Steven Soderbergh Remembers the ‘Inimitable’ David Lynch: ‘Such a Loss’

David Lynch, the peerless director behind such masterpieces as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive, was one of cinema’s all-time greats, a unique visionary whose dark and surreal films were the stuff of both unsettling dreams and sumptuous nightmares.

His passing Thursday at the age of 78 (following his announcement earlier this year that he was suffering from emphysema) is a titanic loss to the medium, and in an exclusive new interview with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh pays tribute to the late auteur as a true one-of-a-kind – as well as a pretty great furniture maker.

“I knew him a little bit,” remembers Soderbergh shortly after news broke about Lynch’s death. “There was a period when Section Eight [Soderbergh’s film production company] was active where we were desperately trying to get David to let us produce a movie of his. I went to see him at his house in LA and we had a really fun afternoon. Like, he was a really fun hang— amusing and smart, obviously. But I couldn’t convince him. I promised him the world, and as Mary Sweeney—who was with him at the time—said, ‘He just has to go his own way.’”

Even showering him with praise didn’t do the trick, Soderbergh recalls. “I was like, The Elephant Man is a perfect film—don’t you want to try something in that [vein]? And I just couldn’t convince him.”

That said, the visit was far from a total loss. “What I got out of it was, I bought two pieces of furniture that he made,” Soderbergh smiles. “End tables that are spectacularly beautiful that I still have. There are only ten of them and I bought two. So he’s always nearby.”

From his debut, Lynch was a genuine original, and his oeuvre stands as one of the movies’ most daringly idiosyncratic, unconventional, and virtuosic. For Soderbergh, “it’s such a loss. The walking definition of inimitable. The people who tried to appropriate his algorithm, that just didn’t work.”

Even the term “Lynchian” was something of a misnomer, he points out, because it was “usually [used] as an example of something that isn’t it. He was just so unique. Every single decision that he made came from a very specific space. That’s why if you were to try to imitate it, you would fail, because you are not him. Every piece of furniture, the texture, the color, the framing, the rhythm, the music—like, you’re not going to get there.

Just give up.”