Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535880
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 57 collide. There was this special moment for David back in the late 1960s before he even made films when he was staring at a painting he had done and then he heard a wind and he felt like the painting moved. I think that was the kind of superhero origin story for him and that's where he realized that sound creates a special emotional spark to what we see. He was like a Dr. Frankenstein in the lab who always looked for those eureka moments. If he had been blind, he would have been making radio plays. His filmmaking was like a piece of music. An orchestration of emotions. What was it like to collaborate with him? Did he talk very eloquently about sound, did he outline a lot of his sonic ideas in the script or how did he communicate his ideas? There were always a few sonic cues written into the script and I always really appreciated that. There were specific examples on Twin Peaks: The Return, where I had to write down certain things when reading it. He would write phrases like "giant hairy electrical hum permeates the air" and other vivid, inspiring sort of descriptors. Otherwise, David would communicate about sound just sitting at the mixing board beside me. It's kind of like that Steve Jobs quote where somebody asked him, what do you do? You're not a programmer. You don't know how to build computers. What do you do? And Steve Jobs says: "I'm a musician, but I don't play an instrument. I play the orchestra." You know, like he knows how to communicate, how to talk with others in order to get them to do the thing. David was very similar. He was always coming up with suggestions and ideas like "take that sound and lower it an octave and put it in reverse." He didn't want to hear everything and he did not want the crew to paint every single detail and then sort it out on the dub stage. He was very specific: "I want to hear this and I want to hear that." He wanted the process to always feel fun and if the process wasn't feeling fun, he would invent something to make it fun again. Which moment or moments that you've created with Lynch are you the most proud of? I'm the most proud of Twin Peaks: The Return because it felt like a culmination of everything. It was the perfect job, you know. The crew worked together for the fourth time and everybody really enjoyed each other, the mood was good and it was a shorthand with everybody involved. It was definitely, definitely the most fun and rewarding experience I've ever had and probably will ever have, which is always depressing to think about when someone's passed, you know. What part of Lynch's sonic legacy do you hope will inspire future generations of filmmakers? He was using sound as a way to thrust you into the subjective hot seat, like all the great directors do. Subjective filmmaking, you know. Really putting you into the flesh of the character as they're experien- cing something. David came at it from an instinctual level because of a huge curiosity and a huge passion toward the human experience that I hope will inspire filmmakers forever.