“AHS” director talks THAT Cuba Gooding Jr. & Lady Gaga scene
Director Jennifer Lynch discusses “American Horror Story,” her famous dad, childhood crushes, & more
American Horror Story comes to PaleyFest Los Angeles for the sixth straight year this month — why tamper with success? Year in and year out, AHS is one of PaleyFest’s most popular and dynamic events, and we expect nothing less this time around, on closing night, March 26.
Last fall’s iteration of the anthology creepshow, subtitled Roanoke, centered on the mysterious disappearance of the Roanoke Colony, founded by Sir Walter Raleigh in North Carolina in the late sixteenth century. Chapter 3, a particularly eventful one, was directed by Jennifer Lynch, daughter of noted filmmaker David Lynch (Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, plus TV’s Twin Peaks), and a longtime director herself. Jennifer Lynch has spent the bulk of the past six years helming episodic television. She is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a 1990 spinoff of the Twin Peaks TV series
Jennifer spoke to us recently from Toronto, where she was shooting an episode of FX’s The Strain. She is also developing multiple TV projects of her own, which hopefully we will one day get to see. Here follow excerpts from the interview.
Paley Center: We can’t help wondering if you are drawn specifically to the horror genre, considering you’ve directed episodes of The Strain, The Walking Dead, American Horror Story, plus some of your film work?
Jennifer Lynch: For as long as I can remember I have adored what I consider to be the human monster. I think that all of us have a little bit of that in us, and while these shows tend to be looked at strictly as horror, they also deal a great deal with humanity, and I like the way people are forced to change their behavior when they find themselves in situations they aren’t accustomed to. I remember being small, and everyone’s got that terror about something being underneath their bed, and I sort of loved that, and I felt badly for whatever might be hiding under my bed, so I would have my hand down, in case it wanted to hold mine, because I thought, “Anytime I hide, it’s because I’m afraid.” So, I think I’m drawn to what propels us in horror and also to the part of horror that lives, at least for sure in me, as much as the light. The planet is half light and half dark, and I’m sort of grooving on treating characters that way. But I’m also a big fan of comedy and really enjoy romance and action; love all kinds of stuff. I think I’m drawn to moments and things that echo my own personal experiences, which have been both horrific and joyful.
PC: That’s amazing, about the monster under the bed.
JL: That may come from, you know I was born with severely clubbed feet, and they put me in casts up to my waist within an hour of my birth, and I never crawled. Some of that’s reflected in the baby in Eraserhead [David Lynch’s first full-length film as a director, released in 1977].
I felt a bit monstrous, and I think all of us do. I think we all feel a bit different, which is something I try to play with in Laura’s diary as well, because I tend to think the biggest crime humanity commits is that we forget we’re all in this together, so it separates us. So I felt like a monster, and yet I didn’t think I was bad. But I suffered.
“My first two crushes were Gene Wilder and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
I love a joyful, absurd, sort of primal monster, and that I guess speaks to who I am, who my parents are [her mom, Peggy Reavey, is a painter], and the fact that I grew up the way I did. So I’m more compassionate toward the monster or the serial killer — not because they can be justified, but because I feel like I understand it. People aren’t born that way; they make certain choices based on their own experience, and so becomes the wreckage.
PC: That seems pretty relevant to Episode 3 of America Horror Story: Roanoke, because there’s a lot of backstory in that episode and we start to understand why “The Butcher” — the Kathy Bates character — is who she is.
JL: Absolutely. Priscilla too was born and considered a monster, and yet she and her spirit were greatly motivated by the things she felt deprived of or hurt by. Again, it doesn’t make her behavior OK, but it makes it understandable.
PC: It’s interesting, given your father’s involvement in Twin Peaks, and the fact that your grandfather worked for the National Forest Service, that the woods play such an important role in this episode. Do you think of the woods as a nurturing place or a frightening place or some combination of the two?
JL: They are as equally nurturing as they are deathly terrifying. Without getting weird I’d say that’s very mother and child.
PC: Your dad is famous for tearing up scripts and improvising on the spot. In American Horror Story are you tied pretty much to the script or are you playing around with it, as the director?
JL: There’s a little bit of room in prep to discuss things that I’m inspired to discuss or suggest, but as a whole you have a network and a plan. It’s your job to respect that, and yet cross that gate in ways that suggest you’ve been there. Ryan Murphy and Tim Minear and John Gray are all great people to work with, because, ultimately, what they care about is the story and those characters, so a good idea’s a good idea, regardless of what time it arrives. It’s more a puzzle than a problem. I try, without changing anything, to say, “This is what they want; how do I make that something I can believe in?” And hopefully I get home at night having done that.
PC: One of the things I noticed was that in the scene where Kathy Bates comes back from the woods for her reckoning with her son and the other people who cast her out, you cut to outside the tent and film in silhouette for a bit, before you go back in for the slaughter. Was that your idea?
JL: Yeah, I wanted to do a lot of things in shadow. For me there’s a lot of magic in the shapes we make with our bodies when we do things. It’s a language in and of itself and I try to pay attention to that when I’m trying to capture a moment: what shape does Mom make in this? What shape does her son make? What does it look like from the outside? Also, and I did this in what was called Rabbit, but they made me call it Chained, which is a feature I shot, to me it’s more frightening to hear someone screaming than to see what’s happening to them, and this was something that allowed me to see the shapes they make and then imagine what was going on inside, and of course we jumped back in there to see some of the goodness [laughs].
PC: Do you have a favorite scene in the episode?
JL: I think the two feral boys nursing on the sow, and I also really enjoyed the scene with the social worker, though them spitting on her got cut out. There was quite a nice moment where one of them spit on her face, and that was pretty effective [laughing]. But I also love the normal moment of quiet outburst, the terror that can be a whisper, the weakness sometimes of yelling, and I got to play with a lot of those moments in that episode of well.
PC: What about the famous scene with Cuba Gooding and Lady Gaga? Can you fill us in on that?
JL: That was one of the highlights of my career, I have to tell you, between Sarah Paulson, Chaz Bono, Cuba, and Lady Gaga. That was at Griffith Park, night for night, everybody was really tired and wound up, and it was kind of magical. Once you reach a level of, “Here comes Sarah Paulson upon a dressed pig and two hillbillies fondling themselves whilst watching a man entranced and a mysterious creature having sex in the woods,” you know, you have to roll with that. I found myself there in the woods in Griffith Park able to have my little monitor and be just feet away and make some suggestions about what people might be thinking or doing while going into this. It was a beautiful night.
PC: So the one thing we haven’t talked about is what it was like directing the actors in this episode, or in this type of program, which is pretty heightened. Leslie Jordan makes his season debut in this episode, as the psychic Cricket Marlowe. Talk about commanding the screen!
JL: Leslie is incredible — not only one of my newly favorite people, but exceptionally talented, a combination of brave and curious, which is sort of beautiful, because he remains as much a child as he is wise because of his age, so he’s a lot of fun to work with. He really was brought onto the cast almost at the last minute, and we were going to shoot with him four days in, and suddenly the schedule changed and he was shooting close to five days of dialogue the next day, and he came in and nailed it. He had been allowed to interpret his own version of Cricket, but he listened very carefully to what Ryan had told him, and he did a great job. He’s a little powerhouse. It was more conversations with him about what else we could try that about any sort of an adjustment. And bless his heart, I had him doing some crazy stuff.
David Bushman is a television curator at The Paley Center for Media in New York and the co-author of Twin Peaks FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About a Place Both Wonderful and Strange (2016) and the upcoming Buffy the Vampire Slayer FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Sunnydale’s Slayer of Vampires, Demons, and Other Forces of Darkness (2017).
