‘Blue Velvet’ DP Frederick Elmes Remembers David Lynch: He Allowed Me to Trust Ideas ‘That Seem Out of the Ordinary’

Two days after David Lynch’s passing, it’s still hard to believe 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 January 16, only shot three features with cinematographer Frederick 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 entirely sui generis vision of the American underbelly in all those films. The worms writhing beneath white picket fences, the neo-noir potential of a severed ear that gives way to a saga 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 — got on the phone with IndieWire late on Thursday night after Lynch had passed. “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. Midday, I hadn’t heard anything,” he said.

The cinematographer said they’ve always kept in touch despite not making a film together since “Wild at Heart” won the Palme d’Or in 1990, though they shot 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 that he was in bad health, and I knew his emphysema last time I was out there [in Los Angeles],” said Elmes, who lives in New York. “He was really clearly keeping his distance from everyone and not leaving the area of his house. So I know that was a real concern of his. But he was so eager to work. He couldn’t help himself from talking to filmmakers. He really wanted to get into animation and to, sort of, AI-generated animation. He was really speaking to people to try to get projects going, even in his illness.” (For one, Lynch had recently been trying to get the animated project “Snootworld” off the ground even after Netflix rejected his pitch.)

Frederick Elmes accepts the Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal onstage during the American Film Institute’s 45th Life Achievement Award Gala Tribute to Diane Keaton at Dolby Theatre on June 8, 2017.Getty Images

Dating back to the ’70s, Elmes and Lynch were both students of the American Film Institute in its early years at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. “He was a fellow a year ahead of me. Someone else had actually started to shoot ‘Eraserhead’ and shot the very beginning of it but couldn’t stay because it was turning out to be a long, long-term project,” Elmes said. “David and I hit it off, and it was a long project. It took us four years to shoot it. I was fine working at his pace. I wanted to see it through. We were the ghosts [of the American Film Institute], we’d been there so long. We were always haunting the dark corners because we needed locations to shoot ‘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 every nook and cranny, and we knew the stories, and we knew the ghosts of the place.”

What does the term Lynchian — the impending doom hidden beneath all that’s banal — mean to Elmes? It’s one so overused as to become eroded of meaning, and hard to put into words.

“It’s so odd, the concept of something Lynchian and to have been a small part of that from the beginning is an odd concept,” Elmes said. “When we did ‘Blue Velvet,’ I was thrilled we had done ‘Eraserhead.’ We had worked apart from each other for years because he did a film with Mel Brooks [‘The Elephant Man’]. We obviously got back together with ‘Blue Velvet’ and had been talking about that story. He was pretty clear about 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.”

In terms of the movie’s influence on his own career, Elmes said, “Fast forward past that, ‘Blue Velvet’ has come out [in 1986], and I was, as a cinematographer, trying my darnedest to get into the world of shooting commercials. You couldn’t shoot a television commercial unless you’d done one before. It was a real catch-22. My agent came to me with this project and said, ‘Somebody’s approached me, they want to set a commercial in this small town of Blue Velvet, the underside of the town, they want this sense of darkness,’ and she said to them, ‘I’ve got just the guy, I’ve got Fred Elmes. He filmed the movie, he’s going to be great for your commercial.’ She said, ‘He doesn’t have a reel. He just has the film.’ And they said, ‘Well, we can’t possibly hire him without a reel. So I didn’t get the job.'”

Isabella Rossellini in ‘Wild at Heart’©Samuel Goldwyn Films/Courtesy Everett Collection

“Blue Velvet” famously caused a stir in theaters — and even from critic Roger Ebert — for its frank approach to nudity and sexually charged violence, particularly with Isabella Rossellini as abused lounge singer Dorothy Vallens, under nitrous-huffing Dennis Hopper’s violent spell. Lynch began dating the actress around the time of making the film, and they were together through the release of “Wild at Heart,” in which she also starred and under even more makeup and flamboyant hairstyling, before breaking up. “They were pretty discreet on set [of ‘Blue Velvet’]. There wasn’t much sign of that connection. They kept it pretty undercover. I knew something was going on, but it seemed like a secret affair until after the fact,” Elmes said.

Elmes said that to this day on other projects in film and TV, “I feel people refer to him.” (Along with many Jarmusch films, he also shot Charlie Kaufman’s hallucinatory, Lynch-indebted “Synecdoche, New York.”) And the term “Lynchian” remains an elusive but coveted direction to go toward for any working filmmaker. He said it’s used almost “as if it’s out of a dictionary, [and] everybody should know what this means. It’s so disconcerting to think about my relationship with David in a way that actually generated some part of that.”

How best to sum up a filmmaker Elmes maintained a longtime 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 farfetched. He’s allowed me to trust that, yeah, maybe this is actually the way to solve this problem. This is the way to approach this scene visually. Why not take a chance with it? Why not go out on that limb and make it a little darker than you would’ve before? And I love that,” Elmes said.

He remembered especially a moment they shared at the film’s 1986 Directors Guild of America theater premiere, where Lynch’s feedback from months prior during the “Blue Velvet” production finally snapped into focus.

“There’s a moment in ‘Blue Velvet’ when Jeffrey sort of sneaks into Dorothy’s apartment and then gets caught. And in the laboratory, David kept saying, ‘It’s too bright, it’s too light. You just got to make it darker.’ So we made it darker in the laboratory, and then we’re sitting in the Director’s Guild at the premiere of the film a couple months later, and I said to David, ‘I can’t see anything. I can’t see anything in that scene.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’ He just loves those moments.”

Elmes shared a tribute to Lynch on Instagram, which you can read below.