Jacques Tati: The director behind David Lynch’s favourite movies

Ask a director to name their favourite films, and there’s a strong chance that a David Lynch production will appear. The surrealist master has been making strong cinematic statements ever since he burst onto the scene with 1977’s Eraserhead. Outside of film, he co-created the awe-inspiring Twin Peaks and has been behind the camera for music videos for the likes of Chris Isaak, Donovan, and Nine Inch Nails.

To many, Lynch is a true original, someone who inspires others with traces of their work scattered across the cinematic cosmos. But every creative starts out by copying what they see around them, so what inspired the mad man with the quiff? Lynch himself answered this question in an interview with IndieWire, revealing two films by French director Jacques Tati sit among his favourites. 

One of them is Tati’s 1953 comedy Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (‘Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday’ in English). The film introduced the titular character, a bumbling pipe smoker who would reappear throughout the director’s work. It’s classic slapstick fair, with Hulot (played by Tati himself) causing chaos in his rundown old car and pratfalling about the place to the general public’s dismay. Think Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean and you won’t be far off. “When you watch his films,” Lynch said of the Frenchman. “You realise how much he know about – and loved – human nature, and it can only be an inspiration to do the same.”

The second Tati picture name-dropped by Lynch was Mon Oncle (‘My Uncle’) from 1968. Another Monsieur Hulot adventure, this one sees the good-hearted fellow navigate a post-war France obsessed with flashy design and capitalist consumerism. This was the movie that broke Tati in the United States, as Mon Oncle won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Lynch chose to screen the movie during the open week of his Club Silencio in Paris, which was inspired by the venue of the same name in Mulholland Drive. 

Tati, a trained mime, played Hulot in four films. The character also appeared in François Truffaut’s Domicile Conjugal (‘Bed & Board’), although he was played by Jacques Cottin, a costume designer who worked across several of Tati’s projects. Roger Ebert called Hulot, “friendly to a fault” in his review of Les Vacances. “He is the man nobody quite sees. The holiday-makers are distracted by their own worlds, companions and plans, and notice Hulot only when something goes wrong, as it often does.” In this regard, he is the perfect example of the old idiom ‘nice guys finish last’, as the rest of the world is so self-centred that they fail to notice the clumsy, but well-meaning man in front of them.

You can tell just how important Hulot is to cinema by the sheer volume of figures he has inspired. As well as Lynch and Mr Bean, the character was a reference point for Rian Johnson when he was writing his ‘Knives Out’ mystery series. Both he and Daniel Craig, the actor who plays detective Benoit Blanc, used Tati’s performance as inspiration for the flamboyant crime-solver, with the director citing Les Vacances as one of his favourites too.

Other movies cited by Lynch in the interview include The Wizard of Oz (“there is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about The Wizard of Oz”), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (“it has a lot of sadness in it, and beauty”) and Federico Fellini’s 8½ (“sheer magic”).

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