It’s now been over a year since the great David Lynch departed this Earth, and with his passing he left a number of unrealized projects. The major one was Unrecorded Night, a series set to be produced by Netflix but cancelled when the pandemic hit. While plot details are sparse, it was meant to feature an ensemble including Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, and Naomi Watts, and mark a return to Lynch to the world of Los Angeles.
Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David Lynch, recently chimed in on Reddit that we will likely see Unrecorded Night in script form, noting, “Unrecorded Night scripts are likely to be published by myself and my siblings as a way to offer what could not be realized, to those who would have loved it. I beg everyone to wait for this release and not hunt down what will likely be unauthorized versions and would soil the beautiful work Dad created. Like many millions of people, we are great fans of our father’s work, and wish to see it shared and celebrated in every good way. We know there is a wanting, and we feel the need to fulfill Dad’s gifts as best as possible.”
It’s also now been revealed that Toby Jones was set to lead the project, as confirmed by Lynch’s longtime collaborator Sabrina Sutherland in an interview with Boston Hassle, and re-stated this past week at a BFI Q&A. While Toby Jones had never previously worked with Lynch, his father Freddie Jones, who passed away in 2019, starred in The Elephant Man, Dune, and Wild at Heart, as well as Lynch’s TV projects On the Air and Hotel Room.
Toby Jones
“Nobody else could direct it, but I think even in its written form, Unrecorded Night is really wonderful,” Sutherland told Cinema Femme back in 2025. “It’s an incredible story, and I really think that it’s the best thing he’s done. He and I worked on it for several years. We went through all of his old writing and organized all of the things he has. There is so much writing and scripts of David’s that was never published. For Unrecorded Night, he took things that had already been written and kind of combined them, while also writing new stuff. We started preproduction and got shut down, but then during COVID, we continued working on the script even after he started his YouTube channel. David wanted to change a whole bunch of the script, so we turned it from what it was during preproduction to what we ended up with before he passed away.”
Another one of Lynch’s longtime collaborators, cinematographer Peter Deming, told us last year, “It’s definitely its own original thing, and how it was formatted, I don’t really know. It was going to be a lot of episodes, because David really liked what he called ‘the continuing story.’ Because I tried to… you know, I really love the feature stuff, but he was like, ‘I’m not going to make any more movies. I’m just going to make longer stories because I love the longer story.’ In fact, Twin Peaks: The Return, we weren’t really sure how many episodes there were going to be until it got into post-production, because it wasn’t really written that way; it was written as a 550-page film. So how that was sliced and diced really was a post-production question. Unrecorded Night was the same way––it took me three sittings to read it because it was so thick. But it was definitely not Twin Peaks. It was definitely a really interesting… mystery, I would say. Yeah, it’s too bad. [Laughs] It really is. Because it would’ve been good.”
He added, “He loved to make films about Los Angeles. He wasn’t trying to hide the setting. Lost Highway, while not implicit, was certainly implied. Mulholland Dr. was obvious. INLAND EMPIRE was obvious. To me, this was another LA canon for him, and one that sort of mixed in filmmaking and Old Hollywood a bit, and it was just, maybe, number four in that line of products.”