INTERVIEW: After watching this new doc, you’ll know Catherine, the Log Lady
Photo: Catherine Coulson will forever be remembered for her time as the Log Lady in Twin Peaks. Photo courtesy of Next Step Studios / Provided by Justin Cook PR with permission.
Twin Peaks, the landmark TV show from David Lynch and Mark Frost, continues to attract viewers more than three decades after its initial release. The original two seasons of the series are in-demand streaming choices, and the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me still plays in repertory at arthouse cinemas across the world. Twin Peaks: The Return, the final cherry (pie) on the top of this exquisite franchise, has plenty of dedicated fans as well.
Of the many characters portrayed in the series, there may be no role more beloved than the Log Lady, perfectly acted by the late Catherine Coulson. This Twin Peaks character was an anomaly, in the most Lynchian of ways. She held an actual log as she went about her business in town, often stopping for a bite at the Double R Diner. When she talked, the Log Lady often sounded like an oracle, a harbinger for apparent doom on the horizon. She was also funny and eccentric.
Now a new documentary from Richard Green lets viewers better understand the life and career of Coulson. I Know Catherine, The Log Lady is currently playing in movie theaters around the nation, honoring Coulson’s legacy nearly 10 years after her death.
One of the most unbelievable aspects of Coulson’s career as an actor, which is detailed in full detail in the documentary, is that she put on the iconic sweater and glasses of the Log Lady one more time right before she died. At the time, Lynch and company kept it a secret, but he filmed a few Log Lady sequences a couple of days before Coulson’s death. And now audiences have a final postscript to her career, forever captured in Twin Peaks: The Return. For Green, this part of her life, death and career was what motivated him to make the film.
“They shot the Log Lady scenes in Catherine’s living room, and Catherine died four days later,” Green said in a recent Zoom interview. “I heard that 10 years ago, and I went, wow, there’s a movie here. Now I had produced 20 years ago a movie called David Lynch Presents: I Don’t Know Jack, the unsolved life and homicide of Eraserhead star Jack Nance. So as soon as I got this idea, I thought, wow, there are so many of the same elements and people. I was fascinated by the idea of somebody taking their last breaths to perform a part that was important in their life. I just wanted to know more.”
From that point on, it took approximately two years for Green to secure the rights to footage of Coulson acting in her many parts with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. What Log Lady fans might not know is that Coulson had a long and storied career in theater, and I Know Catherine, The Log Lady includes clips from various points of her career.
After securing those rights, Green moved on to a big interview that would seal the deal for making this documentary. “Then I arranged the interview with David,” he said of his talk with Lynch, who died earlier this year. “That was by far the best interview I had ever been a part of in my life. He was just amazing, and we had a wonderful kind of rapport.”
For those who are obsessed by Lynch-land, Green and the director go way back. Not only did they work together on the Nance documentary, but Green plays the pivotal magician character in Mulholland Drive.
“The experience I had on Mulholland Drive was transformative for both of us and is still mentioned to me every place I go as everybody’s favorite scene in Mulholland Drive, their favorite Lynch movie,” the director said. “Once we did that [interview with Lynch], we realized we had a great story, and we needed money to do it. So about nine months later we ran a Kickstarter campaign, which was very successful and then started working right through COVID and having to triple the budget because it took so much time. When you’re doing a biography of someone this complex and someone this unknown in some ways — most of the aspects of her life [are unknown] — a lot of the two years we were doing interviews just to figure out the story, just to get the timeline before we could tell how to tell the story and which parts of the story were going to be most relevant to an audience. So it’s been a long and comprehensive and intense and interesting and challenging 10 years.”
What struck Green most profoundly when making the documentary was that Coulson would have one-on-one connections with so many of her family, friends and members of the public. She always treated people with respect and gave them her full attention.
“I’m constantly meeting Twin Peaks fans who had a moment with her and who she handed the log to, and they were just flabbergasted that they could even touch it,” Green said. “She did something that I think is really, really unique. The Log Lady was a character. Catherine Coulson was a real, living person, who in the course of her career played hundreds of characters, but she was able to … meet people on the street or at Twin Peaks festivals and give them that one-on-one connection. … She was a real person, and yet she carried the images and the power of the Log Lady to these folks.”
The director added: “And to this day they talk about her with reverence, and the other thing about it is she didn’t make them feel like I’m this wonderful actor on high. She made them feel like they were close family friends because she was so in touch with her own humanity.”
At first, when Green and his team started recording interviews with Coulson’s family and friends, there was some hesitation. The filming began so soon after the actor’s death that interview subjects didn’t know what to make of this documentary project.
“Initially there was a little reluctance from her closest friends because it was so soon after she passed,” he said. “I liken it to the experience we’ve all recently had about David passing. There are a lot more strangers that feel close to David and were impacted, but the people that knew David were devastated by his passing. And I think that was true of Catherine as well. People were just really sensitive and missed her; they miss her to this day, and it’s almost 10 years.”
What broke down some walls was Donna Dubain, a close friend of Coulson’s who joined the project as an executive producer. Dubain would introduce Green to various people from Coulson’s life, and that was his ticket to being trusted.
“I think everybody just opened up,” the filmmaker said. “They wanted to talk about her. I was coming at it from a place of real interest in who she was and who they were. Each of these interviews was over an hour, and they don’t start with Catherine. They start with who the person is I’m interviewing, what their perspective on the world is, how they got to where they are and how they started to know Catherine, so the conversations with all these interviewees became life conversations. And I think that they all wanted to share this strong, powerful attraction and appreciation they had for Catherine.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
I Know Catherine, The Log Lady, directed by Richard Green, is currently playing in movie theaters around the United States. Click here for more information.
