Bill Hader names his favourite David Lynch movie: “It’s heartbreaking”
Picking your favourite David Lynch movie is like picking between the perfect sunrise and the perfect sunset, if both those things had been put through some weird Lynchian nightmare filter, that is. Every one of his works magnify the darkness at the heart of us all with equal parts grace, experimentalism, and the surreal.
Despite the challenge, Bill Hader has no issues picking his favourite. It seems bizarre that the beloved voice behind characters such as Fear in Disney’s Inside Out and the spaghetti-wielding Flink Lockwood in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs might be familiar with the world of Lynch at all, but what a funny image that is.
Outside of Lynch’s world, Hader has impressed fans with his grandiose knowledge of classic cinema. He recently achieved a long-held dream by becoming a guest programmer for Turner Classic Movies, where he pointed to other films he couldn’t live without, such as The Wild Bunch and A Clockwork Orange. So confident in his deep knowledge of cinema, Hader didn’t need a push to go on record about which Lynch movie tops his favourite list.
The “heartbreaking” film at the heart of his Lynch obsession is none other than The Elephant Man, Lynch’s 1980 offering starring Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft and John Gielgud. Trust Hader to pick a movie all about being kind, no matter the occasion. Why are we so afraid of people unlike ourselves? Lynch poses the question and provides no solid answer, in typical Lynchian fashion. This ambiguity is just what makes it so appealing to Hader.
“It’s a brilliant film, it’s so heartbreaking too,” Hader said. “I remember my parents telling me about the Elephant Man and I thought it was sad—about a deformed man who couldn’t lay down to sleep and if he lay down he’d die.”
Hader reminisced on Eli Roth’s History of Horror podcast, adding, “For David Lynch to be able to take that script and bring some of his own thing to it and be intuitive with it, but not smother it; he made an incredibly handsome movie.”
The mature, tear-jerking project was Lynch’s second feature film, following his 1977 debut Eraserhead. Of course, the nerdy film-lover in Hader knew this fact too, and added, “Mel Brooks deserves a lot of credit for seeing Eraserhead and being like ‘yeah, this guy could shoot Elephant Man with all these massive British actors and something that needs a really specific, gentle touch to it.”
Lynch humbly reiterated this sentiment when discussing the movie in 2006, professing that he will be “forever thankful” to Brooks for taking a chance on him. From a shaky, surreal film about the ear-splitting screams of a mutant child to the elegant reflection on living a life with deformity, Lynch’s career path is as wild as the man himself. Though unconventional in its style, critics ate the movie up; it received eight Academy Award nominations, though it failed to bag any of them. No bother, because having Bill Hader in your cheerleading camp is surely the best reward the classic movie might anticipate.
