My brother knows about cars, so he looked it over and said, “This is a good car.” I’d just won second prize in the Bellevue Film Festival for The Grandmother and the prize was two hundred and fifty dollars, so I used that money to buy the car, which cost maybe two hundred. I needed insurance and right across the street is State Farm, so I walk up these wooden steps to this nice guy on the second floor and he took care of the insurance. In a day I had a car with insurance and a house. It was unreal. Lots of people lived with us in that house on and off—Herb Cardwell was there, and Al Splet, and my brother, and Jack was with us for a while, too. It didn’t bother me having all those people living with us, but it would really bother me now.
The day Jack and my brother and I walked up to the AFI and I saw this mansion for the first time, I couldn’t believe it. I was so happy to be there. When I arrived in L.A. I wanted to make Gardenback and I’d finished a forty-page script; then I met Caleb Deschanel and he liked the script. He thought it was a horror film, sort of, and he took it to this producer he knew who made low-budget horror films. This guy says, “I want to make this and I’m going to give you fifty thousand dollars, but you gotta make the script a hundred or a hundred and twenty pages.” That really depressed me. The whole story was there but I still spent the next whole fuckin’ school year meeting with Frank Daniel and this student named Gill Dennis, who was kind of Frank’s sidekick, padding this thing with mundane dialogue I hated. In the back of my mind I was thinking, Do I really want to make this? Because I’d started getting ideas for Eraserhead.
One day during my first year at the AFI, Toni Vellani told me, “I want you to come and meet Roberto Rossellini.” So I walked over to Toni’s office and there was Roberto. We shook hands and sat down and talked and we just clicked. He told Toni, “I’d like David to be an exchange student and come to Rome and attend my film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.” They wrote it up in Variety that I was going there, but the next thing I know Rossellini’s school goes belly-up. It’s fate. I wasn’t supposed to go there. Still, it was nice meeting him.
I needed money, so Toni said, “You can intern with this guy Ed Parone who’s doing Major Barbara at the Mark Taper Forum,” so I interned there. What I was doing as an intern was getting coffees for Ed Parone. The play starred David Birney and Blythe Danner, and it was the debut of Richard Dreyfuss, who stole the show. I hated the play and didn’t like the director. He wasn’t very nice to me. Maybe I wasn’t getting good coffees for him, I don’t know. I had a bad attitude and had zero interest in theater. Blythe Danner was nice, though.
Toni knew I built things so he then got me a job in Utah, building props for Stanton Kaye’s film In Pursuit of Treasure. Before I got there I heard stories about Stanton Kaye, like they had to push him up the hill to go direct, he wasn’t on time, he didn’t give a shit or whatever—he was acting weird. I went to Utah and started building the treasure for In Pursuit of Treasure. I was making Aztec gods and gold bricks, just making stuff up, and it was just me in a basement with this guy named Happy, who worked at a circus and was a carny. “Happ,” I called him. I was only supposed to be there for a week, and after two weeks of this I wanted to go home, so I said, “My buddy Jack can do this stuff.” So Jack came and met a lot of people who saw that he was great, and it opened doors for him. I think that was a kind of a turning point for Jack.
The first day of my second year I go up to the AFI and I’ve been put in first-year classes, like I’d flunked. Plus, I’d wasted the last fucking year, and anger came up in me like unreal. I stormed down the hall, and Gill saw me and saw the look on my face and he said, “David, stop! Stop!” He chased me but I went right up to Frank’s office, past Mierka, his assistant, and walked in and said, “I quit!” I stormed out and went to see Alan and he said, “I quit, too!” So the two of us went to Hamburger Hamlet and griped and bitched and had coffee. A few hours later I went home and when Peggy saw me she said, “What’s going on? The school’s calling and they’re really upset that you left.” So I went up there and Frank said, “David, when you want to quit, we’re doing something wrong. What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to do Eraserhead,” and he said, “Then you’ll do Eraserhead.”
Once I started working on Eraserhead I stopped going to classes, but I’d go up from time to time to see a film. The projectionist in the big room at the AFI was a film buff beyond the beyond and when he’d say, “David, you’ve got to see this film,” I knew it would be something special. One thing he showed me was Blood of the Beasts, this French film that intercuts between two lovers walking through these streets in a little French town and a big old-style slaughterhouse. Cobblestone courtyard, big chains, and steel things. They bring a horse out and there’s steam coming out of the nostrils; they put this thing on the horse’s forehead and boom! Down the horse would go. Chains around his hooves hoist him up and they had him skinned in no time, blood going in the grate; then cut to this couple walking. It was something.
I was looking for actors for Eraserhead and there was a theater director named David Lindeman who I remember as a student at the AFI. I described the character of Henry to him and asked if he knew any actors who could play that, and he gave me two names. One of them was Jack Nance, so I decided to meet Jack. With Eraserhead, the first person I met was the person I cast, every single one. It’s not like I would take just anybody, but they were all perfect.
The Doheny mansion was built on a hill and it had a ground floor, a second floor, and underneath the ground floor was a basement with rooms that had been turned into offices. There was also a bowling alley there and a laundry room where the Dohenys had their wash done. Because sunlight is good for cleaning clothes, they had this pit that you couldn’t see from the street or from any angle. It had, like, sixteen-foot walls and was just an open pit where they hung their laundry. Beautiful pit. Concrete walls and real nice steps going up and out. That’s where I built the stage the Lady in the Radiator performs on. It sat there for a while because it took a long time to build it, probably because I didn’t have any money.
Anyhow, Jack Nance and I met in one of those basement offices. He came in and he was in a grumpy mood, like, What the fuck is this student-film bullshit. We sat and talked but it was real stilted and didn’t go well. When we finished talking, I said, “I’ll walk you out,” and we walked down this hall, not saying anything, and out some doors to a parking lot. We got out there and Jack looked at this car we passed and said, “That’s a cool roof rack.” I said, “Thanks,” and he said, “Is that yours? Oh my God!” Suddenly he was a completely different person. We started talking about Henry right then, and I said, “Henry’s got a confused look,” so Jack did a confused look. I said, “No, no, that’s not it. Let’s say Henry looks lost.” Jack did a lost look and I said, “No, that’s not it, either. Maybe it’s like he’s wondering,” and he put a wondering face on. I said no again, then finally I took him by the shoulders and I said, “Just be a total blank.” And he went blank and I said, “Jack, that’s it!” After that Jack went around saying, “Henry is a total blank.” I took him home and showed him to Peggy and she gave him a thumbs-up behind his back, then I took him back to the AFI. Jack was absolutely perfect in every way. I’ve thought about who else could’ve played Henry, everybody in the whole world I’ve seen since then, and there’s nobody. It was fate. Jack was perfect and, like Charlotte said, Jack didn’t mind waiting. He’d sit around thinking so many things in his head, and he doesn’t care what’s going on around him.
When I met Jack he had this kind of afro. We didn’t want his hair to look freshly cut for the film, so about a week before we began shooting I got a barber to come to the stables and he took Jack into the hayloft and cut his hair. I wanted it short on the sides, long on the top—that’s the look and it was very important. For some reason that’s just a thing I liked from the get-go in life. Jack’s haircut was very important, but it wasn’t until the first night of shooting when Charlotte ratted his hair that it really got there. It stood up way taller than I probably would’ve gone for, so she played a major role in the creation of Henry.
There was this incredible studio way down on the eastern end of Sunset Boulevard that was closing up shop, so I rented a thirty-five-foot flatbed truck and Jack and I went over there on a cloudy day and