“Film has a beautiful organic quality”: So, why did David Lynch go digital?
Part of the cosiness that defines David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, despite the rather horrific goings on that form the series, boils down to the fact that the first two seasons were shot on grainy 35mm, and the distinctive difference with season three, filmed 25 years later, is that the latter was shot on digital.
Lynch’s move towards digital filming came in the mid-2000s, when he shot 2006’s Inland Empire on a Sony PD150; in fact, during this time, the industry trend saw big-name directors ditching film for digital, as the digital camera market was becoming more inundated with new models for both professionals and casual consumers. Danny Boyle had shot 2002’s 28 Days Later on a Canon XL1 camera, while Agnès Varda made her 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I using a Sony VX1000.
Clearly, you could make an incredible film without forking out a large budget for the sake of celluloid, but many purists will always argue that film looks better, and even today, there are many filmmakers who won’t use anything else, like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino.
There’s nothing like watching a movie in the cinema on film, too, the flickering images, the small bits of dirt, the whirring sound of the projector all adding to the viewing experience, which also seemed to be Lynch’s opinion, once upon a time.
In an old interview with Mark Cousins for the BBC, he once expressed his preference for film, stating, “It’s organic, I’m not against the computer, or digital, and I love manipulating images, but film still has the beautiful organic quality. And a lot of times, with light and the emulsion and the way it’s developed, you get some happy accidents, you get something that’s thrilling to the soul.”
He even went as far as saying, “I think, right now, digital’s coming up every year, but it hasn’t matched, you know, the beauty of film”. Yet, after Mulholland Drive, Lynch became an advocate for digital more than film. It seems like, once he discovered the medium for himself, he never looked back.
By shooting Inland Empire on digital, he was able to get this intimate, low-resolution effect that really served the narrative, which saw Laura Dern’s character descend into madness. Using the streets of Hollywood as a backdrop, there was something so terrifying and haunting about the film that could only be achieved through Lynch’s thrusting a handheld digital camera in Dern’s face.
So, what changed his mind? In a 2006 interview to coincide with the release of Inland Empire, he revealed why he was done with film, explaining, “Along the way, I fell in love with digital video, and now I love digital video, and I’m through with film”. Lynch was convinced that it was a dying medium, “It’s a dinosaur,” he called it, “Everything about it is a dinosaur, and it’s soon to be gone pretty much forever”.
The filmmaker found film to be impractical compared to the ease of digital, saying, “It scratches, it breaks, it’s dirty. Nothing but dirt on it, and no two prints are the same. It’s a nightmare; you can hear the projectors chattering. It’s a nightmare.”
It’s an opinion that might be controversial to some movie lovers, but Lynch was never one to go with the crowd. To him, digital was what was needed to bring the ideas of his later career to life better than anything else, and so he made his moves accordingly.
