Director David Lynch, one of the most important filmmakers of the past century, has died at age 78.
His family announced his death in a Facebook post on Thursday.
“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch,” the post read. “We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’”
Lynch was the visionary behind the films “Mulholland Drive” and “Blue Velvet” and television series “Twin Peaks.” In 1990, his romantic crime film, “Wild at Heart,” won the Palme d’Or ― the highest honor at the Cannes Film Festival. He was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Director.
His debut, the 1977 film “Eraserhead,” has become a cult classic; in 2004, it was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
In a 2006 interview, Lynch pushed back against the idea that he’d set out to be a famous filmmaker.
“There’s no launching a career. They call it a film business, but money is the last thing a person should be thinking about, in my book ― the last thing,” he said. “You fall in love with ideas, and you get fired up and you go and you try to translate those ideas into cinema. And it’s a beautiful, beautiful journey, and so it has nothing to do with any kind of career. It has to do with the loving of doing.”
While making “Eraserhead,” he said, he would raise money to shoot one scene and then go back out to raise money to shoot another one.
Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946 and originally trained as a painter. While living in Philadelphia with his wife and family in the 1960s, he developed an interest in animation and began experimenting with film, funding his work through the newly founded American Film Institute.
Last summer, he revealed that he had emphysema after many years of smoking. Homebound and unable to walk far without running “out of oxygen,” Lynch said he could no longer work in person.
“Smoking was something that I absolutely loved, but in the end, it bit me. It was part of the art life for me: the tobacco and the smell of it, and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work, or thinking about things; nothing like it in this world is so beautiful,” he said. “Meanwhile, it’s killing me. So I had to quit.”