“At the time I was making Twin Peaks, I was fixated on the number nine (now I love the number seven). But I played this game I made up called License Plate Game, a ridiculous sort of game. If you see your initials on a car and the numbers add up to your favourite number, and the car is very good – that’s the highest you can get. An X is a wild card. If there is an X on the license plate you can make it any letter you want. It’s good if you see your initials, if they are out of order, even. But it’s not as good as if they are in order. And it’s good if they are in order, but the car isn’t so good. It’s a little bit less good. It’s good if you see your initials, but it’s a bad number. But if you see a 666, you cannot turn off your car engine until you see something – a 333, or something like that – that balances it out. OK? So Mark Frost and I are going to our first meeting at ABC Television for Twin Peaks. We’re driving down Robertson Boulevard towards Santa Monica and a car turns from off Santa Monica, coming right towards us. It’s a brand new, white Mercedes and the license plate says DKL999 and I said, ‘This is going to go very well’. And it did.”
On Monday morning David Lynch made a groundbreaking announcement on Twitter: cult TV show Twin Peaks will be returning to our screens with a third series scheduled for 2016, 26 years after its pilot first aired. So, as Lynch devotees start counting down the days until they can re-enter the heady world of Laura Palmer, Agent Dale Cooper, Audrey Horne et al, we present an extract from Hans Ulrich Obrist’s captivating interview with the idiosyncratic auteur, taken from the latest issue of AnOther Magazine. Here, Lynch recalls devising the typically whimsical License Plate Game.
Read the full interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist in AnOther Magazine A/W14, out now.
