David Lynch Hoping to Return to Film With Animated Project ‘Snootworld’

INLAND EMPIRE, director David Lynch, on set, 2006.
Studio Canal/courtesy Everett Collection

David Lynch, known best for the dark dramas Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, as well as the cult classic TV series Twin Peaks, is currently trying to sell a new, under-the-radar animated project called Snootworld, which he began working on in the early 2000s with Tim Burton collaborator Caroline Thompson (The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands.)

Snootworld is kind of an old-fashioned story and animation today is more about surface jokes,” Lynch told Deadline of the project, which follows some tiny creatures called Snoots, who become even tinier when they reach the age of eight and have to be sent away for a year to be protected. “Old fashioned fairytales are considered groaners: apparently people don’t want to see them. It’s a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes. I don’t know when I started thinking about Snoots but I’d do these drawings of Snoots and then a story started to emerge. I got together with Caroline and we worked on a script. Just recently I thought someone might be interested in getting behind this so I presented it to Netflix in the last few months but they rejected it.”

 

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The Snoot world is disrupted when the Snoot hero disappears into the carpet and his family can’t find him. “It’s something that children and adults can both appreciate,” Lynch added. “I’ve never really done a straight animation but with computers today it’s possible to do some spectacular things.”

Lynch, 78, hasn’t directed a feature film in almost 20 years, since Inland Empire. He did return to his iconic Twin Peaks franchise in 2017 for a third season, decades after the show ended.

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