By Michael Sragow, Salon Magazine, October 28, 1999

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In the script to "The Straight Story," which has just been published, there are a lot of what seem to be obvious "movie" scenes that aren't in the finished film – scenes, say, of police stopping Alvin, or of Alvin having a hard time maneuvering because of his physical ailments.

A film isn't finished until it's finished. It's always talking to you, and it's an action and reaction thing all along, to the first perfect answer print. You add a part, and suddenly something else is affected. So it never fails that some of the scenes you think will never go are gone – and another thing that didn't seem so important, even a fragment, is saving the day.

One thing everyone should do before they say their film is finished is see it with, probably, 20 people or more (although it could just be one person). Your objectivity comes roaring back in because you're seeing it through their eyes now and that can save your film. It's a critical screening, to test it – and you don't have to have cards filled out, you just have to sit with it and feel it and you'll know what to do. Now, that's a rough screening. The film is working, and working, and all of a sudden it's not working. You can feel it even with people who've gone through the film with you, just from being in a roomful of people.

What gets me – and I've been thinking about this – is that the film is always the same when you've finished it. You know, there are variations from theater to theater, in the acoustics and in the brightness (because of the bulbs in the projectors), but the frames are all there, and the sound goes with it. Still, every screening is always different from one to another. This dialogue between audiences and picture is a fascinating thing. Circles seem to start going between them. The more abstract the film, the more audiences give – they fill in spaces, add in their own feelings. You have the same picture but a different result because of the mix in the crowd. In that way the film is never really finished.

When Alvin finally arrives at his brother's house he hollers "Lyle" twice – once he just calls out, the second time he sounds worried, like he fears he might have come too late. I just lose it when I hear that second time. It seemed to me like the sort of inspiration that happens with the director and the actor on the set. Sure enough, the script just has one "Lyle."

These things are gifts, in a way. When something just happens that's normal like that, it's so beautiful. What kills me is when Richard does this – [Lynch inhales sharply, in a strangled sob] – before the very end. I go crazy when I hear it. I would start crying in the editing room, standing behind Mary when we were working. I think the film really affects men. There's a thing about grandfathers and fathers alive in it – and brothers, too – and it gets you. It gets me.

Your father was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture. You were born in Missoula, Mont., and lived in Sandpoint, Idaho; Spokane, Wash.; Durham, N.C.; Boise, Idaho; and Alexandria, Va. Your background wasn't too distant, geographically, from the people in this movie.

My dad was talking to Richard at the premiere, and they've heard of a lot of the same people, and know at least some of the same people. Richard spent a lot of time up at Glacier National Park at one point in his life, and that's a place where I went as a kid, there and all through the Pacific Northwest. It wasn't part of a cowboy life for me, but it was for my father, a generation before. He rode a horse to school – a one-room schoolhouse, that kind of thing. My granddad wore cowboy boots and was a wheat rancher and to me was just the coolest guy. Very cool. He would wear these really beautiful Western suits – and string ties and cowboy boots, really polished. He always drove Buicks. And he wore these special gloves, real thin leather gloves, when he drove. And he drove really slow – which I really loved. I hate riding fast. Sitting with my grandfather I got a lot of feelings I would never be able to articulate. But small children can feel so much, and they don't forget. And this goes in the bank – these relationships you have that are pretty profound but are never really spoken.

Your granddad's loving Buicks, and Alvin Straight's attachment to his Rehds and John Deere riding mowers – they're not exactly the same thing, but they seem linked. You've said the film is about man and nature, but it's also about man and his machines.

I've got pictures of my grandfather and his tractors, with these giant metal wheels and these big spikes sticking out of them, and he and his men with these giant canvas gloves and oil cans, and the scene looks more like a machine shop than a farm or a ranch. These machines were incredibly important to them.

And these machines, like the ones in the movie, have character. Something that has disappeared from contemporary design, which makes everything look the same.

Yes, the character of the machine is gone. I don't know when it happened, but it probably goes back to computers – when manufacturers started to design everything to be aerodynamically correct, and to use vacuum-formed models and everything like that. You can see why they did it – it makes perfect sense, and in some ways it's safer, and it could be really good. But then you see a 1958 Corvette Sting Ray, and you almost die to see what it was and what it's come to. You don't have any joy ever getting in a car, not the same joy anyway. There might be some cars that are still pretty cool but they're few and far between. I've got a 1971 Mercedes that is pretty beautiful, a two-door; I'm waiting to get an American car that I would love to drive, but it hasn't happened.

In the film it's not just cars or Alvin's mowers. It's Alvin and his daughter Rose sitting by the humming grain elevators at night, this gorgeous looming image. You provide a feeling for the rural landscape that isn't conventionally soft or pastoral.

It's not like you picture Pittsburgh in the smokestack-industry days – it's not about belching fire. But these people rely on a lot of machinery, and some of it's huge. When you go to a big John Deere dealership and see what's there, it's pretty impressive. And then there are these big grain elevators, and a lot of railroad tracks right next to them – it's an industry. But then it's also so organic. It's miles and miles and miles of fields and very few people. What you really feel is man and nature.

You mentioned that the film "talks" to you. How does a script talk to you?

When you read a script or read a book, you're picturing it and feeling it and being moved forward with it. A whole bunch of things start happening inside and those are what you have to remember and translate into film. One moment the idea doesn't exist for you, the next moment that idea comes into your conscious mind and explodes and you know the whole thing. Mary heard about this trip in 1994 when the press covered Alvin's journey. Millions of people read that story, but she got this fixation. And she was talking to me about it, and talking to me about it, and I knew she wanted to do something with it, and I was thinking, that's fine. In 1998, four years later, she got the rights to that story, and I'm still thinking that's fine for Mary. And she and John Roach started working on a script together. They went on the trip, they met Alvin's family and a lot of people. And as soon as they finished the script they gave it to me. I knew Mary wanted me to direct it, but I never really thought it was going to happen. Then I read the script and that was the end of it. It wasn't one thing that decided me, it was the whole thing. When I get an idea or read a script or a book that I love, the next thing I do automatically is "feel the air." And on "The Straight Story" the air married with the script and I knew I was going to do it.

"Feel the air." Having seen the film twice, I'm inclined to take that literally, as your reaction to the atmosphere in the story.

It's just a feeling of what's happening in the world right now – a note, a chord, something like that in the air. It seems to be accurate but there's no way to prove that it's accurate. It's a big thing, but also sort of subtle. "Zeitgeist" – is that what someone called it? It's the spirit of the time, and it's constantly changing, and it's fed by everybody. And you see if what you've read or fallen in love with jibes with that. It doesn't necessarily mean that the result will be commercially successful. It just means that you feel the timing is right.

Is it true that at Cannes you said you felt the potential or the need to make more gentle movies?

No, not a need – that would be a wrong reason to do a picture. I just loved the screenplay and wanted to make it when this thing in the air supported that.

Well, I was really conscious of the air within the movie – from the opening shots of the wind rustling through the fields and the leaves. In all your films, sound helps the audience feel what you see, and in this film I thought it also helped us understand the characters.

It's like talking is the tip of an iceberg. There's a whole bunch you can't say, but you know. And in a movie you want to carry that other thing. The story may be talking to you, but if an intuition is going, you just want to go with that. When you're working with actors you may not say so much, with words. But you're looking at the person's eyes and you're saying something and moving your hands in a certain way, and you can see some recognition suddenly appear. Then you go and do the scene again and it has now jumped, and is getting closer to this unspoken thing, which is much bigger, which is what's important. But how it happens is anybody's guess.

There certainly seem to be a lot of connections in the script that would set your instincts going – and not just your grandfather, and driving slow. I've even read that you like sitting in chairs the way these characters do.

I love sitting in chairs!

But there's not as much weather for you to react to while you sit in L.A.!

No, there's not a lot of change in the weather, but there's good weather. And there's a certain light in L.A. I came to L.A. in 1970 from Philadelphia, and I arrived in L.A. at 11:30 at night. My destination was Sunset and San Vicente. The Whiskey a Go Go was right there; I turned left and went down two blocks on San Vicente and that's where I was going to stay until I found a place. So when I woke up in the morning it was the first time I saw the light. And it was so bright and it made me so happy! I couldn't believe how bright it was! So I sort of fell in love with L.A. right there. And I like the idea in L.A. where you can go inside but you can then just walk outside and there's no change in temperature – it's just an inside-outside life.

There's something about sitting in a chair and just letting your mind wander. It gets harder and harder to do, but it's real important, because you don't know what you're going to wander into. And you can't try to control the wandering. You need time to think about mundane or absurd things or junk before you start getting down into something that could be useful. It doesn't always happen that something useful kicks in, but it wouldn't happen if you didn't give it a chance.

I imagine you can't do that during the making of a film.

No, then you're in a different mode, much more fast, action and reaction. A new idea could come in but it has to do with the dialogue you're having at that moment and you've got to make sure it feels correct before you leave that moment. So it's real intense, not like the period in between films.