11 Famous Directors Who Write Their Own Screenplays

It's Thursday, January 16, 62 degrees Fahrenheit, and it comes with a deep sadness in my heart to report that we've lost one of our greatest renegade filmmakers, David Lynch, at 78 years old.

A painter turned filmmaker, Lynch was an exceptionally artistic oddball whose work helped bridge the commercial and experimental filmmaking gap in many ways. Many know him best from his groundbreaking show, Twin Peaks, pushing the limits of network television to be more experimental and surreal. He did so in his films as well, first taking the filmmaking world by storm with the ethereal Eraserhead in 1977, before sidestepping to bigger studio projects Elephant Man and Dune. From then on out, he blazed the trail with big, audacious, dreamy projects like Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, and Inland Empire, among many other great works that cinephiles cherish. His style is so distinct, in fact, it's almost become cliché to label something resembling his style "Lynchian".

An ardent practitioner of transcendental meditation (as documented poetically in his novel Catching the Big Fish), Lynch's library of work is lined with an ambiguous mystery, encouraging its audience to look deeply within themselves to find a self-reflective answer, rather than having an answer for everything within his stories. He was never afraid to make weird humanist art for art's sake, and we love him for it. As he told audience members at his premiere screening of Eraserhead, "Don't ask about the baby."

Another astounding quality of Lynch was his creative drive to keep on creating no matter what the project. Lynch's library of short films, music videos, and even commercials is vast and is a worthwhile watch for any filmmaker who feels weighed down and burdened by the constraints of commercial filmmaking. His inspiration is a gift, always encouraging us to stick to our artistic instincts and be true to ourselves—hell, Twin Peaks aired on ABC, after all. Think about that.

While it's immensely sad to think we'll never see another project written or directed by our beloved eccentric auteur, his last masterpiece, Twin Peaks: The Return, is just about as perfect of a final project to end on as we could ask for. His family put it best when they announced his death on Facebook, saying:

"There's a big hole in the world now that he's no longer with us. But, as he would say, 'Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.,"

In honor of keeping our eyes on the donut, let's celebrate Lynch by revisiting his works below. Everything is worth a watch. And, after, during, or even before or between, keep making weird art. He'd appreciate it, kid.