When David Lynch passed away this past January at the age of 78, the world of film— and art, and music, and culture as a whole— lost a giant. Lynch held as firm a claim as anyone to the title of “Greatest Living Filmmaker,” and his work, from Eraserhead and Blue Velvet to Mulholland Drive and both runs of his groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, was utterly singular. Yet with his passing also came something which was, to quote Lynch’s most famous creation, both wonderful and strange. Tributes poured out across the internet, from Lynch’s friends and collaborators and from the millions of people whose lives his work touched. The Burbank location of Bob’s Big Boy, where Lynch famously stopped every day for years at exactly 2:30 PM for a chocolate milkshake, became an impromptu shrine, with fans leaving everything from packs of cigarettes and cups of coffee to original works of art. This show of love, which continues more than six months after Lynch’s death, has been truly remarkable, and stands as a testament both to the director’s impact both as a filmmaker and as a person.
To celebrate the life of this legend, several cast members from Twin Peaks are going out on tour to swap stories and connect with fans, including Ray Wise (Leland Palmer), Harry Goaz (Deputy Andy Brennan), Kimmy Robertson (Lucy Moran), and Dana Ashbrook (Bobby Briggs). They are joined by Sabrina S. Sutherland, who entered Lynch’s orbit as production coordinator on the second season of Twin Peaks before becoming one of the director’s closest and longest-standing collaborators and friends. In advance of the tour’s stop at the Wilbur this Sunday, I spoke to Sutherland about her decades working with the master filmmaker and the legacy of Twin Peaks, as well as some previously unreported details of what would have been Lynch’s final project, Unrecorded Night. (This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and flow).
BOSTON HASSLE: Your collaboration with David Lynch started with the original Twin Peaks. Is that correct?
SABRINA S. SUTHERLAND: My original meeting with David, for sure— collaboration, that’s kind of stretching it! [laughs] I first met him working on the second season of Twin Peaks.
BH: How did you come to be involved with Twin Peaks?
SSS: I, like a lot of people, fell in love with the show. The pilot is really what sold me. I was working on a different show, and I called up that production office and said, “I really want to work on your show.” I was super lucky, and was able to segue from the job I was on to Twin Peaks for their second season. It was perfect timing,
BH: What was your involvement with the show that first time around?
SSS: I was the production coordinator. The coordinator is kind of like the office secretary, in a way. I handled all the actors’ contracts, travel, the script distribution, all the memos, that kind of thing. I worked in the production office on the call sheets and production reports, and made sure that they got out. [I was] working with the production manager, working with the producers, working with the accountants in the office and the writers with the script, and then the actors, making sure that they had what they needed.
BH: I know that David was not as involved with that second season, but do you remember your first meeting with him, or your first interaction?
SSS: Well, there’s something about David. When he comes in a room, no matter where it is, you kind of focus on him. He has this magic. Even if you have 100 celebrities and famous people and politicians, he’s the person you’re going to look at. So he came into the production office, and everybody, of course, is focused on him. He came around and said hello and introduced himself— just said, “Hi, I’m Dave,” whatever. It was very informal, but very kind of powerful. He just had that ability, that kind of aura around him, and certainly it was exciting whenever he came. Everybody just loved when David was there. Unfortunately, on that second season, he wasn’t really around, but when he was there, it was super exciting.
BH: I do want to ask a little bit about the cast as well, because you’re touring with members of the cast. Do you remember any of the interaction between the cast?
SSS: Oh yeah, for sure. I’d go on the set— it was like a big warehouse. The office was in the front, but you’d walk through a door and there’s a whole bunch of sets over here, and you walk through another door and there’s a whole bunch of sets here. I always was walking back and forth, so I’d see interaction, both on set and also personally. The actors, I can’t speak for them, but it seemed like they were just very happy to be there, and really enjoyed it. It was exciting! It’s hard to describe the excitement, but it was a joyous period of time.
BH: You were obviously there at the end of the series. Did everyone know that the series was ending as it was ending, or was that sort of a surprise?
SSS: Well, the hope, of course, was that it would continue on. After the episode where Laura’s killer is found, the story took on a different tone and kind of a different path, and it went in such a way that when we finally ended, that last episode— that’s the episode David came back in on, and he recreated that magic that was his stamp on stuff— somehow that felt like it was the finale-finale, for me anyway. It just seemed like, “Oh, that’s it.” I don’t know if they knew that the show was already not going to be back, [but] it just seemed like the feeling of it was kind of the culmination of everything from that season, and it all went into this last episode. And then, when it ended, I was surely disappointed.
BH: You continued working with David and his production company pretty much from then on. After that was On the Air, correct?
SSS: On the Air, then Hotel Room, then Lost Highway. I did some commercials in between, [and] after Lost Highway we did some more commercials. But I was freelance, so I worked on a lot of things. Deepak Nayar was the producer— I think he was the second AD on Twin Peaks, and then he moved up, and on Fire Walk with Me he became the first. David took him on as producer for On the Air, which was exciting. Deepak went to me and said, “Hey, I want you to come do this.” It’s not like David invited me, it was Deepak, because I’m still, again, working in the producorial office area as production coordinator. Deepak and I were going to do The Straight Story, but then we parted, so I went with Deepak, and David did The Straight Story [without us].
And then Mulholland Drive— they had shot the pilot, I was working on something else, and David called me one night and said, “Hey, we’re going to turn this show into a movie, and I want you to produce that part.” That’s the first time he wanted me to come in and produce, but it was the kind of nuts-and-bolts, production management, line producing part of it. I was super excited, but then when I went through it, I realized that there wasn’t enough money to have me. So I said, “You know, you’re smarter not to have me there, because you can’t afford me,” because he had such a small amount of money. But then after I left, I found out they got a whole bunch more money, and I could have worked, and it would have been great! So I cut my time short with him there, and later on he told me I should have worked on it, and I said, “Yeah, I should have!” [laughs]
BH: From there, of course, the next one was Inland Empire, which it seems fair to say is a pretty unconventional film, even by David’s standards. What was that like working on that one?
SSS: That was a very interesting film. [David shot it] over a five-year time span. He was shooting a little bit of stuff here and there with Laura Dern, not with the thought of having a feature film. I wasn’t even working on that portion of it. That was David and his wonderful guys that he relied on there at the office who were doing that. I was working on his commercials and different things like that, so I wasn’t really involved during the shooting period. But then, at the end, David and [editor] Mary Sweeney said, “We want this to be a feature film, but it was done so unconventionally. Can you come in and make it something that can be an actual product?” Not the creative part of it, but behind the scenes, making sure the unions were set, making sure the documentation was there. Things were just kind of not organized, and I came in and organized it. For example, there was no script. I said, “Well, we have to have a script in order to be able to say that you wrote it. I actually need to have a script!” So David had to go back through with what he had to make the script. He had script pages as he was going along, but it was never organized in any way. It was all very jumbled!
BH: I just recently rewatched it for the first time since it was in theaters, and it really is quite a thing!
SSS: We just worked on it a few years ago, David and I, through Criterion. We remastered it, I don’t know if you saw that version of it?
BH: I did! It actually just came on the Criterion 24/7 stream, and I decided it was a good time to finally rewatch it.
SSS: Oh, excellent! When I first saw it when it came out, it was like, “Wow!” There was so much to it. But then, watching the DVD that came out at that time, it was kind of hard to watch. It was dark, and though I love the movie, it just had issues technically. But then when it got redone with Criterion, I was watching it, and I was like, “Wow, this film is amazing!” I felt it was amazing [the first time], but I hadn’t really watched it again. Seeing it with the Criterion version, and having it cleaned up— we used a little bit of AI, even, to make it work— and it looks good, so technically I can now watch it. And the film itself is just an unbelievable film. I think it’s one of my favorites of David’s.
BH: When did you become aware of the new Twin Peaks series?
SSS: Well, we had completed The Missing Pieces [the program of deleted scenes from Fire Walk With Me included on the 2014 blu-ray], and that took a year, two years maybe, to do. And we had that screening, and he reconnected with Mark [Frost] at that time. Then they started writing, and at some point David confided in me he was writing with Mark. And I’m like, “Oh! What does that mean?” And he’s like, “Well, I’ll tell you when we’re done.” So it was said, but it wasn’t said. They wrote for a while, and then came to me when they had the first two scripts and an idea of what the show was going to be like. The two scripts were not like the two episodes that you saw. It was very different, but it had the idea of it. So they knew what they were going to write, and that’s what went to CBS and Showtime, and then there was another year of writing and working on it before we even started thinking about going back to Showtime with what was finished, and they could read it at that point. And that’s when it came out that it wasn’t going to be “episodes,” but one big movie kind of thing.
BH: What was the experience like working on the new season compared to the original series?
SSS: Well, for me, of course, it was like night and day, because I had such a different role. This is truly where I was more collaborative with David, and was able to be immersed with his world. I slept, ate, breathed Twin Peaks for all that time. Going to set, I would get to the office, wherever David was, and then Michael, his assistant, would drive David and myself to the set together so that we could talk about what was coming up. And then at the end of the night, we drove back, and I might even stay there at the office talking with him into the night about the next day, or something down the road. It was almost 24 hours, and certainly we worked all the weekends as well. So it was way different. Way different! [laughs]
BH: How long did it take to shoot the entire thing? It’s such a massive piece of work.
SSS: It was actually kind of quick, for what it was. I think officially it was 142 shooting days, and for 18 hours [of television] that’s pretty good. I think we might have had one or two extra days that we did some stuff, but it was about 142 days of shooting. So it’s kind of an extensive period. We started in I think August or September shooting in Seattle, and then we’re up there until the holidays, and then in January we came to LA, and then we were in LA for the rest of the time, until we went to France right at the very end.
BH: For the Monica Belucci scene!
SSS: For the Monica Bellucci scene, exactly!
BH: Before we go, I do want to talk a little bit about Unrecorded Night, the project that David was working on in his last few years, which I know you’ve been opening up a little bit about recently. Is there anything that you can tell us about that, or if people might be able to see some form of what it was going to be?
SSS: It was something that we had been working on. We started pre-production right before COVID hit, and then we got shut down. And then we were continuing working, David was rewriting all the way up to his passing. In fact, we were going to meet the next week, on Tuesday, and he passed away on Thursday the week before. It was very disappointing. We were going to be meeting with Netflix fairly soon. I had already contacted them to say we had the project for them to see.
I would say that right now, no matter who does it, it certainly wouldn’t be David’s film, because David is so… he’s one of none, you know? I mean, there’s nobody else like David. So somebody else may do something with it, and that may be interesting and great, but certainly not what David would have done, for sure. But that’s a possibility. It could be published. It’s all with [David’s] family, and whatever they’d like to do with it, it’s up to them. It was, to me, kind of the culmination of his writing. We took a long time collecting everything and putting it together, and the message and everything in it was very special to him. I think it was something pretty cool and unique. It was going to be this massive, epic thing— kind of similar to Twin Peaks in style, in that it would be 20, 25 episodes. It was huge in that respect. It was nothing to do with Twin Peaks, though, so let me just say that. It was a completely different story, but it would have been very interesting. And I don’t know if I should tell you, but… [long pause] the lead was going to be Toby Jones. It would have been a pretty interesting film.
BH: To close things out, you’re going on tour with the members of the cast. What can people expect from the show?
SSS: Well, hopefully it’s going to be a community of people who love Twin Peaks, who are getting together. I mean, that’s what I am. I’m a fan of Twin Peaks, and I hope to meet other fans and just make it a community get-together in a way. [It’s] something that I don’t think has been done in the US, where the people who worked collaboratively with David— like you said, it was a collaboration. The actors, the crew, all the special nuances of the show wouldn’t necessarily have been like that without all of these influences. And obviously Mark is a huge part of Twin Peaks, although he won’t be on the tour, but please know that he is obviously the integral part with David. There would not be Twin Peaks without Mark. It’s a collaboration— it starts with them, and [then] everybody else working around them. So it’s this group, a few people here who were in that process and who love the show, and want to share that love with others. I guess that’s what to expect, just to have a love fest for the show.
BH: I think it’s pretty remarkable how Twin Peaks has caught on with a new generation of fans, who maybe weren’t old enough to watch it the first time, or even weren’t born. Is that something that David was aware of as it developed?
SSS: I mean, he was aware that there are fans, for sure. He always said that he can make whatever he wants, he stays true to his ideas, but then he puts it out into the world, and he has no control over what people say or do. But I know that it was a joy for him to hear from people, and hear that people liked it. Who wouldn’t like to hear that what you’ve done is good, or enjoyable? I know he liked that. He wasn’t fixated on it, or watching social media or anything like that, but he definitely knew that there were people who liked him. But I will say I was totally surprised, and I think David would have been surprised, with the outpouring of love after his passing. That was just really breathtaking in many ways. I think he would be shocked by that.
Twin Peaks: Conversation with the Stars comes to the Wilbur Sunday, 8/24, 7:30pm
