Do ideas just pop into your head full blown and you just go with them?

One summer day, I was at a laboratory called Consolidated Film Industries in Los Angeles. We were editing the pilot for Twin Peaks and had finished for the day. It was around six-thirty in the evening and we had gone outside. There were cars in the paring lot. I leaned my hands on the roof of one car, and it was very, very warm—not hot, but nicely warm. I was leaning there and—ssssst!—the Red Room appeared. And the backward thing appeared, and then some dialogue.

So I had this idea, these fragments. And I fell in love with them.

That’s how it starts. The idea tells you to build this Red Room. So you think about it. “Wait a minute,” you say, “the walls are red, but they’re not hard walls.” Then you think some more. “They’re curtains. And they’re not opaque; they’re translucent.”

Then you put these curtains there. “But the floor . . . it needs something.” And you go back to the idea and there was something on the floor—it was all there. So you do this thing on the floor. And you start to remember the idea more. You try some things and you make mistakes, but you rearrange, add other stuff, and then it feels the way that idea felt.

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