Martin Scorsese calls David Lynch's death 'a sad day for moviemakers and movie lovers'

Director Martin Scorsese has called David Lynch's death "a sad day for moviemakers and movie lovers".

The Wolf of Wall Street director has joined in the outpouring of tributes to his fellow filmmaker Lynch, who died on 15 January aged 78. He had been diagnosed with the chronic lung disease emphysema in 2020.

In his statement, Scorsese reflected upon Lynch's back catalogue of unusual and mind-bending films and TV shows such as Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks.

"I hear and read the word 'visionary' a lot these days - it's become a kind of catch-all description, another piece of promotional language. But David Lynch really was a visionary - in fact, the word could have been invented to describe the man and the films, the series, the images and the sounds he left behind," he said.

"He put images on the screen unlike anything that I or anybody else had ever seen - he made everything strange, uncanny, revelatory and new. And he was absolutely uncompromising, from start to finish. It's a sad, sad day for moviemakers, movie lovers, and for the art of cinema... We were lucky to have had David Lynch."

Since his death was announced on Thursday, tributes have poured in for the Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart filmmaker from the likes of collaborators Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts and Nicolas Cage and fellow filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, James Gunn and Ron Howard.

In his statement, Spielberg recalled getting Lynch to play director John Ford in a key scene in his 2022 film The Fabelmans.

"It was surreal and seemed like a scene out of one of David's own movies," he wrote. "The world is going to miss such an original and unique voice. His films have already stood the test of time and they always will."