“Don’t hold me to it Keanu, but I think I am [done with film].” David Lynch told Keanu Reeves in the 2012 Side By Side documentary. And in his book, Catching the Big Fish, you’ll find a more straightforward statement written in black and white: “For me, film is dead.”
Inland Empire, David Lynch‘s nearly 8-year-old but most recent feature film, was shot entirely on digital video using a Sony DSR-PD150. Last year, he shot a music video for Nine Inch Nails on a Canon 5D Mark II and the Hasselblad Lunar. And there are plenty of additional examples from the past decade that indicate the director has turned his back on the medium he so expertly used for the majority of his filmography.
But in a bit of a surprise move, David Lynch declared in an interview on Italian television yesterday that he’s falling back in love with film again, stressing that he’s talking about celluloid.
“Celluloid is so beautiful, but digital is getting better and better and better. Cinema will never die. Celluloid is in trouble.”
—David Lynch (2/2/2014)
But an old flame never dies, right? When Che tempo che fa host Fabio Fazio then asked if the director was working on a new movie project, David Lynch answered in true Major Briggs manner: “I’m… We’re all top secret!”
Last year, daughter and fellow filmmaker Jennifer Lynch disclosed that her dad is trying to make a mind-boggling new movie. Fans’ minds would be pretty much boggled already by the mere thought of a new David Lynch movie shot on 35 mm just like his masterpieces.
You can watch the entire David Lynch interview that aired February 2nd 2014 on Rai Tre, but be aware that it is overdubbed by an English to Italian interpreter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVm6D-ePkec
Fire walk with 
Any movie would be great, but how I wish he would return to Twin Peaks…
I think he damn well needs to get back to Twin Peaks.
hi! I write from Italy, unfortunately, the interview is not the best, there is a better than a few months before broadcast on Sky Italy
I can’t find the interview you mentioned… Do you remember the name of the program?
Love to see a new David Lynch movie. As long as it’s the classic Lynch that mixes cool and surreal. NOT like Inland Empire. That was just.. urgh…
No, he doesn’t need to go back to Twin Peaks. TP was great TV, and influenced most if not all of contemporary TV’s great continuing shows, but it was, is, and always will be Lynch-lite. I felt so then, I feel so now, and his subsequent masterpieces Lost Highway, The Straight Story, and Mulholland Drive prove me right. All you Peakers out there, enjoy what you got — and then get the fuck over the fact that it’s over. It’s over, needs to stay over, and Lynch has moved on — why can’t you? I’m sick and goddamned tired of fanboys of every stripe (with regards to their own fetish object of choice — TP, Wild palms, Dexter, Breaking Bad, Buffy, et al) refusing to let something that needs to end just fucking end! Let it be dead, as it has been for twenty three or so years now, and instead evolve with the genius artists who created these important pieces of TV. Y’all are stuck in a nostalgic reverie that says more about yourselves, and your inability to continue on through life and enjoy and discover new things, than it does about the particular pieces of art or entertainment in question. Sorry to be so blunt and crude and maybe even rude, but I’ve been sitting by listening to you yokels blather on about The Black Lodge and White Lodge, and What if Captain Kirk was Secretly in Love with Spock, and Did Heisenberg *really* die? for far too long. “I wanna know! I wanna know! I wanna know!” you keep crying, like some kind of infantile Siskel and Eberts who have to have every fucking mystery explored and explained and exploited and everything from your formative years rehashed and regurgitated back at you till it all looks and sounds like meaningless niche-sploitation puke, ad nauseum, ad infinitum, till it all gets cheapened and coarsened and ultimately means nothing at all anymore — just so you can get your fanboy nuts off. Well for my part, I wanna see Lynch do something new and different that he’s passionate about. This is what a real artist does, and this is what Lynch, at his very best, has always done, because, unlike you, he’s a real artist — he CREATES things. He creates worlds and moods and feelings unlike anyone else, and yet these worlds and moods are oddly familiar to us all, in a deep, primordial, thrilling and sometimes nauseating way. That’s the David Lynch I’ve loved from Eraserhead on, that’s the David lynch who I wanted and missed but rarely got during the TP Wild at Heart years; that’s the David Lynch I got back with a vengeance with Lost Highway, The Straight Story, and especially Mulholland Drive. (Inland Empire was a mess, but it was a hypnotic and dangerous mess.) You guys are the ones who want things like Spring Breakers and Upstream Color and every other great piece of modern art to re-repeat itself endlessly for you own amusement. And so I say, finally, after bearing two decades of your fanatical yet shallow-as-a-wading-pool obsessions (which entirely miss the point of what you’re obsessed with, by the way), IT’s OVER, GODDMANIT! MOVE THE FRIGGITY FUCK ON!… and while you’re at it, maybe remember why you got excited by Lynch in the first place: because like all of the truly greatest artists throughout history, he cannot be commodified, cannot be quantified, and at his best, we really don’t know what he’ll do next. That’s the Lynch project I want to see… if you want to see Twin Peaks again so badly, go watch fucking Twin Peaks — and please, please, please just shut the fuck up about it already! (Thank you for your valuable time.)
Well, that gum we all like is finally coming back in style. And not because we refused to let it go. Actually, part of the reason we refused to let it go was that the artist himself has said numerous times over the years that his heart never left Twin Peaks, that he always wanted to continue the story. Maybe this is why when he and Frost went to Showtime with the idea, they didn’t have a script – they had binders full of ideas compiled over the years.
Pull your head out of your ass and stop trolling TP fansites if you don’t want to hear about it.
I love David and his movies. My favorite is twin peaks and Inland Empire. I can understand why it is top secret, his films could reveal a lot and are full of his wisdom and revelations. No coincidence that the video is now ‘private’. I saw screw the agenda, David’s movies help awaken people, because he is one of those rare ones with the power to make a movie that changes the world forever, for the better. New movie or not I am more than pleased with what he has released thus far.