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The following features interesting trivia and stories about the productions and actors of older and current films. Titles are chosen arbitrarily but requests are taken at chapworld@charter.net. This page will be updated every other Tuesday. |
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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) |
Rated R for strong violence, sex, and drug content, and for language |
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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is a 1992 American psychological horror film directed by David Lynch and written by Lynch and Robert Engels. The film can be viewed as both prologue and epilogue to the television series Twin Peaks (1990-91), created by Lynch and Mark Frost...
The film revolves around the investigation into the murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley) and the last seven days in the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), a popular high school student in the fictional Washington town of Twin Peaks, of which these two connected murders were the central mysteries of the television series. Additionally, the film's convoluted narrative references and clarifies Agent Dale Cooper's (Kyle MacLachlan) fate in the series finale. Thus, the film is often considered a prequel, however, it also has features more typical of a sequel...  Most of the television cast returned for the film, with the notable exceptions of Lara Flynn Boyle who declined to return as Laura's best friend Donna Hayward (she was replaced by Moira Kelly), and Sherilyn Fenn due to scheduling conflicts. Also, Kyle MacLachlan, who starred as Special Agent Dale Cooper in the TV series, was reluctant to return out of fear of getting typecast, so his presence in the film is smaller than originally planned... Fire Walk with Me was greeted at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival with booing and jeers from the audience and met with negative reviews in the United States. The film fared poorly in the United States at the box office, partially because it was released almost a year after the television series was canceled (due to a sharp ratings decline in the second season), partially due to its incomprehensibility to the uninitiated and the fact that the film only appeals to a subset of the viewers of the Twin Peaks series. However, it was a commercial hit in Japan...
Twin Peaks was canceled only a month when David Lynch announced he would be making a movie with French company CIBY-2000 financing what would be the first film of a three-picture deal. However, on July 11, 1991, Ken Scherer, CEO of Lynch/Frost productions, announced that the film was not going to be made because series star Kyle MacLachlan did not want to reprise his role of Special Agent Dale Cooper. A month later, MacLachlan had changed his mind and the film was back on...
The film was made without Twin Peaks series regulars Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, and Richard Beymer. At the time, these absences were attributed to scheduling conflicts, but in a 1995 interview, Fenn revealed that the real reason was that she "was extremely disappointed in the way the second season got off track. As far as Fire Walk with Me, it was something that I chose not to be a part of." Fenn's character was cut from the script, Boyle was recast with Moira Kelly, and Beymer's scenes were not filmed. In a September 2007 interview, Beymer claimed that he did not appear in any scenes shot for the movie, although his character, Benjamin Horne, appeared in the script... Kyle MacLachlan's reluctance was also caused by a decline of quality in the second season of the show. He said "David and Mark [Frost] were only around for the first season… I think we all felt a little abandoned. So I was fairly resentful when the film, Fire Walk with Me, came around." Although he agreed to be in the film, MacLachlan wanted a smaller role, forcing Lynch and co-writer Robert Engels to rewrite the screenplay so that the Teresa Banks murder was investigated by Agent Chester Desmond and not by Cooper as originally planned. MacLachlan ended up working only five days on the movie... Another missing figure from Twin Peaks was co-creator Mark Frost. The relationship between Lynch and Frost (pictured) had become strained during the second season and after the series ended. Frost went on to direct his own movie, Storyville (1992), and was unable to collaborate with Lynch on Fire Walk with Me...
David Bowie had this to say about his part of the movie: "They crammed me. I did all my scenes in four or five days, because I was in rehearsals for the (1991 Tin Machine) tour. I was there for only a few days."...
Principal photography began on September 5, 1991 in Snoqualmie, Washington and lasted until October of the same year, with four weeks dedicated to locations in Washington, and another four weeks of interiors and additional locations in Los Angeles, California. When shooting went over schedule in Seattle, Washington, Laura's death in the train car had to be shot in Los Angeles on a soundstage during the last day of shooting, October 31...
Lynch wanted to make a Twin Peaks film because, as he claimed in an interview, "I couldn't get myself to leave the world of Twin Peaks. I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside. I wanted to see her live, move and talk. I was in love with that world and I hadn't finished with it. But making the movie wasn't just to hold onto it; it seemed that there was more stuff that could be done," and that he was "not yet finished with the material"...
Actress Sheryl Lee, who played Laura Palmer, also echoed these sentiments. "I never got to be Laura alive, just in flashbacks; it allowed me to come full circle with the character." According to Lynch, the movie is about "the loneliness, shame, guilt, confusion and devastation of the victim of incest. It also dealt with the torment of the father, the war within him." ...
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me received a reaction quite the contrary to the television series. The film was entered into the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, where it was greeted with booing from the audience and met with almost unanimous negative reviews. According to Roger Ebert from The Chicago Sun-Times, the film was met with two extremes, one side being overall positive, while the other side being the exact opposite. Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who was also in attendance, confessed in a 1992 interview, "after I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at Cannes, David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different. And you know, I loved him. I loved him."... U.S. distributor New Line Cinema released the film in America on August 28, 1992. The film flopped in the United States, partially because it was released almost a year after the television series was cancelled due to a sharp ratings decline in the second season and partially due to its incomprehensibility to the uninitiated. It grossed a total of $1.8 million in 691 theaters in its opening weekend and went on to gross a total of $4.1 million in North America...
According to the Internet Movie Database, despite its poor critical and commercial response, Fire Walk with Me gained attention at awards time. The film was nominated for five Saturn Awards and two Independent Spirit Awards, including Sheryl Lee being nominated for Best Actress. The only awards won by the film were for Angelo Badalamenti's musical score, which won a Spirit Award, a Saturn Award, and a Brit Award...
The film holds a 62% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with 31 of 50 critics giving the film a positive review. The site wrote of the critics' consensus: "For better or worse, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is every bit as strange and twisted as you'd expect from David Lynch"...
Lynch originally shot over five hours of footage that was subsequently cut down to two hours and fourteen minutes. The footage nearly appeared on New Line's Special Edition DVD in 2002, but was nixed over budgetary and running-time concerns... In 2002, a French distribution company called MK2 began negotiations with Lynch to include the missing scenes, properly edited and scored, in an upcoming Special Edition DVD. This has yet to appear. Most of the deleted scenes feature additional characters from the television series who ultimately did not appear in the finished film. Lynch has said that "I had a limit on the running time of the picture. We shot many scenes that, for a regular feature, were too tangential to keep the main story progressing properly. We thought it might be good sometime to do a longer version with these other things in, because a lot of the characters that are missing in the finished movie had been filmed. They're part of the picture, they're just not necessary for the main story." According to Lynch, had the movie included these scenes, it "wouldn't have been quite so dark. To me it obeyed the laws of Twin Peaks. But a little bit of the goofiness had to be removed." ... Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost posted on his Twitter that there is a possibility that the deleted scenes will be released as part of a Blu-ray version of the Twin Peaks Definitive Gold Box Edition... After Fire Walk with Me was released, Lynch reportedly planned two more films that would have continued and then concluded the series' narrative. But in a 2001 interview, he said that the Twin Peaks franchise is "dead as a doornail."... The soundtrack placed at #1 on an NME list of the 50 best film soundtracks ever in 2011. The climactic scene of the film and the closing credits are accompanied by excerpts from the Agnus Dei of the Requiem in C Minor by Luigi Cherubini. This music is not included on the CD...
In most versions of the film certain sequences are subtitled, at the nightclub where the music drowns out the dialogue and when characters speak backwards, but not in the British version. Apparently, director David Lynch changed his mind so often as to whether they should be included or not, by the time he came to a final decision, the British distributors had already made all their prints (without subtitles) and couldn't afford to make any more...
The zigzag pattern on the floor of the Black Lodge is similar to the pattern on the floor of the lobby of Henry's house in Eraserhead, also directed by David Lynch. The Black Lodge version of the pattern is much larger...
Originally announced for production shortly after the cancellation of the television series, the film was shelved when several key members of the cast, notably Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn and Kyle MacLachlan, declined to participate. MacLachlan, in particular, adamantly refused to appear for fear of typecasting. Director David Lynch managed to persuade the actor to return albeit in an abbreviated role, and created the character of Agent Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) to compensate for Cooper's absence in the story. This created several continuity errors (the degree of which is still debated among fans) between the film, the series and several canonical tie-in novels...
For one scene, David Lynch asked Sheryl Lee to inhale the smoke from five cigarettes at once. Lee agreed, and fainted on the spot... The song "Sycamore Trees" featured in the series finale, but appearing on the movie soundtrack, is claimed by Norwegian pop group A-ha to be an unauthorized cover of their song "Sycamore Leaves" written in 1989. A-ha band member Pål Waaktaar sued David Lynch (Lynch wrote the lyrics for Sycamore Trees) for plagiarizing, but eventually lost the case...
Much of the cast credited as starring in the film actually only make brief appearances on screen. Peggy Lipton and Heather Graham both appear for less than 30 seconds in the 134 minute film... The convenience store sequence refers back to one of the first episodes of the television series, when Philip Gerard, under the influence of Mike, tells Cooper that the Black Lodge spirits lived above a convenience store when in the human world. According to Michael J. Anderson (Man From Another Place) the scene originally ran for twenty minutes; only about one minute actually appears in the film...
The movie originally ended showing Dale sitting in the Black Lodge, comforting Laura after she entered. It then cut to the last scene of the TV series, with Harry breaking down the door of the bathroom and finding Dale smashing his head into the mirror and laughing. Dale tries to act like nothing happened, but is dragged off to bed. This was to confirm that it was Dale's doppelganger that escaped the Black Lodge...
Another deleted scene which took place after Laura's death extended the dialogue between Cooper and The Man From Another Place. Just after the dwarf says "I am the arm," Cooper notices that the ring disappeared. He then informs Cooper that someone else has taken the ring, and implies that Cooper is trapped in the Lodge forever...
Cast: Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer
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