Quotes

[about working on Twin Peaks (1990)] There were times, when David [Lynch] was making Wild at Heart (1990), when I was doing almost all the work on Twin Peaks (1990). But everybody wants to believe in the auteur theory, that it all somehow springs from one person, and David had a much higher profile. - (Empire, August 1993)

[Interview taken in 2008. His personal experience working on the set of Twin Peaks] That three-year period was great from start to finish. It would have been much better to see Twin Peaks continue for another year or two. But sometimes the best experiences aren't the longest running, and in a way that makes them sweeter. As the years go by I think of the show with great fondness. It was a very happy experience, Something really special and meaningful in all our lives and in work-a very rare combination.

[on he and David Lynch writing the Twin Peaks (1990) pilot] We'd talk and talk and talk and have turkey sandwiches and go out to lunch and drink coffee and work things through verbally before we ever committed anything to paper. The pilot was written in three weeks - once we had done all of that prep work, we sat down and it just poured out of us. We scarcely went back to change a word. There was just something about that moment and this subject matter and that particular time in our lives where we felt a kind of grace about the work.

[on Twin Peaks (2017)] (It was) the equivalent of the most incredible high school or college reunion that you could possibly imagine. We've ended up going through life with all of these people and it was intensely personal, and many great friendships were born from it. That was the most unanticipated benefit from this.

[on David Lynch] I knew him pretty well for forty years. We knew he was suffering from emphysema and that he'd had a rough couple of years. I'd stayed in touch with him and sent him my best. He was resolute and strong in mind and will as he always was, and determined to keep plugging away, stay creative, work on his ideas, right up to the end. And I don't believe he was truly afraid of what came afterwards. I think all of his years of spiritual studies and his affiliation with TM is pretty well known. I think that gave him a kind of comfort about all of this that perhaps many people don't have. The possibility that he might be in a better place did occur to all of us, certainly free of the limitations of what this terrible disease had inflicted upon him.

I was always fascinated with building out the world. It's easy to say I was a word guy, he was a picture guy, but I did come from a literary and dramatic tradition, and I always felt that we were filming a novel. I had experienced that somewhat with 'Hill Street', which was groundbreaking in terms of how you expanded across episodes. Here we decided to do that the entire way, and see where the how the world develops as we followed this story. I think that was something our our audience really enjoyed. They really like to live in this world. That's since become a more common phenomenon associated with television shows, but I think we might have been the first to do it to that extent, and that was something we were really proud of.

[on Twin Peaks (1990)/Twin Peaks (2017)] It was always my feeling that we should reward scrutiny. That's always what I've admired in other people, when they've done the deep work required to make sure that the subterranean levels of the building are solid, so the foundation will stand up. You can't build a skyscraper on quicksand, you've got to dig down deep. This is the beautiful thing about it, that there's so much to uncover.

[on the death of David Lynch] He was an absolutely delightful human being. He's left a big gap, he was a force, he was a singular human being, a singular kind of talent. And he was a joy to know. I remember saying, 'the man from another place has gone home' on the day that he died. And that may well be the case. I hope it is.