David Lynch’s Cinematographer Talks About How That Incredible NYC Rat PSA Got Made

David Lynch was a true artist—how many other filmmakers' names have been turned into adjectives? Lynch, who died on Thursday at the age of 78, was also responsible for one of the most indelible New York City public service announcement ever made: A dark, harrowing film about the perils of littering.

Not a whole lot is known about the backstory of this PSA, which was made in the early 1990s as part of the We Care About New York campaign started by Mayor Ed Koch a decade earlier. When we asked the Sanitation Department about it, a spokesperson said that the officials who would have been responsible for it have passed away. "We have never really been clear on the specifics there—who approached whom, who paid, etc," DSNY's Joshua Goodman told us.

Goodman suggested we speak to the PSA's cinematographer, Frederick Elmes. Elmes regularly collaborated with Lynch—they made "Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet" together, among other films, as well as a string of commercials.

We reached out to Elmes to learn more about how Lynch's We Care About New York ad, and he was kind enough to speak with us.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Hell Gate: Tell me about how this PSA got made.

Frederick Elmes: David Lynch and I went to film school together. We went to the American Film Institute, and we made the film "Eraserhead" together, and I worked with him on several other features. In the midst of all this, I started shooting television commercials. And David kind of had an interest in making short films, like, you know, television commercials, but there really wasn't anybody that was too tuned in to what he was doing. We did work together on one French perfume commercial in the early days. I would say that this job for the New York City Sanitation Department was just completely the opposite. 

So where the French commercial was this kind of romantic, very dreamy, beautiful woman in a beautiful house in Paris, with sort of gorgeous color, this spot with the rats is very gritty New York, black and white, with food spilling in the streets. But that's what they wanted to see. It was supposed to be a rough-edged look at people throwing trash just anywhere and trying to help break that habit, because what it leads to is the rat population.

Did you interface at all with the Sanitation Department? Did they know what they were getting?

No, I'm sure they had no idea what they were getting. I'm certain they had no idea. I mean, there was no such thing as making a storyboard about it. David may have made a couple of little sketches about trash in the street and rats crawling around in the gutter and in the subway system and so on. But I don't think they had any sense of the mood of it, or the music—the music kind of swells and gets kind of gruesome there at the end. 

In fact, it's hard to know just what part the Sanitation Department had in it. I mean, it's a PSA, so the job goes out to an advertising agency who comes up with a concept and tries to put together a package—"Yes, this director and here's the story we'd like to tell," and then they get some input from the director. I don't know that I ever remember seeing a script. I just remember David listing off a bunch of shots that we had to do in various neighborhoods in the city.