Thirty-five years ago, the question of who murdered doomed prom queen Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks was on everybody’s lips. Even Queen Elizabeth II cut short a private audience with a Beatle at Buckingham Palace to avoid missing the cult TV phenomenon. “Paul McCartney told us he had been invited to perform music to celebrate the Queen’s birthday, and she had to rush upstairs to see who killed Laura Palmer,” remembers Mark Frost, who created the show with visionary director David Lynch.
When Hill Street Blues writer Frost teamed up with Lynch, they shifted the small screen’s Overton Window forever, injecting surrealism and art-house style into the mainstream. Fish in the (damn fine) coffee percolator? Backwards-talking dreamlike sequences? Log-carrying oracles? Twin Peaks – spanning two series and a 1992 prequel movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me – was compulsively weird and acted as a blueprint for future prestige dramas such as Lost and Stranger Things. In 2017, Frost and Lynch reunited for Showtime’s uncompromising third lap, AKA Twin Peaks: The Return, memorably described as the “pure heroin vision of David Lynch”.
From California (although his Zoom background is, aptly, the iconic Twin Peaks waterfall), Frost spoke to NME about the enduring influence of the series, the chances of a revival and the legacy of Lynch, who died in January this year from emphysema.
Hello Mark! Twin Peaks was so radically different in 1990 to the point where even the cast and ABC network executives were unsure of how it would be received. Did David Lynch and yourself trust that audiences would understand it?
Mark Frost: “We trusted the process. We sat down and wrote the pilot in three weeks – it came out in a burst. We’d written together for a couple of years up to that point and we knew when, as David was fond of saying, ‘you got a big one on the line.’ Then it was just about: can we realise it and navigate the tricky political circumstances of network television and its limitations at the time? I knew a lot about those limitations, but I felt I had a blueprint for how to crack the safe.”
Rewatching the pilot, it’s full of raw grief. Does it hit differently for you following David Lynch’s death?
“Well, I haven’t watched it since he left us and, honestly, I don’t watch the show very often. I mean, David and I talked a lot about issues like this. When you’re working that closely together for the length of time that we knew each other, you get to know another person pretty well. I’m confident to say I don’t think he had any fear of death whatsoever. And I think he’s doing just fine – wherever he may be.”
What are your favourite memories of working with David Lynch?
“I remember the laughter. We just cracked each other up. Writing is a hard, solitary experience 99 per cent of the time, but this was different. This was two people in a room playing tennis – we’d found somebody who could return-serve, and we could get long volleys going… I don’t want to torture the metaphor! And we had a hell of a good time doing it. We enjoyed each other’s company. When you work like that, the conversation tends to be wide-ranging and involve what’s going on in your life and what you think about contemporary issues and eternal issues; all those things are in the hopper. That’s what I miss.”
What made him so special?
“He was fearlessly creative in the face of anything that came his way, and he was eternally challenging himself to meet that moment and do something more than he had before; it was an ethos and way of living. He was an artist first, last and foremost. It was a pleasure to be in his company, to be his friend and work together as closely as we did.”
When did you last talk to him?
“A couple of months before he left us, we talked about his diagnosis of emphysema, what he was facing and how resolute he was that this wasn’t going to diminish his creativity or prevent him from expressing himself. I thought that was very in character. We were friends ‘til the end and he went out the way he wanted to go; you gotta tip your hat to him for that.”
Lynch implied that he was interested in expanding the world of Twin Peaks via waitress Carrie Page. Were you talking about continuing the series?
“A little bit, yeah. We had a little bit of a recipe forming; nothing terribly formal, but it was in the wind. I felt there were uncertainties about his health, so I didn’t press him on it, but nothing really stopped the flow of his creativity. I’m kind of the same way, so yeah, we’ll see what happens.”
Can you say anything about what those tentative plans might have involved – is it something you can still see happening?
“I mean, I honestly don’t know yet. It’s still kind of too soon, but it’s something I’ll get around to thinking about long and hard.”
Even if this is the end of Twin Peaks, at least it bowed out with The Return which was unsparing in its vision. You even turned David Bowie’s character into a kettle!
“We were talking to David Bowie about coming back and he wanted to do it. He obviously was battling serious health issues [liver cancer] and, at a certain point, he called us and said, ‘I’m not going to be able to do it’. We really thought long and hard about that. And David [Lynch] tried to – and did – come up with a startling visual representation of what that might be in a way only he could. And I think David Bowie would have probably got a kick out of it had he been around to see it. I certainly did!”
David Lynch’s speech as FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole about accepting trans character Denise Bryson became a social media rallying cry in the climate of rising transphobia – how did that feel?
“The line ‘fix their hearts or die’ became popular, and I couldn’t have been happier, because Denise was one of the first trans characters on network television. I’ve had so many people come up to me over the years telling me how much that meant to them.”
The core of Twin Peaks is the sexual exploitation of young girls by an entire community. Given the headlines we’ve seen over the past few years about the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, does it seem more timely than ever?
“It does. Remember this all came together at the tail-end of the [President Ronald] Reagan era in this country, where there was a wilful blinding to the underlying ugliness to a lot of, I guess, capitalism or sexual politics, that hadn’t really yet been addressed. But it was bubbling up under the surface. That’s the sort of thing a writer tries to stay attuned to and what we wanted to capture: that there was something rotten in the state of Denmark, even more so 25 years later, as we have seen.”
In an age of revivals, Kyle MacLachlan (Agent Dale Cooper) has said he “doesn’t think” anyone should attempt a “crazy reboot” of Twin Peaks with younger Hollywood stars – what are your thoughts?
“No one’s come to me about it, and we own the property. Part of our strategy going in was this was a world we had created and owned, so nobody could exploit it in destructive or stupid ways. We wanted to stay true to what we’d done, and that will certainly be my guiding principle going forward with whatever happens with the show or where it goes from here. We’ve set a standard that we have to hold ourselves to.”
Do you have a favourite moment of Twin Peaks?
“The episode where we wrapped things up in season two where they catch the killer, Leland confesses and ultimately dies in the jail cell is an enormously powerful scene. Another one is more personal to me, which is the first scene we shot in The Return. It was filmed a year before we started production. My dad [Warren Frost] played Doc Hayward on the show, and that was based on his own father-in-law. Dad was just entering the final stages of his life and battling the onset of dementia. I said: ‘We need to write a scene for him. It’s going to have to be like a Zoom call.’ We came up with a way of doing it at my family’s place in upstate New York – where my parents had been married. My dad and mum were there, along with my brother [Scott Frost] who’d worked on the show. My son, who was 12 at the time, was holding the cue cards for my dad.”
“David got on Skype with him and they shot the scene together. It was virtually the last scene he ever acted in. It’s incredibly meaningful and I felt we’d written a scene that was up to the task. That’s a moment I’ll never let go of.
All episodes of ‘Twin Peaks’ launch on MUBI June 13. The original US pilot episode screens as part of the BFI’s Film on Film Festival on June 15 accompanied by a Q&A with Kyle MacLachlan