“You don’t get to do that”: why David Lynch wanted to drill a hole in an actor’s face
David Lynch had some pretty big ideas when it came to filmmaking. Take episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return, for example. He wanted to make the atomic bomb sequence as loud as possible – even though the scene would be made for television, not a movie theatre. No one had done something quite like that for TV before.
His ambitions were usually doable, whether that involved getting his characters to speak backwards for Twin Peaks or creating an alien-like creature for Eraserhead (something that still remains a total mystery), but there was one idea he once proposed that went a little too far.
The thing is, asking your actors to do something that actually requires them to modify their bodies in some way, whether that means gaining weight or shaving off their hair, is a big ask, and you can hardly be upset if a star is uncomfortable with your requests.
You’d think that asking an actor to lose a significant amount of weight, for example, would be enough, but Lynch always took things a step further. He wanted one of his actors to actually pierce a hole through their cheek – something that would clearly leave a permanent scar. Is any movie worth that? Even a David Lynch one?
In the book Room to Dream, actor Brad Dourif, who played Piter De Vries in Dune and Raymond in Blue Velvet, revealed his strange first encounter with Lynch, which saw him bring up an unusual proposition. “When I met David, my first thought was, ‘This is the preppiest-looking guy I’ve ever seen in my life.’ Slacks and a jacket, button-down shirt, a voice that sounded kind of like Peter Lorre from Philadelphia.”
It seems like you never knew what to expect from Lynch, because he operated on such a different plane of existence – his creative ideas all-consuming and his love of art clouding every waking moment. If he requested something as bizarre as an actor undergoing surgery for the sake of a film, you had to take what he was saying seriously. He almost definitely wasn’t joking about.
“I walked over to him and said, ‘Hi, I’m Brad,’ and he said, ‘I know. I’ve gotta ask you a question: How do you feel about actors having surgery?’ Apparently, he wanted to cut a hole in an actor’s cheek so they could put a tube through it for this effect of a tooth that emits a gas,” Dourif revealed.
That’s certainly one way to start a conversation with someone, and Dourif couldn’t believe the interaction. “I couldn’t tell if he was serious or it was an ongoing joke,” he admitted. Of course he was being serious, Lynch had ideas that some filmmakers couldn’t even comprehend, and this was a prime example.
“I heard him saying to Raffaella [De Laurentiis; producer], ‘But why not?’ She said, ‘No, you don’t get to do that.’” Clearly, someone has to establish a boundary, and it’s usually a producer who gets to make the final call. As much as De Laurentiis wanted to bring Lynch’s ideas to life, drilling a hole into an actor’s cheek is undisputedly too far, even for the surrealist master.
