Blue Velvet Revisited: Unseen picha From a New Documentary on the Making of David Lynch’s Classic 

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Thirty-one years ago, a young filmmaker name Peter Braatz received word from his idol that he was ready for his arrival. “Bring lots of money,” the letter read. “We’re making a very low-budget film.” It would be shot in North Carolina, in a town Braatz, who is German, had to look up on a map—“What is this Wilmington? I thought”—but he and a friend traveled to America and found their way to an agreed-upon spot, and it was there, in a Burger King next to the Greyhound bus station, that Braatz first met David Lynch.

In the coming weeks that August, Lynch would welcome his cast to the set of

: Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan, and Jack Nance. Rossellini had just appeared in her first starring role in an American film,

; just two years into her role as the face of Lancôme, she would wear vamp-red lipstick and eyeshadow blue as pool-cue chalk for her role as tortured torch singer Dorothy. (The movie would make her acting career, but it was so controversial, her agency initially dropped her, and the nuns who taught her in school called to tell her they were praying for her.) Hopper, newly sober after kicking an astounding drinking and cocaine habit (28 beers a day and a bottle of rum on the side, he went on the record as saying), would make his comeback in

that same year. “You have to let me play Frank; I

Frank!” he said to Lynch of the gas-huffing villain Frank Booth. Dern was known then mainly for

, playing the part of naive voyeur Jeffrey, stumbling into the dark underworld of his seemly, sunny hometown, was practically a rite of passage for his

“Beneath that appearance there are so many things happening,” says Lynch at one point in

, the ruminative making-of documentary Braatz has just completed from the Super 8 footage and still photography he shot that summer, along with a soundtrack just out from Crammed Discs. The director of

, dressed in his customary khaki pants and white oxford shirt buttoned to the collar, sitting on a porch swing.

Braatz, speaking from Slovenia recently, where he was in postproduction for the documentary, calls Lynch “a gentleman.” “He was very kind, very friendly, never furious,” he says. “He reminds me a bit of James Stewart.” Back in film school in Germany, he’d written an essay on

, translated it into English, and mailed it to Lynch, care of Mel Brooks. Mel Brooks? “He was a producer of

,” Braatz gently reminds. “My school had a book of American production addresses, and his happened to be one of them. Hats off to Mr. Brooks that he was so generous to forward it.” The essay and a request to study with the director actually made it to Lynch, who responded, on

, he would introduce Braatz to the crew: “This is Peter. He wrote a poem about

, evocative and captivating and strange, a cinema voyeur’s behind-the-scenes ticket to the making of the controversial film that is now regarded as a voyeur classic. A “meditation,” he calls it. There is no directorial voice-over and no live sound for what he shot; Braatz brought to Wilmington 60 rolls of Super 8 film, one for each day of shooting, which he plays over music and splices in interviews he did with the cast and crew. “Swimming in music, which has the interviews inside it. Black-and-white photographs and color film and Polaroids,” he says. It’s not as formless as he makes it sound; in fact, it follows the chronology of the film: Jeffrey’s discovery of a severed ear in a field, Jeffrey watching Dorothy deliver a haunting “Blue Velvet” at The Slow Club, Jeffrey hiding in Dorothy’s closet . . . .

from that ear—the film’s central metaphor and a seashell-like portal to this small-town underworld—but also from Bobby Vinton’s 1960s version of the song. “There was something mysterious about it,” he said. “It made me think about things. And the first things I thought about were lawns—lawns and the neighborhood.” As Lynch would later do in

’s small town of Lumberton (an actual town in North Carolina, about 75 miles from where Lynch filmed) a nostalgic, iconic, any-town, anytime aesthetic: saturated colors, old cars, and classic teenybopper clothing, for instance. Trees and diners and roadhouses and nightclubs.

is turning 30 this summer—the anniversary is a coincidence, Braatz says, though he hopes

will have a film festival premiere this year. He was unable to initially get funding for the documentary in 1985 after

’s mixed reception, and put the footage aside for years. The time elapsed isn’t really evident until you see the behind-the-scenes moments on set in Braatz’s film: the very dated world of Wilmington, the very ’80s fashions of the crew, MacLachlan’s near-mullet, the cars. There are shots of Lynch, a painter who initially studied visual art, adjusting Hopper’s wig and mask, or painting a sign himself, doing his best to render every detail a little bit timeless, a little bit utterly normal, or a little bit deliberately off, to give everything in the film the quality that is now known as simply “Lynchian.”

“David was producing every piece of art,” Braatz says. “He’s writing, he’s creating props, he’s making set decoration. You see him in my film working on each piece himself. So it’s not just a portrait of

“I admired him tremendously; he was like my older brother who I wanted to be in the ’60s,” Rossellini says in the documentary. When she came to Wilmington, Braatz said, it was “as if the whole continent of Europe had arrived” with this beautiful and unexpectedly down-to-earth actress. She would date Lynch for several years.

“I’m not sure that David is a film buff or ever has been,” Hopper says in

. “I don’t find that necessary . . . I find that

. [Luis] Buñuel was dealing with Surrealism and Dada, but David is dealing with his own subconscious, his own way of looking at things, and it’s not emulative of anybody or imitative of anybody. It’s his own vision. And it’s wonderfully naive.” The movie, Hopper believed, was “going to be very funny.”

Braatz and his friend were permitted to read the entire script the night they arrived on set. “We thought, wow, this is a superfast crime story with a lot of action and brutality and sex and surrealistic ideas. It was very exciting to read, but it was very different from the final movie,” he says. “If some typical genre filmmaker like Scorsese had done the film, it would be completely different. It would be like ABBA doing Led Zeppelin.”

What Lynch was shooting was 25 minutes longer. “Sound is so important to him, he adds so many things in postproduction,” Braatz says. “Ants crawling under a glass or—how do you call it in English?—a match that goes on fire. These things are mostly related very closely to the sound of the picture.” In the film’s most difficult scene, when Frank assaults Dorothy, the set was closed to all but a skeleton crew. “It was clear it was intimate and it should stay that way,” says Braatz. He remembers listening, like MacLachlan’s Jeffrey cowering and watching through the slatted door of Dorothy’s closet, to the sound of it being filmed.

He shares Lynch’s sonic leanings, envisioning a documentary where the soundtrack was paramount. “I wanted to keep some similar atmosphere throughout the whole film,” he says. He enlisted the bands Tuxedomoon and Cult With No Name for the soundtrack, and added title cards created by Jonathan Barnbrook, designer of David Bowie’s

Listen to “Do It for Van Gogh” by Cult With No Name from the

“The music provided the perfect atmosphere for that. It’s like a trip back in time, like a time tunnel. I’m revisiting my old Super 8 material. It’s not music like Badalamenti [Angelo, Lynch’s longtime soundtrack composer, whom he first worked with on

] would do. In my first film I tried to make some strange sounds and industrial noise like David does. But I wanted to create some distance here, and to let the audience have some space for their own thoughts, to read between the lines,” explains Braatz.

Above all, Braatz remembers, “It was a fantastic time, it was a beautiful time, it was a small paradise for a film student. He was so generous to let me be there.

“One day on set I got the news and I said to David, ‘Today Orson Welles has died. What does that mean to you?’” Braatz continues. “And he said, ‘Well, he made one of the greatest movies in the world, but then he put so much weight on it was only a matter of time for him.’ Still the world doesn’t seem the same when someone really great goes. The world is not the same then. And on the same day, Yul Brynner died. The crew was [made up of] film gypsies, traveling from movie to movie, and they were all freaking out. We were like, ‘Who the fuck is Yul Brynner?!

died. He made the best film of the 20th century!’”

Above, see a slideshow of original unseen still photographs from

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