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Stepping Inside: How David Lynch Tapped Into the Unconscious
Scott Coffey and David Lynch David Lynch’s death was a big personal loss of a friend, confidant and mentor, but it’s been astonishing to me how many people who knew him only through his art have been affected. He got inside our heads so effectively; like Kafka, he had remarkable access to his unconscious. He seemed as though he could dream while awake, and being on a set with him, not only were you entering his dream, but everybody there was having a collective dream.
I saw Eraserhead when I was in high school; friends took me to a midnight showing at the University of Hawaii. The movie shuffled my DNA around in some way, and every one of his movies would shuffle it again, like he had some crazy pipeline into my being. I remember arguing with friends that Blue Velvet really doesn’t have much to do with what lurks beneath the surface of small-town America or anything to do with Ronald Reagan—it’s an inner journey, a Jungian trip-out confronting the shadow. I mean, Lynch tells us that at the very beginning of the film, with his camera literally pushing into an ear!
Early in my acting career, I met David socially, when a mutual friend, casting director Johanna Ray, introduced us. Years later, I was on the 6 train in lower Manhattan one winter afternoon and noticed a man standing up against the doors across from me. We were dressed identically: khaki pants and a black shirt buttoned all the way up to the top. The man was looking around, smiling, bemused by the subway and its inhabitants, his slightly wild hair matching his smile. I thought, I’ll look like this guy in 20 years. Just as I thought that, he looked over at me and smiled, I smiled back and thought, Wow, this guy looks just like David Lynch. I asked, “David?” “Scott?” We both laughed.
I had to get off at the next stop, but despite only meeting briefly that one earlier time, we were both excited to run into each other and stayed in touch, and he wound up putting me in almost everything else he did. I think my favorite experience of working with David was being Jack Rabbit in his Rabbits series, which was so weird and fun. I auditioned for the first season of Twin Peaks, but I wasn’t quite right for anything and don’t think Mark Frost liked me very much. David did later cast me in Twin Peaks: The Return.
One day, while David was casting the Mulholland Drive pilot, I was up at his office. There was a stack of headshots that he’d rejected. I saw Naomi Watts’s photo and knew what a good actress she was because we’d worked on Tank Girl together. I picked up her headshot and said, “Hey, she’s really great. You should meet her.” He did, loved her and then, on the spot in his office, offered both of us a role in the pilot. David wrote a role for me, a weird agoraphobic screenwriter named Wilkins who lived alone with his dog upstairs from Naomi and Laura Elena Harring’s characters. The leads were the three of us and Justin Theroux. ABC didn’t like the pilot, and I got to see the 14 pages of inane, stupid notes they sent, like, “If a character smokes, they should have a hacking cough to show how bad smoking is for you.” His fax machine kept spitting out this epic batch of criticism, and without even reading them, David took the pages from the tray and moved them into the garbage. When the pilot didn’t get picked up, I was really sad because I knew I’d never get an acting role this great again. He had told me what would happen with my character in the first season, and it was fantastic and totally wild.
That was kind of it for my acting career, but that was OK because directing was what I wanted to do more than anything, and I’m a much happier person now than I was as an actor. David helped me with that transition, supporting and advising me. I learned most of what I know about running a set and dealing with actors from working with him, having spent weeks on Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. He would make a womb for the cast and crew to do their best work in, and it was like swimming in some magical amniotic fluid. It felt like you couldn’t do anything wrong—if you brought in a great idea or one suddenly occurred to you, David would get excited and love it. It’s funny: you think he’d be a control freak and dictate how he wanted everything said or done, but he was collaborative and brought the best out of everyone. Once, on the set of Mulholland Drive, he directed the union Steadicam operator like he was an actor. This was a career camera operator in for the day to do Laura Harring’s POV walking down the hall, and David said to him, “You’re scared. You don’t know what you’re going to find around this corner. Be careful. Someone could kill you!” The guy was thrilled. He got to be directed by David Lynch! For sure, no director had ever talked to him like that. In his amazing experimental world, David really did bring out the best in everyone, cast and crew alike. He was my friend, mentor, confidant and, ultimately, family, more of a father than my own dad, even. I loved him.
