Twin Peaks Episode 1.006 Audio Commentary By Caleb Deschanel and Harley Peyton

The now out-of-print Twin Peaks DVD set from Artisan Home Entertainment was originally released in December 2001. This multi-disc set contained the first seven episodes of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s series (minus the Pilot episode). In addition, Directors, Writers and other crew members who worked on the show provided audio commentaries. For this article about episode 1.006, director Caleb Deschanel is joined by series writer Harley Peyton to discuss working on the penultimate episode of the show’s first season.

TWIN PEAKS EPISODE 1.006 AUDIO COMMENTARY BY CALEB DESCHANEL AND HARLEY PEYTON

The audio commentary from Director Caleb Deschanel and Writer Harley Peyton is found under the “Episode Features” tab after selecting “Ep. 6” from the Disc Three DVD Menu.

[Voiceover from Michael J. Anderson plays over the “Previously on Twin Peaks” montage]

Episode six is directed by Caleb Deschanel, one of our great cinematographers and the director of the film The Escape Artist. He provides commentary along with series writer Harley Peyton.

[Harley Peyton] Hi, I’m Harley Peyton. I wrote episode three and then also episode six, which we’re about to see. I wrote episode three, and then Mark would move on to the subsequent episodes. So I kind of had a break and then I then they came back to me for episode six, but they were always written in sequence. In six, the plot is is really gaining a lot of momentum because we’re we build and build into the final episode of the first block of shows.

So what I have to do is really push the narrative forward, whether it’s what’s happened to Leo, who I believe was shot in the previous episode. And so where is Leo now? And really, when you’re going from scene to scene more than anything, it becomes about keeping the narrative going. I mean, when you’re writing a serial narrative that is one of your primary jobs, and when you’re when writing the third episode, there was a little less of that because it’s really you’re introducing a lot of things to the audience. And so the job becomes different by the time you get to six.

I mean, after all, it was a soap opera. And so we have all of these storylines that you have to keep running. And, and as a writer that becomes, almost preeminently difficult.

And that was always one of the interesting tensions or is one of the interesting tensions in the show, is that Mark coming from television as he did, and David coming from the movies, Mark is very particular about getting those things right, about knowing that what happens in this episode has to be paid off in this episode. David is much more impulsive and tends to work as he goes, which is not to say that he ignores the script. In fact, he’s very detailed about it.

But I think for David, the inspiration of the moment is much more important than the kind of longer term inspiration. And so you have this really great dynamic tension between those two urges, and they were partners in every way. I mean, I sometimes believe that Mark doesn’t get the credit that he deserves, and they were truly partners in that sense.

And you can see it reflected in the show. There are moments of kind of unexpected inspiration that come out of nowhere. And while that’s not necessarily always David, it’s not a bad guess I think that it might be, because Mark was again, watching some of those details that David really didn’t think about so much.

I think the thing in looking for a director for a show in particular, is that is that there are directors who can be chosen because of a prior relationship with David.

Tina [Rathborne], for example, I think it was a friend of David over time. Other directors who are simply interested in doing the show because of its reputation in the first season. One of the lovely things about working on Twin Peaks is that you, in some sense, have your choice. I mean, finding good directors in television is very difficult.

David and Mark are relatively fearless about bringing in directors who haven’t done television before. They simply weren’t concerned about that. So while I don’t know if Caleb Deschanel had ever worked as a DP [Director of Photography] in television prior to this, I have no idea. He was someone who could come in and was so good and so good with the camera. And of course, as always, you’re trying to beat the cop.

It’s a lot of fun to watch, because this was a show that was shot in a warehouse in the Valley, in what was a kind of Twin Peaks theme park, and all of those sets that are so familiar were all under one roof, and you would kind of be moving from one to the next. And a good director has to be able to get both what’s on the page and also get to the next set up.

And Deschanel was, of course, with all those experiences, it was amazing. But it was interesting to watch him work because this is someone with a brilliant and one of the best DP’s alive and here he’s doing a show where the look is so distinctive and so particular and so Lynchian. And so it was interesting to watch directors of all kinds bring their own talents to bear as much as you do, as a writer, on a situation which is nonetheless very well defined for you.

And that’s mostly what television is about, I think generally also. But but here you’re really kind of matching that Lynch and Frost template, whether it’s as a writer or as a director.

[Caleb Deschanel] I’m Caleb Deschanel. I’m the director of a number of episodes of Twin Peaks and episode six. For me, the real challenge was how do you do so much work and so little time, which I was not really used to. And, I mean, compared to now, I mean, the shows we had had, probably 40 to 45 pages, which is not a lot of page count for basically 47 minutes.

So it was at a leisurely pace compared to shows now that that oftentimes would do 120 pages for an hour show. And you notice how much more fast paced they are. But, you know, that was the nature of this show, was that there was a certain melancholy moodiness to it that did had that kind of pacing, and that was an essential aspect of the show, and it was all about subtext and a lot of the subtext came from listening and paying attention to these characters, because what was really going on was not what they were saying, but was really what was under the surface.

And, you know, they would profess to, to one thing and really mean something else. And everybody had secrets in, in the film, in the TV show.

They tended to be a lot of tableaus in it. And now that I look at it, compared to what television is like now, I mean, it really seems very static. But at the same time, you know, part of it was with storytelling as well, was using the camera in tight and then moving to reveal something else. And it was it evolved really from the storytelling more than it did from, you know, interest in a different stylistic point of view.

And also the sets where we had sets that are pretty complete so that you could really move around on a lot more, you know. And seeing it again, I mean, I really think that the style sort of suited the kind of melancholy mood of the, of the story. I mean, it really was.

I mean, it’s like if you look at The Shining, I mean, set the scene where Jack Nicholson is having his interview is just a totally static scene, and there’s two guys answering really mundane questions and revealing mundane things, but the subtext is so much more important.

And I think it was the same way here, is that if you move the camera too much in a show like this, people lose track of what the subtext is. And the subtext was the most important thing about the show.

There’s a relationship between every character, every bunch of characters in this, this show. So everybody also has their fears. And, you know, I mean, I think it’s it’s important to understand, you know, each character’s fears in order to, to know what to do with those characters and also what motivates I mean, some characters don’t want to be made fools of, some are afraid of certain things. Some, you know, and Cooper has his own loves to0, you know, coffee and and pie and I mean, I mean, there’s so middle America and so wonderful and yet, you know, the, you know, under the surface are all these other complications with all these things.

[Harley Peyton] In writing the dialog for the show, you have to match the voice of every one of those characters that, in my case, I met when I first saw the pilot and over time, you begin to learn to work in that voice. Mark was always there to kind of make the corrections, I think, as he saw necessary, and he would do that on a lot of scripts. But I think the characters were so well defined that you had a good idea about who they were in your head.

Even if you’re talking about Donna’s father, you know, Doc Hayward or Andy. It wasn’t I wouldn’t say necessarily easy, but they were so well defined that you knew going in what you were going to reach for. And I think maybe the hardest thing was trying to come up with those Agent Cooper lines, because Agent Cooper was someone who was always open to experience. It was always seeing the world kind of through from a different angle, in a way.

And so in any particular scene, and you don’t want to do this overboard because you can’t, you’re going to have so many coffee and pie jokes, but nonetheless, you want to give Cooper those moments where it’s not just being a detective, but also being an observer of life who reinterprets it as he sees it.

There was one thing that I wrote about, you know, every day, give yourself a present just like Christmas. And that particular line of dialog is one of those things where when you write it, you know you have a good one. And there was a very good feeling, because a very important thing is to give Cooper those observations both there and also when he was talking on his little recorder to the woman back home.

[Caleb Deschanel] When you were working on one episode, you were as much interested in where it would go as, you know, the people watching it at home after we had finished the episodes. No one was sure where it was, I don’t think really where it was going to go. I know Mark and and David certainly had an outline of what they wanted to happen, but I think along the way, different characters kind of flowered and altered their perception of who they were interested in as well.

So, because it was a really big cast and there were and if you analyze it, I mean, all the names in the cast come from old movies, old TV shows. It reminds me, in a way, of of Bullwinkle and Rocky, because that was a show that when you were a little kid, you could watch that and enjoy it just as a cartoon.

But as you got older, you realize that there were all these subtle references to the Brill Building and the music business and, you know, movies in general and history and all sorts of fascinating things that that added layers and layers to it so you could appreciate it on one surface level. And you could also begin to appreciate the subtext in terms of its relationship to the history of television and movies. So, you know, I think everybody who worked on the show had the same kind of fascination and an interest in it.

[Harley Peyton] There is a kind of a desire to push whatever kinds of expression you’re dealing with, a couple steps more than you might normally. There’s a great moment in the pilot where, Laura’s mother finds out about the death of her daughter, and there’s that kind of howling anguish that she does into the telephone, and David carries it out much longer than you normally would. And the melodrama is therefore pushed much farther than you normally would push it.

And that became, I think, a kind of, a kind of totem in the show that we came back to time and time again. It was the is the desire to take emotion and express it in a way. That was a little, a little more forceful and a little more detail than you might expect.

Mädchen Amick in a scene in this episode has a moment like that. And, and David and the subsequent directors were wonderful at allowing the actors to really let that stuff pour out of them. And the melodrama, again, going back to the soap opera roots, in a way, excessive melodrama is part of that tradition. And here I think you have that same notion of melodrama, but again, seen through a somewhat different angle.

And to me, it brought so much to the show, and particularly as a writer coming in, that was one of the more intriguing things that you could push the humor, you could push the melodrama and try things you might not try otherwise, even within the relatively rigid framework for what information had to be given to the audience in every episode.

[Caleb Deschanel] To be honest with you, I mean, this opening on basically something in a house and not being sure what it was, but, you know, suddenly here, Laura Palmer’s voice and you’re on a piano and obviously a certain part of the house, and you start dollying to reveal that there are these other characters listening in to this tape recording that is a tape recording that is, you know, from, you know, from from the doctor’s office, Doctor Jacoby’s office, and it certainly isn’t something that we developed, but it’s certainly something that that, you know, was would help sort of set the mood, because the mood of every show was to sort of create, you know, a mystery and an interest in the mystery and what was going on.  So at every stage, you know, it was always interesting to try to create, you know, visuals that were like, that would heighten that interest in that mystery in the show.

Everything is is a somewhat of a reveal. You know, in the show, I mean, you oftentimes would start small and come wider. I mean, the other thing is when you cut wide in this shot, the, the the implication is that there’s someone listening, someone watching. I mean, there are all these sort of elements that, that, you know, when you make a choice from a directorial point of view, it also implies a choice editorially is that at a certain point, when you start, you start on nothing.

You dolly across, you reveal who’s listening to this tape recording. You reveal in their conversation what they intend to do. And then at a certain point, you cut back. And, you know, I mean, there’s nothing more than a wide shot of them from the living room looking back. But the implication from a visual point of view, really, and from an editorial point of view, when you suddenly cut back, when you’re used to dollying into these characters and being tight on them, is who’s listening who, it implies somebody else is paying attention to what’s going on here.

And I think that’s really important. You see, it used all the time as a tool of, you know, directing or editing a movie, but you have to be really aware of those things when you’re, you know, when you’re directing a show that you have those elements that you can then cut back to, to, you know, to make, you know, make a point.

TWIN PEAKS – EPISODE 1.006 – ACT TWO COMMENTARY

[Harley Peyton] I think we all have our favorite characters and the ones that we love to write. I love to write Audrey Horne because I thought she was really sexy, and she tended to challenge, whomever she was in a scene with just as a character. And also, I think as an actress, Sherilyn Fenn did that as well.

So I liked writing Audrey a great deal. David is not above or below a fetish, and I think in this sense the character of Audrey was kind of fetishized, you know, and she had those kind of her saddle shoes and that kind of sweater sets.

And Sherilyn was just amazingly sexy and I think also very, very smart. And the smart part of her character is something that emerged more and more as you went through the show, because she was starting to try to figure out things on her own and she was trying to discover, you know, in the service of her feelings for Agent Cooper, “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

And I always thought that her strength in the show was very, very interesting. She was someone who seemed rather fearless, where some of the other characters were less so, and that always made her fun to write, particularly as she got into her own investigation of what happened, leading, of course, to One Eyed Jacks.

[Caleb Deschanel] What’s amazing is she goes in his office, she lights a cigarette. She hides in the closet, continue smoking a cigarette. I mean, first of all, today you don’t have anybody smoking anywhere. So, you know, if someone was smoking, anybody nearby would be aware that somebody was smoking. So there’s a real humor to it.

[Harley Peyton] It’s not the first time in a show where you’re seeing a moment where you might question the reality of it, and particularly the smoking at a cigarette, although, again, I think that says so much about about her character. And that was something that was more than likely not in the script.

It’s that it’s that there was a sense in her of, of a kind of power that she had and a complete lack of fear. And if she’s going to be in that closet, she’s not going to deny herself the cigarette that she wants. And yet, at the same time, she’s managing to spy and find out important information.

Yeah, there’s a wonderful sense about her in that she’s kind of listening, but she’s always at play. And one thing about her character that I liked a great deal that she seemed to be playing, and which is more than just being playful. But the world, the world becomes a kind of chessboard for you, and you’re moving around pieces at will. And and she was very, very good at that.

[Caleb Deschanel] It’s sort of this wonderful sort of youthful vitality that’s really great about, you know, her character. And you know, we definitely played that up. I mean, we definitely said, “Listen, you know, don’t worry about I mean obviously you have to be quiet, but go ahead and smoke your cigarette and smile and react. You don’t really have to worry about being discovered.”

And, you know, the elements of sound using the sound of the cigaret burning implies that, you know, it should reveal to [Emory] Battis to, you know, that that she is, you know, in the closet hiding. But we just treated it as if she could never be discovered. Almost as if, almost as if, you know, she was just standing there and was invisible to him.

I think there was a real effort to to make a lot of these people ordinary. I mean, Battis is probably the most ordinary character you could ever imagine. And then to find out that the subtext is that the guy is really kind of strange human being who’s, you know, enticing these girls to go work at this club.

[Harley Peyton] Early on, as you were walking around, you can kind of go through sets or you could, you know, you can go sit in the Double R Diner and write a scene there if you like. So it became this kind of place of magic. The show was shot six days in the location of the sets, rather, and one day out on location and barely that.

So it was rare that we ever left that place. And so that creates a different kind of energy, I think, than a lot of television shows where you’re frantically trying to kind of go from one location to the next and shoot your three days, which is what you usually have when you’re outside the studio. It’s pretty limited.

[Caleb Deschanel] The, you know, the shots that were added and they were, you know, generally exterior shots that were shot up in the Northwest to sort of give the feeling of the outside of the cafe where the big lumber truck goes by. That was a stock shot that came from somewhere.

I mean, it’s pretty limited, and it’s pretty common in most television to, you know, shoot most of the shows on sets because most television shows involve a lot of dialog and are mostly shot on sets. And so we really when we went out, I mean, we would go to places like Lake Malibou and other, you know, other locations that had trees that sort of matched the kind of things they had in the Northwest and that sort of thing but.

The biggest problem with the diner was that, you know, because you were seeing the outside to a great extent, you know, you couldn’t you didn’t have the freedom of sort of, you know, dealing with the real outside where, you know, you, you had car would have cars going by in a real activity outside.

And plus it was so sort of it was had been established as being so high key and so much of the, the show, you want to feel like things could be hiding in the shadows and it was just very restricting as to how much you can move around and how far back you could get.

It was probably built to a real size, but it should have been built, you know, a third larger than it was, so that you could really move around more and find different angles in it. Because enough took place here that, you know, you wanted to be able, you know, to take advantage of the whole set, which you couldn’t because of its size.

And you guys was like some coffee afternoon. Everything was pretty much motivated by, you know, what was going on in the scenes and the storytelling. I mean there’s just, you know, this really great scene when Cooper tells Harry that, you know, you should always give yourself a present every day and it may be a new shirt, it may be a couple of cups of coffee.

But if you look at this shot of the cups of coffee, it’s like a cover photograph from a menu in a 50s diner. And so, I mean, there were a lot of sort of visual cues that we would take advantage of, because you really were dealing with a character who had a certain 50s mentality and everything in the set on the surface, but, you know, under the surface was a subtext that was different. It really is a character from The Age of Innocence. You know, living in another era. I mean, it’s it’s it’s interesting that he, you know, he somehow survived with his 50s sensibilities into, you know, the late 80s, early 90s.

[Harley Peyton] There’s always a sense, I think, with the carrot, even the characters who were there for a day, a day player, or maybe a couple days in an episode, there was always a desire to, first of all, make them a piece in a larger puzzle. And that could be about the danger in. There was always a sense of what’s going to happen to them. So there was a certain tension built into the writing of the character.

Also, by the way, there’s always an effort to write certain eccentricities into these characters and certain kinds of humor, and that was always very important to. So it was one of those shows where there were no throwaway characters ever. And believe me, Mark makes very, you know, makes sure of that as he goes through the episodes.

Even, by the way, when you’re talking about the soap opera within a soap opera, I mean, that was something that gets cut from a lot of episodes, because when the episodes run along, that would become something that was easier to cut on before we kind of locked the picture. But even on the soap opera within a soap opera, there was a whole lot of care given to that and the way it reflects the show as a whole.

Mark, who had worked on Hill Street Blues and some other shows, really was the person who understood how a TV show works, and without that, the entire enterprise would have fallen apart, no matter how much inspiration is brought to bear on it. And Mark was great not only at the things I mean, not only bringing a certain a great deal of creativity to the show, but he was the one who really had to keep the series inside his head.

And every show has to have a person who has the ability to do that. And for Twin Peaks, Mark Frost was a person who had the show inside his head and knew from episode to episode what was going to transpire, and the storylines became very Baroque after a while, and you had to really, even as a writer, as a writer, when you’re coming and going, it would get kind of complicated and trying to figure out what was going on or remembering what happened in the last episode.

Was somebody chewing gum? And we have more gum here? And Mark was really the one who managed to keep us on track that year and, and does a wonderful job at it. I mean, it’s one of the I think it’s one of the strengths, particularly the first season, which has this wonderful cohesiveness to it. And that was really something that Mark brought to it.

The thing about the show is that it in many ways, there are so many interesting relationships that are there talking about different varieties of love. And the Josie character in particular was a fascinating one because she was duplicitous and we learn what we learn much more about that in later episodes, but particularly in this early episode, she’s a she is a character who seems to have secrets and it’s in a way that Laura Palmer has secrets. And the keeping of secrets is one of the running themes in the show and how those secrets can destroy lives.

And so her character was fascinating to write and because Harry Truman, and the name speaks volumes is such a stalwart, upright guy, the relationship had an automatic sort of tension in it, and shows a kind of passion in him that you might not expect. And it was always fun to write their scenes, particularly because Josie, although she stopped doing it after a while, there was a certain amount of malaprop in writing her character, and you have to be careful that that doesn’t become a comic crutch, but that was something that we also use from time

What’s fascinating about Joan is it just the fact that she’s Chinese, you think of Chinatown and you think of the idea of other cultures being mysterious and in, you know, inscrutable. They very deliberately give her things to do that make her, you know, really inscrutable.

I mean, it’s really kind of fascinating because they kind of create a cliché and at the same time they take advantage of that cliché. Her character is really fascinating because she probably has relationships with more of the characters than, you know. She has more things that she’s juggling than almost any of the other characters in the in the show.

[Harley Peyton] You certain characters are assigned certain, I guess, characteristics or dialog tendencies, but as a writer, you would then try to follow. Josie in a way had a certain bent toward malaprops that we used quite often earlier in the show. I think over time that’s something that you use a little less. But Josie is kind of malapropism is a source of humor, certainly, and also because she was an exotic presence in the show and someone who was clearly from somewhere else.

The thing about Twin Peaks is that it’s it’s so hermetically sealed from the real world, and you really only had two presences who come from somewhere else. You have Cooper and you have Josie, who comes from a completely different life and a completely different world. And she’s unique in that. And so, again, the writing of her character became very important, I think, to kind of hit those characteristics.

And of course, her demise, which was argued over incessantly by all of us, is kind of appropriate to her kind of otherness, I suppose, since she did after all, become a doorknob of one variety or another.

TWIN PEAKS – EPISODE 1.006 – ACT THREE COMMENTARY

[Caleb Deschanel] The excuse for this was that, they’re going to go to One Eyed Jacks disguised as just ordinary businessmen. So it gives us a chance to put Cooper in a tuxedo and and have, Big Ed all dressed up. So, I mean, it just sort of it would just sort of became this little costume drama.

And then, of course, there’s the element of putting Big Ed in a mustache and a wig. And this is wonderful moment when Cooper has this big wad of money from the FBI. And yet he still has this, you know, wonderful sort of childlike confidence that he’s going to go and he always likes to come back with at least, you know, a 10% increase in the money for the FBI. I mean, it’s great. It’s great. And you just sort of totally believe that he’s going to do it. I mean, you don’t think, oh my God, what happens if he loses all the money gambling? You think, oh yeah, he’s Cooper, he’s going to do it.

By this time in the series, you end up really believing in these characters and believing in their, you know, their sort of simple, old fashioned ideals. One of the great things about this show, too, is the fact that you would get away with things that would seem like you couldn’t get away with, but you just, you know, just the way you could have Audrey hiding in the closet, smoking a cigarette. You could have these guys wearing wigs and doing things, and you just, you know, the audience wanted to believe that they could get away with it. So they let that happen.

The audience really wanted to believe that these guys could go in there and pretend to be someone else and screw up their cover and their dialog and everything and still make for at that point, we felt that we could get away with a lot, that perhaps in a more realistic show, you couldn’t get away with it, that there were elements of exaggeration.

And, you know, I really think that that there’s no such thing as reality. I mean, the reality is something that you create in the situations, and you have the character like Cooper, who is an FBI Agent who behaves as if he’s coming out of, you know, something in the 50s, you know, real Ozzie and Harriet time. And yet he he’s very much of a late 80s, early 90s character because he has a subtext where he understands these things and, and he realizes that people have these secrets, and he doesn’t fool himself into believing that everybody still lives the way they did in the 50s.

And yet at the same time, you know, none of these characters are real. So you can get away with things that, you know, because as an audience, you want to believe in them. You can get away with things that, you otherwise couldn’t get away with if you were trying to do a a much more reality based story.

[Harley Peyton] Catherine, is, on one level, the traditional kind of matriarchal figure in a soap opera. I mean, you’re going to you always have those characters who come from the kind of somewhat older generation. They’re the places where you usually find power and where you find power, you frequently find a seat, of course, typically, given the show that we’re doing, you come at that from a number of different approaches.

First of all, she’ll be playing a Japanese gentleman shortly. But I think of equal importance was her relationship with Benjamin Horne. It was it was very sexual and very interesting and very flirtatious. And Piper was, of course, wonderful at that. And so that’s something that also, I think helps us with the character.

Again, as a writer, you never know exactly where they’re headed. But I think you always assume that she’s going to be in charge, although as it turns out, she’s not, as you get to the end of the season and that to me, even at the time came as a bit of a surprise.

[Caleb Deschanel] What’s really great at the end of this scene, she says, think, think. And, you know, you see it on the page and you go, how can anybody say that and make it work? And yet she does. I mean, it’s sort of this wonderful. This scene is all about what the people aren’t saying. You get the impression that he understands that she doesn’t know about this insurance policy.

And yet neither one of them is willing to reveal the truth to each other. But they do reveal the truth to each other. But they never say it out loud. I mean, it’s almost as if these characters feared that they were being recorded. And if they reveal if they said, “Well, I never I never wanted this insurance policy,” you know, that that somebody would hear. So you treat it as if these two people cannot say what the truth is, but they both know that each other understand the truth.

Right to the point at the end where the insurance man says, you know, if there’s anything, anything I can do implying, you know, I know you’re in trouble. I know somebody is trying to do something, and I’m revealing to you the fact that they are taking out this insurance policy behind your back, which means maybe they’re trying to kill you. I mean, that’s the subtext. If you want to know the truth.

I like these scenes because they’re there’s something very slow about them and very deliberate. And everything that is said is revealing something about what is known and not known. And as an audience, you know, what makes this interesting is not the fact that we’re running around, running through and lots of actions happening. It’s the fact that as an audience in our minds, we’re going through what all this means, and it keeps us really interested and fascinated with what’s going on.

But again, I mean, there’s so many wonderful actors and actresses in here that they were able to make things work that, you know, I mean, they they understood, you know, that that what was going on was not on the surface. And that was what was really wonderful about these scenes.

[Harley Peyton] And this is something that that goes back, I think, to a certain extent to David, too, because David’s ability, as a director with obviously a wonderful reputation, one of his great abilities is to attract actors to cast. And this show was beautifully cast. And Piper Laurie is one of the important pieces to that puzzle. And she was extraordinary.

And as someone who was always a lot of fun and brought a different energy to the show, I think as an actress, both on and off the set, because you had a lot of young people here beginning their careers, and that’s a very heady time. And a lot of people who are just starting out. And so it was pretty new to them. And you could really tell who the pros were on the set. I mean, Michael Ontkean had done a great deal of work at this period. Of course. Piper, Laurie, you know, beyond anyone.

[Caleb Deschanel] It was such a genius idea to have this minor bird as a witness to the crime. And then, you know, to reveal – “Stop it. You’re hurting me, Leo. Stop it! Leo.” So we know that Leo was there.

Now, this is something. I mean, this is what is one of my contributions to the show is, you know, was to take advantage of the theme of doughnuts, which were always in the in the sheriff’s office and combine them with the murder of the, the bird I loved in my mind, thinking of this image of the bird being killed and it’s blood dripping on the doughnuts.

I mean, that was just to me, that was just like a great thrill to to take one of the sort of key archetypal elements of this show and then, you know, use it in a way that, I mean, it’s both, it’s both very funny and very horrific at the same time, which was really sort of the essence of this show.

[Harley Peyton] Usually the directors who were brought on were very, very strong. Dwayne Dunham came on as being David’s editor, so that now he’s coming from a completely different direction. He had never directed before. But but Dwayne, as well as someone who is always looking for new ways to kind of present things. Tim [sic] Holland (ed. note – Harley meant Todd Holland), who went on to do the Gary Shandling Show and Malcolm In The Middle, was not that experienced at the time, and he came up with actually some of the more bizarre and interesting ideas then any of the directors.

Now, he was the one who actually wanted to get one of those little micro cameras that kind of came out of the wall. And from the whole, I mean, that’s something that was his idea, and we’re always very open to that. And so it’s it’s I think the directors, generally speaking, it was rare that you felt that anyone in the same way that the writers are not not straightjacketed by all the great work that David Mark previously.

TWIN PEAKS – EPISODE 1.006 – ACT FOUR COMMENTARY

[Caleb Deschanel] [One Eyed Jacks] is a real location. As a matter of fact, this is interesting because what happened was I had some scenes here, David had some scenes, and then one of the other directors, I don’t remember who it was. Mark or somebody else. What happened was that we went in and we shot all together. I mean, I shot David, David shot first, then I think Mark and then then I came in and, you know, shot my part of the episode at this location, which is actually a house I think, up on. I think it was, I think it was on Lake Malibou, but it was a real house that we converted into One Eyed Jacks.

There’s sort of, you know, the implication because, I mean, during a context in which people would oftentimes try to hide who they were anyway. And so the idea of these guys trying to hide out who they are, and at the same time, I mean, everybody kind of understands what’s going on. They just don’t understand it in the same context. She says, oh, you look like a cop who says, I am a cop. But then it becomes a joke because he is a cop. But, you know, she thinks he’s joking that he’s a cop. So, I mean, there’s all this there’s, you know, subterfuge going on at the same time.

Going back and looking at this episode, you become very much aware of how much you have to have invested in these characters as you go along to really appreciate the show. It was a show where you really needed to be a fan, or at least someone who watched the show regularly in order to really appreciate who these characters were and where they were coming from, and you know what their relationships were.

I remember when the show was on the next day. I mean, you would go be getting coffee or having lunch, and it was amazingly number of people who would be talking about it and talking about what things met and, you know, what the show was about and how well it worked or what it meant for, you know, the characters in the future. And, I mean, it really was part of our culture for such a period of time. It was really amazing.

[Harley Peyton] The Maddy stuff was fun to do. The character, of course, is is taken from Maddy and Vertigo and and it was just fun to play with that notion. And I must tell you, I don’t know if the plan was always to bring Sheryl Lee back, although I suspect it was because no one’s going to waste an actress was that good on being a corpse in the initial season.

But writing, writing that material was a lot of fun, because now you have this kind of younger group of characters who are trying to solve the mystery and teaming up to do so, and the use of Maddy, particularly when she puts on that blond wig and pretends to be Laura. Now you’re having a kind of doubling in terms of of how you’re defining their show, and they’re defining certain characters. And there’s I had a lot of fun and almost and there’s a weird kind of ontological sense of just about, who is Laura Palmer?

I mean, she’s such a totem in this show. And I think when you have Maddy pretending to be Laura, but she’s really the same actress who was playing the other person, you get a lot of interesting feelings just when you’re watching those scenes. I think because because of the way the character of the actress approaches it.

And that’s something that I think may have been more unconscious than conscious, but there is a lot of doubling in there. The most obvious is Maddy and Laura, but they’re also a lot of the show tends to work in pairs and and how the various pairs can work, whether it’s a romantic pair or a pair based on a friendship or the Horne brothers.

So you do have a lot of that kind of doubling. And of course, mirrors because the show is headed toward a horrific shot or Agent Cooper’s looking at his double in a mirror and a double of a completely different kind of.

So there was a lot of that throughout the show. And I think as a writer, you would look for those opportunities, but I think mostly a lot of the doubling was built into the narrative. So that would simply come out of your work, even if you weren’t thinking about.

[Caleb Deschanel] I would have liked to have to some extent changed, you know, some of the lighting schemes and use things, you know, make it a little bit more, more chiaroscuro, more, you know, shadow and light than it was actually used. I mean, you know, to me, it tends to be flatter than, than I would normally like to do it.

But, you know, it was it was a style that was established for the show and it works really well for the show. But, you know, I mean, they’re, listen, they’re always limitations to what you can do coming in and, you know, when you’re doing a show where you have to, you know, when you’re doing a show where you have to do all these many pages and in a day, you know, you pretty much have to concentrate on the scenes and what what the characters are doing.

There were times when I wanted to do some things differently when I sort of felt like I was a little bit more limited visually just because of the fact that the show had already been established and, you know, a lot of things were done a certain way. But I think film and TV is obviously very visual medium, so I mean even a certain aspect of directing is, you know, where you put the camera and how you use the camera.

Obviously, one of the reasons why I would move the camera was to try to combine ideas and and you know go from a wide to a tight or a tight or a wide or you know do a reveal see here’s here’s the review of Joan where she’s always talking to people as if she’s an absolute innocent and then it’s always revealed that she’s not so innocent.

[Harley Peyton] I mean, one of the great things about writing television is that something can happen to you in your real life on Monday; you can put it in a script on Tuesday; they can shoot it on Thursday; it could be on TV two weeks later and a month after that they can be writing about it in New York Magazine. And that’s what actually happened with regards to the cherry stem.

I was at a restaurant with some friends and a good friend of mine said, “Watch me do this trick.” And she then proceeded to tie a cherry stem in her mouth and show me the knotted cherry stem and I was just in the middle of writing the sixth episode and realize that I now had my moment
for Audrey Horne when she went out to One Eyed Jacks and put it in the script the next day.

As for whether it’s really possible I don’t, I’m not so sure. I mean most people tie a separate cherry stem into a knot and hide it in their mouth and then do a switch. That’s traditionally how it’s done. Sherilyn Fenn, of course, was I think publicly said I’m a occasion that she had no such talent. Mädchen Amick I once on a talk show in fact do the trick. The question would be whether she could actually do it or whether she had that second stem in there.

But that was one of the fun things to do and it’s again the certain things from the show that kind of people talked about overtime and that was certainly one of them. So I’m happy to have contributed.

[Caleb Deschanel] I mean this scene was really subversive at the time. I mean where she you know it’s eyes the the Cherry stem with her mouth. We actually shot it in a way where we could do it all in one shot and then, when it was edited, it didn’t work that way because we really wanted to make it seem as if she had done it. But it was impossible to kind of create the the kind of tension that we needed in the scene

It actually took a couple of tries to sort of make it you know clear because it wasn’t, you know, where she put it down and, you know, we just we ended up putting it down on the napkin so that was really clear that it had been tied together because it’s obviously important to tell this story and if you don’t if the audience isn’t aware of the fact that she’s tied it and it doesn’t make sense. So you know that’s why this shot was so tight.

Now we’ve gotten so used to so much being revealed I mean so much nudity so much. This TV show operated on another level where everything was implied everything was suggested at, everything was, I mean, it had a real sexiness about it that it’s just didn’t flaunted itself and just didn’t throw itself at you. I mean it allowed the imagination to work so much more than it does today.

I mean today, if you really look at so many things, they don’t let anybody use their imagination. They just throw it at you – there it is take it for what it’s worth. Whereas in [Twin Peaks], you know, you have to really see through it. You really have to, you know, understand what’s going on in the minds of these characters to really appreciate it.

And I think that’s what made the show fascinating. It was still at a time when people were willing to take the time to analyze the characters and underneath these girls and underneath these boys is this yearning and this, you know, sexuality and this, you know, desire for each other and desire for doing something with their lives that now we tend to see things just wasn’t presented so nakedly and so obviously that it doesn’t have, you know, it doesn’t allow the audience to have the pleasure of discovering it for themselves.

[Harley Peyton] I was at CBS once when an executive said to me we used Twin Peaks to show to the Northern Exposure people about how we want more sexuality in the show. They said at the same time they showed them what not to do in terms of being too opaque or certain kind of narrative things that are too “weird.” But that was one of the nice things in the show.

[Caleb Deschanel] The networks were really you know they censored a lot of things in the show. I mean there were a lot of words taken out a lot of things were discussed about what you could and could not do on television. And what was really amazing about what David and and Mark did with the show was it a lot of the things that are so much more subversive and so much more, imply so much more from the point of you know sexuality or was under the surface and was hidden from the censors.

And a lot of that got by and a lot of them were obvious things that we’re sort of, you know, much more innocent you know we’re actually taken out of the show. So you know, I mean it was really was a very subversive show in a lot of ways just because you know they were it was clever enough and it was, it was in the subtext so much that I think a lot of things got by that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten through the network censors.

[Harley Peyton] The one thing about Twin Peaks is that the pace is slower – there’s no question about that. It is so rich in detail and so rich in a kind of melodrama, and also in a kind of maturity of the humor that it presented a sort of experience that I’ve never really seen anywhere else except maybe in some of David’s movies – Blue Velvet comes to mind.

But it’s something that I think is very unique and the pace of it was something that you simply didn’t see on television. And the music I think contributes to that as well because the music is perfectly matched to it, and there there is a kind of language sense but because of all the things that are hiding underneath, whether they are literal secrets or surprises to come along the way, that that pace in that so-called slowness can be very deceptive.

There are moments of violence in the show that seem that much more violent and are and have that much more impact simply because of the context that they’re in. And if you think about the way television developed in the years after Twin Peaks when what you and instead had was a kind of editing style and seem to be based on attention deficit disorder. The kind of languid feeling of this show and I think the beauty of it pictorially, is something that’s very important and I think a real nice thing about it.

[Caleb Deschanel] I think the show survived through at least into the part of the second year and then became I think a little more conventional. You know what happens is that you end up investing this and you have all these characters who were on the show and all these people start feeling like you know this is their lives and they want to keep it going. And it certainly would have been great at the show could have been sustained for long enough so it could have been syndicated, and you know I think it would have gotten much bigger audience had that happen.

But I don’t think anybody expected the show to continue as long as it did and and, you know, partly because of the way it’s set up the story is about someone who’s been murdered and we’re looking for the murderer and once you find the murderer, in a sense, the show’s over. And how long can you sustain that? I mean he certainly couldn’t sustain that for three years, which is what people were wanting to do.

[Harley Peyton] I think it’s as good as it gets with television, and again particularly back then. I mean you didn’t have the kind of crossover that people do now. To me now, I think you’re you know when you look at West Wing or some other shows as much different. But back then it wasn’t like that at all which makes the show to me even more amazing, given the time that, you know, that it came out there and in the time that it came to be – both in the kind of in the humor of the show and the sexuality in the show. It was it really was, in a way, revolutionary television and there’s not much of that.

[Caleb Deschanel] I do know that I feel that the first year and certainly part of the second year, we’re just as perfect television as I think. And it really did revolutionized television. I think shows like X-Files and a lot of the sort of mysterious shows that have come out since then were really greatly influenced and made possible by Twin Peaks. I mean if you look at Twin Peaks in the context of when it appeared and the kind of things that were being done at the time, that it really was a show that just changed television to a great extent.