20 Years Of Twin Peaks: Mark Frost Interview

Can you believe it's been two decades since we first took a trip to the screwed-up small town of Twin Peaks? Thanks the combined efforts of co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost, what started out as a brilliantly bonkers subversion of the murder-mystery genre soon descended into a different kind of madness as killer spirits, backwards-talking dwarves, log ladies and one-armed psychos began to crawl out of the woodwork. As the second series finally makes its bow on DVD (available to buy from March 22), we spoke to Mark Frost about the legacy of the series...

It's 20 years since the first episode of Twin Peaks aired (April 8, 1990 on the ABC network), how do you think the show stands up after two decades?
"I've not actually watched the show in a real length of time, because once you have made a show you don't really need to watch it. From what I have heard it's been picked up by a new generation of kids, who have grown up and seen it on DVD, and they seem to be pretty caught up on it, so it doesn't feel like it has had a lot of drop off, which for a TV show is very unusual. I guess it's a good sign, that we have kept their attention as long as we have."

How did the concept come about originally?
"It really came about as a result of a conversation David Lynch and myself had, we were working on a couple of features together and one of our agents posed the question, 'What would you guys do if you were asked to come up with a television idea?' ABC, which at the time was in last place among the TV networks, in particular was looking for something, anything and we came in at the right moment and hit them with the idea. It ended up going the distance, very much to our surprise I must say."

Obviously the show has got yours and David Lynch's stamp all over it, but did you ever have any vision of where the show would go? Obviously you started out with a murder mystery, yet it developed it to something very different...
"What ABC had in mind when they sat down with us, was something along the lines of a bizarro version of a day-time soap. This was, remember, coming out of an era which had been dominated by shows like Dallas and Dynasty. We certainly weren't going to do anything like that, but I had the idea of wrapping a murder-mystery around it and making a kind of hybrid genre. And much to our surprise, they kept saying yes at every stage of the development process. Even at the point when they wanted us to make the pilot, they didn't think it would be made into a full series. They said it should run as a seven-hour mini-series and if we were lucky get a few college students to take a look at it during the spring break. But they were caught completely by surprise when we hit the kind of numbers we did."

You've often said that you made the plot up as you went along, but did you have any long-term plans for the show?
"I can certainly tell you that we certainly had everything worked in terms of what the Laura Palmer mystery was, well ahead of starting the series. We didn't think much beyond that until that story was resolved. Try as they might, there are shows today which will try to tell you they know where they are going, I have to say, especially in the case of Lost I don't find that a particularly convincing argument."

There were clearly a lot of improvisational elements to the show. Obviously the famous one was Frank Silva, when he was accidentally cast as Killer Bob, one of TV scariest characters. How do you think that approach affected the way the series flowed?
"You know what it did, it reflected a philosophy we had about the show which was to hire good people, get everyone involved and, should there be any happy accidents occur during the making of the show, don't be afraid to fold them into the mix. So for instance, Frank Silva who was a set dresser on the show, was working on set right until the camera was rolling and didn't have time to clear, and was stuck behind a bed kind of craning his body in an uncomfortable way to be out of the shot. But when we say the dailies, we saw his face reflected in a mirror which quite by accident had been placed on a dresser near by... and it was pretty terrifying. We knew there would be a character like Bob, we just didn't think he would reveal himself in the way he did. That being said, as soon as he did, we said let's use it and that's often how some very cool things happen."

Considering the kind of programmes, which were considered popular in the early Nineties, do you feel you were taking a chance, making something as different and out there as you could?
"Bucking the trends of television often creates some of the most popular TV shows. That's often the origin of some of the best television made. I didn't feel any undue pressure or that we were out on a limb in anyway, I just thought we were doing our own thing. Because of the way we set up the deal going in, we had a really unusual amount of creative freedom and I guess that the valuable reason, especially to the networks and producers, is that sometimes when you don't mess with the process you can end up with something really quite valuable. I'm afraid that's a lesson which has often been lost in recent years."

Do you have any regrets about the show?
"You know there was a bump in the flow of the narratives from one major story to the next [the discovery of Laura Palmer's killer and the introduction of a mid-season story arc] and if I had any regrets about the show it would probably be that I wished we had worked out a smoother transition. The Laura story was so cumbersome and grabbed people's attention; it was a very tough act to follow. And I almost felt like our audience needed a bit of a palette cleanser to get the taste of that out of their mouths, before we involved them in another big mystery. I think there are some justifiable criticisms of the second season, perhaps the storytelling wasn't quite as taut or as fraught with emotion, in the second half. But I thought by the time the second season came to an end, we were pretty much back up to the standard we had set."

The second season ended with a number of major cliff-hangers, but we never got a chance to see what happened next. How would those plots have been resolved?
"I think it's always easy to say what if, but if we had the chance to do a third season, we would have hopefully raised the bar a little bit higher."

At the end of season two, Audrey Horne's life seemed fairly extinguished, Agent Cooper was possessed... Did you have a story in mind, for where that may have gone after?
"We did, we had at least knocked out the first half of the next season and to be honest with you, I have completely forgotten what these were at this point. But I do remember at the time we thought we were on to something pretty cool."

Do you think we'll ever see a resolution?
"Maybe so, there has been a lot of talk of the years of finding some way to round it off and we did explore that a couple of years ago, but it became impractical from a story standpoint. I mean all the actors are 20 years older, it's a little harder to sell that Audrey is still in high school. It was great fun while it lasted, and it's certainly fun to see that people are still enjoying it today."

Did you have a favorite character, there's quite a rich selection?
"Well clearly Agent Cooper, what was there not to like about him? I know for me, he was the centre of the story, he was the Sherlock Holmes, he was the guy carrying us through the mist and he was the character, for me, who was the most fun to write. It felt like I knew who this guy was. To take him places and put him through things was an awful lot of fun."

There was a return to Twin Peaks with the film Fire Walk With Me, which I think many people thought would offer some resolutions, but it actually turned out to be a prequel. What was the decision behind that?
"Well to be honest, it was a decision David made on his own, I was off making a movie. And I had a very strong conviction that we had an audience hanging on by their thumbs and I wanted to move the story forward and take it to the next level. He wanted to go back and revisit the origins of the Laura Palmer story and I felt that we had covered that already in the series itself in more oblique and interesting ways. That being said, I thought he did a really interesting job with it, I wasn't terribly involved in the making of it and didn't have much to do with writing it."

Glen Ferris