Two days after David Lynch’s passingit’s still hard to believe it the most influential filmmaker of our time is gone. It’s also hard to believe that Lynch, whose death at age 78 was shared by his family on Jan. 16, shot just three movies with cinematographer Fredrik Elmes: “Eraserhead”, “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart”. The alchemical match between director and DP remains one of the defining collaborations of Lynch’s career, with Elmes crystallizing Lynch’s nightmarish and wholly sui generis vision of the American underbelly in all these films. The worms writhing under white picket fences, the neo-noir potential of a severed ear giving way to a tale of psychosexual menace involving Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper.
Elmes — who most recently shot Jim Jarmuch’s “Father, Mother, Sister, Brother” in New Jersey, Dublin and Paris — called IndieWire late Thursday night after Lynch passed away. “I was busy all afternoon and just got this barrage of calls and texts from people informing me. I was working and I didn’t see or hear any news until I got this round of calls. So it was news to me. Dinner, I hadn’t heard anything,” he said.
The cinematographer said they have always kept in touch despite not making one film together since “Wild at Heart” won the Palme d’Or in 1990, although they did a number of perfume campaigns for Calvin Klein and Yves Saint Laurent in the early 90s. “We emailed back and forth a few months ago, actually. I knew he was in bad health, and I knew about his emphysema the last time I was out there (in Los Angeles),” said Elmes, who lives in New York. “He really kept his distance from everyone and didn’t leave the area of his house. So I know it was a real concern for him. But he was so eager to work. He couldn’t help but talk to filmmakers. He really wanted to get into animation and into, kind of AI-generated animation. He really talked to people to try to get projects going, even in his illness.” (First, Lynch had recently been trying to get the animated project “Snootworld” off the ground even after Netflix rejected his pitch.)
Dating back to the ’70s, Elmes and Lynch were both students of the American Film Institute during its early years at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. “He was a guy a year ahead of me. Someone else had actually started shooting ‘Eraserhead’ and was shooting at the beginning of it but couldn’t stay because it turned out to be a long-term project,” says Elmes. “David and I hit it off, and the where a long project. It took us four years to film it. I worked well at his pace. I wanted to see it through. We were ghosts (of the American Film Institute), we had been there so long. We always haunted the dark corners because we needed locations to film “Eraserhead.” We needed to find quirky little places, and they were there at the Doheny Mansion. It was a beautiful old building, and we knew all the nooks and crannies, and we knew the stories, and we knew the ghosts of the place.”
What does the term mean Lynchian — the impending doom hidden beneath all that is banal — mean to Elmes? It is so overused that it becomes hollowed out of meaning and difficult to put into words.
“It’s so weird, the concept of something Lynchian and having been a small part of it from the beginning is an odd concept,” Elmes said. “When We Did”Blue velvet,” I was glad we had done ‘Eraserhead.’ We had been working apart for years because he was doing a movie with Mel Brooks (‘The Elephant Man’). We obviously came back with ‘Blue Velvet’ and had been talking about it the story. He was quite clear in explaining this small town and the underside of this small town, and the whole character of it in the years before we worked on the film together.”
Regarding the film’s influence on his own career, Elmes said: “Fast-forward past that, ‘Blue Velvet’ had come out (1986), and I was trying, as a cinematographer, my best to get into the world of shooting commercials. You couldn’t play in a TV commercial if you hadn’t done one before. It was a real catch-22. My agent came to me with this project and said, “Someone has contacted me, they want to put a commercial in this little town of Blue Velvet, on the underside of the city, they want this feel of darkness,” and she told them, “I’ve only got the guy, I’ve got Fred Elmes. He shot the movie, he’ll be great for your commercial.’ She said: ‘He has no roll. He only has the film.’ And they said, ‘Well, we can’t possibly hire him without a roll. So I didn’t get the job.”
“Blue Velvet” caused a stir in cinemas – and also from critic Roger Ebert — for its candid approach to nudity and sexually charged violence, particularly with Isabella Rossellini battering lounge singer Dorothy Vallens, under the violent spell of nitrous Dennis Hopper. Lynch began dating the actress while the film was being made, and they were together through the release of “Wild at Heart,” in which she also starred, and under even more makeup and flamboyant hair styling, before breaking up. “They were pretty low-key on the set (of ‘Blue Velvet’). There wasn’t much sign of that connection. They kept it pretty secret. I knew something was going on, but it seemed like a secret deal until after the fact,” says Elmes.
Elmes said that to this day on other projects in film and television, “I feel like people refer to him.” (Along with many Jarmusch films, he also scored Charlie Kaufman’s hallucinatory, Lynch-indebted “Synecdoche, New York.”) And the term “Lynchian” remains an elusive but coveted direction to move toward for any working filmmaker. He said it’s used almost “like it’s out of a dictionary, (and) everyone should know what this means. It’s so disturbing to think about my relationship with David in a way that actually generated some of it.”
How best to sum up a filmmaker Elmes had a long-standing creative and personal friendship with? “He’s such an original filmmaker. He’s allowed me to trust myself, to trust ideas that I have that seem out of the ordinary, that seem a little far-fetched. He’s allowed me to trust that, well, maybe this is the way to solve this problem. This is the way to approach this scene. Why not take a chance on that part and make it a little darker than you would have done before?”, says Elmes.
He particularly recalled a moment they shared at the film’s 1986 Directors Guild of America theatrical premiere, where Lynch’s feedback from months before during the “Blue Velvet” production finally came into focus.
“There’s a moment in ‘Blue Velvet’ when Jeffrey kind of sneaks into Dorothy’s apartment and then gets caught. And in the lab, David kept saying, ‘It’s too bright, it’s too bright. You just have to make it darker. So we blacked it out in the lab, and then we’re sitting at the Director’s Guild premiere a couple of months later, and I said to David, ‘I can’t see anything. I can’t see anything in that scene.’ Yes, it is great.’ He just loves those moments.”
Elmes shared a tribute to Lynch on Instagram, which you can read below.
