Recap from BFI Screening of ‘Twin Peaks’ Pilot with Kyle MacLachlan

The death of David Lynch did not go unnoticed here in the UK. Since March, two national cinema chains, Everyman and Picturehouse, have embarked on year long retrospectives of his theatrical work, re-releasing one film a month each in order. Picturehouse are even pairing each one with another film that could be said to have influenced it or been influenced by it. (Personally, I await November’s double bill of Mulholland Drive and Sunset Boulevard with bated breath.) In London, we’ve gone a bit further than the rest of the country, but then we tend to with this kind of thing. The PCC, an arts and rep cinema beloved of John Waters (1), has been running a season called “David Lynch Forever!” As well as his films this has also included the whole of Twin Peaks in episodic double bills on Thursday evenings (2). They will shortly progress to all-night screenings of all three seasons as separate Saturday night / Sunday morning marathons. The undoubted highlight of all this memorialising however, has been at the arguable home of cinema in the UK, BFI Southbank.

WHAT IS THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE (BFI) SOUTHBANK?

For those readers who don’t know the place (and there’s no reason why you should) it’s the base of the British Film Institute, an organisation which has responsibility for allocating funding to UK independent filmmakers and storing the national film and television archive. It also has a four screen cinema, holds symposia and talks, acts as a kind of professional association for many in film and television associated industries, and has a library full of material (such as full runs of historic film magazines and clipping from UK papers about film going back a century) which is incredibly useful if you write about film and telly for a living. Which I do.

TWIN PEAKS PILOT SCREENING AT BFI SOUTHBANK ON JUNE 15, 2025

The BFI also runs several film festivals during the course of the year, and one of these is the Film on Film. At this films and television are projected solely from vintage film prints, including dangerous nitrates (3) and the closing night gala of this year’s festival on Sunday, June 15, 2025, was a presentation of the Twin Peaks pilot episode using the 35mm print from which it was transmitted by the BBC back on 23rd October 1990 (4).

This print was handed to the BFI by the BBC for archiving at some point after transmission, along with a lot of prints used as part of Moviedrome (5)all of which the BBC no longer had the rights to show but did not want simply to throw away. (They were not wanted back by the studios that owned them.) It had been in cold storage ever since.

That would have been exciting enough on its own, but it was announced before booking opened that the screening would be introduced by, and then followed by a Q&A with, Kyle MacLachlan to serve as a tribute to Lynch. The BFI cinemas are public, not members only, and you can usually rock up on the day and get a ticket to almost anything.

Nevertheless advance tickets are bookable, with Patrons (people who contribute thousands of pounds a year to the BFI)(6) getting access a day before Members (for whom membership is only £39 a year), with the remainder of the tickets going on sale to the general public twenty four hours after that. I have been a member of the BFI for thirty years, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that I have never known a screening for anything sell out as quickly as this one did following that announcement.

Certain events at the BFI, maybe one a month (7) will sell out during the membership phase, with no tickets available to non-members. I’m reliably informed that there was a danger that MacLachlan’s appearance was going to be so oversubscribed that not even every patron would be able to get tickets. In the end, this didn’t happen but members were asked to put into a ballot for tickets, rather than being allowed to book using the usual process, and there were no tickets available to non-members at all. To put this into context, this was a harder ticket to get than the same week’s screening of an original UK 1977 distribution print of Star Wars(8) introduced by Kathleen Kennedy and I know a lot of people pulled in favours in order to be in the room that night.

It was worth the effort. The pilot looked great. I’ve never seen it on a cinema screen before (although I was one of the 8.15m people to see it on the BBC that night in 1990, and many times since) and the colour grade was very different to the Blu-ray master, much more tinted towards brown and red, with the black areas of the picture beautifully deep and dark. The evening scenes glowed, with e.g. the headlights of Harry’s cruiser or James’ bike standing out against a background the colour of which Cooper would have approved of for a cup of coffee. There were polite rounds of applause for MacLachlan’s name in the credits, Cooper’s first appearance on screen, and a standing ovation at the end.

That was the second standing ovation of the night, as MacLachlan got one on entering the cinema before the screening began. He seemed genuinely thrilled to be there, noting with approval that the screening room has appropriately dark red velvet curtains, paying and exclaiming “LET’S ROCK!” before being ushered to his seat.

I’ve been to a lot of BFI screenings with guests, and plenty will introduce the film, disappear to hospitality for the duration, and return to answer questions afterwards. Not MacLachlan, who sat with his wife and watched the film with us. This was really great, not only because you could occasionally hear him laughing at funny lines, and that we knew he was experiencing our enjoyment of the pilot, but also because when he came back for the Q&A he was really enthused about the material and responding to the actual viewing. He was talking about what he’d just watched, rather than Twin Peaks as a generic thing from his past.

He was full of praise for Jack Nance’s performance in particular, and kept laughing about how young everyone looked. He also mentioned that while he had always known Bob was visible in the mirror as Sarah Palmer sits up in terror in the final moments, he’d never actually been able to see him until this screening. Such is the power of the big screen.

MacLachlan still talks about Lynch in the present tense. Sometimes correcting himself to place him in the past, but mostly not bothering. Which was rather moving.  He said that the first scene he shot as Cooper was Coop’s first meeting with Harry at the hospital, and looking at it now he thinks Cooper isn’t quite right in it. That he hadn’t quite ‘got’ the character yet, that that only came the next day. Which was an interesting insight, even if I personally love that scene to pieces.

He also admitted that several of Cooper’s mannerisms are taken directly from Lynch himself, and the he often wondered how Lynch noticed this. He said the key to being directed by Lynch as Cooper was the “wind / elvis scale”. I.e. that Lynch’s main directions for Cooper consisted of asking for “More Elvis”, “Less Elvis”, “More Wind” or “Less Wind” and that while neither of them could explain that, they both knew and agreed on what it meant in terms of performance.

Regarding the pilot in particular, he said that no one working on it thought it had a hope of being picked up, and that he personally expected what we now know as the International Edit to be screened as a Movie of the Week, and for everyone to spend decades saying how stupid ABC were for not proceeding with the series. But at least they all knew they would have that one movie of the week to be proud of.

One very interesting comment was that, between the pilot and episode one, he and Lynch talked about the possibility that his character was not really an FBI Agent at all, merely posing as one. Either that the real Agent Cooper was “dead in a ditch” somewhere or that the FBI was not actually investigating the Laura Palmer case at all. Obviously the idea was ruled out before the first episode was actually written, as in that Albert Rosenfield shows up, but it gives an idea of how creatively free that window was.

MacLachlan was interviewed by the BFI’s CEO Ben Roberts, even though they have a large team of programmers and guest presenters to call on. This might be considered to show how important the screening was considered by the BFI, although given Roberts’ clear enthusiasm for and knowledge of Twin Peaks, it’s possible this was just an example of a fan understandably pulling rank to meet Agent Cooper. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you? Roberts also let slip that the BFI would be presenting the entire Lynch screen canon in January 2026 to mark the first anniversary of his passing, and MacLachlan promised to come back for some of those screenings, noting how important it was to preserve his friend’s memory and access to his art, a comment that itself drew yet another round of applause.

Probably best to start queuing for tickets now.

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1. So much so that he stars in the short film played before everything the cinema screens, in which he unleashes a foul mouthed tirade aimed at anyone who might not turn their phone off before the film starts. The PCC has a very strict policy on this, and has been known to eject people for getting their phone out during a screening. I’ve seen it happen.

2. I’ll be heading out to see 2.7 and 2.8 shortly after writing this

3. We’ve all seen the end of Inglourious Basterds, right? The BFI is the only place in the UK with a licence and the right safety procedures to screen a nitrate, including an airtight projection box.

4. An advantage of starting this late was that Seasons 1 and 2 were shown as a single run, the pilot right up to 2.22, with only a short break for Christmas 1990. No hiatuses or long waits between cliffhangers for us!

5. This was a strand of ‘cult films’ shown on BBC2 which ran from 1988 to 2000. Each film was given a contextual introduction, initially by film director Alex Cox and in later years by critic Mark Cousins. Many in UK film and television, including myself, credit Moviedrome esoteric and wide-ranging choices with expanding their cinematic tastes at crucial points in our lives. Although many people remember it as being on Moviedrome, it was actually another BBC2 strand, Moving Pictures, which showed Lynch’s The Grandmother as a curtain raiser to Twin Peaks two nights before. Where it blew my mind.

6. Which mostly goes towards things like film preservation.

7. Since Twin Peaks, a notable one has been The Duellists (1977) which will be introduced by its director Ridley Scott in September.

8. I.e. not just without any special edition changes, but also featuring the initial international sound mix.