‘Everything to me’

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This article was published 17/01/2025 (573 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Thursday, it was announced filmmaker and artist David Lynch had died. And like the cosmic cataclysm he created in Twin Peaks: The Return, his death, just prior to his 79th birthday, sent a pulse wave from Los Angeles all the way to Winnipeg.

“David Lynch was everything to me, the very reason I first picked up a movie camera,” says Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin, 68, in an email interview.

Maddin recalled seeing Lynch’s first feature with some friends at the long-gone Festival Cinema at Sargent Avenue and Arlington Street.

“Until I saw his Eraserhead in 1980, I had no idea films could draw on the subconscious so powerfully, could speak to me directly,” Maddin says, adding some of his friends were impressed, while others were frustrated and even infuriated by the strangeness of the “arty and arbitrary” production.

“That anyone had made a movie like Eraserhead, a thing that could sear my senses and leave me unable to sleep that night, astonished me. He showed me a vast new region of possible film subjects and gave me the courage and even the compulsion to attempt my own forays into that region.

“I could never approach Lynch’s powers, but it’s been great trying. That’s all I’ve been trying to do. His death truly saddens me.”

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Winnipeg-based writer and filmmaker George Godwin, 70, could relate to Maddin’s experience. As a film critic at the University of Winnipeg, Godwin also saw Eraserhead in its 1980 festival run, and was likewise thunderstruck by its dreamlike invention.

Godwin would go on to review the film for Cinefantastique and eventually write a whole book on the film, Eraserhead: The David Lynch File Vol. 1.

Lynch himself was so impressed with Godwin’s analysis, he hired Godwin to be a on-set diarist for his subsequent film Dune (1984), which turned out to be a disappointment for many. For Godwin, the experience was life-changing.

“But just in terms of getting out into the world and dealing with the studio, dealing with a big film production, dealing with all these pretty famous people, I sort of realized that, oh yes, I can actually function in this much larger context than I was used to,” he says.

“Being referenced in his autobiography really puffed up my ego a bit. He acknowledged what I’d written about Eraserhead was the most significant writing about the film. That feels really good.”

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Los Angeles-based, Winnipeg-born actor-writer-showrunner Johanna Stein had a brief but memorable role in Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive (2001) as “The woman in #12,” a character with an apparent but unspoken connection to Naomi Watts’ character Betty.

“I had been such a fan of David Lynch. I was obsessed with Twin Peaks when it came out, I went to AFI film school mostly because he was an alum. So when I was cast in Mulholland Drive, I wasn’t just excited about booking it, I was totally starstruck,” she recalls.

“I don’t know if he could sense how nervous I was, but while the shot was being set up, he sat me in a chair next to him and we just chit-chatted. He asked me questions about my family and where I was from, and said things like ‘gosh-darn’ and ‘oh, that’s neat!’ He was so disarming and genuine, it really set me at ease.”

Stein affectionately recalls Lynch’s directing style.

“There’s a moment in one of the scenes where my character is skulking around outside an apartment. Sensing something bad has just happened, I’m supposed to walk quickly towards camera, which was being held by an operator who’s walking backwards,” Stein says. “David calls ‘Action!’ and because I’m new and don’t know any better, I run full-speed right into the camera, almost knocking the guy over.

“David yells ‘CUT!’ and then I hear him call out in his twangy, Midwestern-y voice, ‘Y’know Johanna, you’re not training for the Olympics here…’

“What a loss. He was such a uniquely talented artist and filmmaker, and such an authentic and fascinating person.”

randall.king.arts@gmail.com