35 Amazing Photos From the Set of “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (1992)

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is a 1992 psychological horror film directed by David Lynch, and co-written by Lynch and Robert Engels. It serves as a prequel to seasons one and two of the television series Twin Peaks (1990–1991), created and produced by Mark Frost and Lynch. It begins with the FBI’s investigation into the murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley) before shifting to the last seven days of the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), a popular-but-troubled high school student in the fictional town of Twin Peaks, Washington. Palmer’s murder was the primary plot thread of the TV series.

Greenlit shortly after the TV series was cancelled, Fire Walk with Me had a much darker tone than the TV series and did not address many of season two's unfinished narratives, including its cliffhanger ending. Although most of the television cast reprised their roles for the film, many comparatively lighthearted scenes featuring town residents were cut. In addition, the series’ main star, Kyle MacLachlan (Dale Cooper), asked for his role to be downsized, and Lara Flynn Boyle's character Donna Hayward was recast with Moira Kelly. In 2014, several deleted scenes were recut into a narrative and released as Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces.

Lynch planned to start filming in August 1991, but Kyle MacLachlan (Dale Cooper) prompted a delay by threatening to pull out. MacLachlan provided various reasons for his reluctance to participate. He was worried about being typecast as a Cooper-esque figure in future productions. In 2000, he added that he “felt a little abandoned” by Lynch and Frost during the second season of the TV series, as the two were simultaneously working on their own projects. He said that he blamed himself for souring his relationship with Lynch. After a month, MacLachlan agreed to return, on condition that he only appear for five days of shooting. This forced Lynch and Engels to rewrite the first act, which originally had Cooper investigating Teresa Banks’ murder. MacLachlan implied that he had requested rewrites to those scenes before he would consider appearing in them, “and David was unwilling to do that.” Lynch filled in the gap with Chris Isaak, a singer whose songs he had previously used in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. He also cast Pamela Gidley to play Teresa Banks, the young woman whose murder starts the film's narrative; she had previously auditioned for the role of Shelly Johnson that eventually went to Mädchen Amick.

The film was made without Twin Peaks series regulars Lara Flynn Boyle (Donna Hayward), Sherilyn Fenn (Audrey Horne), and Richard Beymer (Benjamin Horne).[ The character of Donna was recast with Moira Kelly, who had worked with Sheryl Lee on Love, Lies, and Murder. Boyle and Fenn’s absences were initially attributed to scheduling conflicts, which Fenn repeated in 2014. However, Fenn added in 1995 that she did not want to return because she “was extremely disappointed in the way the second season got off track.” A 1997 biography of Lynch said that according to rumor, Boyle declined to return because she felt Lynch’s treatment of female characters was misogynistic. Beymer declined to appear, remarking that he was dismayed by a scene in which Ben Horne offers Laura Palmer cocaine for a kiss, which he said reduced Ben to “just a coke dealer.” He added that he expected Lynch to cut his “token” appearance from the final edit anyway. Fenn and Beymer eventually returned to the franchise for Twin Peaks: The Return.

The actors’ sometimes-hectic schedules forced Lynch to improvise. In addition to MacLachlan’s limitation of five days on set, Lynch insisted on casting Gidley even though she was shooting a different film at the same time; she shot her Fire Walk with Me scenes on her free days. Kiefer Sutherland reportedly sustained facial injuries during the shoot, forcing his scenes to be delayed, although the producers and police denied the claim. David Bowie shot his scenes in four or five days because Tin Machine needed to rehearse for their upcoming tour. He was not pleased with his Southern accent, and asked Lynch and Frost to overdub his lines when they used archive footage from the film in Twin Peaks: The Return. In addition, Lynch himself was dealing with a hernia “during the entire shoot”; he had injured himself while laughing too hard at something funny that Angelo Badalamenti did.

Fire Walk with Me premiered at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival in competition for the Palme d’Or. The film was notoriously polarizing: Lynch said that the film was booed at Cannes, and the American press generally panned the film. The film was controversial for its frank and vivid depiction of parental sexual abuse, its relative absence of fan-favorite characters, and its surrealistic style. The film was a box-office bomb in North America, but fared better in Japan and France. Due to the poor reception, plans for two sequels were abandoned. However, the film has been positively reevaluated in the 21st century, and is now widely regarded as one of Lynch’s major works. Lynch and Frost eventually received funding to produce a third season of the TV series in 2017, which revisited several plot threads from the film. In 2019, the British Film Institute ranked Fire Walk with Me the fourth-best film of the 1990s.