Martin Scorsese pays tribute to David Lynch: “It’s a sad, sad day”

Tributes to the late David Lynch have been coming in from throughout the entertainment world since news of his death broke on Thursday (1/16), and here’s one from fellow filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Speaking to IndieWire, he said, “I hear and read the word ‘visionary’ a lot these days—it’s become a kind of catch-all description, another piece of promotional language. But David Lynch really was a visionary—in fact, the word could have been invented to describe the man and the films, the series, the images and the sounds he left behind. He created forms that seemed like they were right on the edge of falling apart but somehow never did. He put images on the screen unlike anything that I or anybody else had ever seen—he made everything strange, uncanny, revelatory and new. And he was absolutely uncompromising, from start to finish.”

“It’s a sad, sad day for moviemakers, movie lovers, and for the art of cinema,” Scorsese continued. “But Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, the two Twin Peaks series and the film Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire… as the years and the decades go by, they will just keep growing and deepening. We were lucky to have had David Lynch.”

Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Dune star Kyle MacLachlan, Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks: The Return star Naomi Watts, and numerous others, including Flying Lotus, Beach House, Charli XCX, Interpol, Billy Corgan, Karen O, Michael Stipe, and more have also paid tribute to Lynch.