Mark Frost founds TWIN PEAKS

“These girls are jam packed with secrets,” said David Lynch about the women of TWIN PEAKS. Why did characters such as Audrey Horne and Shelly Johnson get viewers so hot and bothered? TWIN PEAKS co-creator Mark Frost explains. 

LADIES OF LYNCH explores the subversive female characters created by the late David Lynch, and the singular women who helped shape them. Season 9’s guests include celebrated actor and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini; Lynch’s daughter Jennifer Lynch; his producer of more than 30 years, Sabrina Sutherland; TWIN PEAKS co-creator Mark Frost; and the award-winning novelist Deborah Levy.

Written and guest hosted by culture writer Simran Hans, these conversations with actors, writers, producers and craftspeople who worked directly with Lynch reveal insights about the enigmatic and much-missed filmmaker, and the provocative women he put on screen.

TWIN PEAKS and TWIN PEAKS: A LIMITED EVENT SERIES are now streaming on MUBI in the US, UK, Ireland, Latin America, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Netherlands and India. 

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes adult themes of sexuality and violence, a few spoilers and some memories of the great David Lynch. But it doesn't include me, your regular host Rico Gagliano. For this season of the show I am handing over the hosting reins to UK film critic and culture writer Simran Hans. You can find her writing on the regular in <i>The Guardian</i>, <i>New York Times</i> and <i>Sight and Sound</i> magazine. You are in very good hands with her. Enjoy. Something happened to the writer Mark Frost when he was 13 years old. Something that's haunted him for years. It was 1966, and he was living with his family in Southern California, where his dad worked selling real estate. That year, they became close with his boss's family. The head of the realty firm had two kids, a daughter who was a year older than I was and a son who was a year younger, and we were great friends with both of them. Mark had a bit of a crush on the daughter, so when he found out she was moving away to boarding school he felt his heart sink. Susan was her name, was going to go that fall to a boarding school in Vancouver, Canada. And she left at the end of that summer for her first year of high school. And it was some 6 or 7 months later that the the family got a call that she had been abducted and murdered at the school by an escaped lunatic. The news was devastating. Susan's parents made the journey to Canada to retrieve their daughter's body, while her brother stayed at home with Mark and his family. He hadn't been told what had happened to his sister. We knew about this and he didn't, and there was something about the experience of that weekend of holding that information, but not being able to share it with this close friend of mine that was kind of devastating and it stayed with me my whole life. Years later, Mark Frost was developing a TV series with the filmmaker David Lynch. You might have heard of it. It was called <i>Twin Peaks</i>. The show begins with an image of a teenage girl washed up on the beach. Her eyes are closed like she's sleeping, but her lips are lifeless and gray. The girl's name is Laura Palmer, and her murder devastates the town of Twin Peaks. So when we started talking about who's the girl on the beach, this was the story that came up for me. And I think it was why I felt it personally, it had so much emotional impact, at least as far as I was concerned. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, and on this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. I'm your guest host, Simran Hans, and this is season nine. We're calling it Ladies of Lynch, a mini series about the subversive female characters created by David Lynch and the singular women who helped shape them. In today's episode, I'm joined by Mark Frost. I'm the co-creator, co-executive producer, principal writer, and showrunner of <i>Twin Peaks</i>. If you've watched <i>Twin Peaks</i> and if you haven't, it's currently streaming on MUBI, you'll know that it features an incredible cast of memorable, funny, and idiosyncratic female characters. Coming up, you'll hear me talk to Mark about how he and Lynch developed most of them. From Audrey Horne... The powerful, swaggering businessman should have a teenage daughter who completely befuddles and perplexes and bedevils him. To Josie Packard. We played with the trope of the Asian woman who was a woman of mystery, but we tried to do more with it than that. But I started things off by asking Mark how these characters compared to the rest of network TV when the show first aired on ABC in 1989. Well, I mean, they were wildly out of step with what was going on. This was remember, the show debuted not long after the kind of the heyday of the 80s nighttime soap. <i>Dynasty</i> and <i>Dallas</i> and <i>The Love Boat</i> and <i>Knots Landing</i>. And it was all these people with big hair and lots of big emotions, and it was melodrama, basically, it was nighttime soap operas. Which was the antithesis of what we wanted to do. We-- that was ostensibly what ABC had asked for. They wanted a nighttime soap, and we gave them something quite different. They could still sort of see it categorically as something that they could maybe market that way, but they were utterly baffled by it in every other department. It didn't fit any of their parameters, and we took that as a very encouraging sign, actually. In fact, Frost and Lynch were first brought together by another story that didn't fit easy parameters about a woman who didn't either. It was back in 1985, and the two were both represented by the same talent agency, CAA. A new biography of Marilyn Monroe, written by the British journalist Anthony Summers, had just come out and CAA had scored the rights. The agency paired them up to make a film based on the book, with Jessica Lange set to star as Marilyn. First, though, they figured it'd be a good idea to meet. And it was instantly clear that we got along as David used to say, like Ike and Mike and we made each other laugh. We had the same taste in movies. We had the same kind of favorite classic movies that we liked to draw from. And we were both drawn to the story of of Marilyn. She represented such a powerful archetype and the kind of the American and Hollywood mythology of its day. There was quite a lot more to her than what people knew about just from watching her on film or perceiving her as a celebrity. I turned the script in we were all feeling very positive about it, to United Artists on a Friday,

and on Monday morning at about 9: 6:25

00, I got a call from the producer saying the studio had already put it in turnaround. Turns out Bobby Kennedy's widow sat on the board of United Artists, and she didn't like the part in the book or the script about her late husband's alleged affair with Marilyn. Needless to say... They said, absolutely not. We can't make this movie here. I'm sorry. You would have thought they might have read the book first before they bought the rights, but that's Hollywood. So we didn't end up doing that project. But we had such a fun time working together. We started collaborating on a couple of other projects as well. And when you sort of referenced that archetype that Marilyn Monroe represented, how would you describe that? Well, she was in some ways the ultimate objectified woman in terms of the male gaze in the postwar era. And although there was, as I said, a great deal more to her than we knew, she was often cast in these kind of stereotypical roles and quickly became the Hollywood blond goddess of the 1950s. Well, I thought it was an interesting moment to bring up and reflect on because, you know, there is another enigmatic, mysterious blond at the center of <i>Twin Peaks</i>, and she also has a secret diary with a lock and a key. And there's quite a bit made of that, actually, in the book. Yes. In what ways did that project and sort of those themes feed into or inform the character of Laura Palmer as you began to create her? I don't recall that we spoke about that as a conscious connection, but clearly, as you have just outlined, there were similarities. I'm sure, given that we'd been talking about that for quite some time, it found its way into our conception of Laura. Now, remember that Laura was not going to be in the show. She was simply a figure from the recent past. And it's her death that ignites the entire story. But when we found Sheryl Lee in Washington at that point, all we knew she was going to be was a headshot as the homecoming queen, and she was going to be found on the beach. But when we were filming the pilot, Sheryl was so full of life and so delightfully in the grasp of this character. It prompted us to say, well, we've got to find some way to keep her alive in the story. And in fact, I had decided to bring her back as her cousin a little bit later, which an idea that David liked a lot. And so Cheryl really became a central part of the <i>Twin Peaks</i> experience. When you and David were first creating the world of <i>Twin Peaks</i>, which female archetypes did you start with when you were building out the world? What-- where did you begin in terms of the sort of broad templates, and then how did you sort of work to subvert them or kind of make them a little bit more interesting, a little bit more off kilter in the writing process? I think it's safe to say we started with Laura because she was going to be our portal into the town, so everyone whose life touched hers suddenly came into our view. She had to have a best friend who had survived her. And that was Donna. She had to have a mother. Donna had to have a mother. As we started to, as you say, build out the town, the gathering place for small towns like this is often a diner or a, you know, a small coffee shop that brought us to Norma. We wanted it to be owned and operated by Norma, have her be a strong, independent businesswoman. That led to a relationship with a waitress that in the pilot was a very small part. But when we met Madchen Amick, we thought she was a perfect fit for sort of Norma's protege. And so she became part of the diner, and we came up with the idea of Ben, you know, the powerful, swaggering businessman should have a teenage daughter who completely befuddles and perplexes and bedevils him. And so we came up with Audrey.<i>My name's Audrey Horne.</i><i>Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Dale Cooper.</i><i>Can I sit here?</i><i>Well, Miss Horne, unless I miss my guess</i><i>your father is Benjamin Horne, the owner of this fine establishment.</i><i>So I imagine you can sit anywhere you'd like.</i> And, Sherilyn Fenn, you know, was indelible in that role as well. Let's talk a little bit about Audrey, because I think she is a very specific character. And, she's introduced in this really fun way with her, her saddle shoes and legs swinging out of the limousine. And, you know, when people think of Audrey Horne, they think of that music and they think of Audrey's theme and they think of the dance. Yeah.<i>God, I love this music.</i><i>Isn't it too dreamy?</i> How did the dance come to be in <i>Twin Peaks</i>, and why was it important to see that character sort of expressing herself in that way and having that moment to herself. Well, we initially thought of Audrey as kind of the if you take the good homecoming queen image of Laura as the kind of classic American good girl. And Audrey then became kind of the classic bad girl, the the daughter of the rich, wealthy, powerful man. Who's he he's almost powerless to control. We thought there was a lot of fun to be had with that dynamic. And once we met Sherilyn, she just simply had that quality, you know, that it was playful. It was intelligent. It was funny. Audrey was somebody who was aware of the effect she could have on people, and she wasn't shy about using it. It was almost like Veronica and Betty from the, you know, those comic books which were very much a staple of 60s culture. And if Sherilyn Fenn's Audrey Horne was one of <i>Twin Peaks</i> pin ups Josie Packard, co-owner of the local sawmill and glamorous international woman of mystery, was another. That was originally going to be Isabella Rossellini. As we were talking about writing it, who David was living with at the time, and then Isabella got way too busy with her feature career, and I suggested we look at Joan Chen, who had been in <i>The Last Emperor</i>. What was it about Joan in particular, that made you feel that she would be the right fit for this femme fatale? Well, Joan had a wonderful, powerful, quiet dignity about her. When you met her, you were immediately impressed by that enormously intelligent and hard to read. And we thought, okay, well, that's kind of perfect for Josie, because we played with the trope of the Asian woman who was a woman of mystery, but we tried to do more with it than that and make her a real life person with a real life, painful past, which... ultimately catches up with her in the second season. Now we're forgetting one other very important female archetype with the Log Lady. Should we talk about her for a moment? Ah yes. The Log Lady, whose name in the show is actually Margaret Lanterman. As the town mystic she becomes very important as the show progresses, but at first no one takes her seriously. The Log Lady was played by Catherine Coulson. I asked Mark how she came to be such an important part of the show. It's a very funny story, because Catherine and David had known each other for 20 years at this point and were very close friends because at the time she was married to Jack Nance, and they were both in a theater company that he drew a lot of actors from to populate Eraserhead. And Catherine became part of his crew and then later in her own right, had a very successful career as a first camera assistant in the Cinematographers Guild. She was the first woman to ever be admitted in that capacity. So they had a great friendship. But Catherine was also a terrific actress, and they started playing around with this funny character in between setups about a woman who had a game show. It was like like a question and answer show where she said, I want to test my log in every branch of knowledge. And that was kind of as far as they had gone with it. It was it was sort of a one note, very funny idea. And when he told me about it and said, why don't we see if there's a way for her to fit into our town? I immediately said, well, of course there is. She's she's a perfect archetype. She is the kind of classic, mythic crone, the witch who lives in the woods, the woman who does have other ways of seeing and knowing, which is very much a part of classic fairy tales and Greek tragedies. So we thought, this is a fun way to update the crone. And the log became a kind of perfect channel, given where we were for the kind of energy that was present in this, you know, heavily forested part of the world. So initially she wasn't even. Well, she was in the pilot script just a tiny little bit. She appears in the town hall meeting.<i>Who's the glad-handing dandy?</i> When Cooper's come to town and he's meeting all the townspeople. She's flashing the lights, trying to get the meeting started. And there's a very funny line where he says.<i>- Who's the lady with the log?- We call her the Log Lady.</i> And that's almost all you see of her in the pilot. But people so sparked to Catherine and this amazing commitment she made to, as comics say, the commitment to the bit, you know, that she was profoundly connected to that log. And I was very interested as we moved forward in deepening that and showing that, far from being a town joke, she was actually quite revered as sort of the shaman of the tribe, and that feeling belonged in the town as we had conceived of it.<i>He found my friend Laura lying face down on a rocky beach,</i><i>completely naked.</i><i>She'd been murdered.</i><i>Twin Peaks, a nice place to visit.</i><i>But you wouldn't want to die there.</i><i>Sunday...</i> When the show first arrived in 1990, I guess the pilot was in 89. But when it first arrived on screens, the sex and the violence in <i>Twin Peak</i> s is something that attracted a lot of attention. Also a lot of criticism. What did you make of that response at the time? Well, I guess you can always say there is a very fine line between showing something and exploiting it. I've gone back and watched the pilot a couple of times as years have gone by with different audiences, and what's clear to me is that the pilot in particular is a story about how a small community processes grief and how devastating it is, and how it affects... if that stone hits the lake, the ripples go everywhere and everyone is affected by it. And I felt we stayed on the right side of not exploiting it. And I think my perception of it, as I've looked at it now, bears that out. That grief is palpable. The the the performance is particularly Grace Zabriskie as Sarah Palmer is incredibly authentic and wrenching. And that's what I remember from the incident that I told you about in my life. There was there was nothing funny about it. There was nothing ironic about it. It was raw and horrifying. When Andy, Sheriff Andy finds her body, he's devastated.- He immediately starts crying.- Yeah.<i>Andy...</i> We see a man bursting into tears because it's so devastating. We were trying to upset the expectation that so often these things in procedurals are just used as a plot device. There's almost no time at all other than maybe some lip service into what did that loss mean for the people who were left behind? So we wanted the pilot to focus almost exclusively on that. We weren't there to solve a mystery. We wanted to show what an event like this did to a closely knit community in ways that we hadn't seen depicted on television before. And there were other things about <i>Twin Peaks</i> that hadn't been seen on TV before. The sexuality on show in the series got a lot of people extremely hot and even more bothered. But more on that in just a minute. Stay with us. All right, everybody, your regular host Rico Gagliano here taking just a moment to tell you about MUBI. It is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are, in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them. We release them in theaters, movies from any country, from legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers. We've always got something new for you to discover. And as Simran mentioned earlier, ready to be discovered on MUBI right now is every episode of <i>Twin Peaks</i>. And as much as Mark rightly talks about the show's examination of grief and straight up evil, in the next segment, you'll also hear an example or two of how Lynch and Frost also created almost transcendent moments of joy. And for me, those are the moments I remember from when I first watched the show back when I was an undergrad. There's a reason agent Dale Cooper is a lot of folks favorite character in this show. Like David Lynch, he preached the gospel of taking a second and just enjoying a damn fine cup of coffee. And all of this hadn't been seen on TV back in 1990. This mashup of genres, from police procedurals to supernatural thrillers and a mashup of tones. It was scary. It was hip. Mark is about to talk about how sexy it was, and also kind of life affirming all at once. And if you're in the US, UK, Mexico and many other countries, you can experience it for yourself by watching <i>Twin Peaks</i> on MUBI right now. We've got the whole series, the first two seasons, plus 2017 Twin Peaks, a limited event series. Subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com and have at it. We've got links and all the information you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to Simran and Mark and the rest of this episode.<i>Twin Peaks</i> was a phenomenon. The cast showed up on all the big TV chat shows in every imaginable publication. Sherilyn Fenn appeared on the pages of <i>Playboy</i> and on the cover of <i>New York Magazine</i>, and <i>Rolling Stone</i> did a big photo shoot with the 'Mystery Girls of Twin Peaks' Sherilyn Fenn, Lara Flynn Boyle and Madchen Amick all wrapped in a fluffy white towels. It was a lot, and it wasn't always pretty. In some of the press coverage from the time there was a <i>Rolling Stone</i> magazine cover that has aged quite badly. I agree. I'll read you the opening paragraph just for fun, just to take us back."They are mystery babes. They are mixed up in murder."They look good in sweaters."They are the women of <i>Twin Peaks</i>, or at least three of the women of <i>Twin Peaks</i>."They are six peaks, which is to say, there are other twin peaks in this series."But together, these three account for exactly six of those peaks."And that is only one of their secrets."- That's ghastly.- Isn't it? I did not remember that at all.- That's truly awful.- It's absolutely terrible. And it also doesn't at all reflect anything really about the show. But what do you think it was about the specific sexuality of <i>Twin Peaks</i> that got everybody sort of so worked up? I think because we were showing women in all of their aspects, and part of their aspect is their sexuality and part of their moving through life. It was just part of who they were. It wasn't the only thing they were. Look, it's no secret that for 100 years, the motion picture and television business have shown you attractive people. That's part of the deal. That's how it works. That's very often who's drawn to wanting to be an actor or actress. And it's played an important part in many people's careers. So I don't think you can feel guilty or shy about saying we cast attractive actors in roles where they're being attractive was part of who that character was, so I never felt that we were exploiting them, per se. I felt that we were trying to show them in their totality. And then, you know,<i>Rolling Stone</i> goes ahead and does a cover like that and you go, well, that was a lot of work up in smoke the minute that ended up on newsstands. And it strikes me rewatching <i>Twin Peaks</i>, that a lot of the female characters have a lot of sexual agency, and they're making decisions. They're not passive, they're instigating things. And you know, the show does deal with some really dark themes. Rape, incest, sexual violence, sex trafficking. How did you sort of approach these themes with what you felt was the right tone? How did you and David do that? Well, we were drawing a lot from the tropes of film noir as a storytelling technique. If you go back and look at those films, many of them had quite powerful female characters with a lot of agency. They were very often in charge in a story. It was their story. So we wanted to capture that that felt more authentic to us. That was just the characters as they presented themselves to us. You know, we-- it's a spectrum and there's some representation for somebody all the way from one end to the other, with Laura being the, you know, the victim of that kind of violence. And in the worst way. Let's talk a little bit about<i>Twin Peaks: The Return</i>. Whatever people prefer to call it. The show picks up 25 years later, but it refuses to trade in any kind of feel good coziness or nostalgia. If that's what you think you're getting when you return to Twin Peaks, forget it. You've got a rude awakening within the first five minutes. And actually, I think that's that's a real strength of the show. But why was it important to you and to David to not give the audience that kind of easy gratification? Well, for the reasons you just described, it was, it's, that's what television always does with these kinds of things. And since we felt that we had gone in like a bull in a China shop the first time and broke all the furniture and the lamps and tore the curtains and the drapes, and we just basically played with the whole safe notion of what network TV was supposed to be. The show had to reflect not just how we had changed as storytellers, but how those people's lives might have changed and how the society around them had changed. We wanted to really reflect the passage of time in a realistic way, and that meant any thought of doing this as an exercise in nostalgia was like simply the first thing we said in the first meeting. We're not doing that. We're going to try to-- If we broke down the door the first time, this time we want to destroy the building. We want to really go even further with this idea of being disruptive and breaking new boundaries. And that's what we set out to do. And there was also the sense of a lot of unfinished business, because we felt we were given a fairly rum go by the network, you know, particularly in the second year. When it came to revisiting some of these characters who, you know, we knew them in the prime of their youth and their beauty, and we see how time has kind of ravaged them. A lot of people, not in terms of their beauty, obviously, some of the older characters still kind of have this absolute grace and radiance to them, but a lot of them are emotionally in much worse shape than where we left them. When you think about those characters that we pick up with, whose story do you find yourself most moved by? I think the one that we really wanted to pay off in a positive way, because there are a lot of things that don't go well for people in that 25 year... was Ed and Norma, Big Ed and Norma.<i>My love is growing strong</i> In the first two seasons of <i>Twin Peaks</i>, we learn that Ed and Norma were high school sweethearts, but they end up with other people. In <i>The Return</i>, an older Ed and Norma finally reunite, and then one day in the Double R diner, as Otis Redding plays on the jukebox, he proposes.<i>Will you marry me?</i> And in the most romantic scene in the series, they share a tender kiss. And that's kind of the beating heart of, I think, <i>The Return</i>. The fact that all sorts of things can go wrong in a town and a culture and a society, I mean, sort of, as we're seeing now in this country. But there are always rays of light. There are always people who manage to find some kind of happiness in the depths of that darkness. And we wanted them-- We thought we felt we owed it to them and it was a long time coming. But I think given the the wonderful sensitivity and delicacy with which David directed them in their performances, that's one of the most satisfying moments for me in the entire run of the show. Another thread that's picked up in <i>The Return</i> is the character of Diane. Diane is Special Agent Dale Cooper's secretary, and in the early episodes of Twin Peaks, Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, is always recording messages for her into his tape recorder. In season three, we finally get to meet her and she's played by Laura Dern. She first began, and this is what people often thought she was, was simply a way to get to exposition quickly and neatly, and also do quite a bit of character work about Cooper in the way that he records things and how he makes his observations.

<i>Diane 11: 29:44

30 a.m. February 24th.</i><i>Entering the town of Twin Peaks, five miles south of the Canadian border,</i><i>12 miles west of the state line.</i><i>I've never seen so many trees in my life.</i><i>As WC Fields would say, I'd rather be here than Philadelphia.</i><i>54 degrees on a slightly overcast day, the weatherman said, rain.</i><i>You can get paid that kind of money for being wrong 60%</i><i>of the time you'd be working.</i> But in our minds, Diane was always a real person. There have been theories like, you know, in the old days of, oh, well, there is no Diane. And he's crazy. He's keeping all these tapes himself. And no, she was always very real to us. And it became a huge part of the show. And she became, in her own way, an enduring mystery. So one of the things we felt we really had to do in <i>The Return</i> was, we've got to see Diane. I mean, we've got to know who this is. And we also, you know, Laura, one of David's favorite people, one of my favorite people. She had actually been around when we were shooting the pilot. She and Kyle were dating when we shot the pilot, and Laura was there with us for most of the shoot. So in a funny way, she already felt like she was part of our community. And there was nobody else in my mind who could play Diane. It had to be Laura. We wanted to give her a real story. And the way we wove her into the the larger fabric, I think was quite effective. I think it's totally, totally genius. Both Laura Dern and Naomi Watts, who plays Janey-E, Dougie's wife, long suffering wife, are two actresses who have worked with David a lot, and they're kind of part of his family. What did their roles in <i>Twin Peaks</i> allow them to do that was different than what they had done before? Naomi has great comedy chops, and I don't think she'd had a chance to show those as often as perhaps she might have wanted. The whole key in my mind to doing comedy is to play it as if you're in a drama. I had a mentor in the 70s, very famous actor who was the father of one of my roommates, Alan Arkin. I mean, one of the great screen actors of all time, and I think one of the funniest people to ever appear on screen. But he told me the commitment he always made to the comedy is that it had to come out of someplace real. And that's what Naomi can do. I mean, her exasperation with Dougie and that whole, I mean, that whole storyline, I collapse. I'm helpless with laughter. In <i>The Return</i>, when Janey-E learns that Dougie is being extorted, well, she takes matters into her own hands. Not only does she negotiate with the gangsters pretty successfully too, she gives them a piece of her mind.<i>What kind of world are we living in where people can behave like this?</i><i>Treat other people this way without any compassion or feeling for their suffering.</i><i>We are living in a dark, dark age and you are part of the problem.</i><i>Now I suggest you take a good long look at yourselves,</i><i>because I never want to see either of you again.</i> Janey-E storms off back to her car and slams the door.<i>- Tough dame.- Tough.</i> With David now sadly gone, it's you who is the sort of main keeper of<i>Twin Peaks</i> secrets and all of its wisdom.- Yeah.- How has his passing made you reflect on the work that you made together. When you lose a friend and close collaborator of 40 years, it has a lot of impact on your life and on your sense of time passing. And Kyle and I talked a lot about this after David was gone, because we both knew him, Kyle, even longer than I had, and the whole town, the whole experience, the whole show came out of people who liked each other, working together in an atmosphere that was completely conducive to creativity. And I came from a theater background. David always wanted to create a family atmosphere on his sets. I was used to ensemble work. That was something I tried to instill in all of our younger actors as we were starting up and why when we brought in all these great veteran actors, I asked each of them to, you know, find somebody in the cast that, you know, you sort of spark with and mentor them if, 'cause if we, if this show hits and we go through the tunnel of fame and fortune that might attend some of these folks, it's severely disorienting, and many of them had been through that. Piper, Ross Tamblyn, Richard Beymer, Peggy. I mean, they'd all walked through that fire. So it was sort of an us against the world atmosphere that we tried to create. His particular skill set, his ability to create mood and feeling with picture and sound, and his sensitivity toward getting actors to give you the performance that you want and need was unmatched. He's I think he's in the pantheon of directors. And it's really hard to imagine the town without him. I've been, I guess, reckoning with that and feeling what happens to the town now. Because, as you say, I do feel a sense of responsibility to all these stories and all these characters and the millions of people who've gotten some kind of enjoyment or nourishment out of the show over the, over these years. And, you know, 35 years after you made the show, it's now reaching a new generation of viewers and new audiences. What new meaning might this kind of next generation of viewers take from it? We started writing, you know, in 2013, 2014, and we finished writing, I think by mid or late 2015, and a certain person had not yet come down the golden escalator at that point in New York City. I think you know who I'm talking about. And that hearkened the approach of a fairly dark ten years in our country's history, and God knows where it's going to lead. So I think writers are like canaries in the coal mine. They see or feel things coming. I was feeling something, something dark on its way, and I wanted the show as we came into the current day to reflect that. And David did too, particularly in what I felt was the centerpiece of season three, episode eight. This is the episode in season three where we get Bob's origin story. Bob, being the demon we learn, has been both haunting and sexually abusing Laura Palmer. You know, people are always saying, is evil objectively real? Is it something that's just part of the human spirit? So we decided to depict it and to tie it to an event that could certainly in Greek mythology terms, be likened to Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. You know, it's exactly what Oppenheimer said after the test at Trinity,"I am become death." Something was unleashed. We give you a metaphor there for perhaps how this came to be. What he did with that episode and visualizing it was extraordinary to my mind. When evil is present, it doesn't matter where it came from. Doesn't matter if it's a demon. It doesn't matter if it's someone insane. It is what it is. And you've got to face it, and you've got to confront it, and you've got to decide, what am I willing to do in my life to contribute to its defeat? I think that's a question that's very pertinent to where we are. There's something, Mark said, that I keep turning over in my mind. When evil is present, it doesn't matter where it came from. What matters is that we notice it. The Log Lady sees it. Laura Palmer definitely saw it. In <i>Twin Peaks</i> Mark Frost and David Lynch make us feel the presence of evil, and it's only when we're tuned into that feeling that we can fight it and move closer towards the light. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us to hear more stories about the Ladies of Lynch. Next week we hear from David Lynch's daughter, Jennifer Lynch, about how she shaped one of her father's quintessential heroines, Laura Palmer. Despite the limits of early 90s technology. The first draft was completed in just under three weeks and then disappeared off the disks. And they said, there's nothing there. And I was certain that everybody thought I hadn't written a word and that I was just saying it was on there. Make sure you follow us so you don't miss it. Meanwhile, if you love the show, leave a five star review wherever you listen. And if you've got questions, comments, or a log with a secret, our email is podcast@mubi.com And now let's roll credits. This show is written and hosted by me. Simran Hans. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Our booking producer is Oli Charles. Christian Coons is our editor. Our original music is composed by Martin Austwick and our assistant producer is Kat Kowalczyk. Phoebe Unterman recorded. Mark Frost and David Harper recorded me. Special thanks to Paul Smith for additional recording and moral support. This show is executive produced by Efe Çakarel, Rico Gagliano, Mike Tacca and Daniel Kasman. And finally, to watch the best in cinema subscribe to mubi.com Thanks for listening. And remember, as a wise woman with a log once said,"Fire is the devil hiding like a coward in the smoke."