Roberto Rossellini: top related news

When Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992, director David Lynch had been experiencing a period of mainstream cultural interest in his art. This was a strange position for a surrealist such as himself to be in, but then again, his career never followed a predictable trajectory. After his independent filmEraserhead (1977) took off on the midnight movie circuit, he was brought over to Hollywood with Mel Brooks as his personal cheerleader and producer. He was then Oscar nominated forThe Elephant Man in 1980, and was offered the gig of directing the thirdStar Wars film, which he turned down to directDune (1984), which proved to be a critical and commercial failure. Lynch believedDune taught him an important lesson about filmmaking — he realized he didn’t want to make big movies, and the mainstream was never going to afford him the complete creative control he so cherished when makingEraserhead.