‘Twin Peaks’: David Lynch Reveals a Few Details About the Revival
David Lynch took to the TCA stage Monday to discuss the “Twin Peaks” revival, and it was somehow appropriate that many of his answers were short and enigmatic. Affable as always — he and the cast used the word “beautiful” frequently — Lynch and his “Twin Peaks” actors offered little in the way of specificity on the 18 hours that will arrive on Showtime May 21.
Asked if the new “Twin Peaks” would consist of new storylines versus continuations of old ones, Lynch replied, “I’m really not at liberty to talk about that.”
Is the new version of the show the “pure heroin” version of his original vision for “Twin Peaks,” as Showtime president David Nevins said earlier in the day? “I hear heroin is a very popular drug,” Lynch parried.
Why cast Laura Dern? “I love Laura Dern.”
The only real nugget dropped about the new season is that “the story of Laura Palmer’s last seven days is very, very important for this,” Lynch said.
Speaking of the two seasons that ran on ABC back in 1990-91, Lynch said that one thing that caught he and fellow executive producer Mark Frost off guard was the need to wrap up the murder mystery that kicked off the drama.
“What killed ‘Twin Peaks’ originally — who killed Laura Palmer? — was a question that we did not ever really want to answer,” Lynch said. “That Laura Palmer mystery was the goose that laid these little golden eggs. And then at a certain point, we were told we needed to wrap that up and after that, [the show] never really picked up.”
When it came to the first iteration of the show, the director was a little more more forthcoming than he was about the Showtime continuation. Smiling calmly, Lynch resisted the idea that with the original “Twin Peaks” pilot, he and Frost were straining at the conventions of the television of the era.
“I saw it as a film, and we shot it the same was [as a film] and lo and behold, it clicked,” Lynch said of the pilot, a TV classic that he clearly still loves.
Lynch also said that “Twin Peaks” never had any problems with the Standards and Practices department of ABC 27 years ago, and skirted the question of whether the premium-cable version of the small-town story will be substantially different in tone and content from the original.
He also didn’t…