David Lynch was talking to me – at some length – about teeth. ‘I don’t know where it was I got so interested in teeth and dental instruments and drilling and the idea of drilling,’ the director – who has died aged 78, after being diagnosed with emphysema last summer – told me, ‘and then nerves, and different dimensions of a tooth, the roots…’
It was 2011. The previous year, the filmmaker had guest-edited the October 2010 issue of Wallpaper*. Lynch used the magazine as a platform to promote transcendental meditation, one of his myriad interests away from directing films – the latter something he hadn’t done since 2006’s Inland Empire. As it turned out, it was something he would never do again, although he would get behind the drama camera one more time, for 2017’s Twin Peaks, a long-awaited and suitably deliciously divisive, 18-episode third-season follow-up to his hallowed, hallucinatory early 1990s TV show and film. And he would appear in front of another director’s camera, in a secret cameo, as John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022).
