Lynch Hasn’t Thought Of This?
“I haven’t gotten the big idea,” director David Lynch told L.A. Times/”24 Frames” guy Steven Zeitchik in this 6.22 piece. “I’ve got some fragments that are coming, but not the big idea. If I got an idea that I fell in love with, I’d go to work tomorrow. I just haven’t.”
Okay, here’s an obvious suggestion: Lynch needs to buy the remake rights to Leos Carax‘s Holy Motors, easily the best Lynch film I’ve seen in ages, and do it his way. Set it in L.A. and throw in some local wackitude, create his own dream episodes, his own ending…whatever. But you know 80% of the American hipsters who should definitely see and would certainly appreciate Carax’s film won’t go because of the subtitles (because so many allegedly “cool” people are lazy, not wild, at heart, and because even the adventurous won’t be able to find their way into it with Denis Lavant as the maestro/tour guide), but will buy a ticket to Lynch’s English-language version in a second, especially if Johnny Depp, say, plays Lavant’s role.
Are you going to tell me this part, if and when someone remakes Holy Motors for the U.S. market, doesn’t have Depp’s name on it?
I know — Lynch is a visionary and it wouldn’t be right for him to remake someone else’s surrealistic loonscape…right? But Lynch wouldn’t able to remake Carax’s film — he just needs to start on it and something else will just flow out in his own way. Maybe he’ll wind up making Son of Holy Motors — a companion film that ignores the Carax particulars but expands upon the basic idea or weirds it up in some fashion.
“If only an American filmmaker was this mad, this imaginative, this unchained, this willing to leap,” I wrote in my 5.23 Holy Motors review. “I wonder if any American has it in him or her to create something like this. If he or she did, Americans would probably say ‘what the fuck?’ and stay away in droves. It’s in the realm but well beyond anything David Lynch has ever done. It’s so perfect to have seen this in Cannes, and to be among a crowd clapping and cheering on their feet, and then to come onto a street filled with sun and warmth.”
Of course you realize your suggestion flies precisely in the face of everything Lynch just said, which is that HE needs to GET an idea that he’s in love with. But the content maw needs feeding…
Lynch needs to sit down and do a proper cut of Dune. But who’d want to see that when we can all sit and listen to Crazy Clown Time instead? Right?
Like Lynch, Carax is great visionary – it’s so refreshing to see movies built around images, not words, regardless of the opacity of the images! They’re both anti-Sorkins, and more power to them!
Not leaping to their defense or anything, but surely hipsters aren’t averse to subtitled films? I mean, if they are, then they’re not hipsters in any sense that I understand the term.
Also, don’t know if it’s just my computer, but this site has been like Fort Knox lately – could barely get it to load up until now.
I’m sure there are quite a few Americans out there with these kind of films in him/her, the problem is, unless you’re established, good fucking luck getting financing.
Financing is always tough to get, but it’s even harder now.
I have a script with an A-lister attached and it’s now been 3 years trying to raise the 5 million needed to get the thing going. Money guys love the script, love the actor, don’t want a first timer directing it.
Unless someone has a rich uncle or something bankrolling them their not going to be able to get a movie like Holy Motors made, unless they did it on their own for 2 dollars, which in that case it would never see the light of day, cause you can’t get into the big festivals unless you have a rabbi.
I wish things were as straightforward as Wells makes it seem.
*they’re
Boy, DG picks the weirdest times to come out with one of his “By the way, I’m not JUST a drooling misogynist conservative trash-talker” comments, doesn’t he? Really doesn’t compute. Is this guy for real, or is it just a meds thing? I hope that, during my mad and ruthless struggle for POWER, I never have to find out.
Mr. Glenn Kenny, why don’t you ask one of DuluozGray’s facebook friends from Columbia University:
Dana Harris
Jennifer Wecker-Gritten
Robyn Gertner
Gessy Alvarez
Alex Sears
Susannah Nevison
Yvonne Woon
Michelle Franqui
Jobie Hughes
Heather Monley
Sarah Hsu
Julie Limbaugh
Lauren Joyce
Rachel Elizabeth
Alexis Richland
Kalpana Narayanan
Liza Monroy
Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman
Anne Pelletier
Claudette Bakhtiar Ericson
Stephanie Janiak
Sara Faye Lieber
Annie DeWitt
Kimberly King Parsons
Ela Bittencourt
They can attest to his personal character and integrity.