Wild at Heart
Short description
Wild at Heart follows Sailor and Lula, two young lovers who go on the run after Sailor is released from prison so they can build a life together far from Lula's mother, Marietta, who violently opposes the relationship. Marietta sets a private detective after them, and when he fails to bring Lula home she turns to a gangster with his own reasons for wanting Sailor dead. As the pursuers close in, the couple crosses a strange American landscape and encounters the dangerous Bobby Peru. The film is based on a novel by Barry Gifford and was written and directed by David Lynch, arriving in 1990 as his seventh feature, four years after Blue Velvet and two years before Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play the lovers, with Willem Dafoe, Diane Ladd, Harry Dean Stanton and J.E. Freeman among a credited cast of forty-one.
The production, a German-American collaboration, was made for about ten million dollars and took roughly fifteen million at the worldwide box office. On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.2 from around 112,000 votes, and on TMDB it has a rating of 7 from a smaller base of just under 2,000 votes, indicating a solid and fairly consistent audience response; a critics' rating of 6.6 from fifty-eight reviews places it somewhat lower with reviewers than with viewers.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is based on the novel by Barry Gifford.
- Many actors (Sherilyn Fenn, Grace Zabriskie, David Patrick Kelly, and others) "came" to the film from the series "Twin Peaks" (1990-1991), which David Lynch was filming around the same time.
- The snakeskin jacket worn by Nicolas Cage's character belonged to Cage himself. After filming, he gave it to Laura Dern.
- Nicolas Cage sang in his own voice in the film.
- Nicolas Cage himself performed the songs in the film.
- During filming, Laura Dern (who played Lulu) smoked four cigarettes in a row at the request of the director and screenwriter David Lynch and fainted.
- Work on the film was completed just one day before its premiere at the 1990 Cannes International Film Festival. The premiere screening was met with enthusiastic applause from the audience. When the jury chairman Bernardo Bertolucci announced that the Palme d'Or was awarded to 'Wild at Heart', the roar of the dissatisfied audience almost drowned out the welcoming shouts, with film critic Roger Ebert acting as an informal leader of the disgruntled. According to the film's screenwriter Barry Gifford, there was a belief that the media wanted Lynch's film to fail.
- Director and screenwriter David Lynch knew in advance that the actors playing the main characters, Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, would be participating in quite explicit scenes, and he wanted them to play completely uninhibitedly when they began to undress in front of the cameras. Before filming began in Los Angeles, he sent Cage and Dern on a kind of vacation together so that the actors would get used to each other's company. According to Cage, during those few days, he and Dern took a trip to Las Vegas.
- Accustomed to playing more 'intellectual' heroines, Laura Dern experienced some difficulties with the image of Lula, who is obsessed with physical pleasures. Dern found that chewing gum in her mouth helped her maintain the right pace when delivering her lines.
- The results of the first preliminary screenings were somewhat disappointing. According to Lynch, about 80 viewers left the hall after the first showing of the film, and about 100 after the second.
- David Lynch wrote the music for some of the film's scenes himself.
- Diane Ladd (Marietta) and Laura Dern (Lula), who play mother and daughter in the script, are actually mother and daughter in real life.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
