Maybe the major event of the cinephile year, with apologies to “Baby Driver,” “Dunkirk,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film and “A Bad Moms Christmas,” is the return of David Lynch. It’s now nearly eleven years since Lynch last debuted a real work of directing, “Inland Empire,” and the eccentric, quiff-haired genius behind “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” has been much missed.
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But we’re now a little over two weeks from Lynch’s return: the filmmaker has revived the cult TV show “Twin Peaks” he created with Mark Frost for Showtime, and directed all 18 hours of it, almost doubling Lynch’s total output across his career to date. But the great news comes with bad news: Lynch, in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, says he’ll never make another movie again.
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“Things changed a lot,” Lynch says of the later years of his career. “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.” When pressed if that means “Inland Empire” is his last movie, Lynch replies “yes, it is.” This is obviously, a huge bummer, if not necessarily a surprise: the helmer had essentially retired from filmmaking before the “Twin Peaks” revival, and we guess that we’ll keep our fingers crossed that Lynch might change his mind again, particularly if the right financing fell into his lap. (*pages Megan Ellison*)
Otherwise, Lynch is typically cryptic about the return of “Twin Peaks” in the interview (“It’s the love of that world and the characters and the possibilities, it sucked us in,” he says, of the appeal of bringing back the show), but the piece does close with a great Lynchian quote. Responding to the charge from Showtime boss David Nevins that the new episodes are a “pure, heroin version of David Lynch,” the director responds “I don’t know why he says that, but I will answer that by saying, well, that’s OK because heroin is a very popular drug these days.”
“Twin Peaks” returns on Sunday, May 21st.