DAVID LYNCH'S "WILD AT HEART" (1990) / IMPRINT BLU-RAY REVIEW

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, this is Cameron. Today I'm going to be doing a review for one of my most favorite films, David Lynch's Wild at Heart. This is the new Imprint Blu-ray from Australia. This is an all region Blu-ray. It does come in this huge After Dark Neo Noir Cinema box set.

[00:00:23]It comes with Unlawful Entry in 4K, The Getaway with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, Mulholland Falls, not Mulholland Drive but Mulholland Falls with Nick Nolte, Freeway with Reese Witherspoon and City of Industry with Harvey Keitel. And you get a nice David Lynch quote on the back, too, which I didn't notice until now. It says, "There's a beguiling and magnetic mood. There's so much darkness and there's so much room to dream. There are mysteries and there are people in trouble and uneasiness." This is just a Blu-ray, not a 4K. Now, I have heard that there will be a 4K of Wild at Heart sometime this year. I have no idea who is releasing it yet, but rest assured, it is apparently coming. First up, you should know it's not a new transfer. I believe this is the same transfer as the Shout Select. Also, this is still the US theatrical cut. So, if you were hoping to see Bobby Peru's head get blown off without the 1 second of smoke, which is the version that won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, that is still not included. Yes, you do get that shot as a bonus feature, but it has not been integrated back into the film. Maybe one day it will, but for right now, we still have the US theatrical cut. Now, most of the bonus features from the previous Shout Select Blu-ray have been imported over, with the exception of the deleted scenes. So, there are no deleted scenes of Wild at Heart included on this release. So, you'll have to keep that other one if you do go ahead and get this. That being said, there are some really cool bonus features on here. We have an audio commentary with Monty Montgomery, who was the producer of this film. Now, if you don't know who Monty Montgomery is, he played the cowboy in Mulholland Drive. He also was the original director of this movie. He was friends with Barry Gifford, and so he got a hold of the galleys. Monty then asked David Lynch if he would come on and executive produce it. David said, "Okay, but let me read the book." And so Monty did, and David came back and said, "You know what? I love the book, and I want to make this into a movie." And Monty was like, "Uh okay." Monty then stepped aside and came on as a producer.

[00:02:43]So, we have a commentary with him. The bad news is the commentary, while pleasant, is a little hit and miss because the interviewer is doing her best to draw him out, ask him questions about the production. As we all know that David Lynch is very hands-on with the material and on the set. So, many of the things the interviewer asks Monty about, he just doesn't know or doesn't recall.

[00:03:10]But, it is still pleasant to listen to because he does throw out a couple cool nuggets. For instance, in the first 30 minutes, we find out that him and Lynch watched Dune together on laser disc because David wanted to watch it. Also, they utilized primarily one hotel room to shoot most of the sex scenes in.

[00:03:27]That's kind of fun to hear. One thing that I had always heard was that David Lynch loved the characters of Sailor and Lula. So, he didn't want to conclude the film with the book's ending where Sailor walks away from Lula. He wanted to kind of bring them back together. He called Barry Gifford apparently and said, "Hey, in a later book, do they get back together?" Barry said, "Yes, they do."

[00:03:46]So, David said, "Great. I'm going to now create this awesome happy ending." But, Monty Montgomery tells a different story. He says that him and David were out at dinner with the head of Samuel Goldwyn, the studio who was financing Wild at Heart. And the person at the time running that company said to David at dinner, "You will have a happy ending, right?" And David's like, "Let me think about that." And then after dinner, David said to Monty Montgomery, "You know, I'm going to give them the greatest happy ending they've ever seen." So, that's very different than the version we've heard over the years. Next up, we have a nearly 20-minute interview with Willem Dafoe.

[00:04:23]Couple of things to note, Willem Dafoe was Dennis Hopper's understudy for Blue Velvet. So, if it didn't work out with Dennis, Dennis would have been let go and Willem would have been brought in.

[00:04:33]So, I had no idea. Now, we do learn in another interview on the disc that John Malkovich was David Lynch's preferred choice of Frank Booth, but he wasn't available. So, they brought in Dennis. And if Dennis hadn't worked out, it would have been Willem Dafoe. Also, Willem was not told that the toilet in the Big Tuna, Texas motel room was not a working toilet. And they did three takes, and he peed for real in all three takes. And then someone had to go in there and clean the urine out. So, now Willem also says that he doesn't believe that Bobby Peru was actually in the Marines. He thinks that's a made-up story that Bobby came up with to appear better than he was.

[00:05:20]But my favorite thing that Willem Dafoe said is right at the end of the interview, someone asked David Lynch why he cast Willem Dafoe as Bobby Peru. And David Lynch answered, "Because Clark Gable's dead." Now, if you stop and think about how Bobby Peru looks and what Clark Gable looked like, now I can't unsee it. All right, the next interview is one with casting director Johanna Ray, and it's wonderful. She says that Wild at Heart was perhaps her favorite thing she ever cast for David Lynch just because of the wide variety of people he needed for the production. But the big interview is with editor Duwayne Dunham. It's about a 22-minute interview and it is fascinating. Both him and David Lynch's former sound man Alan Splat who had been working with him ever since the short film days, they were both living in Berkeley, California at the time David wanted to edit Blue Velvet. And David wanted to get out of Los Angeles. So he was like, you know what? I'll just take the film up to Berkeley. Duwayne was like, why do you want to work with me?

[00:06:25]We've never worked together. And I guess David remembered him when he went in for the interview for Return of the Jedi. So he was like, you know what? I think you're my guy. And Duwayne wasn't so sure, but hey, it turns out Duwayne was David Lynch's guy. So here's a couple cool things. He only edited Wild at Heart because he was offered to direct episodes of Twin Peaks. Duwayne Dunham had another job and he said, David, I can't leave that job to edit Wild at Heart. He had just come off editing the pilot of Twin Peaks and he had secured another job because David didn't think he was going to direct a film for a while. David, of course, fell in love with the book Wild at Heart by Barry Gifford. So he said, Duwayne, I need you to edit the film.

[00:07:04]And Duwayne's like, I can't. I already booked another job. So he said, but if you can make it more appealing, I will.

[00:07:09]So David said, fine, you can direct episodes of Twin Peaks as well as edit Wild at Heart. So that's how he got Duwayne Dunham on board. Also, the rough cut of Wild at Heart, which Duwayne Dunham says was edited very tightly, came in at 4 hours and 20 minutes. And both him and David looked at it and said, this is a disaster. So David Lynch was thinking about reshooting a new opening and a bunch of things. And then Duwayne talked him off that ledge and said, look, what if we rearrange the first half of the film before they get to Big Tuna, Texas? What if we take the killing at the end of act two and make it the opening scene. Go back and look at the opening of Wild at Heart. You'll notice they're wearing clothes and then 20 minutes later they'll be back in those same clothes because those two scenes were supposed to be back-to-back and they split them so that they could rearrange the entire first half of the movie. Now, because they did that, they needed things to connect those scenes.

[00:08:10]And this is where primarily all the match striking came from. So, all these things that, you know, we watch and we go, "Wow, what an amazing motif of fire and passion." Pretty much all done in post-production as a way of covering up their cuts and their transitions in the first half. That is why the match striking is primarily in the first half of the movie and not really in the second half. Also, a lot of The Wizard of Oz visual motifs were added in post-production. He also talks about Johnny Farragut's death scene in the movie or the extended version of it that we still have never seen. He says that there was an audience for the test screening and 120 people or so got up and left. David and Dwayne after went to the studio and said, "You know, you got us a Disney audience. We need David Lynch fans in here to watch this."

[00:09:02]So, the studio said, "Fine. We'll bring you David Lynch fans." And so, apparently they packed this theater full of David Lynch fans. Another 120 to 130 people got up and left. David and Dwayne said, "All right, we're going to cut it." Also, Dwayne Dunham was putting the final editorial touches of Wild at Heart on the day it premiered at Cannes. He was in the projection room still cutting and making adjustments on the day of the premiere. And then Dwayne Dunham also says that the first time he ever saw a David Lynch movie was when he was working on The Empire Strikes Back in London and he saw a private screening of Eraserhead with two other people, George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick.

[00:09:43]Can you imagine watching Eraserhead in a private theater with George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick?

[00:09:51]That's how I Dwayne Dunham was introduced to David Lynch. But the coolest bonus feature on this disc has to be, are you ready for this? The isolated music and effects track. So all the dialogue has been removed, but all the music is intact, all the sound effects are intact. No other release has done that. And you know how great the sound is in Wild at Heart. Randy Thom did an extraordinary job. So all in all, I think this is a very good disc. You get really cool interviews, you get a nice little commentary, you also get an isolated music effects track. Now if you want to wait for the inevitable 4K, maybe a lot of these extras will be imported onto that. Listen, if you're a David Lynch fan and you love Wild at Heart, this is a must. If you can, if you can afford it, pick it up.