The camera truck is a complex green pickup whose side door says it’s the property of Camera Trucks, Unltd. The back part has three tiers for gear, lights, a Steadicam, a video monitor and sound feed, and then little seats for David Lynch and the Director of Photography and a camera operator. When it’s back at Base, technical crewpeople converge on the truck in clusters of entomological-looking avidity and efficiency.
During the crews’ frantic activity — all of it punctuated with loud bullhorn commands from Scott Cameron — the technicians from the camera truck and the stand-ins from the cars take their own turns standing around and talking on cellulars and rooting through the baskets of corporate snacks on the snack table looking for stuff they like; i.e. it’s their turn to stand around and kill time. The exterior driving-shots all have stand-ins in the cars, but usually when the shooting team returns to Base the actual name actors will emerge from their trailers and join the roil. Robert Loggia in particular likes to come out and stand around chatting with his stand-in, who’s of the same meaty build and olive complexion and has the same strand-intensive balding pattern and craggy facial menace as Loggia, and of course is identically dressed in mobster Armani, so that from the distance of the roadside cliff their conversation looks like its own surreal metacommentary on parallel identity crises.
David Lynch himself uses the down-time between takes to confer with A.D.’s and producers and to drink coffee and/or micturate into the undergrowth, and to smoke American Spirits and walk pensively around the Mercedeses and camera truck’s technical fray, sometimes holding one hand to his cheek in a way that recalls Jack Benny. Now 50 years old, Lynch still looks like an adult version of the kind of kid who gets beat up a lot at recess. He’s large, not exactly fat but soft-looking, and is far and away the palest person anywhere in view, his paleness dwarfing even the head-shop pallor of the lighting and F/X guys. He wears a black long-sleeved dress shirt with every possible button buttoned, baggy tan Chinos that are too short and flap around his ankles, and a deep-sea fisherman’s cap with a very long bill. The tan cap matches his pants, and his socks match both each other and his shirt, suggesting an extremely nerdy costume that’s been chosen and coordinated with care — a suggestion that with Lynch seems somehow endearing rather than pathetic. The sunglasses he wears on the camera truck are the cheap bulgey wrap-around kind that villains in old Japanese monster movies used to wear. The overstiff quality of his posture suggests either an ultradisciplinarian upbringing or a back brace. The general impression is that of a sort of geeky person who doesn’t especially care whether people think he’s geeky or not, an impression which equals a certain kind of physical dignity.
Lynch’s face is the best thing about him, and I spend a lot of time staring at it from a variety of perspectives as he works the set. In photos of Lynch as a young man, he looks rather uncannily like James Spader, but he doesn’t look like James Spader anymore. His face is now full in the sort of way that makes certain people’s faces square, and it’s pale and soft-looking — the cheeks you can tell are close-shaved daily and then moisturized afterward — and his eyes, which never once do that grotesque looking-in-opposite-directions-at-once thing they were doing on the 1990 Time cover, are large and mild and kind. In case you’re one of the people who figure that Lynch must be as “sick” as his films, know that he doesn’t have the beady or glassy look one associates with degeneracy-grade mental trouble. His eyes are good eyes: he looks at his set with very intense interest, but it’s a warm and full-hearted interest, sort of the way you look when you’re watching somebody you love doing something you also love. He doesn’t fret or intrude on any of the technicians, though he will come over and confer when somebody needs to know what exactly he wants for the next set-up. He’s the sort who manages to appear restful even in activity; i.e. he looks both very alert and very calm. There might be something about his calm that’s a little creepy — one tends to think of really high-end maniacs being oddly calm, e.g. the way Hannibal Lecter’s pulse rate stays under 80 as he bites somebody’s tongue out.
13 what several different members of the crew and production staff, some of whom have been to film school, have to say about Lost Highway
“David’s idea is to do this like dystopic vision of LA. You could do a dystopic vision of New York, but who’d care? New York’s been done before.”
“It’s about deformity. Remember Eraserhead? This guy’s going to be the ultimate Penishead.”
“This is a movie that explores psychosis subjectively.”
“I’m sure not going to go see it, I know that.”
“It’s a reflection on society as he sees it.”
“This is a sort of a middle ground between an art film and a major studio release. This is a hard niche to work in. It’s an economically fragile niche, you could say.”
“This is his territory. This is taking us deeper into a space he’s already carved out in previous work already — subjectivity and psychosis.”
“He’s doing a Diane Arbus number on LA, showing the slimy undersection of a dream-city. Chinatown did it, but it did it in a historical way, as a type of noir-history. David’s film’s about madness; it’s subjective, not historical”
“It’s like, if you’re a doctor or a nurse, are you going to go buy tickets to go see an operation for fun in your spare time, when you’re done working?”
“This film represents schizophrenia performatively, not just representationally. This is done in terms of loosening of identity, ontology, and continuity in time.”
“Let me just say I have utmost respect — for David, for the industry, for what David means to this industry. Let me say for the record I’m excited. That I’m thrilled and have the utmost respect.”
“It’s a specialty film. Like The Piano, say. I mean it’s not going to open in a thousand theaters.”
“‘Utmost’ is one word. There is no hyphen in ‘utmost.’ ”
“It’s about LA as hell. This is not unrealistic, if you want my opinion.”
“It’s a product like any other in a business like any other.”
“It’s a Negative Pick-Up. Fine Line, New Line, Miramax — they’re all interested.”
“David is the Id of the Now. If you quote me, say I quipped it. Say ‘“David is the Id of the Now,” quipped______, who is the film’s ______.’”
“David, as an artist, makes his own choices about what he wants. He makes a film when he feels he has something to say. The people who are interested in his films… some [of his films] are better than others. Some are perceived as better than others. David does not look at this as his area of concern.”
“He’s a genius. You have to understand this. In these areas he’s not like you and me.”
“The head-changings are being done with makeup and lights. No CGIs.” 29
“Read City of Quartz. That’s what this film’s about right there in a nutshell.”
“Some of [the producers] were talking about Hegel, whatever the hell that has to do with it.”