The Writers Guild Lifetime Achievement Award is presented to members who have “advanced the literature of motion pictures and made outstanding contributions to the profession of the screenwriter.” Weeks before David Lynch’s passing, in late 2024, he accepted the Laurel Award for Screenwriting. “Writer-director David Lynch’s uncompromising vision pushed the boundaries of filmmaking,” said WGAW President Meredith Stiehm. “We’re proud to honor him and his legacy.”
Here is the video of Kyle MacLachlan accepting the award on behalf of David Lynch during the Writers Guild Awards on February 15, 2025. It features clips from Lynch’s movies and weather reports, words from Bill Pullman (Lost Highway) and Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks: The Return) as well as a message from his first daughter, Jennifer Lynch.
Transcript of Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, Bill Pullman, and Jennifer Lynch’s words:
Thank you very, very much. I am so privileged to be here honoring the recipient of the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement, my good friend David Lynch.
42 years ago, David came into my life and set me on a course far different from the one I envisioned for myself. And he had that effect on people, took them by the hand, strange worlds, magical places, universes in his mind that he had brought to three-dimensional reality. I couldn’t imagine my life or my career without him. He was a guiding star for me, for a lot of actors, the artist we got into this business to work with, an actor’s dream. Every script from him was like a journey that tested the limits of what we were capable of. He could see things in you that you would never see in yourself. As an artist, David’s name alone conveys a mood: Lynchian. It’s a way to convey the bizarre, the entrancing, the dream-like, the not-quite-real. It’s a mix of the dark and the ordinary that he made uniquely his own. Writers must make the inner external, the invisible, visible. David tapped into the logic of dreams, his singular mind and the wave of human emotions in a canon of work that simply wouldn’t exist without him.
David was in touch with a frequency that not many people can reach, like a signal in the air that he was able to tune into. He believed that ideas did not belong to us. As he explained it, he caught them like fish. There are billions out there waiting for someone to reel them in if you knew how to be open enough to catch them. And that was the key: staying open. David first got his start as a painter. He was working on a painting of a garden at night, all greens and blacks. He heard a wind, and in his mind, he saw the greens move, and he realized he wanted to make paintings that moved. He made a few short films, including a 16mm stop motion film called “Six Men Getting Sick.” It’s a barn-burner, if you’ve ever seen it. Off the strength of those shorts, he attended the American Film Institute, where he made Eraserhead, one of the most iconic arresting and imaginative debuts in the history of film and my personal nightmare. He was chosen by Mel Brooks to helm his second film, The Elephant Man, which David co-wrote, and then went on to write and direct Blue Velvet, the original Dune, Wild at Heart, Inland Empire, Mulholland Drive, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. That was the prequel film to the ground-breaking TV show he co-created with Mark Frost, Twin Peaks. A good one. His films are filled with moments of beauty and layers of darkness, cinematic collages of music and poetry. His paintings don’t just move, they terrify and delight. My heart breaks that he is gone. But the world is so much fuller because he was here. He lives on in the work he did and the people that he touched… Emily, Lula… Right now, I welcome you to join me in taking a look at some of that work and hearing from some of those people.
Naomi Watts
David Lynch is an ideas man at his core. All of his art is all on his own terms. He was so profoundly in touch with his imagination. It spills out of him, and that’s what makes him so unique. Gorgeous writing. And how he creates a scene, you think you know where you’re going with it, and then he just turns it on its head. [Her auditioning scene from Mulholland Drive] was the scene that made me go: “Oh, my God, I hope I get this part.” That is just the most wonderful piece of writing. When we got to the rehearsal, everyone just brought their truth to it, and David was just smiling ear to ear. David deserves the WGA Screen Laurel Award because his work does not date. It’s being talked about decades after. I do believe that that will continue on.
Bill Pullman
Wild at Heart had that crazed version of what later was a lot of purveyor of darkness in Lost Highway. When I first read Lost Highway, I’d already gotten that like, “Take a look at it, read it. It’s not going to make a lot of sense.” And to me, it made absolute sense. The hauntedness of Patricia, her walking up to that house, and that line in the stage direction, I think, was just brief, but he made it into an aria. David definitely knew how to make a line of description in a script into something incredibly vivid cinematically. I think that’s what the Writers Guild should be celebrating, all the diverse approaches to coming up with ideas in scripts.
Kyle MacLachlan continues
In accepting the award on his behalf, I want to read a short paragraph that his daughter Jennifer sent to me. She said, “Due to his failing health, he was working on a video acceptance piece.” (That would have been pretty cool.) “That would have played in place of his attendance. He might have done any number of amazing, absurd, joyful things in this video. Even after a lifetime, one could not guess at what it would have been. I can, however, tell you exactly what he would have said. With a quick smile and a quick wave, he would speak, ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’”
That was our David.
Fire walk with 
