Wild at Heart is a 1990 American romantic crime comedy-drama thriller[4] film written and directed by David Lynch, based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Barry Gifford.

Starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover, Diane Ladd, Isabella Rossellini, and Harry Dean Stanton, the film follows Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune, a young couple who go on the run from Lula's domineering mother and the criminals she hires to kill Sailor.

[5] Early test screenings for the film were poorly received, with Lynch estimating that at least 300 people walked out due to its sexual and violent content.

Wild at Heart won the Palme d'Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, which at the time was considered a controversial decision.

At the club, Sailor beats up a man for flirting with Lula, and then leads the band in a rendition of the Elvis Presley song "Love Me".

When Santos calls mob boss Mr. Reindeer to arrange for the job, he adds Farragut to the hit list, sending Marietta into a guilt-fueled psychosis.

Peru enters the room, deduces Lula's pregnancy and proceeds to intimidate, grope and violently coerce her into asking him for sex; when she finally does, he mockingly reveals his threats to be a bluff and leaves.

Chasing Sailor out of the store, Peru is repeatedly shot by a sheriff's deputy and accidentally blows his own head off with his shotgun.

The photograph of Marietta in Lula's house sizzles and vanishes, symbolically mirroring the demise of Wicked Witch of the West.

In the summer of 1989, Lynch had finished the pilot episode for the successful television series Twin Peaks, and tried to rescue two of his projects—Ronnie Rocket and One Saliva Bubble—both involved in contractual complications as a result of the bankruptcy of Dino De Laurentiis, which had been bought by Carolco Pictures.

[11][12] Lynch stated, 'I've had a bad time with obstacles...it wasn't Dino's fault, but when his company went down the tubes, I got swallowed up in that.

[13] Two days after that, Montgomery gave Gifford's book to Lynch while he was editing the pilot, asking him if he would executive produce a film adaptation that he would direct.

[12] Lynch got approval from Propaganda to switch projects; however, production was scheduled to begin only two months after the rights had been purchased, forcing him to work fast.

'[12] It was at this point that the director's love of The Wizard of Oz (1939) began to influence the script he was writing, and he included a reference to the 'yellow brick road'.

'[17] Samuel Goldwyn Jr. read an early draft of the screenplay and did not like Gifford's ending either, so Lynch changed it.

[19] Before filming started, Dern suggested that she and Cage go on a weekend road trip to Las Vegas in order to bond and get a handle on their characters.

'[10] Within four months, Lynch began filming on August 9, 1989, in both Los Angeles (including the San Fernando Valley) and New Orleans with a relatively modest budget of $10 million.

'[11] The film has been compared to Lynch's previous Blue Velvet, with both said to explore the dark side of the United States.

[12] The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) told Lynch that the version of Wild at Heart screened at Cannes would receive an X rating in North America unless cuts were made, as the NC-17 was not in effect in 1990, at the time of the film's release;[22] he was contractually obligated to deliver an R-rated film.

The site's consensus reads: 'One of director David Lynch's more uneven efforts, Wild at Heart is held together by his distinctive sensibilities and compelling work from Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern.

'[28] USA Today gave the film one and a half stars out of four and said: "This attempt at a one-up also trumpets its weirdness, but this time the agenda seems forced.

"[29] In his review for Sight & Sound magazine, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, 'Perhaps the major problem is that despite Cage and Dern's best efforts, Lynch is ultimately interested only in iconography, not characters at all.

When it comes to images of evil, corruption, derangement, raw passion and mutilation (roughly in that order), Wild at Heart is a veritable cornucopia.

'[30] Richard Combs in his review for Time wrote, "The result is a pile-up, of innocence, of evil, even of actual road accidents, without a context to give significance to the casualties or survivors".

[31] Christopher Sharrett, in Cineaste magazine, wrote: 'Lynch's characters are now so cartoony, one is prone to address him more as a theorist than director, except he is not that challenging...one is never sure what Lynch likes or dislikes, and his often striking images are too often lacking in compassion for us to accept him as a chronicler of a moribund landscape a la Fellini.

'[32] However, in Rolling Stone, Peter Travers wrote: 'Starting with the outrageous and building from there, he ignites a slight love-on-the-run novel, creating a bonfire of a movie that confirms his reputation as the most exciting and innovative filmmaker of his generation.