I fell in love with David Lynch’s work thanks to Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, which I saw around the same time. I love his rich visuals, I love the way he chases weird ideas that live in your memory even if they don’t make much sense…he’s just a really interesting filmmaker who by now has a catalog of terrific movies and TV shows to binge.
One of the best things about David Lynch is that his style is thoroughly, completely his own. He was never capable of making a cookie cutter blockbuster, which is probably part of the reason why his 1984 take on Frank Herbert’s Dune feels like such an outlier in his filmography. This was the one and only time Lynch was tasked with directed a big blockbuster action epic, and it did not go well. He’s talked in the past about how the studio didn’t give him creative control, with the end result being a messy movie that doesn’t quite hold together, even if it has its fans.
Apparently, the memory of that experience still rankles. Lynch recently uploaded a fan Q&A where someone asked what project he’s most proud of. “I’m proud of everything except Dune,” he said simply. “I’ve liked so much working on different movies. It’s not so much about pride but the enjoyment of doing, the enjoyment of the work. I’ve enjoyed working in all these different mediums. I feel really lucky to have been able to enjoy those things and to be able to live.”
You gotta love how up front he is about this stuff. Of course, this doesn’t come as a huge surprise. “ was a heartache for me,” he said a couple months back. “It was a failure and I didn’t have final cut…It’s not the film I wanted to make. I like certain parts of it very much — but it was a total failure for me.”
His antipathy towards the movie is so great that he has “zero interest” in seeing Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming Dune adaptation, which happily looks like it’s going to be a better movie. Fingers crossed, and we’ll find out for sure when it lands in theaters this December.
As for Lynch, he’s having a grand old time in quarantine, posting short films and daily weather reports to his YouTube channel, and generally staying positive about the future. “I believe that we as a whole world are going through a transition,” he said in his Q&A video. “These so-called bleak times are necessary to go through in order to get to a much, much better place. The old way is giving way to a new way. More and more things, horror stories, have come to life and people have been dealing with these things for decades. More things will come out. These wrongs are going to start getting righted. On the other side of this transition, I think, we will find really great times. An end to suffering and negativity. This is what I believe and hope for.”
Here’s hoping.
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h/t IndieWire