David Lynch Says He’s Done With Filmmaking

Good news and bad news, David Lynch fans: The good news is that the new season of Twin Peaks is so close you can almost taste the cherry pie glaze – but the bad news is that in a new interview Lynch has said, definitively, that he doesn’t plan to make any more movies.

While speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald about the advent of Twin Peaks, he was asked whether doing the show had inspired him to come back to filmmaking as well. But he explained that he didn’t think his style works with how movies have evolved over the years.

Things changed a lot. So many films were not doing well at the box office even though they might have been great films and the things that were doing well at the box office weren’t the things that I would want to do.

He’s basically right. His fanbase, though avid, is still pretty niche, and nowadays hype for movies is driven less by who directed them than by the franchise element. Who cares who directs the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie as long as there’s a new Guardians of the Galaxy movie? (Well, we do, but you get what I mean.) Barely anyone saw Martin Scorsese’s lengthy, mesmerizing Silence, and this is Martin Scorsese we’re talking about!

But it’s still a huge bummer that the Hollywood machine has turned Lynch off from films forever. His movies like Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Eraserhead, and his last, 2006’s Inland Empire are dreamily focused filmic curiosities, presenting a weird and wonderful parallel universe that’s also close enough to our own to easily sidestep into, if you’re not careful.

Lynch also spoke about the current trend of advertising films and TV to within an inch of their lives. We’ve grown to expect the kind of barrage of marketing that forced Lynch into an uncomfortable spot during Twin Peaks Season 2.

Completely ruins it. People want to know up until the time they know, then they don't care. So, speaking for myself, I don't want to know anything before I see something. I want to experience it without any purification, pure; [I want to] go into a world and let it happen.

Fans were driven to watch the show because of that one question — Who killed Laura Palmer? — and were disappointed when the answer was revealed halfway through the second season, and then the show, somehow, continued on without that central issue.

But that’s not how Lynch works. If that means we’ve seen the last of him on the big screen, at least we have his other films to cozy up with on lonely rainy nights. Then again, directors say they’re quitting all the time. Hayao Miyazaki is on his third comeback. So, who knows?