an open book, but he opened himself up remarkably for David Lynch. "David had already set a course down for himself that was so personal that it kind of went beyond right or wrong," he says. Cage made what for him was an unprecedented concession by agreeing not to watch dailies, something he's gone to the mat for with other directors. "I do like to watch dailies," he says, "but David wasn't comfortable with it, and David made me comfortable with what he was doing, so I didn't want to press it. I trusted him."

Lynch describes Cage as "completely fearless," but Cage disagrees. "There are things I'm afraid of. One of them is being emotional. I've seen moments on screen when I cried, and I thought it was maudlin. You can give away so much of yourself that it becomes a little bit like jacking off. I had conversations with David about whether it was OK for a man to cry. And he said, if you're a real man, you can cry."

Floating

David Lynch's sets are described as "intimate and peaceful." This may in large part be due to his exercise of old-fashioned leadership. ("David is a leader in the sense that whatever the circumstance--the colder it gets, the later--you don't see it on his face," says Cage.) It may also have to do with his rapport with actors: unlike a lot of directors, Lynch seems to genuinely like and respect them. (This goes beyond the rational: Lynch won't make a film without Jack Nance, the man faced with parenting a bleating larva in Eraserhead. "Jack is David's lucky charm," says Johanna Ray. "We went through a lot in Wild at Heart [because of a scheduling conflict] to get Jack into the film.")

But another thing figures into the relative peacefulness of Lynch's sets--the apparent strength and vibrancy of the director's creative conviction. And this may owe something to Lynch's habit of meditation, which he's done for 40 minutes daily for the last 17 years. On the set of Wild at Heart, he disappeared every day at lunchtime to meditate. "What they say about meditation," Lynch says, "is that you expand your container. Everybody is a certain amount aware or conscious. If you could make yourself more conscious, you might be able to capture ideas at a deeper or higher level. And to me it's about capturing ideas. They're right out there. Right there. For me, I don't want my container to stay the same size. I want it to get bigger. So that's one reason I meditate."

Lynch's container-expansion would appear to be somewhat contagious. "Every single day on _Wild at Heart _something jumped to a whole other level," he says, "because you get so many people together tuning into the thing, everybody's senses are heightened, and you see things and feel things and you get ideas. And the ideas are likely to be right for the film because you're all right there where you're supposed to be. So all you have to do is be ready and keep your eyes open when these happy accidents occur and they can take the film who knows where."

It's no wonder actors like Lynch so much. They're junkies for being, as they say, "in the moment" and Lynch is very nimble in his "moments."

"These things happen almost magically," says Cage. "It's really an openness, to let things happen naturally. I've learned that 'floating' from David."

One of the terrifically "right," charmed moments in _Wild at Heart _came about not by accident, but spontaneously, when Lynch added in a clinching line of dialogue for Cage. The scene is itself an example of what's best about the film; it's the kind of moment that's too full of problematic truth for "normal" films. Sailor is telling Lula, in graphic detail, about an incident in the past when he had sex with another woman, and Lula's enjoying it. The underlying kick to this scene is the implied trust and intimacy between Lula and Sailor. At one point the blonde Lula asks Sailor, "What color was her hair?" And Sailor answers, "Jet black." Then in the line Lynch put in while the scene was being shot, Sailor very sweetly adds, just in case he's made his girl a little insecure, "But gentlemen prefer blondes." You smile when you hear this line, partly because you watched this sensitive guy Sailor beat a man to death in the opening scene of the film.

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