This is rather depressing to confirm, but as suspected, during his final days, David Lynch was indeed working on a new project that was going to star Laura Dern and Naomi Watts.
Watts tells the Los Angeles Times that she and Dern were ready to collaborate again with the director in late November 2024. “We had a beautiful lunch at his house,” Watts said of herself, Lynch, and Dern. “I knew he’d been unwell but he was in great spirits. He wanted to go back to work — Laura and I were like, ‘You can do it! You could work from the trailer.’ He was not, in any way, done. I could see the creative spirit alive in him.”
She added, “I thought I would see him in a couple of weeks [after that last lunch] because I was here in L.A. There’s a lot I could share but I want to be private about it because of his family. But it was a really powerful meeting that filled me with just so much love and hope.”
The project that Watts is likely referring to was called “Wisteria/Unrecorded Night.” In 2019, there was a rumor hinting that Lynch was partnering with Netflix on this project. Watts and Dern had been spotted attending a meeting at Netflix headquarters with Lynch.
The long-held rumor had Netflix greenlighting 13 hour-long episodes and a budget of $85M. The mini-series may or may not have been a set of hour-long movies, it was never confirmed. A Production Weekly listing later noted that production was due to begin in May 2021.
Soon after, the usually tight-lipped Lynch revealed on his YouTube channel that he was going to shoot a “new movie”. And then, radio silence … May 2021 came and went, still no indication that production had begun.
Last year, during an AMA, Lynch’s longtime producer Sabrina Sutherland finally explained what went wrong with the project, and it sounds like the pandemic and Netflix were to blame:
“Unrecorded” Night was a non-Twin Peaks series that was going to shoot at Netflix but was cancelled when the pandemic hit. There’s always a chance we can pick it up again, […] we were in Pre-production and close to shooting.
Less than 24 hours after Lynch’s passing, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos shared a tribute on Instagram, writing that the filmmaker “came into Netflix to pitch a limited series, which we jumped at.”
“It was a David Lynch production, so filled with mystery and risks but we wanted to go on this creative ride with this genius. First Covid, then some health uncertainties led to this project never being produced but we made it clear that as soon as he was able, we were all in,” Sarandos added.
Sarandos claimed that COVID and Lynch’s “health uncertainties” delayed the project, but “we made it clear that as soon as he was able, we were all in.”