AgentEcho wrote:That ain't reality folks. Partially its Lynch's own doing because he's fussy about how he works, but if you think David Nevin can get get his bosses to approve any idea Lynch comes to him with and give him total creative freedom and the budget he wants you're not paying attention.
Very few filmmakers are going to get carte blanche to do whatever they want, obviously. There are always limitations. Lynch had to take a huge budget cut on Blue Velvet because final cut was more important to him than the money. You choose your battles. But Lynch himself is the one who has perpetuated this myth that he can’t get films made anymore because no one is funding mid-range budgeted films anymore, and that’s just not true. Plenty of directors like Yorgos Lanthimos, Leos Carax, Alex Garland, as well as guys with name recognition arguably closer to Lynch such as Cronenberg and von Trier, get funding to make comparable films in terms of budget/niche appeal. Lynch has never needed a huge budget to get his ideas across, and often settles for simple solutions. As I understand it, the misunderstanding with Showtime the last time wasn’t that he wanted an unreasonable budget per minute, but rather that the executives just didn’t understand when Lynch tried to explain that the runtime would likely be twice what they thought, and he would thus need more money to accommodate that. Nevins has said that TP:TR was priced quite reasonably for a project of that length, and I think that’s been true of pretty much all Lynch’s productions. As someone else said, Lynch would have little difficulty getting funding from the French as he often has, or receiving a generous budget from a streaming platform in exchange for his marquee value (look at the exorbitant budget Amazon gave Matt Weiner, who is far less of a household name, to do The Romanoffs). Maybe Lynch himself doesn’t realize/believe that (or maybe he’s just making excuses), but in this market someone somewhere would be happy to be associated with his brand.
