David Lynch may be the creator of some of cinema’s most disturbing and haunting imagery (and sounds), but he’s also a guy from the Midwest. He loves Filet-o-Fish and Bob’s Big Boy and documenting each day’s weather. Sure enough, when Steven Spielberg tapped him to play legendary filmmaker John Ford in last year’s The Fabelmans, he had one main request.
“Well, Cheetos, number one, I love them,” Lynch told Empire magazine (as caught by Deadline). “And any chance I can, I get them. But I know that they’re not exactly health food. So when I do leave the house and I get a chance to… But I don’t get them that often, honestly.”
Lynch added, “If I do get them, I want a big bag. Because once you start… you need to have a lot before you could slow down and actually stop. Otherwise, with a small bag, then you’d be prowling for days to find more […] It’s incredible flavour.”
Lynch appears in the finale of the movie, recreating a story Spielberg has long told about meeting the director of Stagecoach, The Searchers, My Darling Clementine, How Green Was My Valley, and many, many more. In the scene, Spielberg’s young surrogate (Gabriel LaBelle) lucks into meeting Ford in his office. Ford offers him a piece of advice about directing then tells him to skedaddle, only he doesn’t use that word. Lynch’s performance was singled out for praise, but it almost didn’t happen.
“At first I didn’t want to do it,” Lynch revealed. “And the reason is, when it comes to acting, I’ve purposely tried to stay away from it, giving the likes of Harrison Ford and George Clooney a chance at their careers.”
Luckily he “really liked the scene,” in which Ford teaches the upstart (who would eventually cut his teeth on television, including helming the first official episode of Columbo) a valuable lesson about where to put the horizon line in any given shot. Spoiler: Put it anywhere but in the middle, because, Ford argued, it’s “boring as sh*t.”
“John Ford probably had a bunch of things he could call on to give a short education to that young lad. But he picked the horizon bit,” Lynch added. “But it’s true. A horizon in the middle is boring as sh*t.”
The Fabelmans currently streams on Showtime, or on one of those streamers that has Showtime as part of a bundle.
