It’s been more than a decade since David Lynch released Inland Empire in 2006. And even before taking on the job of directing a new season of Twin Peaks, Lynch didn’t seem to have any trouble filling his time, painting, acting, composing music, making weird lo-fi commercials for his line of coffee, and, of course, extolling the virtues of transcendental meditation in the late 2000s. Now that new season is done and ready to be unleashed onto the world, and Lynch insists that the experience hasn’t made him miss the process of making a feature film.
“Things changed a lot,” Lynch tells The Sydney Morning-Herald in an interview published earlier today. “So many films were not doing well at the box office even though they might have been great films and the things that were doing well at the box office weren’t the things that I would want to do.” Asked point-blank if Inland Empire would be his last film by an interviewer who doesn’t seem to think that Lynch’s 2014 Duran Duran concert documentary counts, Lynch says, “Yes it is.”
That’s quite a definitive statement, and would be more definitive if it weren’t for Lynch’s famously intuitive creative process, which he’s compared to throwing out a line and waiting for a fish to bite. There‘s no way to know what sort of deep-sea creatures are floating around in Lynch’s subconscious—even he doesn’t know until they appear—so how can he say definitively that one won’t surface? And then there’s the fact that in 2014, he said he was “filled with hope” about making a new movie with Laura Dern. So while it’s true that only David Lynch knows what’s going on in David Lynch’s head, this could be one of those statements that’s final until it isn’t. We hope so, anyway.