Four-time Oscar nominee David Lynch (“Dune,” “Twin Peaks”) is still hoping his animated feature “Snootworld” will come to fruition. This is despite Netflix recently rejecting his fairytale pitch. In true Lynch fashion, he has said very little publicly about the film until recently.
The History of “Snootworld”
Lynch began to work on the project two decades ago with Caroline Thompson (“The Nightmare Before Christmas”), who penned the first and third acts of the script. Lynch scripted the second act and will produce the project, but is undecided on if he will direct. At one point he was eyeing up his daughter Jennifer Lynch (“American Horror Story”) to do it. But she has “so many things in the pipeline that she ultimately thought it would be better for me or someone else to direct it.”
“I don’t know when I started thinking about Snoots but I’d do these drawings of Snoots and then a story started to emerge,” said Lynch in a rare interview. “I got together with Caroline and we worked on a script. Just recently I thought someone might be interested in getting behind this so I presented it to Netflix in the last few months but they rejected it.”
“Snootworld is kind of an old fashioned story and animation today is more about surface jokes,” he explained. “Old fashioned fairytales are considered groaners: apparently people don’t want to see them. It’s a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes.”
“It takes my breath away how wacky it is,” said Thompson about the storyline “The Snoots are these tiny creatures who have a ritual transition at aged eight at which time they get tinier and they’re sent away for a year so they are protected. The world goes into chaos when the Snoot hero of the story disappears into the carpet and his family can’t find him and he enters a crazy, magnificent world”.
There is Still Hope
Even with two decades behind this project and rejection from a major streaming platform, Lynch still has hope for “Snootworld.” “I like this story. It’s something that children and adults can both appreciate…I’ve never really done a straight animation but with computers today it’s possible to do some spectacular things.” [And let this remind up-and-coming filmmakers that everyone gets rejected. Even arthouse gods like Lynch.]
Of course, he also took this opportunity to coly tease fans about what project he may take on next. Saying; “I can’t talk about those things right now.”
We will keep you posted on updates about “Snootworld” as they become available.
