Trailer
Plot summary
Sailor Ripley goes to prison in Cape Fear, North Carolina, for killing a knife-wielding man named Bobby Ray Lemon, who had been hired by Marietta Fortune, the mother of Sailor's girlfriend Lula. Twenty-two months later Lula waits outside the prison with his snakeskin jacket, and the two take a hotel room and a night at a club where the speed metal band Powermad plays. Sailor takes over the stage for a rendition of Love Me, then tells Lula he will sing Love Me Tender only to his future wife. He asks her to leave for California with him, though the trip breaks his parole. Marietta sends her boyfriend, private detective Johnnie Farragut, after the pair, and also hires the gangster Marcello Santos to hunt Sailor down.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Wild at Heart (1990)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- At the first test screening, eighty people walked out during a graphic torture scene and Lynch decided not to cut anything from the film; at the second, 100 people walked out during the same scene. He remembered knowing by then that the scene was killing the film, so he cut it.
- When jury president Bernardo Bertolucci announced the film as winner of the Palme d'Or, the festival's grand prize, at the awards ceremony, jeers almost drowned out the cheers, with critic Roger Ebert leading the vocal detractors.
SPOILER
Lynch had meant only to produce, but after reading Gifford's book decided to write and direct too. He disliked the novel's ending, in which Sailor and Lula are separated, and changed it after Gifford told him that in the sequel he was writing they get back together and stay together.SPOILER
The MPAA told Lynch the version screened at Cannes would get an X rating in North America unless cuts were made, and as he was contractually obliged to deliver an R-rated film he added gun smoke to the scene where Bobby Peru shoots his own head off, to obscure the gore. Foreign prints were not affected.- Before filming, Dern suggested that she and Cage go on a weekend road trip to Las Vegas to bond and get a handle on their characters. She remembered agreeing that Sailor and Lula needed to be one character they would share, hers the gum-chewing Marilyn side, his the snakeskin, Elvis side.
- Wild at Heart originally featured more explicit erotic scenes between Sailor and Lula, including one in which she has an orgasm while telling him about a dream of being ripped open by a wild animal; the scenes were deleted.
- The Criterion Collection 4K and Blu-ray edition of 2026 carried a new transfer of the unrated Cannes / International Cut, supervised by Frederick Elmes and Lynch's daughter Jennifer on behalf of the David Lynch Estate.
