“If you make this choice, you are no longer welcome at UCLA,” Laura Dern was told when she requested time off to make Blue Velvet.
Then aged 17, Laura Dern was thrilled to land a major part in David Lynch’s 1986 thriller, Blue Velvet. Unfortunately, the powers that be at her university were less impressed.
Speaking to Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson on their podcast, Where Everybody Knows Your Name (via Variety), Dern recounted the moment where she had to choose between her education and working with one of America’s great maverick directors. She’d only been at UCLA for two days, she recalled, when she successfully auditioned for the part of Sandy Williams – one of the film’s central characters.
When Dern went to the head of UCLA’s film department to request time off to appear in the movie, however, the answer was a resounding ‘absolutely not’.
“Well, I’ll look at the script,” the department head said, according to Dern, “but you’re not going to get a leave of absence. It’s not going to happen. It’s not a medical emergency.”
A while later, Dern was called back into the department head’s office, and the exchange was even more angry – they’d read the script and were less than impressed by Lynch’s ideas.
“First of all, if you make this choice, you are no longer welcome at UCLA,” they said. “You’ll be out. But secondly, having read this script, that you would give up your college education for this is insane.”
Made for $6m in the wake of the critical and financial failure of Dune, Blue Velvet is a claustrophobic thriller told with Lynch’s trademark eye (and ear) for weirdness. It’s about a fresh-faced college student (Kyle MacLachlan) who’s drawn out of his picket-fence suburbs and into a nightmare world of crime and depravity – as represented by Dennis Hopper’s deranged gangster Frank Booth and Isabella Rossellini’s downtrodden, saucy club singer.
Needless to say, Dern picked Blue Velvet over her course at UCLA, and the rest is so much cinema history: although only a modest box office success, it’s now regarded as a classic, and helped David Lynch get his career back on track after the troubled production he’d experienced on Dune. In a final twist of irony, Blue Velvet is also one of three films taught at the university Dern was forced to leave.
“Obviously, it was an incredibly shocking script,” said. “I will just end by saying… today, if you want to get a masters in film at that school, when you write a thesis there are three movies you’re required to study. And you know what one of them is? Pisses me off.”
