“I haven’t gotten the big idea,” director David Lynch told L.A. Times/”24 Frames” guy Steven Zeitchik in this 6.22 piece. “I’ve got some fragments that are coming, but not the big idea. If I got an idea that I fell in love with, I’d go to work tomorrow. I just haven’t.”

Okay, here’s an obvious suggestion: Lynch needs to buy the remake rights to Leos Carax‘s Holy Motors, easily the best Lynch film I’ve seen in ages, and do it his way. Set it in L.A. and throw in some local wackitude, create his own dream episodes, his own ending…whatever. But you know 80% of the American hipsters who should definitely see and would certainly appreciate Carax’s film won’t go because of the subtitles (because so many allegedly “cool” people are lazy, not wild, at heart, and because even the adventurous won’t be able to find their way into it with Denis Lavant as the maestro/tour guide), but will buy a ticket to Lynch’s English-language version in a second, especially if Johnny Depp, say, plays Lavant’s role.

Are you going to tell me this part, if and when someone remakes Holy Motors for the U.S. market, doesn’t have Depp’s name on it?

I know — Lynch is a visionary and it wouldn’t be right for him to remake someone else’s surrealistic loonscape…right? But Lynch wouldn’t able to remake Carax’s film — he just needs to start on it and something else will just flow out in his own way. Maybe he’ll wind up making Son of Holy Motors — a companion film that ignores the Carax particulars but expands upon the basic idea or weirds it up in some fashion.

“If only an American filmmaker was this mad, this imaginative, this unchained, this willing to leap,” I wrote in my 5.23 Holy Motors review. “I wonder if any American has it in him or her to create something like this. If he or she did, Americans would probably say ‘what the fuck?’ and stay away in droves. It’s in the realm but well beyond anything David Lynch has ever done. It’s so perfect to have seen this in Cannes, and to be among a crowd clapping and cheering on their feet, and then to come onto a street filled with sun and warmth.”