It’s difficult to put into words the gratitude I have for Sabrina S. Sutherland. The collaborations she forged with filmmaker David Lynch, particularly over the last decade, have transformed my life in ways I never could have anticipated. Sutherland executive produced Lynch’s 18-part masterpiece, 2017’s “Twin Peaks: The Return”—or as she prefers to call it, “Twin Peaks: Season 3”—which now stands as the director’s crowning achievement in light of his death this past January at age 78. I was incredibly honored when one of my former interview subjects, author and professor Martha P. Nochimson, invited me last month to virtually participate in the Columbia University panel, “A Tribute for David Lynch (1946-2025): In Celebration of an Art Life Like No Other.” To my amazement, my fellow panelists were “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner, The Strange World of David Lynch author Eric G. Wilson and Sutherland herself.
The stories that Sutherland shared during the two and a half hour seminar were so captivating that it made me eager to have a one-on-one chat with her. Not only did she agree to do an interview with me via Zoom with Cinema Femme, our conversation lasted nearly as long as the seminar did, and could have easily gone on for several more hours. From serving as a production coordinator on the second season of “Twin Peaks” and a production supervisor on “Lost Highway” to producing such invaluable works as “The Missing Pieces,” “Duran Duran: Unstaged,” “What Did Jack Do?” and the “Interview Project” series—not to mention managing Lynch’s YouTube page where he provided daily weather reports for over two years—it’s clear that Sutherland’s extraordinary career deserves a book of its own. But this is a start…
The first date I had with my wife, Cinema Femme publisher Rebecca Martin Fagerholm, happened after I asked her, “Would you like to talk more about ‘Twin Peaks’?” That show has brought more people together than anything I can think of.
I agree, I think that’s great. I’m really honored that you even thought to talk to me, so thank you.
I’ve always wanted to talk to you, so the honor is all mine. Some of your earliest jobs as a production coordinator had amazing titles like “Hell Comes to Frogtown” and “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death.” What first drew you to film and led you to become involved in this particular role?
Back in high school, I had made some short Super 8 movies. When I was a student at UC San Diego, I wasn’t sure what my major was going to be. I knew it wasn’t going to be science or math, even though I was at a science and math school. I ended up in a film course and loved it, so when I graduated, my degree was a visual arts/communications/film and video specialization. My first job after college was being a tour guide at Paramount. Several of my peers whom I graduated with laughed at me, thinking that was a stupid choice, but it wasn’t because it enabled me to meet people, work on sets and move up that way. I began working as a production assistant, and started really wanting to go into camerawork—like Catherine Coulson, probably—but at the time, it was difficult for women. I remember there being a women’s group for film called Behind the Lens.
The camerawork wasn’t as plentiful, and since I am very detail-oriented and very organized, it was easy for me to get work in the office, since it required someone to juggle all these different things. In the film industry, you’re unemployed all the time, going from job to job, so it was much easier for me to go the office route. I finally made the decision to move towards being a producer, so that’s why I started focusing on production coordinating, figuring that would lead me toward production supervising, maybe production managing if I got in the DGA, becoming a line producer and finally, a producer.
Those films you mentioned were examples of low-budget moviemaking. I loved horror movies, so I was happy to work on them. The title for “Cannibal Women” was changed a couple of times, and it starred Shannon Tweed, Bill Maher and Adrienne Barbeau. The shoot only lasted a few weeks, which was how those sorts of films were made, when low-budget filmmaking was really at its peak. And I guess now it’s similar for low-budget films, though most of them are likely to end up online.
How did you first meet David Lynch and what were your initial impressions of him?
I first really noticed David’s work on “The Elephant Man” when that came out. I was in school, and it was one of the first times that I went to that kind of film by myself. I saw it and was really struck by its emotions, the authenticity of it and the humanity in it. It was very powerful as a film, and it made me really want to work on something like that. Years later, I was working on a volleyball movie called “Side Out,” and a lot of the crew were going to go do something with David after that, but I didn’t get to do it. Then I was doing night shoots for a show, “Sunset Beat,” that starred George Clooney, and I had recorded the first season of “Twin Peaks” when it first aired. I watched all the episodes over a couple days, and thought, ‘Wow, I want to work on this. This is incredible television.’
I was hired as a production coordinator for the second season of “Twin Peaks,” and first met David in the production office, which you had to walk through in order to get to the set. David came in, and he always had people with him, but it wasn’t an entourage. People just gravitated toward him. He came around, introduced himself to me and shook my hand. It was nice, but I was there to work, so it wasn’t like some huge thing. I was coming onto this hit show as a huge fan of it, so I was very excited. New actors and crew members were mixing with the people who had been there before, and I think the original actors were kind of overwhelmed with having the spotlight on them. I was getting calls all the time from people who wanted to come in and work on the show, so it was still super-popular. It was certainly a bonding experience for a lot of us, and some of the people I met on that show are still among my closest friends.
When I recently interviewed “Twin Peaks” music editor Lori Eschler, she spoke about how certain people in her life, including some crew members on the show, had labeled David a misogynist because of the fact that he portrayed abuse onscreen. Yet those attitudes toward him and his work have evolved greatly in recent years. To me, he has always shown great compassion for the women in his films.
I don’t think of David in any way as a misogynistic person. Obviously, he has to value women enough to make me somebody who is working with him, talking to him and being on a collaborative level with him. He loved women, and wasn’t nasty to them at all. Whenever he would get an idea for a project, he would stay true to it. I think he felt that people were really good underneath, but there were a lot of horrible things happening in the world, and he was showing them to us through his work. He also strove to show the humanity that is within people, and that peace can come. That is, to me, his universal statement in the films he made. He loved human beings, and was a great human himself—generous, thoughtful and kind. He had his faults as everybody does, but he was not anti-women in any way.
David loved watching true crime shows like “Forensic Files,” which detail the horrifying things people do to each other, and they would leave him thinking, ‘We need to fix this somehow.’ That is part of why he was such a strong supporter of transcendental meditation. He believed that if people meditated and got strength from the unified field, badness would go away and goodness would come in. At one point, several years ago, David saw that I was stressed and said, “Sabrina, you should learn how to meditate.” [laughs] So I went and learned how to do it, and it did help. I still meditate for twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes in the evening, but I’m not as vocal about it. It really does help me focus and make me feel better. It’s just a great tool for my mental health, and it’s thanks to David for having me go do that.
You also served as a production coordinator on David’s shows “On the Air,” excluding the first episode, and “Hotel Room,” the third episode of which—“Blackout”—contains some of my favorite directing of his career.
“On the Air” had different directors just as “Twin Peaks” did during its second season. There were a lot of “Twin Peaks” episodes, but David only directed a few of them, and he was really only around for those. Someone recently interviewed Harley Peyton, and he was saying that David had an office there and was on set all the time. I will counter that because he was not around all the time, and I wish that he was. It was Harley and Bob Engels who really drove the day-to-day stuff. Mark Frost was barely around as well, though he was there on a more regular basis. I don’t think it was a comfortable situation, honestly. After the series was done, I was basically booted out when they made “Fire Walk With Me,” which was fine.
David was involved in creating “On the Air” during its inception, but once you had other people involved with the direction, it wasn’t the same. For “Hotel Room,” he directed two episodes, and those were shot very quickly. We were shooting on film, so you’d have one ten-minute, thousand-foot load in the can at a time, just as Alfred Hitchcock did on “Rope.” People were getting nervous because David would spend all morning rehearsing with the actors. He still hadn’t shot anything by the time we went to lunch, and when we came back, he was still rehearsing. At about two in the afternoon, he’d start shooting ten-minute takes, and it looked like he was going to run out of film. But within an hour or so, everything was shot and he was done. David was not usually big on rehearsing, but on “Hotel Room,” he rehearsed over and over so that shooting took very little time.
It’s interesting that you served as a production supervisor on two eerie films from 1997 starring Bill Pullman, “Lost Highway” and Wim Wenders’ “The End of Violence.” How did that role differ from being a production coordinator?
It was more like being a production manager. At that time, if you were in the DGA, you were a production manager, and if you were not union, you were a production supervisor, so you didn’t get any of the union credits, you didn’t get any benefits and you didn’t get a lot of pay. But you were doing a lot of the work. David’s longtime collaborator Deepak Nayar was the line producer on “Lost Highway,” and I was essentially the production manager there every day working on the set. I dealt with all the day to day crew hirings, crew firings, equipment needs and things like that, all the while following the budget. Deepak only worked during the day, and David loved night shoots, so I was there for sequences like the dust storm or the explosion, which was a last-minute idea. I also came down for Patricia Arquette, who was concerned about her nudity in the porno footage that was shot on 16mm, and wanted to make sure that it was handled with care.
I had done several commercials with David before preproduction began on “Lost Highway” in 1995. What’s funny is that whenever David saw me onset, he’d have a scrunched up face, thinking, ‘Oh no, what are you doing here?’ He knew that if I was coming down, it was because I’d have to tell him something like, “Oh sorry, you can’t have a technocrane for five days, you can have it for one. Which day do you want it?” On independent films, you don’t have a lot of money, so you have to spread it out. If David wanted something, he would call me to the set and ask, “Can I get this?” He was always cringing around me, thinking that I was looking for ways to say no to him. [laughs] After “Lost Highway,” we began preproduction on the film, “Dream of the Bovine,” which never ended up getting made.
On “The Straight Story,” David and Deepak separated, and a while later, I got a call out of the blue from David. It was after he had filmed the pilot for “Mulholland Dr.” that the network had rejected. He said, “Sabrina, I want you to produce this film. We have footage from the TV show, but we are going to make it into a movie. I know what the scenes will be, it’s going to be really quick—just a couple weeks—and I want you to produce it. We don’t have a lot of money, but let’s figure this out.” I realized that all of the contracts that he had were for television, and they would all have to be renegotiated for the film, so I suggested that it would be cheaper for him to just use the person who he already had—because they were DGA, and I am not—rather than hiring me. So I kind of kicked myself out of it, trying to save David money, which I kick myself for doing, but I was looking after him. I love that movie.
Whenever you try to rationally explain what “Mulholland Dr.”—which is my all-time favorite film—is about, it sounds like you’re describing a crazy dream you had the other night. The film only “makes sense” in cinematic terms, and David enables each viewer to have their own personal interpretation of it.
Yeah, I think that’s the beauty of all his films. I don’t like art critics and I don’t like film critics—no offense [laughs]—because they say their interpretation is the only one that is valid. You can say, “This is what I think the artist might mean,” or, “This is what it means to me.” But I hate when critics make a definitive statement in saying, “This is what it is.”
I’ve always felt that the role of a critic should be to encourage the reader to engage with the art on a deeper level instead of being passive.
Yes! I agree that would be the perfect thing, but it’s not the norm. After “Mulholland Dr.”, David’s girlfriend and eventual wife Mary Sweeney, who edited many of his films, would call me whenever David was doing a commercial for brands like Dior, and I’d come in to help with those. Mary was producing David’s work at that time, while I took on Deepak’s role of line producer. We even did some commercials without David through his production company. David’s next film, “Inland Empire,” took five years to make because he was shooting little pieces of it all the time, starting with “Rabbits,” the web series he made for DavidLynch.com. He shot different stuff in Poland, then came back to California and had a serious shoot with actors like Jeremy Irons and a real crew, rather than having three or four people working on it.
Yet the film was very small, low budget, and completely off the books. It was very much like “Eraserhead” in how he shot the film on the weekends. He loved being able to hold his digital camera, see what he was filming, zoom in whenever he wanted to and let it keep running without having to worry about changing the film. I was brought in as an associate producer when David decided that he wanted to turn “Inland Empire” into a real movie that he could distribute. So I went through all of the steps of going to the Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild while having to collect and account for everything. Mary was the one who did all of the negotiating with StudioCanal to get the money that was needed, and I came in to do the nuts and bolts of putting it together. After Mary and David split up, I helped her on her own directorial effort, “Baraboo,” which I produced.
I love that film!
Mary originally had another script that she was hoping to do called “Campfires Burning,” and we had worked the year before to try and raise money for it. I think we even scouted locations in Spokane, Washington, but when it didn’t happen, she decided that she wanted to make a movie regardless. So the next year, Mary was ready to shoot the film, and asked me to come to Wisconsin and stay with her. It was a low-budget movie, and Mary and I found all the locations ourselves by driving around together. When she found a place that she liked, we parked and I’d go knock on the door to ask if we could shoot there.
There was an interesting lodge that we found, as well as all sorts of ambient visuals like a truck carrying wood. I remember going up to a farmer and asking if he would drive his tractor by for a shot, and he agreed. Everybody in town was very friendly. The farmers would even give us stacks of eggs. Most of the people were working on the film for very little money, and there were a lot of recent graduates from University of Wisconsin-Madison on the crew. It was a project that Mary really put her full passion into, and allowed me to be there to help her.
I also loved the “Interview Project” series that you produced for David’s website, which to me, expanded on the spirit of “The Straight Story” with its vignettes of real-life people in small towns around the country.
That was the work of Jason S., the same person who shot “David Lynch: The Art Life” and also did “Lynch 1” and “Lynch 2,” and David’s son, Austin. They partnered to do both “Interview Project” and “Interview Project Germany,” and ended up winning a Webby and People’s Voice Award for it. The two of them traveled around with a woman who would conduct the interviews with people they would find along the way. When they came back, David would watch the footage and did the introductions for each episode. They did a really wonderful job on both series.
Getting that footage of David working in “The Art Life” was all Jason. David was so comfortable with Jason that he never even noticed when he was being filmed by him. Jason would just be with him for so long, and he would shoot everything. He also shot behind the scenes footage on the third season of “Twin Peaks.” Jason now has a business where he does little vignettes about people that they can put on their own websites.
What were your thoughts on David’s approach to music-based projects that you produced, from “Duran Duran: Unstaged” to the recent “Cellophane Memories” music videos?
Every project would spawn from an idea David would have, and he would create from it. There’s only one project that I’m aware of that David was kind of forced into without having an idea for it, and it never ended up happening. He agreed to direct “Duran Duran: Unstaged” after the band approached him, he listened to their music and ideas came to him. His original plan for the film, which centers on a live concert, was to do all the visual effects live as well, which would have been nuts. It would have required the use of so many cameras. We ended up going to the house of Gary D’Amico, the special effects guy who did the explosion for “Lost Highway,” where he had a big workshop and setup stations. We shot experiments with him there for a number of projects, including the latest “Twin Peaks.” A lot of those experiments were used in the atomic explosion sequence in Part 8.
Though you didn’t work on “Fire Walk With Me,” you did produce its invaluable counterpart, 2014’s “The Missing Pieces.”
I know when we did it, it was kind of a surprise. There were a few of us who went and had to go dig out the actual film, all of the dailies, and go through all of the audio and the negatives. We had to figure out what was there, what wasn’t used, and what possibly could be used or could be extended. David was thinking there might be twenty or thirty minutes of material, but then it kept going and going, and we were like, “Wow.” I think David really loved going back through and finding these things. He worked on it very diligently. It wasn’t like a haphazard thing or anything like that. He really took his time with it, and we spent well over a year putting it together. David put a lot of thought into it, and right when it came out, Mark approached him to ask, “Why don’t we do another season of ‘Twin Peaks’?” I think because David had just done “The Missing Pieces,” he had kind of fallen in love with “Twin Peaks” again, and was like, “Yeah, I think that would be great.”
How mammoth of a task was it to executive produce the 2017 limited series event, “Twin Peaks”?
At 18 hours long, it was easily the biggest thing I’ve ever done, and we shot it like a movie, so we had preproduction. David and Mark wrote together to a point where they had the basis of what would happen. Then Mark went and wrote his book, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, and David continued writing. After that, preproduction began, and for a while, it was just me and David going through what he had written. That was the best experience because I could break it down as to exactly what he saw, and figure out how he was thinking of shooting things. This was before Scott Cameron, the first assistant director, even started. In order to put together a budget, I needed to have a schedule, and with David, there are only so many pages, but you don’t know how it will translate to hours.
Showtime wanted nine episodes, and David was like, “We don’t how many there will be. There will definitely be nine, but there might be more.” The network didn’t like that answer, and that became a problem. Mark was okay with trying to figure out how to shoot it like television, but David and I were approaching it as a film. We had to figure out this giant schedule of locations and actors’ availability and how that was going to work as more of a movie. At the same time, you’re talking about union regulations and contracts, just like on “Mulholland Dr.” The people at Showtime we were dealing with were not on the upper echelon, and they kept pushing us to shoot in Canada because it was going to be cheaper there. We told them, “No, we want to shoot in Washington and Los Angeles. If we can shoot in other places like Las Vegas, great, but we definitely want to use those two locations.”
The network kept trying to come up with ways to streamline things. They’d ask, “Why do you need a special effects person and a standby painter there every day?” Because that’s how David works, and he needs those people to be there. We eventually got to a point where everything came to a standstill, and David and I talked about it without Mark. He asked me, “Are you going to be able to do this?” I said, “I don’t think I can do this the way that it’s going to be done,” and he said, “I don’t think I can do it either. We’re going to stop. Is that okay?” I said, “Yeah.” And I felt good about it. He said, “Yeah, I’m good, we’re done.” And that was it. David wanted to be able to direct the whole thing and shoot it like a film where episodes could be cross boarded. He didn’t want to compromise certain things or feel constricted in any way.
David had me go to Showtime and basically say, “Here’s what we need, and if you want to do it, then let’s partner. If not, thank you very much but we’re not going to do it.” Luckily, the CEO of Showtime, David Nevins, was at the meeting and said, “Yes, we want to do this and we want David involved in it. We want to make the film that he wants to make.” So we got what we wanted in terms of creative control, and we got a little bit more money. The amount had already been brought down to such a low number that just having the ability to make it with that sounded okay to us. They got those 18 episodes for a song. We shot for around 142 plus days, with our final shooting days in France. When we came back, David had a week off, and Duwayne Dunham put together an assembly with his crew.
Once David and I returned, we watched that assembly, which may have been 16 episodes at that time. Then David went through it, talked with Duwayne, and Duwayne kept working on it a little bit. After that, David started doing his edit. There were certain things that he wanted to edit, and it got to a point where there were 18 episodes. David wanted to finish editing them himself, which I don’t think made Duwayne very happy. For another six months, David went through every scene and either tweaked it or left it alone. He did his own thing with Part 8, and after that, the visual effects and music still had to go in. Then we did all the color timing, and it was done.
Duwayne has been quoted saying that certain seeming inconsistencies, such as how the people in the Double R Diner suddenly change during the last scene of Part 7, are mistakes resulting from the lack of time he had to cut it.
All I will say is that David went through everything in the edit so many times, and chose to leave the work Duwayne did on that particular scene as-is. There were a couple of mistakes that I did have corrected after fans pointed them out, but they were small, like subtitles. I do want to say that once Showtime agreed to give us what we needed, we never had a better support and a better group of people to work with than the people from that network. They were a dream. Creatively, they were totally hands off. They came to the set maybe twice and they weren’t watching dailies or anything like that. They just saw it when it was done, and they may or may not have liked what they saw, but they were kind enough to allow David to just do what he wanted to do, and I’m super-appreciative to all of them.
You mentioned in the panel we did that the title “Twin Peaks: The Return” was imposed on the limited series.
When we did this latest “Twin Peaks,” the question was, “Is it Season 3?” Not technically, because so much time had been gapped in between, but for us, it was always “Twin Peaks: Season 3.” Yet Showtime didn’t want it to be eligible for awards as a regular drama series. They wanted it to be in the Limited Event Series category, so therefore, it had to be called “A Limited Event Series.” We weren’t going to be doing another one, supposedly, although look at many of the other Limited Event Series contenders—especially the one that won, “Big Little Lies”—that went on to have another season. Shows are often put in that category because the network figures they will have a better chance at winning awards. I don’t like awards, anyway. They are very prejudicial and political, so I don’t even watch the telecasts.
After it was mandated a “limited event series,” Showtime wanted it to be listed as something that would be intriguing to people in TV Guide, so they came up with “Twin Peaks: The Return.” We told them that we didn’t really like that title, but they said, “It’s just for the TV Guide so that viewers won’t confuse it with the original ‘Twin Peaks,’” so we said, “Okay, fine.” But we didn’t realize that this title would be what the network would call the show when they listed it anywhere. I don’t like “The Return” because it’s a generic title that you see used everywhere. Do I think it somehow reflects what happens in the show? Yeah, but so many other things happen too, so I don’t know I would say it’s “The Return.” I still like “Twin Peaks: Season 3” the best.
“Twin Peaks: Season 3” really does strike me as David’s magnum opus in how it brilliantly incorporates images and themes from the past four decades of his career. In Lynch on Lynch, David’s description of Henry in “Eraserhead” applies strikingly to Dougie in Season 3: “Henry is very sure that something is happening, but he doesn’t understand it at all. He watches things very, very carefully, because he’s trying to figure them out. He might study the corner of that pie container, just because it’s in his line of sight, and he might wonder why he sat where he did to have that be there like that. Everything is new. It might not be frightening to him, but it could be a key to something. Everything should be looked at. There could be clues in it.”
That is perfect! David loved certain visuals and certain ideas that would float through all of his projects, such as the chevron, which you can see in “Eraserhead.” Before COVID, David and I went through this huge book that had all of these beautiful matte paintings and other things that were done for “Dune.” It was absolutely gorgeous, and there were things in there that I saw in Season 3. There were certain recurring themes or touchstone elements that he would go back to, but they were always new. He didn’t like doing the same thing, and it wasn’t like he was trying to repeat himself, like a band that keeps trying to replicate its hit songs. All of the films that David made were so different from one another.
You can see the evolution of David’s ideas, for example, in the ways that “Rabbits” is transformed by being a part of “Inland Empire,” which changes who is on the other end of the phone. I love how the meaning of certain images deepen when he finds new ways to use them, such as the photograph of the atomic mushroom cloud, which we first see framed in Henry’s apartment in “Eraserhead.”
And the picture you see behind Gordon Cole’s desk in Season 3 is the exact same picture that Henry had.
Oh wow! I love that. And how lucky was David in having Mary Reber be the person who actually lives at the Laura Palmer House? She has been so incredibly generous in welcoming fans to her home, my wife and I included.
I really love Mary. David and I did a week-long scout over the new year from 2014 to 2015, and it was just he and I and Kate Becker, who is the Director of the Seattle Office of Film + Music, and location manager Dave Drummond. We wanted to visit all of the old “Twin Peaks” locations in Washington and see what they were like. I’m almost positive that it was New Year’s Day when we took a ferry over to see the lodge, and then we came back through Everett, Washington, to see the house where the Palmers had lived. Mary was married then, and she and her husband had already been in touch with the location scout, so they were waiting for us. When we came in, they didn’t have a lot of “Twin Peaks” stuff there at all, except for a framed picture of Laura Palmer on a table. They had just bought the house a couple of months before, and Mary was super-sweet. Then David said to her, “Hey, I want you to play this part.”
One of the greatest gifts David left us with Part 18 is a final scene that will continue to be debated and interpreted for generations to come. Author John Thorne makes a fascinating case in his book Ominous Whoosh for how David may have been inspired by the Hindu myths of Vishnu. There is a certain optimism in Thorne’s interpretation, yet if we heed David’s advice to follow the emotion in his work, the tone of the music that accompanies the end credits feels resoundingly tragic. Or perhaps it’s just mysterious.
I agree that there are a lot of different interpretations, for sure. I will say certain music cues in the final episodes were things that David had found and edited. They were taken from pieces that Angelo had written years before, based on some emotional things that David had described to him. The same is true of the music cue, “The Fireman,” in Part 8. The music was so long, but David had already edited the scene, and he said, “I want that music here.” When he put the music Angelo had written into the scene, it fit perfectly. It seemed as if the music was somehow made for those images, even though it wasn’t. The ups and downs all matched, and David too was in shock. I don’t know whether subconsciously, after hearing the music, he could gauge it pretty exactly with the rhythm of the visuals, because he was good with time in his head. But it was impressive.
I was amazed at how the third season of “Twin Peaks” made any flaws that the second season had feel like an organic part of a greater whole.
When David was working on Season 3, he had me pull out the pilot and the other episodes he directed—especially the last episode of Season 2, which he also rewrote—as well as “Fire Walk With Me.” Those provided David with the mood and setting for his vision of what the world of “Twin Peaks” was like. One thing that David did not like about Season 2 was the wall-to-wall music. He didn’t like the over-reliance on music to make the show feel like “Twin Peaks,” and there was so much of it that he wanted some space and time away from it. With Season 3, he was very adamant from the beginning that there would be times where he didn’t want any music at all. He had sound design, which is different, but he wanted the freedom of not having music.
What was the experience like of joining David when Parts 1 & 2 screened in Cannes?
That was a great experience. The screen was giant there, and that standing ovation went on forever.
When the new “Twin Peaks” aired in 2017, I felt it profoundly reflected the rampant confusion spawned by misinformation, alternative facts and the assault against empathy that was coming from Washington D.C., which we are now experiencing to a much more heightened degree. David allowed viewers to escape the noise of our current era, and pay attention to the details that would otherwise be overlooked.
I agree with that. The pace of the show definitely made you slow down and really appreciate things. People always get uncomfortable with certain moments, especially the long shot of the guy sweeping as “Green Onions” plays in the bar. A moment like that is an invitation for the viewer to sit back, listen to the song, watch the guy sweep and just let it flow over you. It was kind of a nice, relaxing thing to do. Everybody is always in a rush, and I think David paced it like that because that’s kind of what “Twin Peaks” is like. “Twin Peaks” has a certain flow to it, especially when you are in the town itself. When you are outside of it, you’re in the worlds of other people like Dougie, which are different.
I’ve always felt that David and Fred Rogers were kindred spirits in how they encouraged viewers to slow down and think through things in a way that was therapeutic. Meditation and numbers were also important to them both.
I love that comparison, and I feel that way about them as well. I grew up with “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” and I just loved him. He could make a briefcase exciting. He’d open it up and go, “Look at this, it’s a lock!” When people experienced the new “Twin Peaks,” David wanted every moment to feel totally new and fresh. That’s why we didn’t do ads. Showtime wanted us to do conventional teasers and trailers and those kinds of things. You see in ours that there is nothing that gives anything away.
What was it like to have so many roles on the 2017 short, “What Did Jack Do?”, for which you served as a producer, set decorator and a member of the shooting crew and set construction team?
That was fun. We shot “What Did Jack Do?” before we did Season 3 of “Twin Peaks,” at the end of 2014. Each month, Fondation Cartier would have a different artist present a work that involved animals. I remember going to one of these events, and seeing bats fly by as various colors rose up. David decided he would do a film about monkeys for this series. He had Alfredo Ponce build the actual set, and then everyone pitched in to make what he wanted for the table, the window and the picture of the train station that you see outside. I commissioned a woman in Florida to make an outfit for the monkey, and we shot it in a day or two. The monkey came in for one day, and wasn’t really doing what David wanted, so he had to get a lot of stuff in post.
Later, David was talking about doing a monkey movie for Cartier’s museum, and PETA wrote a letter imploring us not to use animals. I called them up and said, “We’ve already shot a movie with a monkey, and it was kept in a very humane way.” They said that we still shouldn’t have a monkey onset, and I understood their point of view, so I told them that we wouldn’t be using the monkey again, and they went, “Okay, thank you.” “What Did Jack Do?” premiered in Paris, and we eventually asked Netflix if they wanted it, since we were working with them for our next project, which ended up getting shut down.
What are your hopes for David’s unrealized projects, particularly “Unrecorded Night,” potentially being shared with the world in some form?
Nobody else could direct it, but I think even in its written form, “Unrecorded Night” is really wonderful. It’s an incredible story, and I really think that it’s the best thing he’s done. He and I worked on it for several years. We went through all of his old writing and organized all of the things he has. There is so much writing and scripts of David’s that was never published. For “Unrecorded Night,” he took things that had already been written and kind of combined them, while also writing new stuff. We started preproduction and got shut down, but then during COVID, we continued working on the script even after he started his YouTube channel. David wanted to change a whole bunch of the script, so we turned it from what it was during preproduction to what we ended up with before he passed away.
We have an archive that hopefully will be placed in a good institution, and we have some incredible things in it. Next month, we’re going to have an auction for some of his stuff that’s more nondescript, but most of his personal things will be in the archive, including his writings. As we were going through what he had written, I told David, “We should really publish these things.” Some of his old scripts like “Ronnie Rocket” are online, but there are so many different versions of it, and he has so many handwritten notes and drawings. Having all of that in a book would be so great. In an institution, it can be seen by scholars, but published, it would get out to a wider audience, which would be nice.
How do you feel David was creatively fed by his daily videos, “Weather Report,” “Today’s Number Is…” and “What is David Working on Today?” During the pandemic, they gave viewers words of comfort to rely on in the midst of so much uncertainty. It also gave him the opportunity to comment on current events, such as speaking out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or expressing his solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
After we got shut down during COVID, David and I were trying to figure out what we could do in the meantime. I suggested that he could animate stuff, since he loved working with photographs in Photoshop and then putting them into After Effects. He did some of these as short videos, and I told him he could do a whole movie like that. I also brought up the idea of David having his own YouTube channel, and he said, “We could do the weather report there like I used to do.” So we agreed to do that, and then I said, “Let’s do some other videos. Let me shoot you doing some stuff.” David came up with “What is David Working on Today?” and “Today’s Number Is…” At that point, we weren’t necessarily seeing each other in person because of COVID, so we’d talk, he’d shoot himself with a rig that he built and then send me the footage to edit and upload.
There were times when I would go over and shoot “What is David Working On Today?” or the number segments. I shot him signing some of his lithographs and repairing his pants. David began to feel overloaded and pressured to make sure that he did a video every day. He had to think of another piece of music that he’d mention in the “Weather Report,” and he’d always be keeping track of the weather. When David started feeling pressure, he’d push back and say, “I don’t want to shoot anything right now. If I think of something, I’ll let you know.” I’m really glad we did all of that, but I felt pressure too. I’d have to wake up, wait for the video, and then edit it real fast because he wanted it put out at a certain time.
I truly, truly miss him. He was so much fun. You know those wonderful stories that he tells in “The Art Life”? He’d sit and tell us those for hours. Kristine McKenna, who wrote Room to Dream with David, and I have been working on his archive for about three years, and he wanted to look at every single thing that went into it. He would have a story about each thing that we found, and he’d tell it to us, though he wouldn’t let us record it. I did my best taking notes, but half of the time, I just sat there listening. It was incredible. Some of the stories I had heard before, but I could hear them a million times. And there were always new stories too. He was a great storyteller.
One of my favorite videos of him is his quinoa cooking lesson on the “Inland Empire” DVD, where he tells a story about encountering a creature he dubs a “frog moth,” which looks exactly like the thing we see crawl into the girl’s mouth in Part 8.
And it was! That was totally the frog moth. That came from a memory David had from so long ago when he was traveling with Jack Fisk in Europe in the late 60s or 70s.
Whereas Mark identities who the girl is in his book, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, David keeps it ambiguous, which to me, is reminiscent of the different ways that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick approached portraying the Star Child in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
And I will say that Mark’s book does not necessarily line up with David’s interpretation of things. He wrote that book on his own and it’s his version of “Twin Peaks” history.
In what ways would you say your life was transformed by David?
I’m just so appreciative that he believed in me. He had faith in me, trusted me to the nth degree and really believed in what I could do. I have tried living up to that expectation by always attempting to do what I felt he wanted done. That’s what I’m doing now, obviously, in managing his estate, but even during a shoot, as a producer, I learned that to work with somebody like this, his vision is what’s really important and my job is to make that vision happen. My job is not to curtail that or take away from it or make it mine. I just tried to make his vision a reality, and because of his faith in me, I had to give him that same level of respect and faith. He really is my favorite person.
Sabrina S. Sutherland will be going on tour with members of the “Twin Peaks” cast in August and October as part of the “Twin Peaks: Conversation with the Stars” tour. For a full list of venues and dates, click here. The David Lynch Collection Auction will be taking place on Wednesday, June 18th, in Los Angeles. For more information, click here.
All three seasons of “Twin Peaks” will be streaming on MUBI starting on Friday, June 13th, while “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” and “The Missing Pieces” are currently available to view on The Criterion Channel.
