The man behind ABC’s Lost,
HBO’s The Leftovers, and now,
a wildly audacious “remix”
of the ironic graphic novel
Watchmen, Damon Lindelof, 46,
reveals six of the greatest
influences on his work.1 /Twin Peaks
Growing up in New Jersey in the
early 1990s, Lindelof developed
a love of serialized mysteries
thanks to David Lynch’s ground-
breaking ABC series. “I watched
it repeatedly looking for clues,”
Lindelof says. “The whole idea
of forming theories to explain
what happened was all born
out of Twin Peaks. It is a genre
unto itself.”2 /Stephen King
Especially the horror master’s
early novels, like 1978’s The
Stand. “King mixes humor and
horror in a way that I don’t think
anybody else can,” Lindelof
explains. “I won’t say I wasn’t
terrified by his books, but I also
found them really amusing.”3 /Watchmen
Naturally, Alan Moore’s super-
antihero classic makes the list.
“Everything I do—particularly
Lost—is a love letter to Watch-
men,” says Lindelof, who cites
the comic’s use of traumatic
character-origin stories, flash-
backs, quantum mechanics,
and switching character per-
spectives as inspiring for Lost.
4 /Close
Encounters of
the Third Kind
“I love this idea of characters
being compelled by something
that means something but they
don’t know what it is,” he says
of Steven Spielberg’s 1977
sci-fi classic, which follows
people haunted by extraterres-
trial encounters. “The search
for meaning has worked its
way into the stuff I do—the
meaning of life is the search
for meaning.”
5 /Pulp Fiction
Quentin Tarantino’s 1994
masterwork is Lindelof’s
“favorite movie of all time,”
partly because of its non-
linear storytelling: “[John
Travolta’s Vincent Vega]
gets shot in the middle of the
movie while sitting on the
toilet but then he’s the star
of the third act. Knowing
he’s going to get shot [as
I watched the rest of the
film] completely changed
the way my brain processed
how stories coud be told.”6 /Encyclopedia
Brown
Each chapter of this book series
tells a mystery, with the solu-
tions revealed in the back. As a
kid, Lindelof would quickly skip
to the end, looking for each
story’s solution, until one day his
dad caught him. “My dad ripped
out the endings,” Lindelof
recalls. “He said, ‘It will be more
interesting for you not to know if
you were right.’ I realized this
was how I wanted to tell sto-
ries—I want all the evidence for
the right answer to be there, but
I don’t want people to be able to
flip to the end.” —JHDAMON LINDELOF
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