David Lynch’s surreal 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive is set to receive a restoration and re-release to mark its 20th anniversary.
Originally premiered in 2001, at Cannes Film Festival, the film won Lynch the award for Best Director at the event, which he shared with Joel Coen (for The Man Who Wasn’t There). It has since gone on to top a critics’ list of the 21st century’s 100 greatest films, put together by the BBC in 2016.
Supervised by David Lynch — presumably to avoid the disappointment of previous re-releases — the 4K restoration of Mulholland Drive premiered at the Cannes Classics selection this year. The new physical release will also be accompanied by a limited theatrical release, courtesy of Studiocanal and the Criterion Collection, as reported by Variety.
Earlier this year, Justin Theroux, who starred alongside Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, revealed that David Lynch had no idea what was happening in the mystery film (much like most audience members).
“He’s a total outlier because he doesn’t answer your questions,” Theroux told IndieWire in June. “(On) the first couple days of Mulholland Drive, I was of course peppering him with a million questions like, ‘Well, why am I here? Who’s the cowboy? What’s going on? What reality are we in?’”
“When I finished a question, (he’d say), ‘You know, I don’t know, buddy. But let’s find out’. He wasn’t being cute or cheeky or evasive – he genuinely didn’t know.”
The 20th anniversary restoration of Mulholland Drive is set to arrive this November. While you wait, revisit Dazed’s breakdown of the film’s fashion for an exploration of how the characters’ looks contain both keys to their personalities and crucial hints to unravelling Lynch’s twisted story of love, death and despair in the Hollywood Hills.
