How David Lynch Described Twin Peaks to Composer Angelo Badalamenti to Create the Score

The collaboration between a director and a composer is a fascinating one rarely talked about. When successful, it can lead to creations that elevate the visual work and helps it become iconic. That’s exactly what happened with Twin Peaks, the back-then-and-still-now odd Show that none other than David Lynch, created and directed, and changed the way we told stories on TV forever. (dramatic horn sound).

The reason this collaboration is particularly fascinating to me is because the filmmaker needs to put words on feelings, emotions and what she/he sees, and the composer needs to extract whatever she/he can from it, and recreate the feeling, through sound.

I’ve talked about how Jeff Beal worked with David Fincher to create House of Cards score, Clint Mansell with Aronofsky for The Wrestler, Danny Elfman with Tim Burton, and today is about how Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch created Twin Peaks’ score.

Badalamenti has a sharp memory as he basically recreated a very vivid scene of his work session with Lynch.

It was a two steps process. After Badalamenti asked Lynch what he saw, Lynch said:

“Ok Angelo, we’re in a dark woods now, and there’s a soft wind blowing through some sycamore trees, and there’s a moon out, and there’s some animal sounds in the background, and you can hear the hoot of an owl, and you’re in the dark woods, just get me into that beautiful darkness with the soft wind.”

Badalamenti started playing something, Lynch gave him a cue on slowing down the tempo and added:

“Ok Angelo, now we gonna make a change, because from behind the tree in the back of the woods, there’s a very lonely girl, her name is Laura Palmer, and it’s very sad. But get something that matches her.”

You definitely need to watch the video below to see how those words translated into sound. When you know the show, what Lynch says seems obvious, and what Badalamenti created seems like the only score possible.

But if you think that this was just a mood talk, without images to support Lynch’s directions, it’s amazing how accurate this paragraph turned out to be.

Enjoy:

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