Kyle MacLachlan & 'Twin Peaks' Co-Creator Mark Frost on the Show's ‘Wonderful and Strange’ Lodging

Variety

Transcript

00:00 Entering the town of Twin Peaks.

00:02 It's five miles south of the Canadian border,

00:04 12 miles west of the state line.

00:06 You could look at that, where they put the camera there.

00:09 The lodge is so close to the waterfall.

00:12 The falls are really spectacular.

00:14 I don't expect something to be there like that,

00:16 and suddenly there they are.

00:18 Can you recommend to me a good, inexpensive hotel or motel?

00:26 Now, it doesn't have to be fancy, and I mean that.

00:30 David Lynch is very much about wood.

00:34 So when you go into the Great North, you're like, "Holy smokes."

00:38 The Great Northern Hotel, we hardly had to change a thing.

00:42 It had all of the indigenous artwork,

00:45 so it felt utterly authentic to what we were trying to create.

00:49 And my little room, where I was occasionally.

00:53 The true test of any hotel, as you well know, Diane,

00:56 is that morning cup of coffee.

00:58 The hanging episode, I might have suggested that.

01:02 You know, this is, excuse me, a damn fine cup of coffee.

01:09 David's a painter, first and foremost,

01:11 so his visual sense is quite amazing.

01:14 Bringing a cinematic eye to a different format,

01:18 it was jarring and exciting for people.

01:21 We wanted to show you what looked like a placid place,

01:24 and then slowly, with a can opener,

01:27 show you the can of worms that was underneath that.

01:30 The scene where the car drives past the sign up that road,

01:34 and it creates a feeling.

01:37 There's a power and a little bit of a danger,

01:39 these mysterious woods.

01:41 There's a kind of a magic to them.

01:44 I think Cooper's response was fantastic.

01:47 What kind of fantastic trees have you got growing around here?

01:51 Big, majestic.

01:53 Douglas firs.

01:55 Douglas firs.

01:57 So he sees something very good and positive,

02:00 and others see them as a place where bad things can happen.

02:04 So I remember the pilot, when I read it, it was pretty great.

02:07 It was called Northwest Passage, of course, at that time,

02:10 and then they changed it.

02:11 The character of Cooper was very much on the page,

02:14 and then I borrowed a little bit from David,

02:17 had some mannerisms that kind of David does,

02:20 like this kind of stuff, and some ways of talking.

02:23 David, of course, comes on the show and steals all my stuff.

02:25 No, I'm just kidding, he didn't.

02:27 I'm Sheriff Truman.

02:29 Great, Haydirt, you have to speak up, Sheriff.

02:31 Hearing's gone, long story.

02:33 But I really do feel like it was a mixing of David's DNA,

02:39 my DNA somehow, to make that character.

02:42 This must be where pies go when they die.

02:49 The kind of story that we wanted to tell,

02:51 where the town is a character, it's a principal character,

02:54 the fact that we found the town itself intact

02:57 was really kind of astonishing.

03:00 The Sheriff's Station was pretty amazing.

03:03 I should also mention just how much fun I had with Michael Onking.

03:12 It was fun to work with him, you know, a little nose tweak.

03:16 Nobody's perfect, isn't that the truth?

03:19 All right.

03:21 When the llama came through, which is completely unexpected,

03:24 he's a great partner in that.

03:27 I remember the scene interrogating Dana Ashbrook.

03:30 It's me and Harry sitting there, and I'm asking him questions,

03:34 and I'm kind of being a little, you know, "Bobby," like this.

03:38 And he starts to get angry, and then I started to get angry back at him.

03:42 And David, we did it, and David said, "I don't think he gets angry."

03:46 And I was like, "Oh, OK."

03:49 So I went back and did it again, and I tried one where I just, you know,

03:53 turned to the sheriff and a big smile on my face,

03:57 and everyone's like, "What the hell is going on?"

04:01 So moments like that, the expected is this direction,

04:05 the unexpected is that.

04:08 You have to either be incredibly courageous,

04:11 or you have a director who encourages that, and that's David.

04:14 I am deeply saddened to have to tell you that

04:18 early this morning, your classmate Laura Palmer was found dead.

04:23 As screenings happened, I began to get people calling me,

04:27 and they recognized that there was something new happening.

04:32 Who killed Laura Palmer is maybe the greatest mystery of all.

04:36 We did this one public screening, and I invited an industry audience.

04:40 People were almost giddy with how different and funny

04:44 and frightening and bizarre some of the show seemed to them.

04:49 We all felt, after that night, that, OK, we have something here.

04:54 I remember there was huge pressure, of course, to solve the mystery.

04:58 They weren't necessarily forthcoming with how one thing related to another.

05:01 I knew that there was, you know, it's kind of a giant tapestry,

05:04 and it was just like, they have a thought about where it's going,

05:07 but they probably don't even know completely.

05:10 So for the next 25 years, we waited.

05:14 The fans kept the show alive, and then finally there was a drumbeat

05:17 that I think I always say the fans helped initiate that return,

05:21 just because of their loyalty and their perseverance.

05:25 [music]

05:27 Hello, I'm James Wilford.

05:29 Then David came back and he said, it's not just one, it's three,

05:33 and then you're going to have a couple little offshoots over here

05:35 of little fun characters to play.

05:37 And I was unprepared for that.

05:40 I just was like, OK, OK.

05:42 First of all, I thought, gee, am I going to even be able to do Cooper again?

05:45 And I thought, yeah, probably. Where are you?

05:47 We're just entering Twin Peaks city limits. Is the coffee on?

05:50 The return was really-- I'm really glad he got to do that.

05:54 As surreal as some of the episodes are, I mean, this is--

05:57 you're really getting pure David.

05:59 And when we went back to film the return, they had to recreate it

06:02 because that whole area had changed from the mill

06:06 into something completely different.

06:07 And we shot those scenes for the return.

06:09 There was a sort of mystical element to some of that storytelling.

06:13 And we went out deeper into some of the woods.

06:15 We see everything, and it's gorgeous, and it's moody,

06:18 and it's all those things, but there's like an added quality

06:20 that you can't quite put your finger on.

06:23 You know, I cherish my time working with David, particularly on the return.

06:26 I think we sort of knew that I don't know how many more opportunities

06:29 after that there might be.

06:31 I get to work every day with a glad heart.

06:34 Even if I was getting up at 4 in the morning, I was happy.

06:38 Frank, do you have the room key to the Great Northern Hotel? 315.

06:43 What?

06:44 You know, it's funny. Before the show, I never went there.

06:47 And driving past the road, past North Bend so many times.

06:52 And I've been back a few times since then.

06:54 Just pulled off one time and just drove up, parked the car,

06:57 and just walked out myself to the viewing point.

06:59 And there was a cluster of people there, and a few people sort of

07:03 were like doing double takes, and a couple people asked for photographs.

07:07 And some people just went on their way.

07:09 They were there probably just to look at the lovely falls,

07:12 so they had no idea about Twin Peaks.

07:14 Yeah, it was a little magic moment, I guess.

07:18 When I finish here, I'll be checking into a motel.

07:21 I'm sure the sheriff will be able to recommend a clean place,

07:23 squeezed with rice.

07:25 Oh, Diane, I almost forgot.

07:27 You've got to find out what kind of trees these are.

07:29 They're really something.

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