The actress remembers director David Lynch stepping in on her behalf before she learned to advocate for herself, threatening to punch anyone in the face who wasn’t supposed to be on the closed set.
Patricia Arquette is remembering a deeply uncomfortable experience she had to endure earlier in her career when she starred in David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway. Luckily, the director stepped in after crew members said “gross things” during a nude scene.
It’s just further testament to why the intimacy coordinators established after the 2017 MeToo movement in Hollywood are such an essential part of a safe and comfortable set for everyone involved. For Arquette, it was a moment she learned to advocate for herself.
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The movie was already a twisted, mentally exhausting experience just trying to follow the narrative — it was a David Lynch film, after all — so the last thing the young actress needed was another layer of stress piled on top of it.
Arquette, who was 28 years old at the time of the film, spoke about her experience making it last week at the Series Mania forum. At one point, she opened up about the film’s intimate scenes, which she said were already an emotional struggle for her.
“I was so extremely modest, I would take a bath in the dark,” Arquette revealed. “The scene when my character had to strip was terrifying to me.”
To make matters worse, Arquette had to endure side commentary from some members of the film’s crew. “Some of the guys were saying crude things and I told David, ‘I am not comfortable — they are saying gross things,'” she recalled.
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“He said, ‘You read the script–” before cutting off. Arquette suggested that it took Lynch a few moments to process her words, because his immediate follow-up was, “‘Wait, who said what?'”
“When I came back, all these men were looking at their feet, all apologetic,” Arquette said.
Later during the production, she found the strength within herself to make her own stand for a sex scene. “I do have a tough side, I’ll tell ya. It was supposed to be a closed set. I said: ‘If I take this robe off and I look at you, and I know you don’t have to be there, I am going to punch you in the face.'”
She also said she told her love interest co-star, Balthazar Getty, “Just keep your hands on my tits. I would rather you hold them than the whole world saw them.”
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As for those people who immersed themselves in Lynch’s vision and still came out a bit confused … well, Arquette did her best to try and explain the film’s plot as she admitted she was confused, too.
“I would ask David, ‘Am I playing two characters, am I playing a ghost?’ He would say, ‘What do you think, Patrish?'”
So here’s what she thinks: “It’s a woman looked at through the distorted view of a psychotic misogynist. He hates women, he doesn’t quite trust her, even though she is his wife.”
“He kills her but can’t remember it, then he recreates himself as this virile young man and meets her again,” Aquette continued. “And now, she actually wants to f–k him and she is in love with him. But even in this version, she is a dirty whore.”
“In this man’s mind, a woman is always the monster. No matter what,” she concluded. “I thought about Jezebel and Salomé for this part, all these bad girls of the Bible.”
So that should just about clear all that up, right?
