David Lynch’s worlds resonate and reverberate through you. Worlds that don’t just play out on screen; they immerse, distort, and transcend. Behind the velvet curtain and picket fences of Lynch’s dream logic and noir surrealism are those he wholeheartedly trusted to create alongside, conjuring frequencies in tandem: sound designer Dean Hurley and cinematographer Peter Deming are two of Lynch’s longtime collaborators – both acclaimed architects of texture, tone and tension well-versed in the auteur’s esoteric language.

Hurley, the sonic alchemist behind the synthised hums, ambient drones, and static-charged soundscapes of Twin Peaks: The Return as well as much of Lynch’s music discography, and Deming, the eye behind the haunted gloss of Mulholland Drive and the ominous voyeurism of Inland Empire (and beyond) come together here in a rare dialogue that pays ultimate homage to the filmmaker, sharing personal stories and photographs. For all of Lynch’s inimitable vision and uncompromising ability to shape the intangible, to Hurley and Deming, he was above all a friend, a mentor, and a constant beacon of unpredictable inspiration who taught them to raise the stakes.

Dean Hurley: Peter, I’ve got a lot of questions for you. I don’t want to get too nerdy, but walk me through your first encounter with David, was it when you got the gig on On The Air [a TV sitcom created by Mark Frost and David Lynch]?
Peter Deming: No, actually David had done the pilot, which was the first episode.

DH: So you didn’t shoot the pilot?
PD: I did not, Ron Garcia shot the pilot.

DH: Right, of course.
PD: I met David, I was hired, and then we did six episodes with different directors, people close to David. He came by the set I think once or twice, and that was all I saw of him.

DH: It’s such a quirky show. David screened it once when I was working up there and he laughed hysterically. To the point where you’re like, “Is it that funny?” [laughs] When he dropped by the set did he interject anything or try spike the mood?
PD: No, not at all. In fact, one of the times he came he was mixing Fire Walk With Me, so his days were full.

DH: What was the first thing where you were really in the hot seat with the one-on-one direct collaboration and started to get to know him?
PD: It was probably a series of commercials we did, most of them were for a European market and David had free reign, really — it was like a playground for him. We did one for Jil Sander that had a lot of experimentation in it. That was when I started to get the feel of what the day-to-day was like with David on set. You know, commercials are often very structured with storyboards — that was just a notion to David. [laughs] He’d do some [of that] but then we’d expand on what they were, get a little crazier or do lighting effects. That was the introduction, but the first narrative I did with David was an omnibus for HBO called Hotel Room. There were three half-hours, and he directed two of them. They were sort of antithetical to what became the working relationship, because they were very fast. The two half-hours we shot in three days each. In a lot of ways, they were sort of film plays, because we had two cameras and we would oftentimes load the camera, slate, and, “Action.” Then we’d only cut when the film ran out. So we had a series of dolly moves to accommodate the actors and the dialogue. That was very different to how David normally worked, which of course I didn’t know at the time.

“Those personalities are the most gratifying to work for, the ones who race forward, make a decision and let it be.”

DH: In your Mubi tribute to David, there’s an amazing quote you say about sound lifting images to a greater status than they would have earned on their own. I’ve always felt the same way with the cinematography that I’ve put sound to. If the cinematography is of a certain ilk, it raises the sonic experience. I think I mentioned to you, back in the day, we would mix on dupe prints, or like, video copies. Then there would be a point after you did your printmaster where they would marry it to the 35mm and have a full playback. I remember the first time I experienced the power of resolution or cinematography to lift sound was when I was an apprentice editor on The Last Samurai. We were mixing the whole time on like, a VHS-quality dub, probably a standard definition picture, and then they married it to the 35 for a playback, and I remember being able to see way more than I’d ever seen in a frame. I remember being like, “Dang.” Tell me about your experience with that. When was the first time that really snapped for you, when you heard a final mix to what you’d shot?
PD: In terms of working with David, it was definitely seeing Lost Highway for the first time. We were timing it and I went in to look at it at the CFI film lab [Consolidated Film Industries] and remember just being struck by… Like you say, it doesn’t look any different, I’d been working with these images for weeks. But with the sound, it’s the old one plus one equals three. That’s when it really hit me. In fact, I saw the film last week at a screening here in New York at Lincoln Center, and I’m still amazed by the sound. There are some low frequency moments in that film that shake the whole room for a couple of seconds. There are punctuations on scenes or transitions that are great to experience.

DH: Yeah, I think that track is fantastic. He’d worked with this guy, John Ross, on that one. It was right before he built his own studio, where he’d then mix everything. There’s something about that track, and all of David’s stories about like, going down to New Orleans to Trent Reznor’s and busting into his room saying, “Gimme some cool sounds!” I think Trent describes it in a Rolling Stone interview where he’s like, “I need some time to work on this stuff.” But essentially what they did was, Trent had a wall of keyboards that were all linked together, and I guess he allowed David to go through, picking ambiences and sounds. All the tonalities, every single room tone in that film is a musical presence; it’s not just dead air fill. When you start to do that sort of thing, when you squirt a certain frequency with a certain image, I guess they’re both frequencies, and when you have those two frequencies doing something, you’re right, it leaps it to a greater value than either of them on their own. It’s pretty wild.
PD: I have a question for you, because I’ve never been privy to the creative sound part of David’s work. I’m wondering if he has scenes in his head and starts to make sounds with you? Or does he have the image up and you try to do stuff in relation to the scene?

DH: It’s both. I remember on Twin Peaks: The Return, before you guys had started shooting, he starts talking to me, just spitting off a laundry list of things. And of course you have no idea what they mean. Sometimes you can sort of triangulate to the script, “Oh, that’ll probably be used for that.” I remember on The Return he was like, [goes into an impression of David] “We need like, scary, scary prison voices. Distant, scary prison voices.” [both laugh] The way he tells a small detail, you’d think it would be the big set piece in the series. I think he rattles off all the things he’s going to need, and then when we get to that scene or certain spots you start to really work it. Sometimes the original stuff doesn’t marry up and you have to massage or find something different. Especially with him in his office cutting scenes, I’d constantly get an intercom buzz like, [in David’s voice] “I need a gunshot, like a big gunshot, Dean, not a fucking wimpy one!” Stuff like that. [both laugh]
PD: I remember we were on Lost Highway and he had chosen the This Mortal Coil song [Song to the Siren] in prep for the love scene in the desert, but he was searching for something for the interior of Andy’s house, those hallways with Balthazar [Getty], and the interior of the hotel with Bill Pullman. And same thing, he’s like, [in David’s voice] “Do you know any angry music?” I go, “What do you mean angry, David?” And he goes, [in David’s voice] “I need something really fucking angry.” So I thought and I thought, and a couple of days later after I sent him some Big Black, the Steve Albini project, which I love, and a couple of those songs are pretty angry. I talked to him a few days later and he was like, [in David’s voice] “Yeah that’s pretty angry, but it’s not as angry as I need.” [both laugh] I’m not too sure who turned him onto Rammstein, but when I heard it I was like, “Oh my god.”

DH: I’ll tell you who turned him onto that, it was Jennifer Syme, his old assistant.
PD: OK, OK.

DH: She made a mixtape for him with basically the whole Lost Highway soundtrack, Rammstein, Nine Inch Nails. He thought it was fantastic. That’s a good example of, you know, when he asks for something angry – and I’ve seen so many different department heads do this – he’ll ask for something, and they’ll come in with like, a level three. He’ll look at it and get so worked up, “No, no, no, no!” He’s shooting for something so extreme, it takes some cow prodding to get someone to be like, “Oh, you mean angry.” [laughs] It’s crazy. I think that in a nutshell is the secret as to how he would bring the best out of people. Especially in the journeyman world where people are showing up to set every day and are in a routine of do – ing the same thing, “You want some squibs, we’ll give you some squibs.” But [David’s] like, “No, I want gallons of blood coming out of this guy.” He elevates. You start to dial into his lane, which is a very unique lane. What are some of those memories you have where you had to turn it way up because you realised that it wasn’t enough?
PD: We were shooting the Fireman’s house in The Return, which was shot in an old theatre in downtown LA and was part of the black and white section. There were some great architectural things in the lobby that we shot with big Carel [Struycken], and Señorita Dido, and I think they had replaced the carpet, which had a pattern that sort of moved. But then once we got into the big space there was a lot of interpretation. We had roughed in some stuff and I remember him saying, [in David’s voice] “No! It’s too normal.” [Dean laughs] So we had to be like, “OK David, go have a cup of coffee and we’ll goof around a bit.” He came back and… It’s so satisfying, I’m sure you experienced this, when you’re on the right road with him he doesn’t say anything, he just goes [nods his head side to side]. He might comment on a couple of little things, and then as he’d say, “We’re off to the races!”

“There’s something about [Lost Highway], and all of David’s stories about like, going down to New Orleans to Trent Reznor’s and busting into his room saying, “Gimme some cool sounds!”

DH: I remember you speaking about an experience on Lost Highway with Gary Busey where you were pulling the lens off the camera. David wanted like, a defocusing effect, and you got to the point where you were like, “This is everything we’ve got short of pulling the lens off.” And he was like, “Well, try that.”
PD: There are a couple of threads there. When we were shooting Balthazar in his bedroom, there’s a sequence – I think it’s Nine Inch Nails, actually – where he’s having some pain in his head and there’s bugs and we’re shooting the light fixtures. We’d set up this push-in on Balthazar on the bed and we’d rehearsed it so the camera was moving in and down. When we got to the last frame I locked the camera up and they took the dolly back to first position, which was a pull back and a boom up. We both looked at the monitor and there was Balthazar in the bottom left of the frame, and the rest of the frame was just the wall. David was like, “Look, look!” So we didn’t do the push in, we shot it like that with Balthazar in the bottom part of the frame, in the environment. That was the same scene where we were changing lenses and using these older anamorphics from Panavision and they were a little sticky going in and out of the camera port. Scott Ressler, the first assistant, was struggling to make the lens seat correctly and we were watching the monitor when David goes, “What is that?!” And I said, “Well, he’s just trying to put the lens in.” And David says, “That’s fantastic, we have to do that!” So that became a tool, and by the time we came to the scene with Gary, everyone on set was used to it — we called it ‘whacking’ because it’d make this sound when it went in like, whack. But nobody had told Gary, and it was this low angle up on him with Natasha [Gregson Wagner], he’s doing his thing and as soon as we yell “Cut” he looks down at me, because I’m operating the camera, and he’s like, “What the fuck are you doing?!” [both laugh] I thought he was going to hit me. David had to come over to calm him down and explain what we were doing. I remember, and I was going to bring this up from a sound standpoint as well, there’s a transition in the film when Bill’s [Pullman] in prison and he has this freakout and the visuals go into this like, humanoid head thing that opens up and the sound sort of collapses. Then there’s one of my favourite shots, it fades up on, you don’t know what, because it’s so out of focus — and I think that’s the shot you’re on about. We pulled the lens out and just held it there at a certain distance — we had to put some cloth around it so no light would leak in — to get the out of focus that he wanted. The sound on that shot always struck me because it sounded like if you took a credit card and scraped it down a five-day beard, like this [makes scraping noise]. I asked David what it was but he would never tell me. So I want you to listen to what the hell was going on there. [laughs]

“I’d constantly get an intercom buzz like, [in David’s voice] “I need a gunshot, like a big gunshot, Dean, not a fucking wimpy one!””

DH: Well that brings up a good point, I think my equivalent of the lens whacking… Especially when there was a crazy scene, for instance the scene you mentioned with the camera going into the head, or I feel like there’s a bunch in The Return, like when the creature in the box attacks the couple in the observation room. Those sorts of things, you’d start to do something and David would say, [in David’s voice] “Why don’t you take a piece of this and just throw it in there and then throw a piece from there into there.” And you’re like, “Just throw it in there?” And he’s like, [in David’s voice] “Just throw it in there! See what happens!” And it was so hamfisted, but then you’d start to get into it because you start to hear a craziness that no intention would of given it, you know? It gives you permission to go crazy in a way where you’d look like you were having a seizure on any other job. He’d be like, “It’s fantastic!” There’s a sloppiness that you’d have to do in order to jump up to the level that he wants.
PD: Yeah. I remember on Mulholland Drive we did a bunch of shooting downtown at night, and in other places too he’d do this. We had a little wind-up Eyemo camera.

DH: What is that?
PD: It’s a war camera, essentially. It’s a very heavy-duty camera that’s quite small, it only holds 100 feet of film, and the lenses are very basic. At the end of the day David would be like, “I need the Eyemo for the ride home.” He’d get a ride home, open the window and stick this thing out. He’d have to wind it up and then he’d just film stuff. There are a few of those shots in the film, one is when Naomi [Watts] and Laura [Harring] are in the cab riding somewhere and it’s this very odd wide angle of them, then you have these POVs and those are the Eyemo shots that David took on his way home from set.

DH: In a weird way that’s the same exact practice but different technology.
PD: That’s what I’m talking about. I remember when I met him after doing On The Air and we’d spend time doing commercials. Lynch/Frost [David’s production company with Mark Frost] had an office on Santa Monica Boulevard and in the back there was this ‘stage space’ which wasn’t really a stage, you could maybe shoot inserts back there or something. But there were these four or five refrigerators, and shortly before that David had bought his Mitchell camera, an old MOS camera that was a warhorse. I went in like, “Why does he need all these refrigerators?” I opened them up one by one and they were all full of film short ends. David is obviously a man with some financial power, at the time for sure, so I asked him, “Why are you saving all these short ends?” He goes, [in David’s voice] “Pete, you know, if things go to shit, I can always make a movie. I’ve got a camera and I’ve got film.” [both laugh]

DH: He had short ends in the studio fridge for years. There was a little bit of a hoarder mentality, he wanted to have his stuff.
PD: It was his safety blanket for his fears that he wouldn’t have the tools to create anymore. So he always made sure that he owned those. When digital came around it was almost like, “OK, I’m good, nobody can shut me down anymore.”

DH: 100 percent. Back to the thing about getting sloppy and doing things almost wrong in a way. You always use the term ‘brackish light’ to talk about that naturalistic, non-movie light. When did you come up with that term and what does it do for you?
PD: For me, it’s most interesting when you mix naturalistic light with something like movie lighting. Say you have a day scene and a little window light, but then you inject some light that clearly has a nighttime feel. Like there’s a scene in Mulholland Drive, it’s subtle and something we thought of on the day, Naomi and Laura are on the couch in Aunt Ruth’s and they’re trying to find out what happened to her. Laura is sort of in this dream state trying to remember and Naomi is helping her. It was a day scene, softly lit, but then we put this light on Laura that was like an overhead light in a room at night, mix that with the daytime feel and, honestly probably nobody notices it but me, but to me it gave her a slightly different reality than what was existing in the scene. It’s sort of against the rules, but whatever works for the drama, whatever works to propel the story forward.

DH: I like that stuff a lot. All those subtle choices add up to a greater impact.
PD: I have a question for you. David loved whatever tone he thought a room should have, a sound when there’s nothing happening. This is very unique to him, and I think the most organic one was in The Elephant Man where there’s no electricity so all the lights are these little flames. You had this low flame sound he injected onto the movie, which I thought was incredible. But most of the time it wasn’t organic, it’s something he applies to the track. I wondered if you had any insights into the origins of those? Does he record stuff and then manipulate it? Or sometimes when you record a room tone and then you jack it way up it has a sound to it. Having been involved in creating those tracks and mixing, what were those tools that he loved?

DH: That’s a great question. Probably similar to you, when you start working with him, there’s already a lexicon, a palette that he’s developed. Part of the fun of my job was looking back [through his work] and figuring out what got him fired up. Especially in Eraserhead, I was noticing there would be a lot of organ chords used for room tones. It would be a room tone, but it would literally have a musical tonality. I think he was looking for how he could infuse every single scene with some sort of… In a weird way, room tone is like an extreme grade, it colours a scene with a mood. I think David was looking to inject mood into everything, from the most subtle manner to the most extreme. Even on The Return, I was thinking back to that. So the room tone for the Fireman’s house, I don’t know, it might be like a D minor organ chord, but it was a throwback to the Eraserhead days.
PD: How do you affect or filter that so it doesn’t sound like a keyboard?

“He’s shooting for something so extreme… I think that in a nutshell is the secret as to how he would bring the best out of people.”

DH: EQ, reverb, things like that. Actually the biggest sound in The Return was stumbled upon when watching a daily. It was the day you were shooting in the motel towards the end of the story, when Cooper wakes up in the motel room and finds the Richard and Linda letter. For whatever reason, production couldn’t eradicate all the extraneous noises and there was a tone in that scene… Rarely do you hear dailies with tone or any sort of sound happening except for dialogue, it all sounds very boring and barren. But that scene had like a little whining, I think it was an air duct or something in the motel. I heard that and was like, “Man, that sounds incredible.” So I took that tone and was like, “What are the frequencies harmonising?” I took a notch filter on an EQ and exaggerated those frequencies even more. I had tons of different levels of this and used it everywhere. Then when the whole vortex thing happened, I took the same room tone with exaggerated frequencies, distorted it, and played it on a big speaker down the concrete hallway as you walk down to David’s office. That’s the sound of the vortex. It was an organic process. Anything to squeak in a subtle musicality to a scene, it’s almost like scoring on a microscopic level, because you’re like, this is a normal-looking scene, but how can we indicate that something isn’t quite right subconsciously. When you have certain frequencies rubbing, it’ll do that. Like the air isn’t quite right — I think that’s a big thing in life, when you can feel something in the room. David was often asking for stuff, there were a couple of times when he’d literally ask me, “I need a room tone from Lost Highway in here.” And I’d have to find which one he’s talking about. Those Lost Highway ones were all synthesizer tones, where you’d go to a really low octave and hold down a couple of keys that are a close voicing, and you’d get this bizarre rubbing.
PD: You’re trying to recreate a room tone with a keyboard?

DH: No, he was just making tones on a keyboard and using them as room tones. Again, in Eraserhead, there are more motivated room tones with that movie because it’s such an industrial world that David’s creating. A lot of the time what you’re trying to do with sound is evoke the world off-frame to make it sound more expansive than it is, so you have all the pounding and low frequency rumbling because that’s where Henry lives. But in other films, like The Straight Story, you’re looking for a particular cicada or cricket sound. It does the same thing, but you’re trying to do it through different means.
PD: David had a famous quote about night crickets. They were talking about crickets and he was differentiating ones you hear during the day and ones you hear at night. Besides an entomologist, he’s probably the only person who could tell the difference. [both laugh]

“David was looking to inject mood into everything, from the most subtle manner to the most extreme.”

DH: There’s nothing that can evoke that childhood memory of a certain comforting feeling like crickets. There are so many different kinds, but when you get the right one, it’s [the equivalent of getting] the right grade for a scene, it’s like, “Oh this feels really good.” One last question. Out of all the scenes in David’s filmography, the one that I’ve used the most for classes is that Winky’s scene from Mulholland Drive. I think it’s the perfect example of camera and sound so subtly working together to make something that’s kind of normal, very abnormal. Tell me about your floating camera thing, how did that come about?
PD: David came to me a week or a few days before we shot that scene. He said, “I want the camera to be nervous,” but not in a distracting way, he wanted to create some tension with it. So we talked through a few ideas about shooting handheld, but he was like, “No, no, that’s too much.” I thought, well, we could get a little jib arm and we could sort of float around. But we aren’t going to be able to repeat moves, it’ll be a bit haphazard, so in terms of the edit it’ll jump around a little bit. And David was like, “That sounds really good.”

DH: What exactly is a jib arm?
PD: It’s basically the smallest crane arm you can imagine, about six feet long and it goes on top of the dolly. Once you balance it out, the operator just moves the camera. I was just floating around, goofing around, obviously keeping the actors in and going slow enough so that if you’re cutting back and forth it won’t be jarring. Again, it’s one of those things where I don’t know how it’s going to come out until I see the product. They cut it together, affected it with the sound, and the performances of those two guys was so great. So many people comment on it, but it was such a spit and rubber-band method to shooting.

DH: It’s such an unusual way to film a scene like that. And the thing that’s happening sonically, it’s really fascinating because it’s such a subtle handpass. It starts out very naturalistic and really gradually over the course of time they start pulling back some of the diner noises. They start taking the car bys and verbing them out a little bit, so the whole scene starts to triangulate down to almost a nothing, and it’s primarily just the dialogue. It really pulls you in. But at the same time there’s almost this pocket watch going back and forth with your camera movement. It’s the oddest synchronicity. On the page, that scene is kind of a basic scene, and for anyone else directing that scene you could imagine it being awful on sticks. But the way the image and sound is treated makes it this, “Wow, some force is coming out here, reaching into me, and making me feel unsettled.”
PD: A lot of it is also the way the dialogue is delivered.

DH: And the pacing with the editing, because I’m sure it was probably a little bit faster when shooting, but the way things are drawn out.
PD: Yeah, I mean the dialogue was still kind of halting, he’s remembering these things and they’re not coming that fast. Particularly when he says, “Oh, and I saw you over there!” And we tip up and the guy is there. That lends a real creepiness to that scene, and it’s such a simple thing to do. That’s the sort of thing David just thinks up and doesn’t look back. We’re going to do this, there’s no second guessing of any kind, and it’s going to work. I love that.

DH: Yeah, totally. Have you experienced that at all outside of David’s work?
PD: Somewhat. I did a movie called From Hell with the Hughes brothers and we shot a whole section of cross-process reversal film. It was sort of like, there’s no turning back, and they wanted that commitment. But for David, it was almost daily.

DH: I know, I really crave other people who have that. It’s a bold fearlessness. There’s that anecdote when Werner Herzog was in The Mandalorian and he saw them shooting scenes two ways, once with a green ball and once with a Yoda puppet, and he was like, “What are you doing?” And they go, “We’re shooting both ways because we don’t know which one we’re going to use.” And he goes, [does an impression of Werner Herzog] “You’re cowards, you’re all cowards. Make up your mind.” [both laugh] Those personalities are the most gratifying to work for, the ones who race forward, make a decision and let it be.