David Lynch's long-time production partner and writer of The Straight Story reflects on a legendary creative partnership and the gentlest of Lynch's films.
Released in 1999, The Straight Story is often overlooked among David Lynch's filmography for being the most 'conventional' or the least 'Lynchian' of his projects. Co-written, edited, and produced by Mary Sweeney – whose collaborations with Lynch spanned 20 years – the film has finally received a long-awaited 4K remaster from StudioCanal. To mark this release, we caught up with Sweeney to reflect on where The Straight Story fits within hers and Lynch's collaborative oeuvre.
LWLies: There are a couple of conflicting stories about the origins of this film. How did The Straight Story initially come about?
Sweeney: I read about the real Alvin Straight’s story, and it just stuck with me. It never went away. I found out who had the rights – it was [American film producer] Ray Stark. He had an option and he just renewed it annually. I kept tracking it and, four years later, in 1998, Alvin Straight died and Stark didn’t renew the option with the heirs.
Until then, had your research gone any deeper than reading about the story?
I wouldn’t let myself actively research it! I didn’t want to let myself fall too deep in it if I was never going to get the rights. We were doing Lost Highway at the time. I got the rights in early ’98 and by that time it just hadn’t let go of me. I decided I wanted to write it, so I enlisted a childhood friend of mine [John Roach] and we wrote the script together. We did do research then. First of all, I met [Alvin’s] children in getting the rights, and that was pretty interesting. There were seven of them living in Iowa. Then John and I drove the trip. We met a lot of people in his hometown, including this elderly couple who owned the local newspaper in Laurens, Iowa. We spent an afternoon with the seven kids recording them telling stories. That’s always interesting, because in a spread of seven children they each had very different parents.
When we finished a draft we were happy with, we gave the script to David in June. I had been talking to David about this project since I started thinking about it – not that I was asking him anything, but he would always make it clear that “that’s really great, but that’s not my cup of tea.” I gave it to him as someone I wanted to be the first person to read the script, and he fell in love with it. We were shooting in August. A lot of people were interested because people love David. Producers and financiers were jumping on the idea that he would do this very simple, very different kind of film. He absolutely loved it.
This was the first time you’d edited a film from your own screenplay. How protective did you feel?
I work very intuitively. I was keen to make the story work. I feel that I am the first audience and that if I’m not having an emotional response, I’m not doing my job. I had no problem dropping things – it wasn’t killing any babies at all; if they didn’t work, I didn’t want them in there, and I felt very privileged to be in that position as the writer and editor. With film, you can get so transported, floating along with it. You want to have people floating along with it. I really love the use of transitions and the double and triple exposures that created moments of dreaminess – and that goes across all David’s films that I edited.
Back in the day when it was film, you really didn’t have much opportunity as an apprentice editor or an assistant editor to actually cut scenes. You didn’t have the technology to make your own films and shoot things on a phone, or things like that, so I really started editing with David on Episode 2.7 of the original Twin Peaks. With David’s stories there are a lot of points at which people are intentionally destabilised and don’t know what’s going on – this isn’t true with The Straight Story so much – but those are the times you need to be sure that people have some space. They need visual space, audio space, and temporal space to allow themselves to start to solve it from their own emotions. Right in that episode of Twin Peaks, I used all those techniques. His material seemed to require it of me.
David considered The Straight Story a very abstract film and one of the hardest things to do, because it’s just so simple and so slow, and that’s a much harder thing to do than something that’s so full of mystery and action and confusion. It was the nature of how it was written, it was the nature of how he directed it, and we just stayed with that pace.
Knowing you’d be producing and editing The Straight Story, how specific had you been about shots and visuals in the script?
I mean, the landscape was very much a part of it. It was unavoidable. Bobby Z, who was the guy who did that first slow-motion over the top of all the buildings downtown in The Fugitive, did those shots of the fields being harvested with the fantastic DP team. All that stuff is so gorgeous and they did a great job. We had the good fortune to get the financing so quickly that we had this wonderful bridge over from summer to autumn. We [started] shooting in August and we finished some time in October. We moved 350 miles east – we had a base in Laurens, another base camp partway across, and a base at the end of the film. We did travel that distance, and the trees were all turning, and we were crossing the Mississippi – and that was all really part of the magic of this project.
After The Straight Story came two more Lynch collaborations – Mulholland Drive, which retains a certain lyricality, and then Inland Empire, which feels like a different type of film entirely. How did you find progressing onto these two projects?
I think that Mulholland Drive is so outstanding, it’s such a beautiful film, but I feel like The Straight Story was such a palate cleanser after Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway. Mulholland Drive is like a reboot. The beginning of Inland Empire was just DIY. For Rabbits, we built a set in our back yard, it was coming out of David’s pocket, and he had no idea that it would end up a feature film at the time. It kind of went on like that for about three years, and part of that time was when he wrote that long monologue for Laura [Dern] and she came up and they recorded it. It was just piecing things together and then he got it in his mind that he’d decided to make it a feature.
I remember when we were making The Straight Story, standing in the cornfield with seven production trucks and a couple of honey wagons on this two-lane highway out in the middle of nowhere, David just looked at our line producer and said, “I just want to do something simple. Just a simple film.” [Inland Empire], in my eyes, was like a return to the control and independence of making Eraserhead over a period of five years, living in the stables at Doheny Mansion. The control over using the digital cameras, saying he was never going to use film again, was some kind of declaration of independence. I think he was on some revolutionary kind of activity, but actually going back to his roots in filmmaking.
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