Martin Scorsese: “We were lucky to have had David Lynch.”

I hear and read the word ‘visionary’ a lot these days – it’s become a kind of catch-all description, another piece of promotional language. But David Lynch really was a visionary – in fact, the word could have been invented to describe the man and the films, the series, the images and the sounds he left behind.

He put images on the screen unlike anything that I or anybody else had ever seen – he made everything strange, uncanny, revelatory and new. And he was absolutely uncompromising, from start to finish. It’s a sad, sad day for moviemakers, movie lovers, and for the art of cinema… We were lucky to have had David Lynch.

Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, two giants of American cinema, share no direct collaborations but are united by their mutual admiration and distinct approaches to exploring the darker corners of human nature. Martin Scorsese and David Lynch share a connection through Isabella Rossellini, who starred in Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) shortly after her role in Scorsese’s White Material (1985).