Wild at Heart is a 1990 American black comedy romantic crime film written and directed by David Lynch and starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Willem Dafoe, Harry Dean Stanton, and Isabella Rossellini. Based on the 1989 novel of the same name by Barry Gifford, it tells the story of Sailor Ripley (Cage) and Lula Pace Fortune (Dern), a young couple from Cape Fear, North Carolina, who go on the run from Lula's domineering mother and the gangsters she hires to kill Sailor.