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“[You] Build a Movie Like You Build a Fire”: Lost Highway DP Peter Deming on Restorations, Lighting and Working with David Lynch
Lost Highway (courtesy of the Criterion Collection) With all three seasons of Twin Peaks having arrived on MUBI today and two sold-out 35mm screenings of Lost Highway(1997), presented by cinematographer Peter Deming, having taken place at Film at Lincoln Center last night, it’s clear that David Lynch’s 1990s output remains firmly top of mind for cinephiles at home and in theaters. With Lynch’s death (the subject of countless memorials and personal tributes) and it now having been 35 years since Twin Peaks debuted on ABC and captivated America and beyond, 2025 has provided, month-by-month, reasons to commemorate the Lynchian touch (Attn: repertory theaters: Wild at Heart turns 35 this summer and The Elephant Man 45 this fall).
Deming, who in addition to shooting Lost Highway, also shot Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), all 18 parts of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), and a uniquely historic 55-second short (1995), has long been something of a journeyman throughout Hollywood. Having worked as director of photography on projects directed by Wes Craven, Curtis Hanson, Reginald Hudlin, Albert and Allen Hughes, Philip Kaufman, Jonathan Lynn, Darnell Martin, Sam Raimi, Jay Roach, David O. Russell, Ira Sachs, Betty Thomas, Robert Townsend, and many more, Deming’s career continues to flourish. It was Deming’s own personal 35mm print of Lost Highway that was screened at Lincoln Center this week and, in having shot some of Lynch’s most celebrated, cerebral works, he has now become one of the key remaining voices available to discuss how Lynch’s film tick, or at least how the pieces were put in place throughout production.
I spoke with Deming a few days ago to discuss his work with Lynch (Lost Highway in particular), as well as how he “rose up the ranks” to become one of the industry’s most sought-after cinematographers. For additional context on Lost Highway, read an interview with Lynch from our Winter, 1997 issue here.
Filmmaker: I’ve heard you admit that, for you, every project starts with Orson Welles (and his Touch of Evil in particular), and in a roundabout way, so too does your feature-film career, and your relationship with David Lynch. The first feature you shot that had a theatrical release was Evil Dead 2 and it opens with a logo for a fake distribution company called Rosebud, a logo which appears to almost mimic the opening blue-skied, low-angle shot of Blue Velvet. Both Evil Dead 2and Blue Velvet were De Laurentiis Entertainment Group productions shot in North Carolina (due to the production company being based in Wilmington). All just coincidences, I realize, but I found that ironic in retrospect. How did you first become aware of the films of David Lynch?
Deming: I had been aware of David since Eraserhead was released in theaters. I was still in university at the time and we’d heard about this film that had come out, and so we all went and saw it projected in 35mm at a local movie theater and then immediately went across the street to a bar to settle down and talk about it. That was my initial introduction to David’s work, as it was for many people, and he was always on my radar after that. By the time The Elephant Man came out a few years later, I had moved to Los Angeles to attend AFI [American Film Institute] and made a point to see everything he made thereafter as soon as it was released. What surprised me about David was that every film of his was so different, yet each shared a common thread of his originality within it, and so you never knew what you were going [to get next]. It wasn’t like someone who was resting on their laurels and producing the same style over and over and over again, it was completely different each time out.
Filmmaker: I know David was an alum of AFI [Class of 1970]. Did his increasingly successful career hang large over your program?
Deming: He was certainly in the school’s brochure, I’ll say that [laughs].
Filmmaker: Your first feature credits as director of photography were for young filmmakers who would become highly successful very quickly. Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 opened theatrically on March 13, 1987, and just one week later Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle opened on March 20. I know you shot both of those films months (if not years) apart and that this was all just a quirky coincidence of theatrical release scheduling, but I was curious if, in that short span of time, you knew you could embark on shooting feature films full-time. As opposed to shorts or commercials or other types of projects…
Deming: Well, I had always aspired to work on feature films, and on the road toward arriving at that point, I was a camera assistant for many years and would shoot educational movies and industrial films on 16mm. Photochemical is still photochemical, right? It didn’t matter what the project was or what was in front of the lens…you’re still learning that technical part of the job for when you are offered something of more consequential subject matter down the line. When that comes, then you’ll be ready, on a technical level, to handle it. All that early experience was very valuable for me. Regarding Hollywood Shuffle, that film obviously had a very long gestation period, and we never knew when (or if) it would be released and it truly was just a coincidence that these films came out so close to one another.
Filmmaker: I believe you first met David Lynch when you were hired to shoot episodes of his short-lived series for ABC, On the Air.
Deming: That’s right.
Filmmaker: This would’ve been around 1991?
Deming: It was ’91, yes.
Filmmaker: How were you brought on to work on that series? Was it through an agent or…
Deming: I had an agent then, but I was actually recommended to David by a producer who worked on Twin Peaks and, I believe, the pilot for On the Air, whom I had known back when I was a camera assistant. I think she had subsequently seen my name show up [on screen] on several different movies and thought, “oh, look at that,” and, for whatever reason, thought David and I would click or that I might be good for On the Air. But that was all completely out of the blue. I then met David, who wasn’t directing any of the episodes [outside of the pilot] but was certainly in charge of approving each one, and so that’s how that came about.
Filmmaker: Who was the producer who recommended you to David?
Deming: It was a woman named Lisa Cook. She had been a film producer who then went on to work in large film formats for a while. I don’t know what she’s doing now, but I should send her a “thank you” note.
Filmmaker: Getting to work on On the Air provided you with the opportunity to get to know and work with several of David’s closest collaborators. [Twin Peaks co-creator] Mark Frost co-created On the Air and David’s production designer and former roommate Jack Fisk even directed an episode…
Deming: Yeah, the list of directors on On the Air was pretty formidable in retrospect, heck, even at the time. Lesli Linka Glatter directed two episodes, Betty Thomas directed one, as did, Jack Fisk and Jonathan Sanger. These were all either people from the Twin Peaks universe, or in Jack’s case, people who went back years and years with David, to university and art school in Philadelphia.
Filmmaker: When you began shooting David’s films, working with him more closely, was there ever a discussion of style? Being a fan of his work, were there visual choices or notable traits you were consciously aware of emulating or perhaps attempting to avoid out of fear of mimicry?
Deming: There was never a discussion of intended style, although there were discussions (specifically on Lost Highway) about color, certain colors that David wanted the film to be somewhat steeped in. There were things, photographically, we wanted to do with colors by way of different filters. Brown was a key color but photochemically it’s a very difficult color to affect in post-production, and so we had to bake it into the shot somewhat while filming. But there was no talk of how we were going to shoot it or what the visual language of any specific scene should be. For the most part, that just came day to day. We would rehearse [the day’s] scenes and then huddle with David to the side and figure out the shots, which were 90% straight out of his head. He had already decided, when he [was preparing to shoot a scene] how he wanted to have it shot, but the lighting and the mood were always implicit in what we had all just watched in the rehearsal moments before. Rarely was there any further discussion. David would then go away and we’d set the cameras, light the shot, and hope that when David came back, it was sort of the movie he wanted. Most of the time, there were no further discussions, and we would just start to shoot.
Filmmaker: You’ve previously recounted how on the first day of shooting, you realized that the lighting made a scene set in the house too dark, not visually but in tone. What was the intended tone for that scene and how did you realize something was off?
Deming: With David’s scripts, there’s very little, on the page, describing what the mood of a scene is. On Lost Highway, for example, the script would just say, “Interior. Suburban House. Day,” and as you’re reading it, you’re experiencing it like how the viewer will receive it, i.e. you understand from the dialogue that these two characters are married and that they live together in this big house, but none of that is ever written down on the page. When we got into the house on that first day [of shooting] and started to rough in some lighting, we hadn’t seen the scene [played out] yet, a scene that, as written, is set during the daytime in a suburban house. But once we watched the actors play the scene out, it was very tense. Again, if you just read the dialogue, there’s no overt tension apparent in the words, but the way the scene was played and the way David directed it made us realize, after the rehearsal concluded, “oh, we have to start over. We have this lit way too bright, it’s way too sunny for what’s happening in the scene.” Fortunately, we were able to change it around and everything worked out, but that was a good lesson we learned right away, not to come in with too many preconceived notions about what the look of a scene will be until you see what the drama is.
Filmmaker: I believe the house that Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette’s characters live in was owned by David. Were you allowed to get in there during pre-production at all? The house feels incredibly unique on screen, to the movie’s credit and surely to yours.
Deming: It’s interesting how the house worked out. David really wrote the script based on the architecture and layout of his own house, but clearly he wasn’t going to entertain letting a film crew in there. The house we shot in was located next to David’s, a house owned by an elderly gentleman whom David had been friendly with for many years. The man had recently passed away, and David spoke with his family (because he was friendly with them as well), and they were going to put the house on the market. Well, David offered to buy the house, and thank goodness they agreed to sell it to him. What happened then is the art department went into this house and reconfigured the walls of the main level to better fit the story, certainly to an extent you wouldn’t normally do in a house you were actively trying to sell. There were these very long, narrow hallways and these little windows, and it was very much to David’s personal taste, and the story’s. Except for instances of being on a stage where you tend to have total control, this really was a unique situation where a practical location was transformed to meet the needs of the script.
Filmmaker: Some shots within the house had me questioning if I was looking at a single shot or a subtle pairing of two. An example being where Fred is in the living room on the left side of the frame and there’s a shot of Renee in her bedroom that has entered our view via the right side of the frame, which is either a split diopter or editing magic or…
Deming: Are we talking dissolves or overlays?
Filmmaker: Overlays.
Deming: I think that’s very much a product of post-production, yes. I don’t recall pre-planning any of those or the dissolves. I think it’s just the realization that when you have two compositions, you think, “hey, we can really play with this a bit.” There were some scenes where both Bill and Patricia came out of that bedroom and into the hallway, and because it was so very tight in that location, we had on the widest anamorphic lens possible. There’s an inherent depth of field in those [shots] that, even at that shallow stop, were very advantageous. But that was primarily an example of using post as yet another creative storytelling tool.
Filmmaker: Was the fact that you were partly making a film noir always top of mind? Obviously the film is influenced by Robert Aldrich’s 1955 film, Kiss Me Deadly, and the look of Patricia Arquette’s character is explicitly evoking a femme fatale type, but I’m curious how you made a concentrated effort to incorporate elements of noir into the look of the film. Is it even right to consider Lost Highway a noir, in a traditional sense?
Deming: Oh, definitely, and that was something we talked about. I’m trying to remember, but I think one of the versions of the screenplay, even on the title page, mentioned the word ‘noir,’ or as David called it, “a psychogenic fugue.” But film noir was definitely what we were going for, although not in a traditional, hard light sense. It was more in that while there’s a lot of soft light apparent in the film, single source, there’s no fill light and we let the light drop-off and made the conscious choice to not use backlight (when normally you would) to make it a little bit creepier. They’re simple techniques that possess a subconscious effect on the viewer, and David obviously wanted to create mystery whenever he could, and a lot of that is in darkness, and so we embraced literal darkness whenever possible.
Filmmaker: Were there any plans, going into production, of how you wanted to shoot the camcorder footage? It’s initially voyeuristic in intent, but throughout it continues popping up to give the viewer brief, frightening glimpses of grainy, analogue information our eyes are attempting to decipher.
Deming: Yeah, I think there was. To a certain extent, it was sort of technology-based. We didn’t shoot those scenes on a very good video camera, but that was the point. We had shot all of that video content earlier so that we could have it play on a TV screen, on set, for playback when shooting the scene with the actors where [Fred and Renee] find the tapes. I had assumed, wrongly, that David would then go back to those tapes and just transfer them to film and use the [film-out] for the [finished version], but he didn’t want to do that at all. No, we shot all that stuff right off the TV that was playing the tapes in the room, in camera, which made it look even rougher while simultaneously placing the viewer deeper into the minds of the characters. I think that the obscurity of the image made it all the more creepy. It heightened each of those elements you’re describing.
Filmmaker: I’ve heard you speak about how while shooting My Cousin Vinny, you were presented with the challenge of having to frame Joe Pesci and Fred Gwynne within the same shot [there is a considerable height difference between the two actors], and I remembered that story as I rewatched Lost Highway and arrived at the scene where Robert Blake’s Mystery Man meets Bill Pullman’s Fred at a house party. Thanks to a quick Google search, I know that Robert Blake was 5’4″ and Bill Pullman is 6’2. I don’t know if the tight close-ups on the actors’ faces was a choice centered around their differences in verticality (the close-ups are uncomfortably freakish regardless), but it did remind me of the challenge you faced on My Cousin Vinny.
Deming: A little bit, yeah. The advantage I had on Lost Highway was that the scene wasn’t a walk-and-talk situation like the scene you’re referring to [in My Cousin Vinny]. There wasn’t going to be a two-shot with the two of them the way Fred and Joe had. But yeah, I don’t even remember shooting ‘over the shoulders’ with Robert and Bill because we looked at it and said, “well, that wouldn’t work at all. Let’s just shoot the two actors [individually].” The angle on Robert was a little bit high, but primarily eye-level to maximize the effect of his [presence]. The shot on Bill Pullman was set up especially so that once Robert Blake leaves the shot, we take Bill across the room over to another character who asks Fred, “did you know that Dick Laurent has been murdered?” and that shot has those two actors in the frame together.
Filmmaker: As Fred transforms into Pete in the prison cell, we quickly see several blinding lightning flashes and images that will come into play later, particularly that elevated wooden cabin that has been set on fire in the middle of a desert (this footage is played in reverse to make it seem as though the pieces of the cabin are coming together). How did you conceive of that shot?
Deming: That’s another example of David playing around in post, because I don’t recall any of that in the screenplay. In fact, the shot of the cabin burning was a complete improvisation. We had finished shooting all those scenes with the cabin and began packing up our equipment and getting ready to leave to go back to Los Angeles because we had been shooting in the desert near Palm Springs, in Death Valley actually. David asked the producer what was going to happen to the cabin now that we’d finished shooting and was told, “someone will come out and take it apart and essentially throw it away.” David thought that’d be a real waste and so he asked us, “can I blow it up?,” and we all looked at each other like, well, we’re out in the middle of nowhere and though it probably isn’t recommended that we blow it up, we said, “sure, yeah, why not?” The special effects team then went off and collected a bunch of gasoline cans and came back to set.
Now, the cabin didn’t exactly blow up. It sort of imploded a bit and then started to burn heavily. We had a couple of cameras on it, one shooting at normal speed, one shooting in slightly slow motion, and another shooting in reverse. After we got it, we still didn’t know where this footage would go in the movie?” We didn’t know! But it was a part of what David liked to call firewood. He liked to call some things firewood because [you] build a movie like you build a fire. You need firewood to build a fire and, a lot of times, David would gather elements [for a film] that he wasn’t sure how or where they’d fit, or even if they would fit at all. But he wanted to be able to experiment in post with imagery, or firewood, we captured along the way, and that burning of the cabin was one of those situations. He also pulled from other scenes, particularly the end of the film with Bill in the car in the desert. We had shot that scene fairly straightforward. At the beginning of the sequence, when the cops are following Fred, you see the normal shots as we [shot them], but I think David and his editor Mary Sweeney decided the scene needed to get amped up somehow (particularly with the [music] track he used) but we weren’t going to go shoot anything else. David and Mary “blew it up,” so to speak, and played with the frame rates. And I remember seeing it the first time and being just flabbergasted, because it was such a great use of those really rudimentary tools that, again, are not usually embraced technically in the film business. But that doesn’t matter today. It’s just the emotional and visceral reaction to that, and that’s what counts.
Filmmaker: Lost Highway received a new 4K restoration a few years ago that I know David oversaw. When the opportunity presents itself for a restoration such as this, or perhaps on another film of yours gets scaled up to 4K, how involved do you like to be in that process, if at all? And do you ever get called back in for those [restorations]?
Deming: We had done the restoration of Mulholland Drive first and I was very involved in that process. David did his pass, and, though I was actually shooting in London at the time, I did mine. David was adamant that he wanted to be very faithful to the film print, to what people were used to seeing, and he didn’t want to “monkey around,” as he would say, with digital tools just to futz around with this stuff. We would A/B it with the film print and the 4K restoration side-by-side. Some things were fine-tuned very slightly, and one shot was recomposed, but, for the most part, the restoration was very accurate.
In the case of the recent Lost Highway restoration, I had no idea it was happening. This was something that took place during COVID, when a lot of people had a lot of time on their hands. David decided he could do this restoration remotely with the colorist or the lab or whoever and so he just went ahead and did it. If ever there was a time when you wanted a director to take the lead on visuals, it’s David. When I heard that he had overseen it, I wasn’t worried in the least. I knew it would be fantastic.
Filmmaker: Was it right after Lost Highway that you worked with Wes Craven for the first time, on Scream 2? How did that come about?
Deming: It came about literally right after we wrapped photography on Lost Highway. Wes was actually halfway through production on the first Scream film and there had been some disagreements, I’ll say, on set between him and [the cinematographer Mark Irwin]. Some of the disagreements had to do with technology, and I literally got a call on a Friday, and the next day I found myself on a plane headed to [the Scream] set. I met with Wes that Sunday and we started shooting the next day, on Monday.
Filmmaker: I thought Scream 2 was your first collaboration with Wes…I didn’t realize you had been brought on for the first installment.
Deming: Yes, we had just wrapped filming on Lost Highway, and then I went right to work on the first Scream. I was brought on midway through their shooting schedule, as they had already shot for four weeks and still had another four to go. I don’t recall how that job came to me, whether it was through various agents or someone else, but because they were shooting anamorphic, they wanted someone with real anamorphic experience, and I had just come off of that with Lost Highway, and so I was offered a very fortuitous opportunity. I obviously went on to work with Wes a lot more in my career and he became a really good friend.
Filmmaker: So the first Scream is, in its final form, still half-shot by another cinematographer.
Deming: Yes, Mark Irwin shot the first half and I shot the second half and then we colorized the film together. That worked out great and, to this day, Mark is still a friend. I don’t know what led up to [his dismal], but whoever comes in thereafter isn’t really at fault for that. I’ve had that type of situation happen to me a few times and I’ve always tried to mitigate the situation, recommending, “you know, why don’t you guys try to work this out? Because to replace [someone] is a big step.” And then, when you realize they’re at the point where one party or the other isn’t going to work it out, then someone new has to come in. You have to acquiesce and say, “okay.” Obviously, Wes was a huge nam,e and I was a fan of his work, and so I said yes.
Filmmaker: Perhaps this is a morose question, but how does it feel being a voice that gets to carry on these memories of (or for) filmmakers who are no longer with us? This August will mark 10 years since we lost Wes and it’s only been six months since we lost David. You’re now someone who carries on these production stories for them, albeit unintentionally.
Deming: Unintentionally, exactly. I think it’s important to do that, and there’s a certain gravitas to the responsibility. You want to be truthful about the shared experiences you had, but you can only tell or recall them from your memory, from your own point of view. But when I’m asked to do it, I’ve always felt honored, on both occasions.
