John Carroll Lynch On ‘Lucky,’ Harry Dean Stanton, First-Time Directing [VIDEO EXCLUSIVE]

John Carroll Lynch, known for his great character acting for roles in Zodiac and Fargo, jumped at the opportunity to go behind the camera on the new film Lucky.

JOHN CARROLL LYNCH ON LUCKY

His directorial debut, which has thus far earned a whopping 97% on Rottentomatoes, stars Harry Dean Stanton as Lucky, a 90-year-old atheist and smoking enthusiast who finds enlightenment in his off-the-map desert town.

“I was originally considered to be in the picture,” Lynch told uInterview in an exclusive video interview. “My friend Drago Sumonja, one of the two co-writers [along with Logan Sparks], asked me to look at the script, and I thought it was really lovely. A couple months later they asked me if I’d consider directing it, which didn’t take long for me to say yes.”

As for working with Stanton, Lynch thought he was perfect for the role. In fact, the role was written for that actor – “The entire movie was conceived with Harry Dean in mind. There was no moment in the creation of the movie that we ever would have imagined making it with anybody else. He was aware of it, he had agreed to it before I had come on board, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”

Famed director David Lynch plays the role of Howard in the film. Obviously a very busy man, he was hard to track down. “What happened was we were looking for somebody to play Howard, and we had considered some ppl who were unavailable and Harry said, ‘Who’s playing Howard?’ And Logan said, ‘Well, we’re looking now.’ And he said, ‘Have you talked to David about it?’ Logan said, ‘No, you think he’d do it?’ And it started from there,” Lynch explained of the casting process. “We asked him and he after a while said yes, and then we had to figure out exactly when to do it because he was quite busy with a little show called Twin Peaks. I don’t know if you saw it or heard about it, it kind of flew under the radar,” Lynch joked, referring to the popularity of Lynch’s television show reboot. “He agreed to give us two days, and it was great. He came in so prepared and he’s really great in the movie. Howard is a fun character, very disarming.

The story is wowing critics and fans alike, and Lynch thinks the screenplay has a lot to do with the film’s success. “The screenplay was so strongly rooted in the conversations that Logan and Harry had had about the void and about a kind of world view,” he said. “The thing that I love bout the movie is that it’s about living in joy and living in joy, and not shying away from my mortality no matter how close or how far away it is.”