Paramount on a list of news we wouldn’t wish to receive is David Lynch’s directing opportunities being winnowed to a very small set of possibilities. Though limitations have often served a big bang for his art, a new interview with Samuel Wigley in Sight and Sound revealed details of his ongoing homebound isolation, an issue that could only beget inquiries into forthcoming artistic endeavors.
Asked plainly if he would return to a film set, Lynch said the following, reproduced in full:
“No. I’ll tell you, I’ve gotten emphysema from smoking for so long, and so I’m homebound whether I like it or not. I can’t go out. And I can only walk a short distance before I’m out of oxygen. Smoking was something that I absolutely loved but, in the end, it bit me. It was part of the art life for me: the tobacco and the smell of it and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work, or thinking about things; nothing like it in this world is so beautiful. Meanwhile, it’s killing me. So I had to quit it. And now, because of Covid, it would be very bad for me to get sick, even with a cold. So I probably would be directing from my house. And because of Covid, they’ve now invented ways where you can direct from home. I wouldn’t like that so much. I like to be there amongst the thing and get ideas there. But I would try to do it remotely, if it comes to it.”
Wigley wisely inquired into Antelope Don’t Run No More, a feature written after INLAND EMPIRE that’s assumed a kind of mythic status among Lynch faithful. (His co-authored memoir Room to Dream deems it “one of the best scripts Lynch has ever written.”) Per the subject of limitations, he didn’t entirely discount the possibility: “Well, we don’t know what the future will bring, but we remain hopeful.”
If this signals an end of his filmmaking career, there would be at least three fitting ends: INLAND as the winding, nightmare close to a feature-film corpus; Twin Peaks as a monumental last will and testament (which we can go ahead and call a movie of its own); and the recent promotions for Cellophane Memories have recalled career staples (strobe lights over beautiful women, art-collage pieces) while, uncharacteristically, featuring outright pastiche of the likes of Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, whose hard-bitten noir framework has long marked his film work. For now I’ll let this tribute take precedence over an obituary.
Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese has his own downsizing in mind. Visiting the Jacob Burns Film Center for a screening of Made In England, he revealed work on an unnamed limited series that’ll find him directing start to finish, contra Boardwalk Empire or (invoking a long-forgotten name) Vinyl. A big undertaking, one presumes, but otherwise stated he doesn’t wish to make another “big movie” requiring many extras. Probably this squares with plans to direct A Life of Jesus and Home; less so something like The Wager, a historical epic from Killers of the Flower Moon author David Grann, or Sinatra. That Scorsese has been upfront about seeing a finish line for his career makes this news neither surprising nor, in light of it still signaling development, necessarily difficult, but a reminder all the same that there’s only so much time left with two of the greatest filmmakers to ever live.
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