That idea of not spelling everything out—both as a writer and an editor—reminds me of the final moments in one of my all-time favorite films, “The Straight Story,” which was the first David Lynch film I ever saw.
Oh wow! What an introduction to David! Okay, get ready… [laughs]
I love how you linger in the meaningful silence shared between the brothers, rather than rely on reams of dialogue.
I had the great privilege of being able to rewrite in case anybody else decided to do stuff with that script. I had the last say. David doesn’t sit in the cutting room with me, but everything has to be according to what he likes, and fortunately, we liked a lot of the same things. There were a number of people—and David was not one of them—who wanted more at the end of the script. They were like, “Okay…is that it?” But that story is so emotionally powerful and so simple that it could very easily lend itself to sentiment and schlock if you are not really, really temperate with it and keep it very spare. The dialogue is intentionally spare in the picture because that’s the way I remember all these people when I grew up here. It’s very much a love letter to this part of the country, and a lot of other parts of it that are considered “flyover.” I wanted to show how the people who occupy it have a dignity and though they may lack the power of language, they find other ways to communicate. The lack of dialogue and how I went about editing it was very consistent with that kind of laconic culture.
I feel Richard Farnsworth’s performance in the film is one of the greatest in all of cinema. When I interviewed the film’s score engineer and re-recording mixer, John Neff, he said that there were instances in which you read Richard his lines when he couldn’t remember them, and that you chose to leave in all the prompts picture-wise, which resulted in Alvin appearing to be a heavy thinker.
Well, let me just specify in honor of the late great Richard Farnsworth that he only had one scene where he had a lot of trouble, and I think this is what John was talking about. First of all, I wasn’t on the set a lot. I was in the cutting room most of the time. The scene that Richard struggled with involves Alvin sharing a war story with a fellow veteran in a bar, and it contained a lot of dialogue. When we shot that, I did sort of sit by Richard and prompt him. That was a particularly calibrated scene, in fact, because Wiley Harker, the other actor, was deeply moved by the dialogue, and you could tell Richard was too. He’s such a deeply feeling person that he doesn’t need to act, but he’s also an excellent actor. Richard knows about the space between the words and is really great at incorporating it. Wiley Harker was so emotional that he was sobbing at certain points, and I really had to finesse that scene quite a bit to keep his emotion in there, but not let it go too far around the bend. He was very upset. Richard was too, but less so, and his pauses did work for the scene. I had to cut some of the air out of Wiley’s takes, while preserving some of the silences, as well as keeping silences in the transitions.
The absolute insistence of the human brain to figure out whatever it is looking at is part of our survival instinct. “Oh, is that a dog over there? Or is it a bear?” When you can’t identify something, your brain goes to work immediately trying to pull up information from the file of your life and your memories in order to explain what is going on. That scene is a perfect example of what occurs when you give an audience a silence. It ends in a wide shot from across the bar on the characters’ backs, and they didn’t let it run long enough. I could’ve easily stayed on that shot for another five or ten seconds. That is such a moving scene, and when you do something abstract or withhold certain information—in this case, keeping the camera on the actors’ backs and not showing their faces, thereby letting the audience sit like these two guys are sitting and contemplating—you will, as a spectator, fill in what the meaning of that is from your own emotional landscape. Those are the films that you can’t stop thinking about in the morning.