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The David Lynch Quote Collection

David Lynch

TV

"I fell in love with television for the purpose of telling a long story and staying with characters and getting some depth. Solving the murder of Laura Palmer was not something Mark Frost and I wanted to do so early. Then it became a different thing afterwards. TV is a more restricted medium. I don't like a small screen. I don't like the bad sound. The continuing story thing is pretty compelling. You sometimes want to go longer into a world. So if something comes along - if some ideas come along that want to be told that way - I would [return to television] but I don't thing too soon."

"Television provides the opportunity for an ongoing story - the opportunity to meld the cast and the characters and a world, and to spend more time there."

"The idea of continuity on television is fantastic. Never say goodbye..."

"I didn't watch much TV as a kid and I don' t watch it now . I don' t find anything beautiful or unique to the medium, and the only thing you can do on TV that you can't do in film is make a continuing story - which is so cool! I love the idea of the soap-opera thing.
On the downside, there are more restrictions in TV, and you know up front you can't even think in certain directions. Heavy sex or violence is out - although I think the kind of violence that's allowed on TV is the very worst kind. There's no feeling behind it, and that makes it completely diabolical."

"Television has lowered the level and made a certain thing popular, that TV thing moves fast, doesn't have a lot of substance, has a laugh track and that's all."

"TV sped things up and cause people to hear way more bad news. Mass media overloaded people with more than they could handle..."

"The power of most movies is in the bigness of the image and the sound and the romance. On TV the sound suffers and the impact suffers. With just a flick of the eye or turn of the head, you see the TV stand, you see the rug, you see some little piece of paper with writing on it, or a strange toaster or something. You're out of the picture in a second. In a theater, when the screen is big and the sound is right, a movie is very powerful even if it stinks."

"Television is all telephoto lens where cinema is wid-angle. In movies you can play a symphony whereas on television you just get a grating sound. the only advantage is that you the grating is continuous."

"Unfortunately, you have to take that into account [the poor sound quality of most TV sets]. The technician will tell you that the speakers will just rattle. It may sound great [in the studio] but it's not gonna sound great [at home]. Maybe other people do it all the time, but we learned the hard way that you have to mix by playing everything back through the cheapest TV you can get."

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