Naomi Watts gives a teary eyed tribute to David Lynch during her Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony

Naomi Watts is remembering David Lynch during her Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, as the actress gives a teary eyed tribute to the director who helped her kickstart her acting career. The actress reflected on her career, and how difficult it was for her to get roles in the beginning, but everything changed when she auditioned for an initial scrapped out project that later became Mulholland Drive and she finally got her big break.

Speaking about how Lynch's audition was different than all the previous failed ones, Watts tells the audience,

“The minute I walked in, it just felt different. He was present. He was asking me questions. It felt very different than any previous audition I’d gone to — there were so many where it’s a line of people, you’ve had to wait two hours, you’ve had to drive across town to get there and then go back the next day, and people would barely look at you. But David just lit up, and I was able to connect with him in a different way.”

She further adds how she has not watched the film in a long time, as she says,

“It would have a whole other meaning now, with David gone. I just wish he could be there.”

More details about Naomi Watts and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive

David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is a surrealist neo-noir mystery that opens with a woman bathed in light, then drifts into shadows that never quite lift. Lynch called it “a love story in the city of dreams,” though that love feels fractured, between desire and delusion, creation and collapse. It's the film that gave Naomi Watts her big break, and watching her in it, it's not hard to understand why.

Naomi Watts plays Betty Elms, a bright-eyed actress who lands in Los Angeles with the optimism of someone chasing stardust. She discovers a mysterious amnesiac, played by Laura Harring, hiding in her aunt’s apartment, who calls herself Rita after spotting a Rita Hayworth poster. The two women, one dreamer, one ghost, become inseparable as they try to uncover Rita’s identity, finding a blue key, a purse full of cash, and a corpse that looks eerily familiar.

Mulholland Drive earned Lynch the Best Director Award at Cannes and an Oscar nomination, propelling Naomi Watts into stardom. Critics later crowned it as one of the greatest films of the 21st century, the BBC, IndieWire, and the LA Film Critics Association among them.

The film itself was once a dream too. Lynch originally shot Mulholland Drive in 1999 as a television pilot for ABC, but executives scrapped it. French studio StudioCanal revived it, funding new footage and an ending. The result was a cinematic fever dream that critics and even its cast have endlessly debated.