Mulholland Drive star Naomi Watts says that David Lynch “wanted to go back to work” before his death in January.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Watts revealed that she had spent an afternoon with Lynch in November, along with Laura Dern, who acted in Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. “We had a beautiful lunch at his house. I knew he’d been unwell but he was in great spirits. He wanted to go back to work – Laura and I were like, ‘You can do it! You could work from the trailer.’ He was not, in any way, done. I could see the creative spirit alive in him.”
Lynch died after announcing in August 2024 that he had been diagnosed with emphysema and in November revealed that breathing difficulties were preventing him from working on sets, saying: “I can hardly walk across a room. It’s like you’re walking around with a plastic bag around your head.”
Lynch’s final major work as a film-maker was the 2017 series Twin Peaks: The Return, in which both Watts and Dern appeared; he later made a cameo appearance as film director John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s 2022 autobiographical drama The Fabelmans. Watts first worked with him on his 2001 drama Mulholland Drive, after the director discovered her photograph in a pile of actors’ headshots.
Watts added: “There’s a lot I could share [about Lynch] but I want to be private about it because of his family. But it was a really powerful meeting that filled me with just so much love and hope.”
