Bill Pullman: “The stage direction was just brief, but David Lynch made it into an aria.”

In the director’s reel made in honor of David Lynch’s Writers Guild Lifetime Achievement Award for Screenwriting, which was shown during Kyle MacLachlan’s acceptance on his behalf, Bill Pullman talks about the Lost Highway script.

Wild at Heart had that crazed version of what later was a lot of purview, of darkness in Lost Highway. When I first read Lost Highway, I’d already gotten that like, “Take a look at it, read it. It’s not going to make a lot of sense.” And to me, it made absolute sense. The hauntedness of Patricia, her walking up to that house, and that line in the stage direction, I think, was just brief, but he made it into an aria. David definitely knew how to make a line of description in a script into something incredibly vivid cinematically. I think that’s what the Writers Guild should be celebrating, all the diverse approaches to coming up with ideas in scripts.