David Lynch
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David Lynch on (Just) Making the Day
“Did you make the day?” That’s the first question financiers and production execs will ask after a first day — or, really, any day — of shooting. “Making the day” means completing all the scenes on the call sheet so that the production isn’t falling behind, something that can led to dropped scenes, budget overruns and more. But beyond the “making the day” question lies a deeper one: how is a production making the day? Rushed scenes, abandoned coverage and quickly made decisions can result in an on-time shooting schedule but diminished artistic results. That’s why this behind-the-scenes video of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2024 -
Editor Duwayne Dunham on Collaborating with David Lynch on Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks
Five years after the Music Box Theatre’s previous David Lynch retrospective coincided with the television premiere of the highly anticipated Twin Peaks: The Return, the Chicago-based arthouse now presents David Lynch: A Complete Retrospective – The Return, a week-long celebration of Lynch’s work that also pays tribute to his many collaborators, friends and, in one particular instance, offspring. Running through April 14th, the retrospective also includes several in-person appearances, one being from Duwayne Dunham, Lynch’s editor on Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return. An industry veteran who has continued to work extensively for both Lynch and […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 12, 2022 -
“There’s So Much Darkness, So Much Room to Dream”: David Lynch on Lost Highway
The following interview with David Lynch appeared in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1997 issue, and is being reposted online today as a newly restored Lost Highway opens at New York’s IFC Center before the release of a 4K UHD edition from Criterion in October. An audacious return to feature filmmaking after his underrated Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway is pure Lynch. Alternately seductive, mysterious, and terrifying, the film’s narrative unfolds with the chaos of a waking nightmare. Bill Pullman plays an avant-jazz musician whose fear of intimacy with his wife, Patricia Arquette, propels him into a series of schizophrenic states. Or […]
by Stuart Swezey on Jul 22, 2021 -
Watch: David Lynch’s Donovan Video, “I Am the Shaman”
David Lynch directs as well as plays on a new video from Scottish songwriter and performer Donovan. The director is credited with “unique Modal Guitar Textures and effects” on the track, which, in a statement posted to Facebook by Donovan, came together quickly: It was all impromptu. I visited the studio and David said … “Sit at the mics with your guitar Don.” David in same room behind control desk with my Linda. He had asked me to only bring in a song just emerging, not anywhere near finished. We would see what happens. It happened! I composed extempore … […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 10, 2021 -
Shivers, The Elephant Man and Clara’s Heart: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
David Cronenberg was an unknown filmmaker with just two experimental features (Stereo and Crimes of the Future) under his belt when he wrote and directed Shivers (1975), a groundbreaking thriller that launched not only Cronenberg’s career but an entire Canadian horror film industry. Prior to Shivers (also known as They Came From Within, The Parasite Murders, and many other titles), Canadian horror movies were so rare that Cronenberg had to fly in an American makeup effects artist because he couldn’t find anyone in Canada who could do that kind of work; following Shivers’ commercial success, however, there was a boom […]
by Jim Hemphill on Sep 19, 2020 -
“Stay Open to the Moose Head on the Table”: Director Lesli Linka Glatter on Homeland, Learning from Lynch and Spielberg, and Resuming Production
Lesli Linka Glatter began her career in the arts as a choreographer and dancer, and this early experience clearly informs her work as a director. On shows as varied in genre and style as Twin Peaks, NYPD Blue, True Blood and Mad Men, one thing remains consistent when Glatter is at the helm: an astute attention to the dramatic rhythms that are created by finding the precise visual corollary for whatever is going on emotionally in a scene. Hers is a cinema of extreme precision, defined by clear, bold choices when it comes to her compositions and rigorous control over […]
by Jim Hemphill on May 27, 2020 -
“…An Attempt to see Anorexia From a Perspective That Goes Beyond That of the Spectacle”: Moara Passoni on Her CPH:DOX Debut Ecstasy
Premiering in the DOX:AWARD main competition at this year’s (now digital) CPH:DOX, Ecstasy (Êxtase) is the astonishing debut of Brazilian filmmaker Moara Passoni, a longtime collaborator of The Edge of Democracy Oscar nominee Petra Costa (who serves as the doc’s producer). It’s a mix of fiction and nonfiction, of historical images and staged scenes, of autobiographical diary entries obsessively developing a “geometry of hunger” even as political chaos grips ’90s Brazil (and it’s all tied together by a stunning soundtrack, including music by David Lynch and Lykke Li). It’s also a startlingly unusual coming-of-age story, one in which the director […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 26, 2020 -
Breathe Deep
“I prefer placing the perceptual, intuitive, emotional and spiritual growth of the student at the center.” That’s the succinct teaching statement of Pablo Frasconi, a soft-spoken, thoroughly grounded filmmaker and faculty colleague of mine in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has developed a three-course sequence that helps students engage in a form of creativity based on quieting the mind. “Mindfulness and meditation are central,” Frasconi explains. “It is where these classes begin: by looking inward to discover the ’moving visual thinking’ and ’song of the cells’—as Stan Brakhage called these experiences—that is our […]
by Holly Willis on Mar 14, 2019 -
Watch: Olivier Assayas Discusses Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Absurdly Important’ Persona
Olivier Assayas speaks eloquently about his own work, able to talk about them both abstractly and practically. No surprise, then, that he’s as sharp when talking about other filmmakers’ films. A new video from TIFF finds the acclaimed French filmmaker — most recently of Non Fiction, Personal Shopper and Clouds of Sils Maria, and whose 1994 classic Cold Water was reissued earlier this year — talking Ingmar Bergman. Specifically he discusses Persona, the Swedish legend’s game-changing 1966 whatzit, about a caretaker (Bibi Andersson) tending to a damaged actress (Liv Ullmann). Bergman, according to Assayas, showed “that you could be both […]
by Matt Prigge on Nov 16, 2018 -
The Cine-Ghosts of Shirkers
Some of my best conversations have been with people who weren’t there. Absent was OK—even nonexistent was OK. As long as I imagined somebody was there. I did that as a prolific letter writer, I did that as a novelist, and most recently, I did that as a filmmaker. More than 20 years after the defining trainwreck of my youth—having my teacher/mentor disappear with all the footage of a 16mm film we’d shot together—I decided to make a film that would both document the joys and perils of teenage creativity and unfurl the detective work behind the mystery of the […]
by Sandi Tan on Sep 17, 2018
