David Lynch’s longtime producer says unreleased project ‘Unrecorded Night’ was “the best thing he ever did”
One of David Lynch‘s longtime producers has spoken about his canceled Unrecorded Night series, calling it the “best thing” the late director “ever did”.
A year before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Lynch penned a script for an LA-set mystery series titled Unrecorded Night. The series was eventually picked up at Netflix, and the project entered its pre-production cycle before the pandemic hit and shut everything down.
Multiple delays later, Unrecorded Night was officially cancelled. While little is known of the abandoned project, Lynch’s longtime producer Sabrina Sutherland has opened up about the axed series.
Speaking to A Rabbit’s Foot, Sutherland said of Unrecorded Night: “I’ll say this: It was probably the best thing he ever did. It was a culmination of a lot of things. We worked on this for over two years in terms of writing, and we were still writing up until the point he passed away.”
According to Sutherland, Lynch hadn’t given up on the project despite being cancelled at Netflix: “We were getting ready to go back to Netflix because he had re-envisioned some things about it, and it had morphed into something even better than it was. I hope that one day people will be able to experience it in some way.”
Sutherland’s comments come after Lynch’s daughter Jennifer revealed that the family are considering completing and releasing David’s Unrecorded Night script as a published work: “None of us ever tried to make his series in his place. We are considering offering that as a published piece, so that people can sit with his ideas. It would be very sad if people didn’t get to see it.”
Earlier this month, Lynch’s collaborator Peter Deming shed more light on the shelved project. On whether the unrealised series was tied to Twin Peaks, he said: “It’s definitely its own original thing, and how it was formatted, I don’t really know. It was going to be a lot of episodes, because David really liked what he called ‘the continuing story’”.
“I really love the feature stuff, but he was like, ‘I’m not going to make any more movies. I’m just going to make longer stories because I love the longer story’”. Deming said of the script: “It took me three sittings to read it because it was so thick, but it was definitely not Twin Peaks. It was definitely a really interesting… mystery, I would say. Yeah, it’s too bad. It really is. Because it would’ve been good”.
The beloved late director’s death was announced by his family on social media earlier this year (January 16) – he was aged 78. Lynch, who is celebrated for films like Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet and the iconic TV series Twin Peaks, revealed his emphysema diagnosis last year, which was caused by smoking for most of his life. In November, he shared that he required supplemental oxygen to walk.
Among the countless celebrities to have paid tribute to Lynch are Dern, Nicolas Cage, Edgar Wright, James Gunn, Hugh Jackman, Billy Corgan, Questlove – you can see more tributes here.
In NME’s tribute to the late director, Mark Beaumont wrote that the “very word ‘Lynchian’ – denoting a kind of carnivalesque dark surrealism; sometimes fantastical, sometimes macabre, sometimes dreamlike, often eerily everyday – will forever pay tribute to the work of one of cinema’s finest ever auteurs.”
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Surej Singh
NME
