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David Lynch, of course, is best known as the vanguard director of dreamlike and disturbingly allegorical films such as Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and Mulholland Drive (2001)— movies that are as idiosyncratic and independently spirited as movies come, yet consistently flirt with a kind of mainstream Americana. Films like Wild at Heart (1990) and Lost Highway (1997) teem with sex and violence that is anything but cartoonish, while Lynch’s heartland tale,
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The Straight Story (1999), proved clean enough to earn a G rating. He has consistently coaxed vivid, career-defining performances out of his female leads, including Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern, and Sherilyn Fenn. In 1990, well before shows like The Sopranos or Mad Men transformed series television into a creative hotbed, Lynch revolutionized the medium with Twin Peaks, a stark, surreal serial about the investigation into the death of a homecoming queen in a small town in Washington. He was also an early adopter of the Internet as a forum for creative work, producing a set of online shorts dubbed Dumbland, as well as a sitcom,about a family of humanoid bunnies.
Although Lynch hasn’t put out a feature film in more than half a decade, he has hardly been idle. He began his creative life in Missoula, as a painter, and recently compiled Works on Paper, a career-spanning monograph of his wide-ranging output as a visual artist.
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“Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.” 4
Born in Montana in 1946, famed filmmaker David Lynch studied art before experimenting with film in the late ‘60s. In 1977, his first feature, Eraserhead, made its debut, going on to become a cult classic. He next directed The Elephant Man, for which he received two Academy Award nominations among a host of others for the film. Lynch has also directed Blue Velvet and created the acclaimed television series Twin Peaks. A vocal proponent of transcendental meditation, Lynch has added to his film ouevre with works like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.
David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946. Lynch moved frequently as a child due to his father’s work as a research scientist. While still a student at a high school in Virginia, he began taking art classes at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. After high school, Lynch made his way through Boston, Europe and Philadelphia to study art further. The filmmaker In the 1960s, David Lynch began making short films, beginning with the animated Six Men Getting Sick (1966) and The Alphabet (1967), a combination of animation and live action. The Grandmother (1970) was Lynch’s first completely live-action short film. In the early 1970s, Lynch started work on his first feature film, Eraserhead, which premiered in 1977. The bizarre movie had a dark worldview, disturbing subject matter and a surreal tone, but it garnered enough attention to land Lynch the job of directing The Elephant Man (1980), starring John Hurt. That film received eight Academy Award nominations, including two for Lynch in the categories of directing and adapted screenplay. Lynch’s next directing gig wouldn’t go quite as well, as he was picked to helm the science fiction film Dune (1984), an adaptation of a well-loved book starring Kyle MacLachlan and Sting, among many others. The movie was plagued with production problems and received scathing reviews upon its release.
‘Lost Highway’ and ‘Mulholland Drive’ Lynch’s next big screen outing came in the form of Lost Highway (1997), a polarizing picture that put a new twist on his surreal themes. In 1999, he directed The Straight Story, a quiet, simple film—based on a true story—about a man traveling several hundred miles on a riding lawnmower. With Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), Lynch revisited the dreamlike qualities of his more stylized creations. Mulholland Drive earned Lynch another Academy Award nomination for directing. Chilling ‘Blue Velvet’ In typical Lynchian fashion, the director recovered by turning back to his own vision, coming out with Blue Velvet in 1986. The film, which starred MacLachlan, Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini, took a chilling look at small-town life. Though its darker moments led to some outraged reactions, Lynch received critical accolades and a second Academy Award nomination for directing. Lynch would continue in a similar vein with the violent Wild at Heart (1990). This controversial film won the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Creates ‘Twin Peaks’ Lynch took his unique vision to television with the series Twin Peaks, which first aired in 1990 and featured muse MacLachlan as FBI agent Dale Cooper. Like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks took a deep dive into small-town America and found hidden horrors that had previously been unexplored. The offbeat show became a national topic of conversation when it first aired, though the second season’s story line drifted, losing viewers along the way. The series didn’t get picked up for a third season. Lynch would revisit the show with the feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), but the movie received a critical drubbing.
Leaving ‘Twin Peaks’ Miniseries It was announced in autumn 2014 that Twin Peaks would return to the airwaves in 2016 as a Showtime miniseries. Various original cast members are slated to return, including MacLachlan. Lynch was slated to direct each episode of the nine-part relaunch, yet in early April 2015 he announced on his Facebook page that he was pulling out of the series due to ongoing financial disputes. “After 1 year and 4 months of negotiations, I left because not enough money was offered to do the script the way I felt it needed to be done,” Lynch said on his page. “This weekend I started to call actors to let them know I would not be directing. Twin Peaks may still be very much alive at Showtime. I love the world of Twin Peaks and wish things could have worked out differently.” Cast members have created an online video calling for Lynch to return. Transcendental Meditation Lynch is a proponent of transcendental meditation, a practice he has embraced since 1973. In 2005, he founded the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and Peace, which provides support for students, people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and others who may benefit from this form of meditation.
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Life is very, very complicated and so films should be allowed to be too.
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“Stories should have the suffering” Mr. Lynch, did you learn transcendental meditation because you had an anger problem? No. I noticed I did have an anger. Many people have anger and I was one of them. People direct anger at certain people they can get away with – I would take it out on my first wife. What happened was, I started meditating and two weeks later she came to me and said, “What’s going on?” I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “Where is that anger?” She didn’t see it anymore. A lot of times when people start meditating they don’t see the change as soon as the others around them. The others around them notice the change. Why did you start practicing meditation then? I picked it up in 1973. It was the idea that the human being can gain enlightenment. It was driving me crazy, because you hear we only use five or ten percent of our brains. What is the other part for? How do you get more and more and what is the most you can get? A lot of people said meditation is like jogging or like lying in the sun on the beach. This shows a huge misunderstanding about what meditation is. Meditation is a way to go within, all the way within to the deepest level of life, the transcendence, the absolute, the totality and reality, and experience that. The human being is built for it. Do you think you are a better artist because your movies are driven by a higher consciousness? I don’t know. You can catch ideas at a deeper level when you start meditating. Intuition grows, and intuition is the number one tool for an artist – feeling and thinking combined. When you are working on a painting, it’s like you know, and you enjoy the doing so much. It’s the same way with films. The enjoyment of working increases, the enjoyment of everything increases. The ideas are flowing, and the feeling that you can get it to feel correct. You know what that is. It’s a knowingness that grows. It’s really beautiful. Do you still get upset or depressed from time to time? You can still get a wave of depression or hate. And it’s all relative. The degree of it is less and less. So suffering begins to go away. Mankind was not made to suffer. Bliss is our nature. We are supposed to be happy. It is entirely possible to be packed with happiness. Real, deep bliss, wide awake, happy in the doing of things. And it’s the doing of things, the enjoyment of living, that is so much more intense when you have this bliss growing. Can you be more specific how that affects your daily life? The events of the life stay the same but how you go through them certainly gets better. On my film Dune, that experience could have finished me. It was so horrible. I identify so much with my films – and I knew I sold out – and meditation kept me from jumping off the cliff. There is a saying: The world is as you are. You can wear dark-green dirty glasses, and that’s the world for you. Or you start diving within and experience the unbounded ocean of pure bliss consciousness, creativity, intelligence, all these beneficial things, and you start wearing rose-colored glasses. And that’s the way the world looks for you. And it gets better.
I would say your films seem to look at the world through the dark glasses. Why is that? If you saw a film and the beginning of the film was peaceful, the middle was peaceful, and the end was peaceful – what kind of story is this? You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people. How does an idea for one of your films come together? I always say ideas drive the boat. Ideas are a huge, huge blessing. That’s the thing you try to catch – an idea that you fall in love with. Every time that I have made a film that’s not from a book or somebody else’s screenplay, it happens the same way. The whole thing doesn’t come at once, but fragments of things come and these fragments form themselves into a script. You write the idea down and save it until the next idea comes, and little by little the majority of ideas find themselves in a script – which is organized ideas. Then you go and shoot that script and edit it and you mix sounds and music. It’s a process. An idea can give a story that is more abstract and not so straight-ahead, and sometimes it gives you a story that is more straight-ahead. Which do you prefer? I like all different kinds of cinema. There are no rules. Some abstract things don’t move me at all and some move me like crazy. Some straight-ahead movies don’t do anything for me, whereas others really light my fire. It’s cinema, it’s billions of elements. Cinema, they say, combines seven arts. It’s a very complete medium, so it shouldn’t stop you from going other places – if the ideas come along. Cinema is a mighty special, beautiful medium. Are there movies that you oriented yourself on? Everyone should find their own voice. It’s not about copying. But Godard, Fellini and Bergman were my heroes. Sunset Boulevard, Rear Window, 8 ½, Jacques Tati’s My Uncle or Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Rear Window, all of Kubrick’s movies, all of Fellini’s movies, probably all of Bergman’s movies – there have been so many great films that were an inspiration. Have those films subconsciously influenced your work? One could say the concept of voyeurism in Blue Velvet was influenced by Rear Window, for instance. I don’t know if that is true. There have been 110 or more years of cinema, and it’s impossible for any one of us to make a film that can’t be compared to something that has come before. To me Blue Velvet is Blue Velvet and Rear Window is Rear Window. You could say that Sunset Boulevard or Rear Window has conjured an idea for me, but even though I love them or am inspired by them, life is a 24/7 movie. Ideas come out of that all the time. It’s hard to say it’s cinema that conjures ideas. It’s altogether. There are billions of ideas swimming around, you just have to catch them.
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Diehl I’ve noticed a thread throughout your recent activity. You’ve made a new album, you helped put together a new nightclub, you have the comprehensive Works on Paper book that brings together all the strands of your visual art, you’ve taken film distribution into your own hands. Adultery is something of a prominent theme in your films, and you currently seem to be in a moment of creative promiscuity, philandering between genres and mediums. Lynch [laughs] Right. You know, I’ve always said cinema combines so many different art forms. As a kid, I was always building things. My father had a shop in the house, and we built things—we were kind of a project family. I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema, and in cinema, you get to build so many things, or help build them. Then cinema led to so many different areas—it led to still photography, music . . . Furniture is also a big love of mine. I started building these kind of sculptural lamps. Then I got into lithography at this printing place in Madison, Wisconsin, called Tandem Press. For the last four years, I’ve been working on lithography in Paris at a great, great printing studio called Idem. And I’ve always been painting along the way, as well as doing drawings and watercolors . . . There are just so many things out there for us to do. Diehl As I understand it, when you originally got into film, it was to try to make your paintings move. Is that correct? Lynch Yes. I wanted to make a moving painting. Diehl It’s funny because I recently watched The Alphabet [1968], one of the early shorts that you made in art school, and it reminded me exactly of that: it was as if a Francis Bacon painting had come to life. Lynch Ah, well, Francis Bacon is one of my giant inspirations. I just love him to pieces. Diehl Speaking of inspirations, the members-only nightclub you recently opened in Paris, Silencio, was inspired by the fictional nightclub in Mulholland Drive, wasn’t it? Lynch The name was inspired by it, but not the actual club itself. What happened was, they asked me if I wanted to help design this club in Paris. It was a strange place—it was way underground and the space was fairly small. But now the club seems very big—it seems a lot bigger than it did when I first saw it. I designed the walls, floor, and ceilings. In this one particular room, the walls curve into the ceiling. My whole idea was to make a place that you felt good being in. I designed many different things—the stage and the movie theater, which is spectacular. You can go from hearing the loudest music into this very beautiful, comfortable theater to watch a film. I also designed what they call a “yellow forest”: it’s a smoking room in the club, with these steel yellow trees that go from floor to ceiling with these little lights
coming off them, with pods that you can sit on. It was important to me that everything feel very warm, so we created this wall treatment out of wood blocks covered in different types of gold, which catches light in a really beautiful way. I’m real happy with that. I also designed this sink for the restrooms—I’m really happy with that sink. These things, you just don’t know what’s going to come next. It’s great to be given the possibility of designing a sink; ideas start coming that you never thought about before. A person doesn’t really think too much about a sink, but when you do, ideas come that are really beautiful. So the club has a great feeling now. It’s very beautiful to be inside this club, Silencio. Diehl From what I understand, the location of Silencio is historical. The building, on the rue Montmartre, was designed by the creators of the Eiffel Tower. Lynch I don’t know the whole history of it, but there’s metalwork in there that would make you think of the Eiffel Tower. Diehl Since it opened last October, Silencio has hosted performances by the likes of The Kills, Lykke Li, and parties for Kanye West and Chanel, among other events. The New York Times wrote that “it has been compared to the Dadaists’ Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York, and the existentialists’ Café Flore on the Left Bank.” It seems intended to be a kind of hub for new bohemian culture. When I first heard about it, it reminded me of the golden age of New York City nightlife, where you had places like the Mudd Club, where you had all of these disparate people—artists, professionals, people with money, people with no money—meet and exist in the same space. Lynch Well, I don’t know about bohemian . . . It’s a club that people have a good time in. I’m not sure who the clients are all the time, although they seem to be a good bunch. But Arnaud [Frisch], the owner—that’s what his whole wish was, that Silencio would be a meeting place for all different types of people. That’s the feeling it has. Paris is now the second-best city in the world for me. The French have been my great friends, and they believe in a director having final cut. They don’t understand any other way. They protect the artist. Diehl You’ve always been considered an auteur as a filmmaker, but it seems like you’ve become an auteur of many things. I heard that you now even have your own brand of coffee beans. Lynch That came about with these two guys I work with, Eric and Erik. I hate making coffee, but one of them started getting heavy into making signature designs on the foam of the cappuccinos, and then the other started telling me I should have my own brand of coffee. So one thing led to another, and it happened.
Diehl You make sinks, you make coffee—is it possible that you might someday have a kind of David Lynch version of IKEA, where everything necessary for everyday life is created with your vision? Lynch No, no—I’m not doing that! I’d have to quit everything and just design away . . . But it would be kind of fun. Diehl You’ve been making music for years, starting with the soundtrack to Eraserhead. But last year you released your first proper solo album, Crazy Clown Time. Lynch Right. I worked on that with my friend and engineer “Big” Dean Hurley. We pretty much did everything together except for the track “Pinky’s Dream,” which we did with Karen O. Diehl Many tracks on Crazy Clown Time have a surprising dance-music influence. A lot of them would weirdly work in a DJ set at a club. Lynch My music agent, Brian Loucks, always brings people up for a coffee, then we talk, and then sometimes it forms into a collaboration. Brian has brought up some great people over the years. So I had been working on music, and one of the first people Brian was going to bring up to meet about it was into dance music. After that, I started thinking about dance music, and all of a sudden some lyrics and a little tune came. The next day, Dean and I started working, and out came the song “Good Day Today.” We played it for Brian, who loved it, and he gave it to Jason Bentley, and the story goes that Jason thought the song was by Underworld. Diehl I heard that as it was happening. He played “Good Day Today” on his radio show and introduced it as the new Underworld single. Lynch Not only did he play it on the radio, but Jason took it to Ibiza and played it for two guys named Ben Turner and Rob da Bank. They liked it so much, they said, “We want to put this out on our label, Sunday Best.” It’s a tiny company, but they got that music out in a big, big way. Then they came to me and said, “We’d love to do an album. Do you have more songs?” And we had a bunch, and that’s what became Crazy Clown Time. Diehl Where did the title come from? Lynch The title came from the song “Crazy Clown Time.” The lyrics tell a story of the time . . . It’s a traditional backyard story that involves girls and guys and beer. Diehl In addition to the club grooves, many of the songs are deeply rooted in the blues tradition. What do the blues mean to you?
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Lynch Well, I love the dirty, rough-running power of the blues-based electric guitar. I like the idea of a gasoline-powered guitar, where you’ve got an accelerator, and you can push down on it and it just revs up. The great blues music is very simple, but sophisticatedly so. It’s so beautiful, this world that the great blues men and women conjured up. It’s got such a mood and a way of moving, and that was a big inspiration. Diehl I know you were initially drawn to art by expressionist painters like Oskar Kokoschka and Francis Bacon, who in a weird way were doing a kind of European, visual expression of blues emotion. Lynch That’s exactly right. There are so many similarities between the blues and a lot of painting. Diehl I was also intrigued by Karen O’s appearance on the record. That’s the only outside collaboration on the album, and the only song that you don’t sing. How did that come about? Lynch Several years ago, Brian introduced me to Karen O. On that trip, nothing happened, but then last year, Karen O appeared again. She came in, and I gave her the lyrics, then she listened to the track over and over. She kind of sat there, you know, thinking, going over things in her mind. It was quite a comfortable situation. Then, at a certain point, Karen went into the booth and knocked the song out of the park. Diehl Had you known about Karen O’s work with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and her other music? Lynch Sure, but I felt like this was kind of its own thing. The way Karen O says the word pinky, it brings Pinky, as a character, alive. Pinky was in my mind, but not as good as that. Karen made Pinky a character that you kind of know and really care for. Diehl You have a sort of magic with female characters. I found it kind of genius that you included that feminine energy in there. Karen O serves as a kind of presence in your music the way, say, Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive or Laura Dern in Wild at Heart exist as the heroines and femme fatales of your films. Lynch Yes, you’re onto something. [laughs] Well, there are different types of music, and sometimes Dean and I will do a track and we know right away it’s not for us–that it’s gonna go to some girl because it’s just that kind of thing. I also work on music with this other girl, Chrysta Bell, and she’s a real leading lady. She’s gonna be big, I hope, one day soon. But I love women. I can kind of sit and go into a world where the women . . . Talk to me. Diehl Jean-Luc Godard once said, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” Lynch Nope, you don’t need much more than that.
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Diehl The tagline to your last film, Inland Empire, was which I also thought could be the tagline to many of your films. In so many of them, the women become the emotional pivot for the action. Lynch There are men and women in the world, and they’re different in many ways. It’s really beautiful and interesting when the two meet. When a certain girl and a certain guy get together, certain things are going to happen. It’s always these combos and different characters coming together in a story that make certain things happen. These things are what kind of makes it, and the women play a huge role. Diehl It’s interesting because there are frequent connections between the way some of the women look in your films—that sort of ’50s- or ’60s-inspired, all-American aesthetic—and what’s going on in contemporary fashion. I remember those hairstyles and jewel tones from Blue Velvet suddenly became a look, as did the extreme rockabilly style in Wild at Heart. Prada’s Spring 2012 collection really echoes the way some of your characters dress. A couple of years ago, I know that you also made a short film, Lady Blue Shanghai, for Dior starring Marion Cotillard. We know that your work has been an influence on fashion, but does fashion play a role in your work?
Diehl There’s a song that you sing on the soundtrack to Inland Empire . . . LynchThat’s the song “Ghost of Love.” I had sung before that, but that one is where I got more comfortable. That song, I really love. It did start something . . . When a certain girl and a certain guy get together, certain things are going to happen.
Diehl At one point while watching Inland Empire, I realized that I was watching a movie conceived by David Lynch, with a song sung by David Lynch, over a scene conceived by David Lynch. It was like full immersion, visually and aurally, in that moment. Lynch That’s beautiful. Diehl And then on top of that, I learned that you self-re-
HUMOR IS VERY INTERESTING COMEDIES, BUT THERE’S CO TO TIME, ABSURDITIES,
Lynch Well, the women dress a certain way for my films, for the world. I want to say one thing about that look: I work with this woman, Patricia Norris, with whom I started working on The Elephant Man. I loved the ’50s and early ’60s and that sort of started the style of Blue Velvet, but Patty deserves all the credit for the way people dressed in it. She has a knack for putting clothes on people that really fit them in every way. The way she dressed Dennis Hopper, too . . . Well, the way she dressed everybody was perfect, and it has to be. If that part of the movie is wrong, then it’ll jump out and bite you. Diehl You’re known for having so many key long-standing collaborators, like Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan, and the late Jack Nance, for example. You’ve also transformed people’s careers at unlikely moments, like Dennis Hopper and Robert Blake. How do you choose whom to work with? Lynch There are so many people I’ve loved working with, but you’ve got to get the right person for the project. Sometimes a person can be your dearest friend, but there’s just not a role for them in the next film. That’s kind of a hardship. If they’re right for the part, though, you rejoice, because you not only love this person, but you’ve worked with them before and developed a shorthand. It’s a beautiful ride.
leased the film. You took charge of every aspect of that movie, from its creation to its distribution. Lynch Well, everybody knows that the art houses are pretty much gone. It’s the mainstream films that get the theaters now, and theaters can’t survive if nobody’s coming to them, so it’s big advertising and big money that talks. We didn’t have the big money, so we figured that if we could go and book theaters and do it on our own, then it might be the best way. I don’t know if it was, but that’s what happened with Inland Empire. Diehl In your best-selling memoir, Catching the Big Fish, you say, “For me, film is dead.” Lynch I meant that celluloid, the actual film that runs through the camera, is dead. That’s gone, and now digital is here. But storytelling with cinema never will die. The way the stories are told may change, but it will always be. Diehl It might, though, be the death of film as a director’s medium, where the artist gets final cut. It’s interesting how
so many filmmakers with established oeuvres and visionaries who have changed how we perceive cinema—people like you, John Waters, Gus Van Sant, and even Martin Scorsese— often still struggle to set up projects today. Lynch Thousands of other filmmakers out there would agree with that. The studios are superreluctant to give final cut. They have so much money riding on these things, so they want a committee to go and rule the roost. The poor director just dies a death. More and more, when a committee at a studio sees something that maybe people won’t understand, they’ll kill the thing quickly. It’s an insult. I don’t know why anyone would make a film if they couldn’t make the film they wanted to make with all the freedom and the support they needed. But it happens every day, so you have to be independent. You have to not only find enough money to make the film, but you have to have final cut—you absolutely have to have it. Otherwise, you’re gonna die. But there’s always
Diehl You’re a devotee of Transcendental Meditation, which you’ve practiced for more than three decades. What does it do for you? Lynch Well, you’re swimming in the transcendent twice a day, and when you swim there, the world gets bigger, and you get wet with that, and the creativity grows. The Beatles, who did Transcendental Meditation, always talked about how the ideas for all those great songs came to them when they were working with the Maharishi. I always say it’s not Transcendental Meditation that does it, but the great treasury within—the great field at the base of all matter and mind. But you need to transcend to get to that field. People have a lot of different, strange ideas of what meditation is. I meet people who say, “My form of meditation is jogging,” or “I lay in the sun. That’s my form of meditation.” But that’s not meditation. You need a mental technique that truly gets you to a field that is beyond the field of relativity. The key word is transcend. Transcendental Meditation is like a key that opens the door to that deepest level of life, that ocean of pure consciousness.
G TO ME. MY FILMS ARE NOT OMEDY IN THEM FROM TIME JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE.
a way. Sometimes restrictions are a big blessing. When you have to build something yourself, ideas start coming that never would’ve come otherwise. New ideas flow in. Happy accidents do occur. Diehl With Inland Empire, you seemed liberated to run with your vision like never before. Lynch Well, it’s a very big freedom to have lightweight equipment and a smaller crew. The pressure is so much less. Pressure equates to money, so it’s really, in a way, a blessing to go low budget. Diehl Mulholland Drive started out as a TV pilot at first. But when that failed, it actually opened the door for it to become a theatrical film. Lynch It was a closed-ended pilot, and then the ideas came to make it into a feature. I was meditating, and all these ideas just flowed in, in one meditation— all the ideas to finish that into a feature.
Diehl You’ve said meditation helped you in the making of The Elephant Man, which was really your breakthrough film.
Lynch Meditation does open up a kind of an understanding that grows. The Elephant Man was such a gift to me. I was a kid from Missoula, Montana, who had made one film at that point that was considered very strange by most people, and here I was in London, England, making a Victorian drama with some of the greatest actors in the world; a lot of people thought I was really not right for that job. One day, I was standing in a derelict hospital in East London, long since it was a working hospital. The halls had the remnants of gas lamps, and it was filled with pigeon shit and broken windows. Then a wind came and kind of blew through me, and I suddenly knew exactly what it was to be alive at that time. Once I got that feeling, no one could take it away from me. I kind of owned it after that.
Diehl In a way, though, the way you’ve reflected the very surreal world in which we live in your films has helped make surrealism itself a part of the popular cultural discussion. Lynch Well, I don’t know. I love the surrealists, and I sort of understand what they’re saying, but I just think that maybe things aren’t always surreal. To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can’t be said so well with words. They’re intuited. They’re understood in a different way, and cinema can do those things. Cinema is a great, great language for concrete stories, and concrete stories that hold abstractions, and abstract stories. It’s so much like music in that way. Diehl Except for Dune (1984) and The Elephant Man, all your movies are set in America—and often a mythic America of your own making. What is the myth of America that intrigues you now? Lynch I’m an American, and I love America, even with the problems we’ve got. Stories come out from where we live and what we hear and see and feel, so I don’t know what will come next. It’s like fishing: You just wait . . . I’m starting to catch ideas for the next film, but I don’t know what it is yet. It’s like I always say, “The chef cooks the fish, the chef doesn’t make the fish.” Desire is the bait, the fish is caught, and then the chef cooks it. Ideas are like fish. They just come to you sometimes, and when you’re really lucky, you fall in love with them and know exactly what to do.
Diehl We live in a moment where violence is pervasive in pop culture. When you made films like Wild at Heart and Lost Highway, you came under fire for the graphic depictions of violence that they contained. But I always felt you were bringing that violence to the screen so we could transcend it, in a way. Lynch Most films reflect the world, and the world is violent and in a lot of trouble. It’s not the other way around. The films don’t make a peaceful world violent—the violent world made the films.
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Eraserhead is a 1977 American surrealist body horror film written and directed by filmmaker David Lynch. Shot in black-and-white, Eraserhead is Lynch’s first feature-length film, coming after several short works. The film was produced with the assistance of the American Film Institute (AFI) during the director’s time studying there. Starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Jeanne Bates, Judith Anna Roberts, Laurel Near, and Jack Fisk, it tells the story of Henry Spencer (Nance), who is left to care for his grossly deformed child in a desolate industrial landscape. Throughout the film, Spencer experiences dreams or hallucinations, featuring his child and the Lady in the Radiator.
The Elephant Man is a 1980 American-British biographical film about Joseph Merrick (whom the script calls John Merrick), a severely deformed man in 19th century London. The film was directed by David Lynch and stars John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Michael Elphick, Hannah Gordon and Freddie Jones. The Elephant Man was a critical and commercial success with eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor. After receiving widespread criticism for failing to honor the film’s make-up effects, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was prompted to create the Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling the following year. The film also won the BAFTA Awards for Best Film, Best Actor and Best Production Design.
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Dune is a 1984 American science fiction film written and directed by David Lynch, based on the 1965 Frank Herbert novel of the same name. The film stars Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides and includes an ensemble of well-known American and European actors in supporting roles. It was filmed at the Churubusco Studios in Mexico City and included a soundtrack by the band Toto. The plot, set several millennia in the future, concerns the conflict between rival noble families as they battle for control of the planet Arrakis (also known as “Dune”), which is the only planet in the universe that possesses the spice “melange”, the most essential and valuable commodity in the universe. The film was negatively received by critics and was an American box office bomb. Upon its release, Lynch distanced himself from the project, stating that pressure from both producers and financiers restrained his artistic control and denied him final cut privilege. At least three versions have been released worldwide. In some cuts, Lynch’s name is replaced in the credits with the name Alan Smithee, a pseudonym used by directors who wished not to be associated with a film for which they would normally be credited.
Blue Velvet is a 1986 American neonoir mystery film, written and directed by David Lynch. The film stars Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper and Laura Dern. The title is taken from Tony Bennett’s 1951 song of the same name. Although initially polarising some mainstream critics, the film is now widely acclaimed as one of the greatest films of the 1980s, and earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. As an example of a director casting against the norm, Blue Velvet is also noted for re-launching Hopper’s career and for providing Rossellini with a dramatic outlet beyond the work as a fashion model and a cosmetics spokeswoman for which she had until then been known.
Wild at Heart is a 1990 American crime thriller film written and directed by David Lynch, and based on Barry Gifford’s 1989 novel of the same name. Both the book and the film revolve around Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, a young couple from Cape Fear, North Carolina who go on the run from her domineering mother. Due to her mother’s machinations, the mob becomes involved. Early test screenings for the film did not go well; Lynch estimated that 80 people walked out of the first test screening and 100 in the next. The film received mixed to negative critical reviews and was a moderate success at the US box office, grossing USD$14 million, above its $10 million budget. The film won the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, at which it received both negative and positive attention from its audience.
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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is a 1992 French-American psychological horror film, directed by David Lynch and written by Lynch and Robert Engels. Viewable as both a prologue and an epilogue to the television series Twin Peaks (1990–91), created by Lynch and Mark Frost, the film revolves around the investigation into the murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley) and the last seven days in the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), a popular high school student in the fictional Washington town of Twin Peaks. Additionally, the film’s narrative references and clarifies Agent Dale Cooper’s (Kyle MacLachlan) fate in the series finale. Thus, while the film is often considered a prequel, it also has features more typical of a sequel. Fire Walk with Me was greeted at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival with booing and jeers from the audience and met with negative reviews in the United States. The film fared poorly in the United States at the box office, partially because it was released almost a year after the television series was canceled (due to a sharp ratings decline in the second season). However, it was a commercial hit in Japan.
Mulholland Drive is a 2001 American neo-noir mystery film written and directed by David Lynch and starring Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, and Justin Theroux. It tells the story of an aspiring actress named Betty Elms (Watts), newly arrived in Los Angeles, California, who meets and befriends an amnesic woman (Harring) hiding in an apartment that belongs to Elms’s aunt. The story includes several other seemingly unrelated vignettes that eventually connect in various ways, as well as some surreal and darkly comic scenes and images that relate to the cryptic narrative. Categorized as a psychological thriller, the film was highly acclaimed by many critics and earned Lynch the Prix de la mise en scène (Best Director Award) at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Director.
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Lost Highway is a 1997 French-American surrealist psychological thriller film written and directed by David Lynch. Blending elements of horror and neo-noir, the plot features Bill Pullman as a man convicted of the murder of his wife (Patricia Arquette), after which he inexplicably morphs into a young mechanic and begins leading a new life. The film features the last film appearances of Richard Pryor, Jack Nance, and Robert Blake, and is also notable for featuring the acting debut of Marilyn Manson.
The Straight Story is a 1999 biographical drama film directed by David Lynch. The film was edited and produced by Mary Sweeney, Lynch’s longtime partner and co-worker. She cowrote the script with John E. Roach. The film is based on the true story of Alvin Straight’s 1994 journey across Iowa and Wisconsin on a lawn mower. Alvin (Richard Farnsworth) is an elderly World War II veteran who lives with his daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek), a kind woman with a mental disability. When he hears that his estranged brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) has suffered a stroke, Alvin makes up his mind to go visit him and hopefully make amends before he dies. Because Alvin’s legs and eyes are too impaired for him to receive a driving license, he hitches a trailer to his recently purchased thirty-year-old John Deere 110 Lawn Tractor, having a maximum speed of about 5 miles per hour, and sets off on the 240 mile journey from Laurens, Iowa to Mount Zion, Wisconsin.
Inland Empire is a 2006 mystery film written and directed by David Lynch and was his first feature film since 2001’s Mulholland Drive. The feature took two-and-a-half years to complete, and was Lynch’s first film to have been shot entirely in standard definition digital video. The film is a co-production of France, Poland and the United States. It premiered in Italy at the Venice Film Festival on 6 September 2006. nland Empire was named the second-best film of 2007 (tied with two others) by Cahiers du cinéma, and listed among Sight & Sound’s “thirty best films of the 2000s”, as well as The Guardian ‘s “10 most underrated movies of the decade”.
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