David Lynch‘s death at the age of 78 makes for a sad day, but also one rich with memories. This includes the one time I was able to ask him a question, several months before the premiere of Twin Peaks: The Return,
The Television Critics Association press tour, known more casually as the TCAs, is a biannual event featuring long days of panels held inside a hotel ballroom, as networks claim anywhere from an afternoon to multiple days to present their upcoming TV series. On January 9th, 2017 — knowing that the press would have an appetite for any details they could get about the highly anticipated The Return — Showtime had scheduled a panel featuring Mädchen Amick, Laura Dern, Robert Forster, Kyle MacLachlan, and Kimmy Robertson.
Before bringing out the cast, though, Showtime surprised critics with an appearance from David Lynch, the filmmaker taking center stage to address any and all questions we had for 15 minutes.
Now, asking a question in the TCA ballroom can be an intimidating situation even in the most lowkey of situations. There’s the struggle to get the attention of one of the pages running around carrying microphones, and once you get a microphone, you have to pick your moment to speak up if there’s no queue. Many a panel has ended with frustrated journalists holding mics, having been unable to speak during the available time.
The competition for Lynch’s attention during that panel was intense, the atmosphere electric as Lynch took questions like it was a game of speed chess, supplying answers as fast as we could give him queries. And some of his replies were remarkably sphinx-like in their brevity.
For example, when asked “When you’re coming back to Twin Peaks, was Laura Dern always someone you wanted to be involved?”, Lynch simply said, “I love Laura Dern.” A long question about whether he’d ever intended to continue the story of Twin Peaks following the Season 2 cliffhanger got a slightly longer comment: “I always felt, even if it only happened mentally and emotionally, the story goes on.”
I’d only been attending the TCAs for a few years at that point, and still got very nervous about the idea of speaking up in the ballroom, instead choosing to find the folks on stage afterward if I had specific queries. However, this was clearly a carpe diem moment, a rare opportunity to engage with an iconic artist, and I pushed myself to request a mic and go for it.
It helped that I had a topic that I at least found interesting: The original Twin Peaks was produced for ABC beginning in 1990, a time when the rules about what you could and couldn’t do on broadcast television could be pretty strict in terms of language, sex, and violence. The Return, meanwhile, was produced for Showtime, a network free of FCC restrictions on content. How did that difference affect his take on the Twin Peaks universe?
The official transcript from the press conference reveals that when I asked about this, Lynch didn’t quite understand what I was asking, saying “What is that question?” in response. It’s always embarrassing when that happens — even more so in this case, given the amount of pressure involved — but I managed to rephrase it through my shame, emphasizing that I was asking about “standards and practices, like what you’re allowed to say.” (“Like what you’re allowed to say?” Jeez. Not a shining moment in my history of public speaking.)
Lynch then had a surprising response: “We didn’t have hardly any problems with standards and practices in the old days, 25 years ago. In fact, I couldn’t believe the freedom and the things that we did. If you look at the show, it’s kind of amazing. Sometimes dialogue had to be changed, but those changes always led to a more creative, better thing. We had a lot of freedom.”
It was certainly a more substantial note than “I love Laura Dern,” and it felt like something he hadn’t necessarily been asked before. Plus, it revealed a lot about him as an artist and how he had navigated the limitations of a commercially-driven medium like broadcast TV: seeing the rules not as an obstacle, but as a creative challenge that would ultimately improve the work. Getting an answer like that is one of the best moments you get as an interviewer, whether talking to someone on Zoom in your bedroom or in front of hundreds of your peers.
While many of his other responses were vague to the point of meaninglessness, there were some quintessentially Lynchian moments, candid and revealing. Someone wanted to know if Lynch remembered what made him become a storyteller. He said he didn’t remember, because “I only wanted to be a painter, and I got into film because I wanted to make paintings move, and one thing led to another. I’ve been so lucky. I got green lights all along the way, so go figure.”
David Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan, photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images
He was, of course, very funny at the same time. When he talked about reuniting with past cast and crew for Twin Peaks, he riffed on a classic interview cliche: “It’s a family. I’m sure you all hear this — people say, ‘Oh, we’re like a family going down the road. All these actors are so wonderful. The crew is so great.’ But the crew in Twin Peaks was even more wonderful than those others.” The room laughed at that.
Throughout the whole panel, Lynch was entirely himself, as idiosyncratic and warm and open as you might expect (even when dismissing a question with just a few brief words). It was a remarkable experience, one that brought out his human side in unexpected ways, while confirming what a force he was.
I’ll never forget his answer to “What’s the best part of directing and what’s the worst?” Said Lynch, “I love pretty much every aspect, all aspects of the process. I even love preproduction. It’s really thrilling to have ideas and to realize those ideas. There’s so many thousands of different elements and they all have to be as good as you can get them to come together and make a thing work. It’s a thrilling process.”
As for the second part of the question: “There is no worst.”