The inspiration for David Lynch’s mysterious, disquieting world
‘He was the true Willy Wonka of film-making – I feel like I won the golden ticket getting the chance to work with him!’ The speaker is Lara Flynn Boyle, who played Donna Hayward, the friend of the murdered Laura Palmer in David Lynch’s small-screen masterpiece Twin Peaks. That comparison, cited in John Higgs’s terrifically lucid and compact study of the filmmaker, who died in January, aged 78, is rather brilliant. Plenty of actors might feel they’ve won a golden ticket in getting to work with some famous director, but none of those others get to be described as Willy Wonka: a genius with a dash of eccentricity, enclosed in
