Wild at Heart: Die Geschichte von Sailor und Lula

Sherilyn Fenn's accident scene came from David Lynch's impression of Fenn as a porcelain doll, and from the idea of seeing a porcelain doll breaking. He kept telling her about that, and that's how the scene was born. Lynch said of the scene, "I just pictured her being able to do this. She's like a broken china doll." Lynch got the same inspiration for the car accident scene in Mulholland Drive (2001). His direction to actress Laura Harring was to act like a broken porcelain doll. Incidentally, the idea for Mulholland Drive came from a desire to spin-off of Lynch's television series Das Geheimnis von Twin Peaks (1990), with Fenn as her Peaks character, Audrey Horne.

During the scene when Sailor's is running through a traffic jam to find Lula, a crew member and boom mic is visible in the reflection of one of the windows of a black van.

The ending credits play over footage of Sailor singing "Love Me Tender" to Lula, rather than a black screen.

To avoid an X-rating in the USA, David Lynch added a smoky haze and spark impact to the shots where Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) shoots himself with a shotgun and blows his head off. The second shot has the same smoky haze on it to hide the chunk of his head flying though the air. The effect made the removal of his head from his body less clear and muted the blood and gore and got the movie an "R" rating. The uncut version was released outside the USA, but since the David Lynch-approved DVD came out in the U.S. (the shot was altered there), the censored transfer has been used on worldwide DVD releases as well, while most of the versions with the bloodier version of the scene have gone out of print. Oddly enough, the more graphic version is still shown in TV airings in the U.S. on the Sundance Channel.

Featured in Siskel & Ebert & the Movies: Darkman/Wild at Heart/Pump Up the Volume/My Blue Heaven/The Witches (1990)