No, oh God no. Once in a while I’ll catch one and watch a little bit on television. I think I’m far enough away from them age-wise, I’m thinking of my early films like “Dune” or “Blue Velvet” where I can look back and go, “Well, that’s sort of charming.” Sort of watching “Dune” and looking at the size of and the nature of it, which is that nothing seems to make any sense but it’s sort of interesting as a whole. And “Blue Velvet,” which I think stands up incredibly well as a film. But that’s such a different person, that’s me at 23, 24 - 20+ years ago. There’s miles and miles and miles between then and now.
I like the ‘doing’ of it. I get a kick out of some things like some of the things that I think are really good. The “Twin Peaks” pilot I think is good. I like to watch that because it makes me laugh because it’s just goofy. But I don’t like to revisit a lot of my stuff.
What’s the best part in the doing of it?
It’s kind of why I like theater. You have the rehearsal time, you have the four weeks of trying stuff. One of the things in researching Cary Grant was with directors where he was allowed to experiment a little bit and to try a few different things. Hitchcock was one you could do that with, Howard Hawks was one, Leo McCarey did it. Some of these directors allowed him to play a little bit. That was one of the great things about working with David Lynch is that you could mess around a little bit. And one of the nice things about Ian, Ian allowed me to adlib a bit. Once I got into the character and felt like, “Yeah, I really understand him,” then I began to be able to adlib in this rhythms and his vernacular. And a lot of those things crept into the movie.
Having worked with David Lynch, did you ever wonder, “What the heck are we doing?”
(Laughing) Every day. “Twin Peaks” and Blue Velvet” had really strong narrative. What was fun was during the filming of the series of “Twin Peaks,” whenever David would come in and do an episode – and that’s something that’s never done because in television the writer is top of the totem pole – and he would come in and basically the script would just end up being destroyed. He would take out pages, we’d rearrange scenes, we’d change dialogue. I mean, we’d just completely bastardize what we had. And that was fun. It really felt like the inmates were taking over the asylum for a week, which he enjoyed as well. But it was always with a purpose.
There’s not very many filmmakers like David, particularly in America. He’s so brave and courageous. He creates from a place that is unknown. He’s not following any blueprints. He’s following an unconscious urge and that’s hard to do nowadays when people want to know how much you’re going to make on this film on the first day of filming. They want to know what they can recoup by day 90, or day 120, or day 180, or whatever. And David just doesn’t work that way and that just doesn’t exist anymore.
Why do you think “Dune” wasn’t really well received? It took a beating. Was any of it justified?
I think yes and no. We made it in ‘83 and it came out in ’84 [with] Dino De Laurentiis who had a habit of over-hyping all of his pictures and saying it was the biggest budget ever seen – an over-the-top kind of salesmanship. It was a book that was incredibly popular but was impossible to translate. David did an okay job. Now you’d do a “Lord of the Rings” thing – you’d break it into three and you’d hope that it would recoup. But that would be the book, would be three movies. I think it was ill-fated from the get-go. There was no way you were going to make sense of this. There were just too many things going on. Add to the fact that special effects were sort of in an infancy. I know we’d had “Star Wars,” that was ‘77 and this was ’83, [but] blue screen was still pretty rudimentary. You couldn’t use the computer on any of this stuff and that would have been a tremendous help.
It had kind of a throwback quality at a time when we were just getting used to science fiction. We were just seeing shiny “Star Wars” stuff. I appreciated “Alien” because it felt like that ship had been in space God knows how long. It was kind of beaten up and dirty. This was something that was even different than that. This was like made from the ‘30s, kind of. It was just at the wrong time. Add to the fact that it was very difficult to follow, it was a bit stilted, it was just not what people wanted at that time. Now you go back and revisit it and you’re sort of stunned at the beauty of some of the scenes. It doesn’t pull together but, to me, it’s like a “Bladerunner.” I like to go and watch “Bladerunner,” which made no sense but which I loved going into that world. I think people loved going into the world of “Dune” with all of its problems.
