David Lynch will miss the opening of a rare exhibition in Britain showcasing his painting and photography. But the reason will cheer the hearts of millions. “I can’t come over,” he said. “I’m supposed to be working on Twin Peaks.”
Lynch was speaking ahead of the opening of an exhibition at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) – a genuine coup for a small gallery in a town that does not get too many national art firsts.
Lynch said he was excited by the mima show, but immersed in Twin Peaks. It was revealed in October that the cable channel Showtime had approached the filmmaker and his collaborator Mark Frost to bring the series back, marking the 25th anniversary of it being axed by ABC at the end of its second series.
Fans are excited but will have to be patient, he said. “I wish I could snap my fingers and we could get Twin Peaks out right now but it is going to be a while.”
The show, which starred Kyle MacLachlan as FBI special agent Dale Cooper investigating a murder in a strange far-flung town in Washington state, became a cult hit ushering in a golden age of US TV drama. Lynch stressed the new iteration was still in its early days. “We’re not able to even get started because the contracts haven’t been signed,” he said. Once that happens it will be another 18 months before the world sees the planned nine episodes.
“You couldn’t do this if you weren’t excited or in love. I love the world of Twin Peaks. There are many worlds and the worlds are infinitely deep so a continuing story is a thrilling thing.”
Lynch will write and direct all the episodes and he was reluctant to give too much away although others have been less circumspect. The actor Margaret Lanterman, who played the Log Lady, has said she will be in it and MacLachlan, has tweeted: “Better fire up that percolator and find my black suit :-) #Twinpeaks.”
Lynch recalled making the series 20 odd years ago. “We had so much freedom it was amazing, there were a few things with swearing that I had to change in the pilot but changing it went to something that was even better. It was amazing how much we could do. It was primetime TV.”
He admitted being taken aback by its success. “It has been a big surprise that Twin Peaks, in a little town in the north-west of the United States, how those things travelled the world over. It is a strange phenomenon, you just can’t figure it. It’s a mystery. It is a beautiful world.”
Lynch accepts that people know him far less for his visual art than for his TV and film work, such as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. “I’ve always been a painter and all I’ve really wanted to do since I was little was be a painter. The thing that happened was painting led to cinema.”
Lynch said his biggest influence was the city of Philadelphia but in terms of artists: “I love Francis Bacon, I love Ed Kienholz, I like Magritte, I like Edward Hopper. There are many great painters I like but the whole thing is to find your own voice and try and get in to the world of painting deeper and deeper.”
There is a childlike quality to Lynch’s work, something he acknowledges. “I like organic phenomenon, I like the human figure but I see it in a different way. I like childish, bad painting. I like a crude bumpy disturbed surface, and I like sores and distortions. I like teeth and I like hair.” Why the latter two? “I don’t know … I like what I like, go figure.”
The mima show is curated by Brett Littman, executive director of the Drawing Center in New York, and explores how Lynch uses “naming” in his art.
The new show was very much Littman’s baby, Lynch said. “This is Brett Littman’s show. He went through a lot of my stuff and picked things which fit his idea for the show, naming. I do love words in things, I like the alphabet, I like the shape of letters. Really I like Polish and Russian letters a lot, but I live in the United States so I write in English.”
Lynch said it was interesting to see what people got from his work and he too returns to it. “It is very, very helpful once in a while to go back and see older work. You see older things and you remember ‘I was really on to something right there, this could be what I need for now.’ It can fuel the future by going into the past.”
It was not until 2007, with a show at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, that his art became known to a wider public. “I then started having shows in different places.”
While he will not be in Middlesbrough, Lynch said he had vivid memories of visiting northern England in the 1980s and it was a complete and utter disaster. “I was looking for factories,” he said. “I had always heard that the great, great hell-like, fire and smoke and power was in northern England. I was looking for these things and all that was left were cows in very, very peaceful fields. They were levelling smoke stacks one every week. I’d missed the boat completely for the great factories.”
That was for an as yet unrealised film called Ronnie Rocket. The other film he would love to make, he said, is an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
Although Twin Peaks is taking up most of his time he is also working on something that sounds typically Lynchian. “Right now I’m mostly writing, I’ve got a painting going and I’m building a chair. I love to build things and this is for a monkey film. I’m working with a monkey named Jack and that’ll come out sometime. It is not a chimpanzee, the monkey came up from South America.”
David Lynch Naming, mima, 12 December to 26 March 2015
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